By SUSANNE GÜSTEN
Published: December 12, 2012
ISTANBUL — In a collection of essays published in 1959, the writer Aziz Nesin made an apparently anodyne declaration: “Socialism is ethical,” he wrote.
Unfortunately for Mr. Nesin, a typesetter’s error turned the Turkish word “ahlak” into “allah,” resulting in the pronouncement that “socialism is God.” Half a century later, the book remained officially banned, as the trustees of his estate found to their surprise a couple of years ago, when a dozen copies were confiscated at the airport.
“They were seized from the luggage of a colleague who was traveling abroad and had taken them along as gifts for friends,” Suleyman Cihangiroglu, director of the Nesin Foundation, said in an interview in Istanbul this week.
The book, it emerged in heated discussion with security officials at the airport, still figures on a list of nearly 2,000 publications that are officially banned in Turkey by half-forgotten orders of various courts, ministries, emergency rule officials and other institutions.
via Turkey Plans to Lift Bans on Hundreds of Publications – NYTimes.com.
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