Across the Turkish-Armenian divide
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, remember that? The 98th anniversary of the 1915 tragedy passed last week, but all official moves to bridge the divide are currently on ice and the issue appears to have taken a back seat. There was a time not so many years ago when the question was firmly in the headlines - a brief, tentative diplomatic thaw that ultimately petered out. In fact, that wasn’t just an official semi-glasnost, but a cultural one too. Journalist and writer Ece Temelkuran’s “Deep Mountain” was first published in 2008, presenting Turkish readers with a bold new title dissenting from the official line of the state. In it, Temelkuran set herself the ostensibly simple task of meeting Armenians, talking to them, listening to them, and reporting back for the Turkish audience. Eschewing the directly political, she preferred “to write about Armenians, not necessarily what happened in 1915,” and while this may seem like a modest undertaking to an outsider, in Turkey at the time it was a taboo-shaking exercise.
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