Işılay Gürsu on archaeology and public perceptions in Turkey
August 18, 2026
Turkey Book Talk #276 – Işılay Gürsu, assistant director at the British Institute in Ankara, on “Public Dialogues in Archaeology: New Methodologies from Turkey” (Bloomsbury Academic).
The book explores the Turkish public’s views of the country’s rich archaeological heritage, the hunt for hidden treasure at historic sites across the country, and efforts to repatriate ancient artefacts that were pilfered generations ago.
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Onur İnal on the rise of late Ottoman İzmir
August 4, 2026
Turkey Book Talk #275 – Onur İnal of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Vienna on “Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir” (Cambridge University Press).
The book describes how the cosmopolitan coastal city of Izmir, often known in Europe at the time as Smyrna, flourished in the second half of the 19th century, becoming a major connection between the Ottoman Empire, Europe and the rest of the world.
It shows how settlers, migrants and investors exploited the natural resources in the hinterland of Western Anatolia to create a transportation hub of people and goods in Izmir.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by Bloomsbury Academic, access to transcripts of every interview, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #266 – Mustafa Aksakal, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, on “The War that Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire” (Princeton University Press)
The book gives a revisionist take on the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution, suggesting it was not a foregone conclusion and alternative future paths were possible.
Aksakal argues that the end of the empire and emergence of nation states in the region resulted from a combination of European imperial ambitions, resentments among local populations, and catastrophic decisions taken by the Committee of Union and Progress in power in Istanbul during the war.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #264 – Murat Yıldız, associate professor of history at Skidmore College, on “The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul” (University of Texas Press)
The book examines the emergence of sports culture in late Ottoman Istanbul and its implications for developing ideas of modernisation, imperial identity, religious identity, communal identity and gender norms. It also shows how Muslims, Christians and Jews created an athletics culture in schools, clubs and publications that in some ways transcended ethnoreligious divisions but in other ways reinforced them.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #263 – Berin Gür, professor of architecture at Ankara’s TED University, on “The Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture: The Islamist-Nationalist Rhetoric of Conquest and Melancholy” (Routledge)
The book explores how the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Istanbul is remembered in Turkey’s mainstream official narrative and how architecture contributes to this. It dives deep into the weaponisation of historical memory in the country today, while also considering how Greeks remember the same historical event.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #261 – Burcu Karahan of Stanford University on her translation of “One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories” (Translation Attached).
The collection brings together 65 stories blending risque humour and bold eroticism, first published anonymously in weekly instalments in 1923-24. The stories are a fascinating time capsule of a vanished age, but much remains unknown about who was behind them and the circumstances of their publication.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #237 – Brett Wilson, associate professor of history and public policy at Central European University, on his translation of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu‘s 1922 novel “Nur Baba” (Routledge).
The book’s account of a debauched Bektashi Sufi lodge caused a sensation at the time, raising eyebrows with its scandalous depiction of an immoral, even degenerate religious community in turn-of-the-century Istanbul.
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Zozan Pehlivan on climatic shifts behind late Ottoman conflicts
January 7, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #235 – Zozan Pehlivan, assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, on “The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century” (Cambridge University Press).
The book explores how extreme climate disruptions played into socioeconomic shifts and became a major underlying factor behind rising tensions between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in eastern Anatolia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #225 – Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford, on “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World” (Allen Lane).
The book examines how in July 1860 Damascus exploded in communal violence, when a mostly Muslim crowd tried to exterminate the Christian community – a shocking eruption of violence after hundreds of years of relative peace and coexistence. It looks at why tensions built up in the decades before 1860, as well as how the Ottoman authorities oversaw recovery of the region in the aftermath.
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Become a member on Substack or Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to each episode.
Umit Kurt on Gaziantep’s forgotten Armenian past
July 30, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #224 – Umit Kurt, assistant professor of history at the University of Newcastle, Australia, on ”The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province” (Harvard University Press).
The book draws on Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, British and French archives, memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts and property liquidation records to detail the dispossession of Antep’s historic Armenian community and the transfer of their wealth and resources to Ottoman and later Turkish Muslim elites.
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Turkey Book Talk #219 – Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on “Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press).
The book explores the forced migration from the Russian Empire of around one million Muslims between the 1850s and World War One, their seeking of refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and the seismic demographic, economic, social and political impact this had.
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Turkey Book Talk #215 – Andrew Finkel on his novel “The Adventure of the Second Wife: The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan” (Even Keel Press).
Andrew is a veteran journalist based in Turkey for decades. His debut novel is a sprawling, playful narrative exploring the mystery of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II’s obsession with Sherlock Holmes stories.
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Become a member on Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to each episode.
Check out and sign up to the excellent Turkey Recap.
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