Istanbul in the eyes of Foreigners.. – Yabanci Seyyahlar Gozuyle istanbul 2011
We have planned the concept of Istanbul Photo Contest 2011 and will start receiving photos from the 15th of March until the 01st of november. We want to inform that projects are continuing and we are looking for volunteer people to participate in our project. For detailed information about this subject. Please follow our Blog Page.
ISTANBUL PHOTO CONTEST 2010 WINNERS !!
PLEASE CHECK THE BLOG PAGE FOR THE 2010 RESULTS !!
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ISTANBUL PHOTO CONTEST 2009 WINNERS
For our 2009 contest; we received 1117 photos with 213 photographer from 40 countries. Italy has joined with 34 photographer. Following italy with 26 contester comes Russia and after that France with 20 contester. Thanks to all contesters and volunteers who supported our non profit – volunteer project in 2009.
Istanbul Photo Contest 2008 Winner Photos ;
http://www.istanbulphotocontest.com/winners.php
Istanbul Photo Contest Gala evening in 1001 Cisterns ;
via Istanbul Photo Contest, Professional Photo Contest in istanbul – Turkey, Istanbul Photo Competition, Photographers istanbul, istanbul photographers, Turkish photographers, photographer, Turkish photography, Istanbul, estambul, Istambul, Estambul, Turkey, Turkiye, Turchia, Turquie, Turquia, Turkei, Photographie Estambul, Photographie Turquie, Les Arts Turcs, Les Arts Turks, Les Arts Turcs Photographie..
“People in Britain who cannot speak English have cost the taxpayer almost £180m in interpreters over the past three years,” says a prominent report by Kevin Dowling and Mark Hookham in a recent Sunday Times article (23.10.11, page 7). In fact, the topic is considered so important by the Sunday Times that it also gets discussed in an opinion piece (‘Immigrant integration gets lost in translation’, by Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher & Walton, page 31) in the same issue of the newspaper.
In the course of these two articles, interpreters are held doubly responsible for the state of the nation. For one thing, they are – we’re told – a huge drain on public resources at a time when we can least afford it. And for another, they stop immigrants settling firmly into the community by enabling them to resist any requirement to learn English.
The “enormous” expense of interpreting services, says the MP, “highlights the hidden costs of uncontrolled immigration”. The solution, we’re told, is pretty straightforward. Interpreters will be hired through a private contractor and paid £22 an hour. Now, let me think, what might suffer if the sums spent on interpreters are so sharply reduced?
Oh, yes – that would be quality. Why is it hard to understand that the knee-jerk of paying poorly will just create different problems?
One, it will mean that experienced professionals will not take on this kind of work. The gaps will be filled by less-qualified people. Now, which other public service professionals – police officers, teachers, doctors who will not be able to do their jobs properly without effective interpreting – would consider £22 an hour to constitute fair and appropriate recognition of their skills?
Two, it will mean that the interpreters available will not be as well-trained for the task. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to spot the clamour for reducing the training required for surgeons or riot police. What’s behind this disparity? Could it be the myth that any bilingual can automatically interpret?
Thirdly, and most importantly, cutting corners and therefore failing to put effective communication in place is a false economy. This Department has argued long and hard for some serious accounting for the real, hidden, long-term costs of inadequate interpreting. Where are the public policy economists who will work with us on this issue? We’re more than ready to take up the challenge.
From 1993-1995, I researched court interpreting (click herehttp://forestbookshop.com/pages/Categories/0946252483.html for some published results of this research) with one group of minority language users in the UK. I watched from the public gallery as a lengthy trial collapsed owing to inadequate interpreting. That false start alone – back in the mid-90s, mind you – cost over £1m.
And, fortunately, the problems in that instance were noticed. What happens when they’re not? What then is the cost in mis-diagnosis, wrongful imprisonment, lost business and, above all, the loss of human well-being?
Of course money shouldn’t be squandered. And without doubt, it is good to facilitate English-language development enthusiastically and in appropriate ways. But, please, let’s not fool ourselves that the cost of decent interpreting can disappear by magic. These measures will not remove those costs, but only ensure that they come with a side-order of misery.
Once home to the most elegants ball of the times, Atatürk’s favorite Hotel, Tokatlıyan, is now facing an unknown future. Considered as a great piece of architecture, the hotel has been waiting for a restoration for the last 30 years.
The 117-year old Tokatlıyan Hotel stands in the middle of Istanbul’s most crowded Istiklal Street, in Beyoğlu district. DAILY NEWS photo, Hasan ALTINIŞIK
Once a favorite haunt of modern Turkey’s founder, Istanbul’s legendary Tokatlıyan-Pera Hotel continues to face an uncertain future due to a lack of plans to renovate the severely dilapidated building.
“[Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk not only organized balls but also hosted his guests at a rich table during tea hours. It is so unfortunate that the hotel is now in a ruined state,” Professor Afife Batur, a scholar on architectural history at Istanbul Technical University, recently told the Hürriyet Daily News. “The hotel was a pioneer as a building in many ways. The first known hotel posters in Turkey belonged to the Tokatlıyan-Pera.”
Considered by scholars to be a significant architectural achievement, the Tokatlıyan-Pera is one of the best examples of fin-de-siècle architecture in Turkey.
The hotel belongs to the Üç Horan Armenian Church Foundation, one of the richest foundations of Turkey’s Armenian community.
The foundation’s administration, which has remained unchanged for 30 years, has chosen not to adopt any of the numerous renovation proposals that have been submitted over the years.
The hotel was built by Mıgırdiç Tokatlıyan, an Ottoman citizen of Armenian origin who migrated from the northern province of Tokat and adopted the last name Tokatlıyan. The hotel was opened in 1897 with 160 rooms and hosted a number of celebrities, later becoming a favorite of Atatürk.
Emphasizing the significance of the Tokatlıyan-Pera in regard to architecture, Batur said: “It was such a popular building that the Orient Express would transport all of Europe’s high society and the elite to this hotel and elegant balls were held there. These balls would generate several stories for the world tabloid press as well as the Turkish press.”
Another branch of the Tokatlıyan-Pera called the Tokatlıyan-Therabia was situated on the Bosphorus at the exact location of the present-day Tarabya Hotel, Batur said.
Architectural history specialist Dr. Fatma Sedes said the Tokatlıyan-Pera was the apple of the eye of Istanbul and European elites, as well as other political figures. “It was a unique building that left its mark on Istanbul’s architecture,” she added.
via Atatürk’s favorite hotel still doomed – Hurriyet Daily News.
ISTANBUL — In 1990, the year that globalization shifted into high gear and McDonald’s opened an outlet in Moscow, a paper delivered at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery entitled “The Bayeux Tapestry Shish Kebab Mystery” had French academics reaching for indigestion tablets. Its author, the textile specialist Robert Chenciner, pointed to a panel of that famous embroidery in which Norman knights celebrate their victory over the Saxons by grilling skewers of meat over an open fire. From this, Chenciner drew the bold conclusion that the tapestry must be a forgery or at least a much oversewn bit of cloth. There were no kebab takeaways in the Hastings of 1066, he reasoned, and it wasn’t until the Ottomans visited Versailles in the mid-18th century that Turkish food came to France.
Julia Child, the renowned populist of French cuisine, was in the audience that day. She clapped enthusiastically. But curators at the museum housing the Bayeux Tapestry found Chenciner’s theory hard to digest. They countered that archival sources from the late 15th century confirmed the cloth’s authenticity. If there was a problem at all, it must be with the shish kebab itself. Was it even Turkish?
Can any one cuisine call the kebab its own? Was the meat skewer born somewhere — or everywhere, of the primal urge to put flesh to fire?
This year commemorates the 50th year that Turks were first recruited to work in Germany. Many believe that these gastarbeiter managed to wriggle a way into their hosts’ affection by presenting to them an alternative to wurst. A cylinder of meat spinning on an upright spit in front of a vertical open fire — the famous döner kebab — became Germans’ entrée into the culture of their new neighbors. Or so they thought. But no less an authority than The Economist claims that the kebab is an example of cultural reflux: a bit of ethnicity cultivated in Germany and transplanted back to Turkey, where it then thrived.
This argument is pooh-poohed by someone who should know: Beyti Güler, the Horatio Alger of grilled meat and probably the only man alive to have a kebab named in his honor. After spending his boyhood peddling fruit from a barrow in the abattoir district on the outskirts of Istanbul, Güler was to turn his family’s kitchen into the landmark restaurant that bears his (first) name. He opened his first grill house in 1945, but he was soon forced to move it to a barn of a place in order to cope with the throngs who queued up for the house specialty: lamb and beef döner kebab cooked in front of a wall of oak charcoal. In 1983, Beyti’s moved to even grander premises near the airport.
Beyti’s namesake kebab is now served widely throughout Turkey — only it’s nothing like Beyti’s beyti. The street-food favorite is ground lamb and beef kneaded together with parsley, garlic and flakes of red pepper. The original is an outer cutlet of lamb wrapped around loin, a combination inspired by a butcher named Möller whom Beyti met on a trip to Switzerland – in other words, it isn’t Turkish at all.
Some of Beyti’s other delicacies are made of a well-kneaded mince that has a slight spring under the tooth. This is very different from the feel of kebabs from the Kurdish and Arab southeast of Turkey. The meat of those is chopped by hand, with enough fat left in so that while cooking the fat drips onto the slow-burning coals, sending fragrant smoke back up toward the spit. The result is a crispy, crumbly lattice of meat.
Chewy or crusty, kebabs are now part of a global multimillion (some say, billion) dollar industry. There are fine Turkish restaurants outside Turkey, but most spots are takeaway joints that cater to anyone on the prowl for a snack and a brawl after a night out. A British government official once bemoaned the “kebab and fight” culture plaguing pub land. Like most Chinese restaurants — and Indian or Thai ones, for that matter — kebab houses operate like unbranded franchises. Customers recognize the décor and know what to order. These outlets are to McDonald’s or Burger King what Linux is to Microsoft: a free and open resource controlled by users, not large corporations.
But in Turkey itself, there’s now a move to drive the little guys to the wall. Food engineers are busy converting local delicacies into supermarket standards. Within the last decade, they’ve turned the simit — a sort of bagel — from street food to fast food, and many now hope that the kebab will follow suit. Food courts in ever-mushrooming shopping centers boast kebaberies every bit as characterless as their foreign cousins. Unforgivably, some of them even deep-fry their meat.
No one has yet found the way to prepackage the taste of a slowly grilled kebab, whatever the mince or the seasoning. The limp, bluish döner kebab that sells in a wrap outside every German bahnhof doesn’t hold a candle to what I think of as the real thing: a thin sheet of freshly grilled lamb mixed with beef, crisp on one side and moist on the other. For the moment at least, the kebab’s juicy mystery seems to have halted the forces of globalization.
Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. His latest book, “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know,” will be published next year.
via There’s a Kebab in My Tapestry! – NYTimes.com.
Janset Karavin is a pantomime performer who performs on the streets in Istanbul. She also teaches pantomime lessons, writes novels, hosts a radio show, and makes puppets. Photo Credit: Kat Russell
Before I arrived in Istanbul, I had never done any sort of multimedia work. I am a photographer plain and simple. The idea of shooting video has never appealed to me. But as a journalist, being able to write, photograph, and produce multimedia pieces could make me more marketable, so I knew I wanted to try to learn.
The second assignment in my study abroad program was to shoot and produce a multimedia piece. The idea of putting together a multimedia piece for the first time, let alone in a different country where I didn’t speak the language, was intimidating to say the least.
After the difficulty I had faced when trying to get my written profile piece done, I was nervous that I would not be able to find a subject, collect the necessary video and images and meet my deadline.
My original idea was to enlarge my street kid profile into a multimedia piece. I was hoping to gain access to kids, social workers, police, and anyone else who may have expertise or experience in the field. After about a week of making phone calls, showing up at various offices and sending multiple emails, I realized I was not going to get the access that I needed to do the project I was hoping to do.
Once again, I felt defeated, like I had bitten off more than I could chew. I knew I had to find a subject fast, but I was out of ideas and felt frustrated and lost. Two of my instructors sat me down and gave me a good talking to. I love the fact that neither of them attempted to baby me or hold my hand. Instead they laid it out for me.
I had three options: I could continue with my original idea and risk never gaining the access I would need to get my project done, I could sit around and feel sorry for myself, or I go out into the city and find a new subject. I knew they were right. Again, I was being taught that I needed to be flexible; that things will not always go my way.
So I began to wander the city, with my interpreter, looking for a new subject. I found her on Istikal Cadessi, a major westernized shopping promenade. Her name was Janset Karavin and she was a pantomime who was performing on the street. She was very tall and very thin, with red-orange hair, dressed in an all black costume and wearing white gloves on her hands.
As I stood and watched her perform, I thought to myself, ‘there’s my subject’. I knew I had to talk to her and see if she would be willing to work with me. When she finished performing my interpreter and I approached her, explained to her that I was a journalist, and that I wanted to do a piece about her. She agreed. I was so relieved.
We started immediately. We interviewed that night and again the next day. After each interview, she would perform and I would film and photograph her performances. On the third day, we met at her house and I interviewed her on camera. Later that day, later she performed, and again I filmed and photographed. After four days, I had more than I needed to get this project done and it was time to start editing.
We had been taught to use Final Cut Express in class, and it seemed straightforward enough, until I started using it. I am not a computer genius – I know how to do what I do and that’s about it. This was a whole new beast to wrestle with.
I took it one piece at a time. I laid down the video from the interview and began to translate it, cut it and insert subtitles. Next, I went to my photos, picked the best, edited them and dropped them in. The final task was choosing the video clips and that appeared to be the most daunting task of all. With the help of my multimedia teacher, I got through it. In the end, I finished with a final product that I am incredibly proud of.
The difficulties I faced getting my project done were well worth it in the end. I realized that underneath the struggles there were valuable lessons waiting to be learned. I learned that I never give myself enough credit, that I am far more capable than I often think I am, and most importantly I learned to ask for help and to rely on my teachers to guide me.
I left Istanbul with a new perspective, a new found confidence and a new set of skills. I had come to Istanbul a reporter and a photographer, but I left a multimedia journalist.
via Istanbul Adventures V: A Pantomime in Istanbul | Daily Sundial.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) closely monitors Muslims who change their names to sound more American, and Muslims who take on Arabic names.
“The NYPD monitors everyone in the city who changes his or her name… For those whose names sound Arabic or might be from Muslim countries, police run comprehensive background checks” Associated Press reported.
Police background check includes reviewing travel records, criminal histories, business licenses and immigration documents.
All this is recorded in police databases for supervisors, who review the names and select a handful of people for police to visit.
The program is believed to be a tripwire for police to identify homegrown terrorists.
An AP investigation showed that since August the NYPD has been behind intelligence efforts targeting the Muslim community since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The NYPD has surveilled entire Muslim neighborhoods, collecting information on the daily activities of Muslims such as eating and praying which are all behavior protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.
It should be noted that the NYPD is not the only institution discriminating against Muslims, the FBI has its own ethnic mapping program that spies on Muslim communities, especially prayers and other community leaders.
