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 ... Show More
Oct 27
Kenan Orhan on his novel of migration, nostalgia and Turkey's political crackdown
Kenan Orhan on “The Renovation” (Penguin). The Booker Prize longlisted novel tells the story of a woman, recently arrived in Italy, who discovers that her bathroom has been re-modelled into a cell in Istanbul's Silivri Prison. Please support Turkey Book Talk on Patreon or Substac ... Show More
31m 39s
Sep 29
Dimitar Bechev on Turkey, Russia, China and the 'scramble for Europe'
Dimitar Bechev on “The Scramble for Europe: Russia, China, and Turkey Challenging Regional Order” (Oxford University Press). The book questions whether Ankara can be placed alongside Moscow and Beijing as a direct competitor to the EU, with a fundamentally different view on the c ... Show More
30m 34s
Jun 2021
Erasures, Borders and the Afterlife of the Armenian Genocide w/ Sophia Armen (E79)
This is a conversation with Sophia Armen, an Armenian-American writer, scholar and organizer, about the legacy of the Armenian Genocide today.We spoke about race in the Ottoman Empire and then in the Turkish republic, how the genocide changed Armenian cosmology, the cruel absurdi ... Show More
1h 48m
Jul 2025
Anahid Matossian, "Syrian-Armenian Women Migrants in Armenia: Gender, Identity and Painful Belonging" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adop ... Show More
1h 11m
Sep 2023
Elyse Semerdjian, "Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living et ... Show More
1h 24m
Sep 2014
The War That Changed The World: Istanbul - Modernity and Secularism
Turkey emerged from the First World War as a new republic, with a secular and modern identity, attempting to break from its Ottoman past. How has this influenced Turkey today? With historians Aksin Somel and Ahmet Kuyas, and novelist Elif Shafak.
50m 2s
Mar 2025
Ep. 6: Erased in Artsakh, Edited in Istanbul
In this episode, I join Elia Ayoub of The Fire These Times to speak with Efe Levent, editor of Mangal Media, about what it meant to collaborate on my article "Thunder, The Rose, and Ethnic Cleansing" about the erasure of Armenian cultural heritage in Artsakh. When a Turkish edito ... Show More
1h 1m