Back to Turkey

In a week, I will be arriving back in Turkey for two months of intensive language study.  I will be living and learning in Bursa, a city in northwestern Anatolia near the Marmara coast.  This year my study is sponsored by the US Department of State.  I was fortunate enough to win a Critical Language Scholarship.  This series of scholarships are designed to aid students wishing to learn languages deemed critical to US government interests overseas.  As a recipient of this scholarship, my experience in Turkey will differ in several ways from the time I spent there last year.  Not only will I be in a different city, I will be living with a host family, which will more deeply immerse me in Turkish language and culture.  The CLS program will also provide additional cultural programs and field trips.  I am extremely excited and grateful for this opportunity and will do my best to keep everyone updated on my adventures.

As I did last year, I will also be blogging about current events, politics and social issues in Turkey.  If you were reading my blog last year, you might remember that the party of Turkey's Prime Minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, was elected to a majority for a third straight election.  The Prime Minister's party, the AKP, is rooted in Islamist politics but has explicitly denounced religiously-based government.  Despite, or perhaps because of, the AKP's years of governing, the secular elites who had dominated the country until recently continue to worry about the socially conservative leanings and authoritarian tendencies of the AKP and Erodogan in particular.  This recent article in the New York Times on the recent conflict between the government and the state theater and its employees epitomizes the the complicated and contradictory social politics in contemporary Turkey.

In my final post last summer, I discussed what was then the newly developing situation in Syria. The situation deteriorated in the past nine months.  There are at least 24,000 Syrian refugees in camps in Turkey and Syrian forces have at times crossed the boarder to strike at Syrians in Turkey.  Without interference from Turkey, Syrian resistance fighters have used the refugee camps  as a base for strikes into Syria.  Bursa is almost as far as you can get from the Syrian boarder in Turkey so the situation should have little direct affect on my life there.  However, I will be interested to observe how much people are interested in the situation in Syria and how much it dominates media coverage.