The Turkish councilor of the CNN Ferhat Boratav has spoken about Armenian-Turkish relations and noted this theme had been discussed much recently and many people announced about their Armenian roots, many books were published on the theme and many films are shot. “Aravot” newspaper wrote about this.
“The whole memory is found out in this way. The exhibition devoted to the Armenian architecture was opened in Istanbul last year and many people accepted with amazing the most part of Istanbul buildings of 19th century was built by Armenians.”
/Times.am/
via Turkish journalist: “Most part of Istanbul buildings of 19th century was built by Armenians” | Times.am.
Queen of cities: The imagery of Istanbul haunts Ian McDonald’s new novel The Dervish House. (Murad Sezer, Reuter)
Istanbul is known as the “Queen of Cities”, but she is more. During February, the Guardian published two stories focusing on her paradoxes and contradictions. One was headlined “Minarets and martinis”; the other focused on the pull – eloquently portrayed by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk — between the old “(which is usually local and Islamic) and the new (generally Western and secular)”. The newspaper dubbed Istanbul “a world in itself consisting of countless villages.”
That imagery of microcosm and macrocosm haunts Ian McDonald’s new novel, The Dervish House, set in the city in 2027. It recurs in imagery, from the pervasive presence of nanotechnology to the exquisite micro-graphy of an Islamic manuscript, images composed of letters, themselves composed of letters so tiny they have become pixels.
In previous novels about Brazil and India, McDonald has forced us to see with the perspectives of societies not our own. Unlike the utopian science fictions that assume progress inexorably turns other societies Western, he paints futures in which the non-Western co-opts progress to its own purposes. In 2027 Istanbul, it is the Nano Bazaar not the Grand Bazaar that is magic.
“This is dangerous like the true magic always is. This is the new terminus of the Silk Road; central Asia’s engineers and nanoware programmers the merchants and caravan masters of the Third Industrial Revolution.”
Like those other McDonald books, The Dervish House shifts perspectives between half a dozen protagonists, from a faded old Greek economics professor to nouveau riche traders and shiny, ambitious graduates, Turkey’s equivalent (in name as well as kind) of Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe. There’s a Da Vinci Code-style mystery involving the missing relic of the Mellified Man and two halves of a miniature Koran. There’s a fiery Islamic leader, whose street justice committee has genuine virtue as well as dogmatism. There are Kurds and Russians and people who sold out during the reign of Turkey’s colonels. There are several love affairs, one with money itself.
But whereas those shifting perspectives sometimes made the earlier books unsettling reading, here McDonald has borrowed from the conventions of contemporary Arabic fiction to find an anchoring metaphor in the Dervish House itself: home now not only to the spirits of dervishes, but also to the flesh of most of the main characters. As in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building or Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, the building, with its inherited memories and echoes of previous occupants, ties the narrative neatly, if intricately together.
In this textured and detailed book, whose jewelled and scented scenes almost lift off the page, tiny machines shift actions and relationships until the Queen of Cities finds a new order, her residents “mindless automata in their individuality, intelligent in society [in ways that] cannot be predicted from the behaviour of individual components”.
via Nanotech among the minarets – Friday – Mail & Guardian Online.
“Do not forget me – Istanbul” film was for the first time screened within the framework of Istanbul Film Festival.
The film describes stories of people of different nations who are united by multi-cultural Istanbul, press service of the Golden Apricot Film Festival informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.
The project is a joint effort of multinational team, an Armenian, Greek, Jew, Palestinian, and Turk. Artistic director of the film is Huseyin Karabey.
Erik Nazaryan is one of the directors. He presents a story of a Diaspora Armenian who comes to Istanbul and tries to find house of his grandfather. Interestingly, the word “genocide” was first pronounced during the screening of the film.
Armenian audience will have a chance to watch the film during the eighth Golden Apricot International Film Festival scheduled for this summer.
via Word “genocide” pronounced at Istanbul film festival | Armenia News – NEWS.am.
Before the doors of the first exhibition of contemporary Turkish art in London had even opened, nearly half of the 70 or so workd had been sold.
By Colin Gleadell 6:54PM BST 18 Apr 2011
Behind you: the original wood carving for 'Treacherous Wolf? by Yasam Sazmazer Photo: Bernd Borchardt
The first exhibition of contemporary Turkish art in London got off to a flying start last weekend. Before the doors had even opened, nearly half of the 70 or so works by 19 different artists, most of whom had never exhibited in London before, had been sold. Confessions of Dangerous Minds is the alluring title to the exhibition which is being held in the Saatchi Gallery, selected by two young independent curators, Jason Lee and Carlo Berardi. Lee, a Singaporean who studied graphic design in London before becoming a collector and curator of Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern and now Turkish contemporary art, has made artists from the “emerging” markets something of a speciality. Berardi, the son of an Italian collector, found his way to Turkish art through an interest in the Middle Eastern market.
The two decided on an exhibition in London after visiting the Istanbul Contemporary fair in 2008. By now, the blossoming of the market for modern and contemporary Turkish art inside Turkey had persuaded Sotheby’s to hold the first auction of contemporary Turkish art in London to bring it to a wider, international audience.
That sale, in March 2009, was held in the teeth of the recession but still managed to achieve its lower estimate at £1.3 million. Modern art from the Fifties and Sixties formed the backbone of the sale, but it also helped launch younger, less expensive artists, led by Taner Ceylan, whose hyper-realist painting of a boxer’s bloodied head sold for £70,000 to Turkish collector Omer Koc. Two thirds of the buyers were new to Sotheby’s and hailed from as far afield as Asia, the Middle East and North America.
Sotheby’s second sale, a year later, saw an improved £2.4 million return, and led the bankers HSBC to report that “Turkey stands to be one of the most exciting contemporary art markets of the next decade.”
Lee and Berardi decided to time their exhibition to follow Sotheby’s third auction which, this year, was accompanied by Bonhams’ first contemporary Turkish art sale. It was a brave effort by Bonhams, which brought £1 million. But approximately two thirds of the lots, which were too familiar to collectors, went unsold.
Sotheby’s, which had lost its leading expert in the field, also struggled at points, but sold two thirds of the lots and roughly equalled the previous year’s total with a £2.3 million sale. As with all emerging markets, records tumbled for the younger generation, many of whom were making their first appearance at auction. And it was on this aspect of the market that Lee and Berardi had set their sights.
Several artists in their exhibition were also included in the Sotheby’s sale, and collectors who sensed auction prices would go higher than in the gallery made their purchases before the auction – wisely, it would appear. A satin and embroidery work of the Pope engulfed by fire, The Sacred Fire of Faith, by 43 year-old Ramazan Bayracoglu was one of the first to go, says Lee, selling for £40,000 to a French collector. A similarly sized embroidery by Bayracoglu, estimated at £12,000, then sold at Sotheby’s for £61,250. A digitally manipulated photographic print, Guns of War, by 32-year-old Ansen Atilla, sold for £25,000. At Sotheby’s, a similar work by Ansen, estimated at £22,000, sold for a record £39,650. Treacherous Wolf, a bronze sculpture by Yasam Sazmazer, doubled its estimate at Sotheby’s to sell for almost £14,000. The original wood carving, theoretically worth much more after that, sold at the Saatchi Gallery before the auction for £20,000.
Other works in the exhibition have been selling for as little as £3,000, while a painting by Taner Ceylan, whose work soared to a £233,000 record at Sotheby’s, is also spoken for at an undisclosed price. None of the buyers, says Lee, have been Turkish.
The show, which is more of a reflection on what Lee and Berardi have tipped for the future than an academic survey, is the last to be sponsored by the auctioneers Phillips de Pury & Co, which has had a sponsorship arrangement with the Saatchi Gallery since it opened in Chelsea two and a half years ago, and runs until April 30.
via These days we’re all talking Turkey – Telegraph.
Gem-studded treasure bought from private collection in Turkey will join oriental treasures in Jameel gallery
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 April 2011 18.15 BST
V&A’s Ottoman tankard
The V&A said the jewel-studded jade tankard was unlike anything else in British national collections. Photograph: Ian Thomas
The V&A said the jewel-studded jade tankard was unlike anything else in British national collections. Photograph: Ian Thomas
A spectacular 16th-century Ottoman jade tankard – which, with its thumbnail-sized studs of rubies and emeralds held in a net of gold, would have been excruciatingly uncomfortable to drink from – has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert museum.
One of the first of its kind in any UK museum collection, the tankard is among a handful of survivors of such quality, made by imperial craft workers in Istanbul for an Ottoman sultan.
It has been held quietly in a private collection for centuries, and was accepted by the government in lieu of inheritance tax owed. The V&A was helped to raise the £489,000 price tag with major grants, including £225,000 from the Art Fund charity.
“There is nothing like it in the V&A or any other national collection in Britain,” said the outgoing V&A director, Sir Mark Jones. “It is a great addition to our Middle Eastern collection, which is one of the most important in the world, and will help us illustrate the story of the Ottoman empire in the late 16th century.”
The tankard would have been a fabulously expensive object in its day, made of jade imported from central Asia. But, like many pieces made for the Ottoman court, it aped the shape of a much more humble object. With its pot-bellied front and flat back, it imitates the leather drinking vessels nomads would have slung in their saddlebags.
Two centuries later, the tankard became an even more spectacular piece of bling when the florid gold handle, foot and jewelled rim for the cover were added.
It goes on display among the 10,000 spectacular oriental treasures in the Jameel gallery. Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, said: “We hope that as many people as possible will see it and be enthralled by its arresting detail and fascinating history.”
via V&A acquires UK’s first Ottoman jade tankard | Art and design | The Guardian.
I’ve been reading Norman Stone’s excellent Turkey: A Short History. It’s worth looking at because in all the debate about Turkey, Europe and its potential membership of the EU, there’s an underling historical hostility, and Stone provides an alternative narrative. So while Turkish atrocities down the years are well known, they were often the victims, too, and in many parts of south-east Europe Muslims were victims of a borderline genocide.
Stone argues that the Turks have been much maligned in Europe, largely because of a casual anti-Turkishness started by well-placed Greeks in 19th-century London. These Greeks “were good at playing London, certainly much better than the Turks; they had a – the – Indo-European language, had shipping money, Masonic connections and, with marriages often enough in surprisingly high places, the right invitations. They were especially good at cultivating the Liberal Party.”
A century and a half of Greco-Turkish violence began in 1770 when Catherine the Great sent Russian officers to Morea, as the Peloponnese was known at the time, under the banner of Orthodox Christianity. In 1828 a clergyman proclaimed another rising, and organised a gruesome massacre of Muslims, killing the entire Muslim population of Corinth, including women and children, and even though they had agreed to leave with safe-passage organised by the British.
The Turks in retribution hanged the Patriarch and 20 other prominent Greeks, and then massacred the inhabitants of the wrong island, Chios rather than Samos. But despite this the Turks were bound to lose the PR battle: Europe, especially Germany, was in awe to Ancient Greece, and it was easy to take sides even when the story was more complicated. The Greeks were egged on by western romantics, such as George Gordon, Lord Byron, then living in the Adriatic in his mid-30s and “running out of inspiration and money”. Byron, according to Stone, was a bit of a prat, but was nevertheless a dashing figure and started a long process “by which western writers turn up in odd places to stand on barricades and say no pasaran”.
Being anti-Turkish became fashionable in the West, even though “when it came to atrocities, the Greeks gave as good as they got. Somehow, then and later, the Muslim victims were forgotten, and the Greeks were practised hands at image-management, whereas the Turks were not.”
Turkey made great progress in the mid 19th century, but it all unravelled after the panic of 1873, which sent the world economy into depression. There was an uprising in Herzegovina against a crackdown on tobacco-smuggling (still a major industry today – read the brilliant McMafia), followed by trouble in Bulgaria. Bulgaria was filled with refugees from Russian wars, Tatars and Circassians, as well as the native Muslims, called Pomaks, who had lived there for centuries and had good relations with their neighbours. Relations between Circassians and Bulgarian Christians, on the other hand, were tense, and resulted in a massacre of the latter.
This became a cause in the West, and Liberal leader William Gladstone went up and down Britain whipping up outrage, and writing a bestseller,Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Yet the Bulgarians were no innocents, and the British ambassador in Constantinople, Austen Henry Layard, told the foreign secretary that Gladstone was lying. As Stone says: “A curious collection of would-be high-minded clergymen, professors of English history who did not know anything substantial about the area, seem to have acquired a caricature vision of the Turks, lolling around in harems, smoking hashish and ravishing virgins.”
The worst violence was yet to come. In 1897 there was an uprising in Crete, still part of the empire, which eventually the Greeks won, but history ignores the unfortunate fact that Crete was one third Muslim. “Within a decade, Crete was in effect free, and what the world now knows as ‘ethnic cleansing’ went ahead – the Muslims cruelly pushed out, with a great deal of killing. If, two generations later, the Turks resisted very strongly over Cyprus, where there was a comparable situation, this needs to be put in context.”
Most controversially, Stone argues that if the mass murder of Armenians in World War One was genocide, then “it could legitimately be extended to cover the fates of the millions of Muslims driven from the Balkans or the Caucasus as the Ottoman Empire receded”.
The abiding hatred between Greeks and Turks culminated with the burning down of Smyrna, the transfer of a million and a half people in 1922 and, finally in 1955, the final pogrom that ended two and a half millennia of Greek life there.
Greek culture, that is, for the Turks themselves are largely descended from Greeks, and Stone goes as far as to say they are the real heirs to Byzantium. “Byzantium had really been destroyed by the Italians, not the Turks who, if anything, had saved it. Ancient Greece had been destroyed by Celts, after Alexander, and then she had been destroyed all over again by Slavs in the eight century. She had been re-hellenized by the Byzantines, and Greek nationalists could never agree as to whether they were Hellenes or – clerically – Byzantines.”
But, Stone says, the tragedy of Greco-Turkish hatred should not overshadow the achievements of the Turkish Republic, and especially its founder, Mustafa Kemal. The Turkish worship of Atatürk is strange to foreigners, but he was certainly one of the great men of the 20th century, and the achievements of secular Turkey in contrast to the failings of the rest of the Middle East are starting. And despite Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey remains “the only country between Athens and Singapore where, judging by the refugees, people actually wanted to live”.
Turkey’s success is illustrated by this one fact. Although there are five times as many Arab as Turkish speakers, some 11,000 books are translated into Turkish every year; just 300 into Arabic.
Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.
