The fur is flying between the eastern Turkish city of Van and the capital, Ankara. Van, as cat lovers know, is home to the unique Van cat, a breed distinguished by its white coat and different colored eyes. Ankara, as cat lovers might also know, is home to the unique Angora cat, a breed distinguished by its white coat and different colored eyes. Confused? It appears that so are the cities that are home to these two breeds.
As the Hurriyet Daily News reports, officials in Van are not too happy about Ankara's new municipal logo: a fluffy white cat.
From the report:
The official city logo recently adopted by Ankara’s municipal assembly has prompted a “cat fight” between the capital and the eastern city of Van over the origins of the feline symbol, the Anatolia news agency reported Sunday.
The Van Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or VATSO, and the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality both claim their cities are the real home of the “smiling Turkish Angora” depicted on Ankara’s new logo.
Speaking to the press Saturday, the chairman of the chamber said it was wrong for Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek to misrepresent the Van kittens he showed to journalists as if they were Angora, or Ankara, cats.
“Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek has been giving press statements about the Turkish Angora for two days after they selected the feline as the new symbol of the city,” VATSO Chairman Zahir Kandaşoğlu said. “However, he said the Turkish Angora has a white coat with one blue and one amber eye, which is wrong.”
“The kittens presented to the press during the statement are Turkish Van [cats], and as described those are their features. Even if these kittens were born in Ankara, their father is definitely from Van,” he added.
Much has been made in recent months of Turkey's ambitious new foreign policy posture, which seeks to turn the country into a major regional and even global diplomatic player. A lot of that activity has been centered in the Middle East, an area the Turks believe they have "strategic depth" because of their historical links to the region.
But the recent troubles in Kyrgyzstan have led to criticism in Turkey that Ankara's focus on the Middle East is coming at the expense of its influence among the Turkic countries of Central Asia and ability to act on their behalf. For more, read here and here.
Turkish officials have denied these charges, pointing out that they are working hard to play a central role in resolving the Kyrgyz conflict. More on that here.
Announced last summer, the Turkish government's "democratic opening" was a commendable move towards solving the decades-old Kurdish problem through increased democratization and political reforms (take a look at this Eurasianet article from the time). Less than a year later, the initiative (sometimes also called the "Kurdish opening") appears to have ground to a halt, at least on the political front.
The latest setback for the effort appears to be the arrest Thursday of ten members of a group of 34 Kurds -- among them several former PKK members -- who returned to Turkey last October after spending several years in exile in Northern Iraq. The group's return was one of the first and most visible efforts in the government's Kurdish initiative and was supposed to be followed by the return of other groups. But the heros' welcome given to the group and the suggestion that they returned at the order of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan appeared to be too costly for the government in domestic terms and the plans for further returns were put on indefinite hold. Since then, every member of the group of the original returnees (save for four minors who accompanied them) has been charged with speaking in support of a terrorist organization (the PKK) after coming back to Turkey and are currently standing trial.
Where's the beef? A plate of Mongolian vegetarian food.
Andrew Cullen's great Eurasianet piece from June 3 about the budding vegetarian scene in Mongolia stayed with me for quite some time after reading it. I decided to write Andrew, asking him to give the story behind the story about how he came to explore this unlikely veggie scene. Here's what he had to say:
What really drew me to the trend as a story, besides the
surprise factor of people from a country that is inextricably linked to
livestock and meat-eating turning towards vegetarianism, was the spiritual
undertones that link the whole veggie scene here. Literally every
vegetarian restaurant that I've visited has a religious affiliation, albeit
often unofficial ones. Mongolia is not a particularly religious place:
Soviet-enforced atheism and the ultra-pragmatism of nomadic life kept religion
from being a serious social force during the last century. Since 1991, religion
has made a sort of comeback, as Buddhism returned and Christian missionaries
arrived, but it still doesn't have much impact on the public sphere. But then
these restaurants appeared, adhering to very strict spiritually influenced
guidelines that challenged Mongolia's dietary and spiritual status quo.
Amnesty International has just issued a report calling on Turkey to urgently change the way it deals with Kurdish minors accused of joining pro-PKK protests. From the report:
Thousands of children in Turkey, some as young as 12, have been prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation, solely for their alleged participation in demonstrations considered by the government to be in support of terrorism. The demonstrations are focused on issues of concern to members of the Kurdish community, and often involve clashes with the police.
The report gives the children’s first-hand accounts of being ill-treated on arrest and while being held in police custody. Despite widespread accounts of excessive use of force and other ill-treatment, no police officer has been brought to justice.
In many cases legal protections for children in pre-charge detention were not followed.
The Madimak Hotel in the city of Sivas in central Turkey is one of the country's most tragic landmarks, the site of one of a horrifying episode of ethnic/religious strife.
In 1993, the hotel was the venue for the gathering of a group of Turkey's Alevi community, a minority group that sees itself as distinct from the country's Sunni Islamic majority. While the group was meeting, a gang of local Islamists attacked the hotel and set it on fire, killing 37. Since then, no one has been able to figure just what to do with the Madimak and how to commemorate the tragic event that happened inside it. From a report in the Hurriyet Daily News:
A hotel in the Central Anatolian province of Sivas that was the site of a 1993 massacre is in the process of being bought by the government amid debates about the most suitable future use for the building.
The money necessary to buy the hotel has been sent to the authorized provincial administration in Sivas, State Minister Faruk Çelik announced Thursday, speaking at a meeting in Ankara on the legal status of Alevi houses of worship, or “cemevi.”
“The project will cost 4.5 million Turkish Liras. The ministry will provide additional resources for the restoration work,” the minister said.
In February, Çelik had said it was not important whether the Madımak Hotel became a museum or something else as long as local residents were the ones to decide the building’s fate.
The Cem Foundation, a prominent Alevi organization, says the hotel should be demolished and a park and monument built in its place.
Via Istanbul Eats, a very distressing report about the possible demise of Inci, a small pastry shop that claims to be the inventor of the profiterole, the chocolate-sauce doused cream puff dessert. That claim may be dubious, but what is for sure is that the 70-year-old Inci is one of the vestiges of an older, more cosmopolitan Istanbul and one of the city's culinary treasures.
But the small shop is now facing the prospect of being closed down. From IE's report:
We’d like to like the profiterole at Inci Pastanesi on Istiklal. And we’d like to
believe their claim that the profiterole was invented on the premises in the 1940’s. But we like Inci for
non-culinary reasons. This old school Beyoglu pastry shop has been spooning out
cream puffs covered in chocolate goop for 70 years with a respect for tradition
and a refreshing contempt for the latest trends in interior design. For better
or worse, it is an institution.
Those denizens of Baku who feel like the city's dining scene has grown a bit tired might now have something to celebrate: the arrival of Chinar, a new restaurant/lounge serving high-end Asian fare that brings "the new international cool vibe to Baku," as one informant wrote to us.
The fancy spot certainly seems to tell the story of today's Baku. A former humble teahouse, the place has now been reborn as one where "local movers and shakers" can drink flaming cocktails made with caviar foam and watch an hourly display of an art installation that is supposed to mimic flowing gold. Indeed.
We learned these details from the blog of Fluid Movement, a London-based bar consulting company that is teaching Chinar's Azeri bartenders such important things as how to safely light the bar on fire (something that a bartender in New York was recently arrested for doing) and how to make a Baku Bellinin (secret ingredient? Mango foam, of course). See photos here.
Domestic political factors in Turkey may exert considerable influence in the coming weeks over Ankara’s response to the tragically botched Israeli commando raid on the Gaza aid flotilla, analysts say.
No sooner did we report that Jala, a carbonated pomegranate drink and, in our opinion, a candidate for Azerbaijan’s new liquid gold, will be sold in stores in the UK, than competition reared its ugly head.
Well, sort of. This time, we bring you news of a beverage being imported into Azerbaijan. And not just any beverage: a carbonated relaxation soft drink that promises – no joke – to “slow your roll” with a mixture of melatonin, valerian root, and rose hips.
Azerbaijan will become the first international market for Drank, a product of the Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., that now sells in the US and Canada. According to an announcement in the Houston Business Journal, the “anti-energy drink” will be available there already in the next few weeks.
Did we miss something important? Are Azeris in particular in need of relaxation?
UPDATE: Apparently, we aren't the first to take note of Drank, a fact you might discover if you search the website of The New Yorker under the key words "Drank," "Purple Drank," "Beverages," "Drinks," "Cough Medicine," "Taste Tests," or "Lil Wayne."
The soft drink, it seems, has its predecessor in a kind of sedative cocktail that combines cough syrup with 7UP, hails from Houston, TX, and has been immortalized by the rapper Lil Wayne in the song "Me and My Drank." The song, according to the magazine's Ben McGrath, includes the lines "One more ounce will make me feel so great / Wait, now I can’t feel my face.”
