Category: Uncategorized
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Flipping pages: an Overview of Kurdish Periodical Culture
An look at the British Library’s Kurdish periodical collection, with a contextualization of the holdings, and copious links to help those interested find research about periodicals in the various Kurdish languages and dialects.
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Two Sides of the Black Sea: Ukrainian Advocacy in the Ottoman Empire
On occasion, old books can have oddly prescient titles. Ukrayna, Rusya, Türkiye: Makaleler Mecmuası is one such book. I came across it during one of my usual cataloguing sweeps, and thought that I’d shelve it somewhere in my memory. And that’s where that knowledge has lived for the last few years. But since Russia invaded…
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Righting Writing
In this second podcast, I explore some of the highs and lows of writing and publishing.
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Queers Kvetching about Knishes in the Mame-Loshn
I’ve learnt a lot of languages in my time. Even at a young age, I had an aptitude for it. We spoke English at home, and my first foray into language learning was at age 4, when my parents enrolled me in a bilingual English-French playgroup. This might seem like the natural, patriotic thing to…
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Not Your Stereotype: Laz Written Expression in Turkey
A few months ago, I wrote about a small-run personal history of the town of Azakh written in the Azakheni dialect of Arabic. In the preamble, I mentioned that there are a whole host of ethnicities resident in Turkey lacking official recognition or support for cultural autonomy. Despite such administrative inertia, the names and customs…
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Lives Seen: Anatolian Arabic, Azakh and Authorial Authority
In a previous blog post, I noted how the Treaty of Lausanne established, among other things, official recognition of the communal rights of the Greeks of Istanbul, Armenians and Jews by the Ottoman Empire. These rights included mother-tongue education, religious instruction, and publishing activities. To assume that these three were the only minorities to benefit…
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On Vampires, Ghouls and Witches
As a child, I liked to believe that I had a particular connection to the Dracula myth. My grandmother was from a town called Tusnád, now Tușnad, Harghita Prefecture, Romania. It lies about 70 km north from Brașov (called Brasó in Hungarian), and 100 km from Castelul Bran, erstwhile castle of the now infamous Vlad…
From Altay to Yughur 