Given the long gap since the last Turkish shadow journey post, you'd be forgiven for thinking not much was going on. But not so...

A lot of reading has been happening, but that's over at The Velvet Cushion.

I've also tried out a couple of Turkish recipes. Menemen (pictured at the top) is a very tasty way of doing eggs. And I'm not sure how authentic this recipe for Turkish eggplant is, but it was really delicious. Definitely goes in the Must Make Again list.


It might be stretching a point a little, but I'll also include here the very fine dishes we had delivered from Al-Yemen, "the first Arab restaurant in East Malaysia".


Yemen was part of the Ottoman Empire for a while, but the relationship was not a happy one: "Most of the history of the Ottomans in Yemen is marked by a series of uprisings of Yemenis against the Ottoman presence."

But saltah, for example, is a really delicious stew, and "it is quite likely that the dish is of Turkish origin when it was made from leftover ingredients".

So that's good enough for my purposes...

Alongside the saltah, we tried the Sana'ani kebab (which are meatballs served with saj bread), the shish tawook, and the lamb aqdah ("lamb meat floss cooked with vegetables and special spices"). They included some garlic sauce. I think this was probably toum, made from garlic, salt, oil, and lemon juice.



As well as food, I've been exploring the amazing world of Turkish pop music.

Some of it is fabulously rhythmic, and songs by Guliz Ayla, Tarkan, Ece Seckin, Manus Baba, Buray, Ayla Celik, Hakan Peker, and Hande Yener now feature on our dance-track list.

But in more contemplative mode, you can't go past Melike Sahin, whose use of traditional instruments is very evocative. I particularly love the gentle swing of Kimin Izdirabi, but I've enjoyed all her songs so far. (There are another couple of lovely examples here and here.)

Adamlar's Hikaye comes with a great video of the contemporary Istanbul street.

And Vera's Saklanir Nisan also accompanies its jolly um-pa-pa rhythms with an endearing video of everyday life.

Turkey generates a rich vein of popular culture. I was surprised to read recently: "Turkish dizi -- television dramas -- are second only to American ones in terms of global distribution. Turkish is now the most watched foreign language in the world, beating out French, Spanish, and Mandarin."

This kind of success doesn't just happen. The particular dizi this article talks about -- Ertugrul (the first episode, with English subtitles, is here) -- has really taken off in Pakistan, for example. By contrast, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia reportedly spent $40 million on the joint production of a series depicting Arab resistance to the Ottoman Empire: "It was an expensive salvo against Turkey's neo-Ottomanism, but it has apparently failed; no one seems to be watching."

Turkish President Erdogan's "culture war" has generated heated push-back. But for some audiences at least, Turkey has shown that it "understands the power of narratives. It is a smooth employer of soft power, savvy to all the manipulations and delicate handling necessary to build a new image, rewrite history, and erase both the slander and the truth about a nation's past."

Such a rich area... All the more reason to keep plugging on with Turkish...