Adana Vilayet

All of us in Turkey are remnants of an empire that crumbled at the turn of the last century. I was born in Bursa, in western Turkey. My mother's Tatar ancestors came to Bursa from Romania during the Balkan Wars. My father's Circassian ancestors came to Elazığ from the Caucasus just before the turn of the century. Both had been driven from their homes by the advances of the Russian Empire.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan indicated that Ankara “gave away” Aegean islands to Greece under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the pact that defined the borders of modern Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In a speech to regional officials in Ankara on Thursday, Erdogan expressed his regret for the border decisions imposed by the pact.

'In the Ruins: The 1909 Massacres of Armenians in Adana' by Zabel Yessayan (AIWA, $20, 262 pages)

The Russian desire to reach the ?warm waters? of the Mediterranean goes back to before the First World War. The copyright belongs to foreign minister Sergei Sazonov of Tsarist Russia. Sazonov was actually the third signatory of the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, along with Britain and France, aiming to divide the collapsing Ottoman Empire into zones of control.

‘A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East' by James Barr (Simon & Schuster, 454 pages, $25)