Turkey: A Short History

"Would modesty forbid me from talking about my own? It was a very interesting book to write, and the publishers and editors did a very good job. I was covering a thousand years of history , so I was bound to make mistakes. I don’t think there were any particular howlers, but there were an awful lot of small things that the editor picked up. I started off talking about the German refugees who came to Turkey. One of the best known was Ernst Reuter, who was subsequently the mayor of Berlin. I got the name of the concentration camp he was in wrong. And I was a bit out of my depth talking about 16th century Islam. It’s a cult of liberation. Especially for women, who after all, not so far away in this part of the world, are not allowed to drive cars or be a schoolteacher.That general emancipation is something that Atatürk did. Another thing that was hugely important was the language reform [of the 1940s]. The Turkish sounds really need a Latin or a Cyrillic alphabet. You have eight vowels, including the umlauts. The Turks were very divided about it. The young Turks said you’ve got to change the alphabet. But there were an awful lot of people who said the Arabic and Persian words, of which there are millions, can’t be done without the old script, and if get rid of the script you can’t read the old poetry and whatnot. In the end, they simplified the language completely. They got rid of an awful lot of Arabic words, which I don’t think they should have done. But some say you have to do that if you are going to make the mass of the people literate. Because a sentence in Turkish, if put into the Arabic script, can mean one of 12 things – you have to understand the context. Literacy was terribly limited before 1940. I doubt there were more than 10,000 people in the country who could read and write. It’s a good book, that. And I think it is true that the Black Sea countries are connected."