Turkey Book Talk #247 – Erik-Jan Zürcher, professor emeritus of Turkish Studies at Leiden University, on the uses and abuses of nostalgia for empire in contemporary Turkey and the UK.
The conversation is based on a lecture that Zurcher delivered at the Istanbul Policy Center in May, “The Poison of Nostalgia”, which compared neo-Ottomanist tendencies in Turkey with the view of empire in Britain’s Brexit debate.
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Talin Suciyan on Armenians in Turkey after World War Two
June 10, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #246 – Talin Suciyan, Associate Professor of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University, on “Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury).
The book highlights reports from the Soviet consulate in Istanbul in 1945-46, particularly focusing on the oral testimonies of thousands of Armenians in Turkey who registered for a campaign encouraging Armenians around the world to migrate to Soviet Armenia.
This campaign led to many Armenians from across the world moving to Soviet Armenia, but its Turkey chapter was ultimately cancelled for reasons still not clear today. Nevertheless, the book sheds fascinating light on Turkish politics and society at the time, pre-Cold War geopolitical dynamics, and the sentiments of Armenians from villages and towns across Turkey about their lives and why they wanted to emigrate.
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Turkey Book Talk #245 – David Tonge on “The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey: The Revival of the Religious Orders and Rise of Erdogan” (Hurst).
The book meticulously explores the political, economic and social influence of major Islamic orders in the country over the last few decades, including the flourishing of several key groups under Erdogan’s AKP.
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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 #244 – Richard Calis, assistant professor in cultural history at Utrecht University, on “The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius” (Harvard University Press).
The book examines the life and impact of Martin Crusius. Born in Bavaria in 1526, Crusius became celebrated as Europe’s preeminent expert on the Greek world past and present, as well as the Orthodox Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. In his seminal work Turcograecia, he wrote the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule, which served for centuries as a key source of knowledge on the Ottoman Empire itself.
The conversation addresses how Crusius’s work affected European views of the Ottoman Empire and the deep chasm between the Christian and Muslim worlds that his perspective reflected.
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Turkey Book Talk #243 – Fiona Mullen, director of the Nicosia-based Sapienta Economics consultancy, on uncertainty around the future of the decades-long Cyprus divide amid mounting geopolitical uncertainty and regional competition.
Fiona recently wrote that informal UN-brokered talks over the island suggest that the Cyprus paradigm may be changing. Ankara has in recent years pushed for a formal split on the island between Turkish and Greek sides, but shifting regional dynamics make calculations on all sides increasingly unpredictable.
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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.
Bilge Yesil on Turkey’s narrowing media landscape
April 15, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #242 – Bilge Yesil, professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and author of “Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order” (University of Illinois Press), returns to the podcast.
The conversation addresses Turkey’s narrowing media landscape and internet crackdown amid political turbulence, protests and mounting pressure on critics.
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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 #241 – Berk Esen, political scientist at Istanbul’s Sabanci University, on whether Ekrem Imamoglu’s arrest heralds Turkey’s shift from competitive authoritarianism to autocracy.
The conversation addresses the dynamics driving the intensifying crackdown, the international context for this escalation, and the critical choices facing the country’s embattled opposition.
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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 #240 – Cuma Çiçek, author of “The Kurds of Turkey: National, Religious and Economic Identities” (IB Tauris), on the dynamics behind Ankara’s latest push to put an end to over four decades of the PKK’s insurgency.
The conversation discusses jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s call for the group’s disarmament, the implications for affiliated forces in Iraq and Syria, and what it means for Turkish politics.
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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 #239 – Selim Koru, analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in US, on “New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury)
The book dives deep into the stark worldview driving Turkey’s regime change over the past couple of decades, and its profound implications for the country’s domestic and foreign policy.
It places Erdogan’s “New Turkey” in the context of a global trend of civilisation-fixated, far-right movements thriving in the US, Russia, India, Hungary and elsewhere – a pioneer of the emerging anti-liberal world order.
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Check out Selim’s Substack Kulturkampf
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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.
Claudia Liebelt on cosmetic surgery and perceptions of beauty in Turkey
February 18, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #238 – Claudia Liebelt, professor of social and cultural anthropology at the Free University of Berlin, on “Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey” (Syracuse University Press).
Hair transplants, dental implants, botox, nose jobs, lip fillers, eye lifts… Turkey has become almost synonymous with the booming cosmetic sector among international “health tourists” in recent years.
Liebelt’s book is based on extensive research in beauty salons and cosmetic surgery centres across Istanbul, speaking to customers, workers and surgeons to explain the sector’s extraordinary growth among locals and foreigners.
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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.
Omar Kadkoy on the future of Syrian migrants in Turkey
January 21, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #236 – Omar Kadkoy, foreign policy, security and migration program coordinator at Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Istanbul office, on the future of Turkey’s Syrian migrant population after the fall of Assad.
Developments in Syria have raised expectations that the millions of Syrians in Turkey will now return home. While some have already returned, the issue is very complex and poses major social, political and economic dilemmas for both Ankara and Damascus.
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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.
Samuel Hirst on a century of Ankara-Moscow cooperation
December 17, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #234 – Samuel J. Hirst, historian and assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University, on “Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939” (Oxford University Press).
The book examines crucial but sometimes overlooked decades of close cooperation between the young Republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union on key political, industrial and cultural projects. The conversation also discusses later episodes of collaboration between Ankara and Moscow in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the bromance between Erdogan and Putin today.
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Read a transcript of the interview on Substack
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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.
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