Mustafa Kemal

Turkey’s renowned philosophy Professor Ionna Kuçuradi has reacted to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who said the Turkish language is not suitable for the discipline, daily Cumhuriyet reported.

“We had a language which was very suitable for science; yet we slept over it one night and the next morning it was gone. Now we have been dragged down to the level of a country which learns and teaches science in foreign languages. Thousands of words and languages are forgotten. The structure of the language, which used to be suitable for deriving new words and expressions, was curbed.”

‘Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination’ by Stefan Ihrig (Harvard University Press, 311 pages, $30)

I have been to Rasih Nuri İleri’s home a couple of times.

He would talk about even the harshest memories in a soft style. His house was like a museum, even though this is used too much as a cliché, but this is the only way to describe his house.

Turkey’s post-modern civil war continues to produce confusion on the conceptual level. The latest example is the meaningless debate about Ottoman Turkish in high schools. It is currently taught as an optional lesson, but here was a discussion during last week’s National Educational Council to make it compulsory.

The much-speculated will of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, will be reviewed by a court before a key ruling on the fate of the country’s new presidential palace, a group of plaintiffs announced on Dec. 4.

Turkey is being governed from the massive recently built presidential palace, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said, in an apparent bid to assert his authority over the prime ministry.
 

Catholic clergy gathered in central Istanbul on Nov. 24 ahead of Pope Francis’ scheduled visit to Turkey this week.

Speaking at the gathering Istanbul Latin Catholic Church Bishop Monsignor Louis Pelatre stated that the pope's Nov. 28-30 visit will only include the cities of Ankara and Istanbul and he would not be visiting Ä°zmir, as previously reported.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, as you might have probably heard, argued last week that Muslims discovered the Americas some three centuries before Christopher Columbus. Since then, this unexpected take on history has been attracting the attention of not just the Turkish but even the international media.

Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ has defended the new presidential palace’s much-debated cost by comparing the situation to the billiard table at the Pembe Köşk (Pink Villa), which was used by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in the 1920s.