Two skinny teenagers in oversized sweatshirts bound onto the stage, each wearing New York Yankees caps, nodding their heads in time as they call to the crowd: “Put your hands in the air! We want to hear maximum noise!”
Amid commemorations marking 70 years since the 1941 deportation of the Russian Germans to Central Asia, there is a palpable sense that the community is disappearing. In Bishkek, roughly 30 people gather each Sunday to pray at the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Empty seats are abundant in a room that once was routinely filled to overflowing.
In the Canadian hamlet of Niagara-on-the-Lake stands an unusual monument – especially for a North American town of fewer than 15,000 inhabitants. It’s a statue of Mehriban Aliyeva, the wife of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, styled as a “divine muse.”
The educated public learned that renowned Georgian theater director Robert Sturua had been dismissed from the post of artistic director at the country's leading Rustaveli Theater in Tbilisi from the maestro's own curt posting ("I've been fired") on Facebook late on August 16.
The sparkling azure Great Almaty Lake in the Tian Shan mountains outside Kazakhstan’s commercial capital is usually a tranquil spot, but this summer it is a hive of activity: a film crew has descended to shoot a Kazakh historical epic, a tale of love and war set against the backdrop of some of the country’s most sumptuous scenery.
A walk through an Istanbul airport bookstore might lead an unsuspecting traveller to think that English-language literary works from Turkey begin and end with the novels of Nobel-Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. In reality, a diverse range of Turkish writers now garners a growing amount of press time in English.
Hollywood’s treatment of the Russia-Georgia war in 2008 is about to hit movie theaters in the United States. The Georgian-funded action flick, titled Five Days of August, seems to blur the line between entertainment and propaganda.
