(by Simone Perotti) “You’re asking me if we Turkish are Mediterranean? Good question. Our identity is difficult to define”. Buket Uzuner is a beautiful woman, with refined manners, and you can tell immediately that she is an educated, active and well-travelled woman who knows the [...]
(by Simone Perotti) “Ours is a complex history …”. The interview with Murat Belge, who I meet at the Italian Cultural Institute, is one that I have been looking forward to since he confirmed it, and indeed I am not disappointed. A journalist, translator, a person [...]
(by Simone Perotti) To reach Nedim Bora Hazar who is a director, actor and musician, it takes one and a half hours sailing from Kabataš between Tophane and Ortaköy, to the second largest of the Princes’ Islands, Bourgazada. When we disembark, he is there to [...]
(by Simone Perotti) Istanbul. Looking at Istanbul when one knows its history makes quite an impression. It resembles life, an in attentive pampered traveller, who overlooks the pearls in the hollows of the rocks, in the corolla of flowers that surround the path, but stains [...]
(by Simone Perotti) Chef Musa Dagdeviren has a smile like a Cheshire cat. He has a thick curved Turkish-style moustache, quick honest eyes, and one understands that he is as curious and courteous as he is determined and decided. Our food-blogger friend Ayfer Tuczu Ünsal introduced [...]
(by Simone Perotti) Where could I possible meet with the Director of Excavations of Yenikapı, the greatest discovery of ancient ships of all time, on the south coast of Sultanahmet, if not at the Rahmi Koç Museum, on the shores of the Golden Horn? It is a [...]
(by Simone Perotti) In the Office of the most important Turkish literary agency, Kalem Agency, I breathe the smell of home. It is like entering the head offices of Consulenze Editoriali, the agency of Rosaria Carpinelli, at Vittor Pisani street in Milan. Instead we are [...]
(by Simone Perotti) “There is so much creativity here. A young population, that has only recently opened itself to art and to the West. ” Ferdan Yusufi is a striking woman, dressed in a very original manner, with long wavy hair, a scarf wound around her [...]
(by Simone Perotti) “Impossible.” The writer, journalist and blogger Ayfer Tuzcu Unsal answers without hesitation when I ask her if there is an emblematic aroma that sums up Turkey. And she answers in the same way when I ask whether there is a taste that encloses [...]
(by Simone Perotti) “Oil is subversive, like the mixing of races.” This is how Buket Uzuner, a much loved writer in Italy for her splendid “Ada d’ambra” (Sellerio), but also an environmental activist and author of an extensive bibliography of fiction and non-fiction, started yesterday [...]
