Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Khojaly genocide. It is the most horrific massacre mankind has witnessed in recent years. In one night, 613 Azerbaijanis, including women and children, were slaughtered in the most brutal fashion as they tried to flee to safety. This grave event is a crime against humanity. Thirty years on from […]
It’s not every day you discover a bit of family history you share with the British Prime Minister, but it happened to me late last summer. I was flicking through family photo albums with my father, Oktay Hamit, when I came across a large black and white one of him and seven other men. I […]
“Here we are, on July 11th 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica, on the eve of a great Serb holiday, we present to the Serb nation this town. And finally, the moment has come that, after Uprising against Dahijas (Ottoman janissaries), we take revenge against Turks in these lands.” These were the words of Rakto Mladic, a […]
On this day twenty years ago, actor Kemal Sunal suffered a fatal heart attack as he boarded an early morning domestic flight from Istanbul to the Black Sea city of Trabzon. He was just 55 years old. Sunal is said to have had a lifelong fear of flying and had not been on a plane […]
Every 19 May, the people of Turkey commemorate Mustafa Kemal’s landing at Samsun, on the Black Sea, on May 19, 1919, which marked the start of the Turkish War of Independence. The Turks emerged victorious from the four-year war, expelling numerous foreign powers which had invaded the crumbling Ottoman Empire, among them Britain, France, Italy, […]
A year after they were given the right to vote and stand for office, 17 Turkish women were elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) on 8 February 1935. A by-election in 1936 saw their number increase to 18 and they constituted 4.6% of the Parliament: the second biggest proportion of female MPs […]
The founders of the Republic of Turkey took steps to make people’s lives easier and to modernise the country in line with Western standards. One of the measures was to adopt European time and calendar. There were a few different systems used to decide the time in the Ottoman Empire: under the Alaturka system, sunset […]
This year marks one hundred years since the first two-minute silence was observed on Armistice Day, on 11 November 1919. At exactly 11am, the British nation will pause what they do for two minutes to pay our respects to our Armed Forces community, past and present. The day’s origins lie in the Armistice – the […]
Exactly 225 years ago today, 14 October, the first-ever resident Turkish ambassador to Britain set off from Ottoman Turkey on a 3-month journey, arriving in London for his new post on 21 December 1793. A decision by Sultan Selim III on 23 July 1793 paved the way for Britain to receive its first resident […]
110 years ago, Winston Churchill raged to the Liberal Cabinet about Great Britain’s “detestable oppression” towards Cyprus, claiming that the British Government’s treatment of the island “constituted a blemish upon Imperial policy of a peculiarly discreditable kind.” What did Churchill say about Enosis? What was the “maiming, crippling toll” he accused His Majesty’s Government […]
