Barren mountains and pasture scoured by ceaseless wind: the land west of Eregli is about as close as Turkey gets to desert.
But it is here, at the southern edge of the central Anatolian plateau, in the shadow of a peak named after deer that were hunted to extinction over 50 years ago, that Rahim Demirbas has been planting his forest since 1998.
A pretty garden and a table laden with cheese, ham and good bread: a typical summer evening scene on the Prince's Islands, a popular haunt for wealthy Istanbul residents.
Reporter Irfan Aktan quoted Piling, a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a Kurdish rebel group that has been fighting the Turkish state since 1984, in a long article he published last September in a Turkish magazine about divisions within the PKK between hawks and doves.
It was a typical early summer day in Yuksekova, a town of 60,000 people in Turkey's southeastern corner. The sun was out, the rivers were running fast with snowmelt, and there was a riot on.
Skull-caps on their heads, five students aged between 18 and 40 hunch over a text in Arabic in the southeastern Turkish town Norşin. In front of them, legs folded like a yogi, a copy of the same leather-bound book open on a low wooden lectern, an elderly teacher declaims in sing-song Kurdish.
Waving a yellow press card usually opens doors in Turkey. It didn’t impress the police officer guarding the entrance to Agos, the Turkish-Armenian newspaper run by Hrant Dink until a 17-year-old Turkish nationalist gunned him down in January as he stepped outside.
