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Diary of the Emerging Republic

David Barchard on the birth of modern Turkey

  • With a handful of grit and a dash of gloss, the photographer Ara Güler captured a people in motion, at work and at play. This picture shows a man repairing a taka in the Golden Horn.

October 1923: When, on that autumn day in 1923, the Turkish Republic was first proclaimed, its capital, Ankara, could hardly have looked less like the capital of a large country. It was a town of around 29,000 people. A few provincial office buildings and hotels were clustered around the square which today we know as Ulus. Keçiören and Gaziosmanpaşa were outlying summer resorts. Çankaya was just a villa on a hill. The War of Independence had mostly been directed from the buildings within the Citadel, whish as a result have been carefully preserved to this day as a memorial to the national struggle. Turkey was a country of around 13 million people having lost about 5 million during eleven years of famine, disease and continuous war.

Other Highlights from Cornucopia 17
  • The Great Yalı of Zeki Pasha

    Built as a glittering prize, then closed through war and exile, this flamboyant survivor is one of the last of the great waterfront mansions of the Bosphorus.

  • The Family Brassica

    The Greeks and Romans, who appreciated cauliflower for its sobering effect, were particularly fond of the magnificent cauliflowers of Cyprus, with their tasty creamy-white florets.


  • The Republic

    Cornucopia celebrates Turkey’s 75th birthday with 40 pages of photographs by Ara Güler and John Brunton and articles by Norman Stone and David Barchard. It was the century of Turkey’s birth, of unprecedented peace and hard-won prosperity. In just 75years, Turkey has come a long way.


  • Headhunting

    The memoirs of Frederick Courtney Selous, naturalist, explorer and probably the greatest of all the African hunters of the nineteenth century, recall his hunting expeditions in Turkey. His book East and West: Sport and Travel has been translated into Turkish by Derin Türkömer, a passionate hunter himself, who describes his hero’s adventures


  • Silence of the Lammergeiers

    The towering peaks and rolling foothills of Turkey’s LakeDistrict simply take one’s breath away. Eğirdir, at the heart of Anatolia’s majestic Lake District and the midpoint of a triangle of mountains, is great trekking country.

Buy the issue
Issue 17, 1999 The Republic
£12.00 / $15.49 / 530.32 TL
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