Despite having read and enjoyed works in translation like Christos Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See and Burhan Sönmez’s İstanbul, İstanbul, I know that the full range of works in translation this year alone is vast (580 books according to Three Percent’s 2016 database).
A year and a half ago, most of Turkey lost power. 80 of its 81 provinces, excluding Van, suddenly had no electricity. Since power outages in Istanbul are fairly frequent, that morning as I was out helping my then boyfriend get a tax number in central Istanbul, the lack of electricity around us was more of an annoyance than news until I went on Twitter to see how long the cut would last.
Lawrence Durrell’s life-long relationship with Greece began early. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor, he too was the product of British colonialism, having been born in Jalandar, a case that may be more common than is often realized in thinking about Britain’s involvement in India.
The year was 1944. Special Operations Executive officer Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, having spent a year in Cairo, returned to the occupied island of Crete to kidnap a German general. The incident would come to be known as the Kidnap, or Abduction, of General Kreipe.
When I first set out to find C.P. Cavafy’s maternal home five years ago, my friends and I figured heading to the local church in Neochori (present day Yeniköy) would yield the best results. The Alexandrian Greek poet had spent three years of his life, from 1882 to 1885, in the then Greek-dominated village in…
The era of the carefree expat has passed. This is not to say that being an expat is impossible today, but to say that with tightening visa requirements and economic downturns, staying abroad after initially being bitten by that desire either requires outright deliberation or hefty doses of chance.
On the flight back to Istanbul, I hold one of the first books put out by Istos Publishing in my hands. Out of the press’s slim, silver-colored bilingual Greek-Turkish edition of Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Ascetic (Ασκητική-Çileci), the publishing house’s logo pops out in gold, almost holographic. I turn the pages and the zen-like messages appear…
Christos Ikonomou is the author of three short story collections, including Something Will Happen, You’ll See (Archipelago Books, trans. Karen Emmerich, 2016), for which he won the National Short Story Prize. Something Will Happen, You’ll See, a devastating and sparingly written collection of stories about the Greek crisis in working class neighborhoods in Athens, is…
We’ve been told not to use the metro. We’ve lived through warnings during Nevruz, the Kurdish New Year, to not go out due to potential clashes on the streets. The German Consulate and German schools in Istanbul shut down for two days ahead of the weekend due to a threat, and so the streets were…
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