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These days living and working as a writer in Istanbul requires a bravery that most American writers have never imagined they would have to muster, a bravery far beyond what it already takes to put pen to paper.
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…
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…
İstanbul İstanbul Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein OR Books, May 2016 192 pp, $18 Buy: paperback | eBook Unlike in New York, where managing to live in the city for ten years grants one the status of being a New Yorker, rarely will you meet a person living in Istanbul who will be identified…
The aftermath of war and displacement is often a diaspora, the literal scattering of a group’s seeds far from the tree of origins. However to call that wrenching of branches, as was discussed in Part I of this series (Mirrored Crisis: What Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex can show us about today’s refugee crisis) just a scattering is…
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