‘The Art of Banksy’ exhibition at Global Karaköy takes the artist’s work out of context and packages it for consumers
By Emma Harper | February 11, 2016
A tube train approaches a station, tracks rattling noisily, the blinking headlamps blinding and the heavy metal carriages sending tremors through surrounding structures and human bodies alike. The experience of standing in a station as a train pulls in, an elemental aspect of city living, is difficult to duplicate. Just...
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Contemporary Art, Exhibitions, News, Gezi Protests
By Victoria Khroundina | July 28, 2015
On display until the end of summer is a 50-square metre painting paying tribute to the Gezi protests. It was on display on the terrace of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects in Karaköy until the end of June and will be shown in Kadıköy throughout August (watch this space for an update of the location)....
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Contemporary Art, Exhibitions, News, Gezi Protests
By Victoria Khroundina | May 21, 2015
In 2013, the revered pop culture/music channel MTV launched a new series of documentaries, entitled
Rebel Music. The idea behind the series was to highlight stories of young fearless musicians and artists around the world who are rising up against oppression in their respective countries. The series had its premiere last...
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Film, News, Gezi Protests
By Victoria Khroundina | December 31, 2014
As 2014 comes to a close, I take a look at the year that was. In January, we announced that the Ancient & Modern award for original research has gone to Dr Peter Andrews (76), doyen of Asian tent studies, with Harriet Rix (23) taking the Godfrey Goodwin prize. Above,...
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Archaeology, Architecture, Contemporary Art, Design, Exhibitions, Film, History, Museums, Nature, News, Gezi Protests, Photography, Sport
By Victoria Khroundina | April 5, 2014
Day by day, Istanbul looks more and more like a giant construction playground than a city whose history dates back 1500 years. With ever more narcissistic projects signed off by the bulldozer-happy Prime Minister Erdoğan, it is becoming increasingly hard to keep track of exactly what is going and what is...
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Architecture, Culinary Arts, History, News, Gezi Protests
Turkey would be a poorer place...
By Cornucopia Blog | March 23, 2014
... for caricaturists! Unthinkable, of course, but eventually someone will have to go. Sooner or later. Will it happen in time to save the Belgrade Forest, the Bosphorus, any last precious corner of poor Istanbul? News came today that all the lovely old 1900s stations, large and small, are to be...
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News, Gezi Protests
By THE CORNUCOPIA BLOG | March 13, 2014
Our hearts go out to Berkin Elvan’s family. Since Tuesday, the streets of Istanbul have been filled with people mourning his death: whether peacefully protesting or putting a carnation in water. Berkin’s funeral was yesterday. Thousands of people turned up to pay their respects. Police also joined in with gas...
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News, Gezi Protests
By Cornucopia Blog | February 4, 2014
If the world press is to be believed, the Black Sea has become a cesspit of grubby speculation and political greed. Kiev speaks for itself. A horrendous nuclear power station project is steaming ahead on a well-known earthquake fault line on Turkey's Black Sea coast (the Japanese and Russians are...
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News, Gezi Protests
By Victoria Khroundina | December 30, 2013
With just a few days left of 2013, it’s time to look back on the year that was. The year 2013 will be etched in history as the year of the
Gezi protests. It all started with a tree, so to speak, in late May when a group of people...
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Architecture, Contemporary Art, Culinary Arts, Design, Exhibitions, Film, History, Museums, Music and Performing Arts, Protest Music, Nature, News, Gezi Protests, Photography, Sport
After a hot summer, the solidarity protests continue
By Victoria Khroundina | December 23, 2013
After weeks of preparations and permissions sought (and granted) from local municipalities, the day of the solidarity march was finally upon us. Yesterday (December 22) thousands of people came together in Kadıköy to protest the urban politics of the government. Environmentalists, archaeologists, historians, architects, ecologists, women’s movements, LGBT movements, human...
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Architecture, Culinary Arts, History, News, Gezi Protests
Solidarity march on December 22
By Victoria Khroundina | December 17, 2013
Enough is enough. This Sunday December 22 the people of Istanbul will ‘reclaim their city’. The brainchild of a number of organisations, movements and forums (some notable ones include Istanbul Urban Movements, Defence of the Northern Forests, Abbasağa Forum, Archaeologists’ Association Istanbul Branch, People’s Engineers and Architects, Istanbul Assembly for...
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Architecture, Culinary Arts, History, News, Gezi Protests
By Victoria Khroundina | July 31, 2013
The Yedikule saga continues. Although there has hardly been a peep out of Turkish media this week, some international proponents are expressing their concerns – good, they need to be heard. I went to check out what has been happening to the Yedikule
bostans since the construction trucks rolled in,...
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Culinary Arts, News, Gezi Protests
The Gezi Park resistance inspires art exhibitions around Istanbul
By Victoria Khroundina | July 22, 2013
The Cornucopia Blog has been following the Gezi resistance from a cultural perspective, and we have shown examples of how the movement has added meaning and beauty to some of the art, music and writing being created in the city. Elsewhere on this blog I have posted information about which...
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Exhibitions, News, Gezi Protests, Highlights Turkey
The threat to Istanbul’s oldest gardens
By John Scott | July 21, 2013
There has been little international reporting on Istanbul this week. No news not good news. The assault on Turkey’s heritage is unrelenting. One report that did come out concerned the city’s famous Theodosian land walls, which we reported on last week. The article, by the
New Yorker writer Elif Batuman, is...
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Culinary Arts, News, Gezi Protests
Stop press: the unpublished last issue of NTVTarih
By Cornucopia Blog | July 13, 2013
The publishers of
NTVTarih, the Turkish equivalent of the BBC
History Magazine, pulled the plug on the magazine hours before the July issue was due to print two weeks ago. The staff promised to make amends, and we have learnt from the pages of Hürriyet Daily News that the most celebrated issue...
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News, Gezi Protests
All quiet in the Arctic circle
By Cornucopia Blog | July 13, 2013
As T24, the independent online newspaper, reported this morning, Turkish journalists took to İstiklal Caddesi yesterday with that most seditious of slogans: 'Penguins are beautiful in the arctic!' – a reference to the nature documentaries that replaced the news last month. They hoped to give their birds an airing in...
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News, Gezi Protests
High tables and low: the first iftar in Taksim
By Cornucopia Blog | July 10, 2013
Monday night saw dozens of members of Taksim Solidarity – that wicked band of senior militants (men and women, grey-haired academics and the like) – being wrestled into a police bus (rather more than wrestled in the case of one of them – it took four well-built men, one per...
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Culinary Arts, News, Gezi Protests
The ongoing destruction of Istanbul's cultural heritage
By John Scott | July 8, 2013
YEDİKULE YEDİKULE YEDİKULE! Before reading this, fling open your window, fill your lungs with air and bellow '
Yedikule!' three times very fast. For anyone in earshot who ever called Istanbul home, it will bring a tear to the eye. Now sit down and brace yourself. This is yet another sad...
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Architecture, Culinary Arts, History, News, Gezi Protests, Travel
Taksim and the Nika Riots
By Cornucopia Blog | July 4, 2013
On July 4 Jonathan Freeland returned to 6th-century Constantinople in his BBC Radio 4 series,
The Long View, to explore the context of recent events in Istanbul. The parallels are uncanny, down to the unification of the Greens and the Blues of the Byzantine hippodrome and today's newfound solidarity between the rival fans of Istanbul's...
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History, News, Gezi Protests
Reactions from some of Istanbul's cultural institutions to the Gezi Park protests
By Victoria Khroundina | July 3, 2013
The Gezi Park resistance, which started in Istanbul on May 31 and pretty soon spread to every corner of Turkey, has had an impact not only on the issues at the heart of the protests themselves, but on many aspects of practical and cultural life. As we have posted elsewhere...
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Exhibitions, Music and Performing Arts, Protest Music, News, Gezi Protests
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