I have lingered rather too long on the Turkish segment of my shadow journey, but it has been really rewarding.

A batch of Turkey-related novels has kept me occupied for many hours lately. I talk about Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat over at The Velvet Cushion, but there are a couple of others I want to just briefly mention here.

(Apart from the very last one, by the way, all the pictures in this post are from our trip to Kars last year. This eastern part of Turkey is a vivid reminder of the fluidity of borders, and the confluence of Turkish, Armenian, and Russian culture and history, so salient again right now.)




The first novel is The Last Train to Istanbul by Ayse Kulin, which came out in 2002. This is worth reading for the light it sheds on an episode of World War II history that I knew nothing about: the assistance provided by neutral Turkey to Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, and the delicate diplomatic tight-rope walk that involved.

Stanford Shaw documents the ways in which the Turkish government and its embassies helped not only vulnerable Turkish Jews (by arguing their exemption from anti-Semitic laws, helping them update or reestablish their Turkish credentials, and organizing "train caravans" to take them back to Turkey) but also other persecuted Jews in the east of Europe (by allowing, inter alia, Jewish organizations to maintain representative offices in Istanbul, and use the Turkish post office to carry messages and aid packages).

Of course, none of this is without its controversies. The Turkish government's role has been called into question by some writers, and in any case, Turkey itself was hardly an oasis of tranquility for its Jewish population, who were regularly the butt of anti-Semitic jokes, and were subject to taxes that specifically targeted non-Muslims. This "contradictory image" springs in part from Turkey's precarious neutrality.

Kulin's story focuses on many of these historical points, as it follows the fortunes of two sisters (one in Istanbul, with a high-powered diplomat husband; the other in Paris, something of a family outcast since her marriage to a Jew).

She draws on interviews with former diplomats who were involved in arranging the trains to Istanbul, and with Jewish people who used them. And this input has definitely contributed to the sense of authenticity.

Not such good marks for structure and character-development, though. And I think the book would have benefited from some really rigorous cutting.





Another of my Turkish reads was in fact a listen, because I've taken to audiobooks again... Many, many years ago, they used to make my driving commute just about bearable. And now they're really useful when I'm ironing (yes, I do this sometimes), or having a longish cooking session, or just enjoying the morning or evening air on the balcony.

My first listen was The Abyssinian Proof, by Jenny White, which came out in 2008.

It features Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the Istanbul of the late 1880s. The plot involves stolen antiquities and a mysterious sect, all played out against the background of narrow alleys, Byzantine cisterns, and secret passageways.

For a 21st-century woman, born in Germany and raised in the US, to attempt to see through the eyes of a 19th-century male official of the Ottoman Empire might be considered a little bold... But then again, White has a lot of background knowledge. She is a professor in Turkish Studies, and as well as novels, writes anthropological texts on topics such as women's labour, Islamic politics, and nationalism in modern Turkey, and blogs (or blogged) about all manner of Turkish issues..

And The Abysssinian Proof is a rip-roaring adventure that worked well as an audiobook.





The book I'm listening to at the moment is The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. She's an interesting woman. Born in France of Turkish descent; raised in Turkey by her mother, after her parents divorced (a somewhat unusual scenario in the Turkey of the time); domiciled in the UK, but having close ties with Spain and the US, she doesn't surprise us when she describes herself as a life-long "nomad" and "commuter", a "citizen of the world".

"Belonging," she says, "is not a once-and-for-all condition, a static identity tattooed to our skin; it is a constant self-examination and dynamic revision of where we are, who we are and where we want to be."

Amen to that...

Shafak wrote The Bastard of Istanbul in English (in 2006), but when it was translated into Turkish, and published in Turkey the same year, it not only became a bestseller, but also saw its author sued for "insulting Turkishness" (she was acquitted). Why the fuss? Well, because the novel deals with what happened to the Armenians in 1915...

I've not finished it yet, so I'll defer judgement, but this connection certainly offers a very handy transition to the next stage of my shadow journey, which is the Caucasus region.

As, actually, does my final story, a food story...

The other day we went back to La Boca Ria, the Spanish restaurant not far from our flat. I had coca, a Catalan flatbread, somewhat reminiscent of pizza, but with a very thin, crisp crust, and no cheese anywhere.


I immediately thought of other pizza-like substances. And sure enough: "Coca de recapte is thought to be a precursor of Italian pizza, French pissaladière, Turkish pide, and Armenian lahmacun, among others. While it is difficult to trace its origins, they are often linked to the arrival of Romans to the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain."

So there we are. Every dish is a citizen of the world too.