Orhan Pamuk

Open Letter: A Halt to New Delhi’s Demolitions

The Indian government’s Central Vista Redevelopment, pressing ahead amid a pandemic surge, is tearing down vital parts of the country’s cultural heritage without proper consultation or adequate provision.

The Fading Dream of Europe

The Fading Dream of Europe

In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream.

My Turkish Library

Freedom to Write

The Anger of the Damned

Censored in Palestine