🎆 🎇 Happy First Year to Our Blog 🎆 🎇

Today is the anniversary, the first year of our blog.

I say our blog, even though it is I who get up early in the mornings, go through the day’s esteemed newspapers and put together a bulletin for you. Without you, the dear reader, and had you not been there, the whole of this blog, and all that labour, would have lost its meaning.

So it is reader and writer together; and here I ought really to call myself a “gatherer of news”, or a “curator of daily news”. Otherwise this project, this undertaking, would never have come to mean anything at all.

First of all, my heartfelt and enormous thanks to every one of you who has subscribed to this blog and spared the time in your day to read it.

Next, endless thanks to our hard-working Turkish journalists, who bring us these stories at all hours, day and night. Without them this blog would not exist either, for I do not write a single news item from scratch; I am merely the intermediary, the means by which a given story reaches you.

The blog has led me to make friends in diplomatic circles in Ankara and Istanbul, and to attend invitations. I had no such intention when I set out. Because of my work, I already have access to gatherings of this kind, but meeting people through the blog has been much nicer. It gave me a reason to meet them, and a good excuse to start talking.

Over the course of the year I have gone about the blog by trial and error, proceeding, and this will sound rather Turkish, on the honest logic of “the caravan is put in order on the road”. It turned out this way because I had no previous experience of blogging. And it turned out well, too, truth be told.

Let us see. I hope it will be a fine year, first of all for my beautiful country, Türkiye, and then for everyone living on this earth, whatever their colour, language and religion, who bears no hostility towards Türkiye and no enmity towards the Turk.

A year has now passed since the day the blog was founded.

I dedicate to you a poem I love by the famous Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran. The way this poem describes the notion of “time” has always greatly appealed to me.

Since I’ve Been In Jail

Since I’ve been in jail
the world has turned around the sun ten times
And if you ask the earth, it will say:
“It’s not worth mentioning,
a microscopic time.”
And if you ask me, I will say:
“It’s ten years of my life.”
I had a pencil
the year I came to jail.
It wore out in a week from writing.
And if you ask the pencil, it will say:
“A whole life.”
And if you ask me, I will say:
“It’s nothing, a mere week.”
Osman who was jailed for murder
completed a seven-year stretch and left
since I’ve been in jail.
He wandered around outside for a while,
and then got jailed again for smuggling.
He served a six-month term and left again,
and yesterday a letter came saying he’s married
and a child will be born in the spring.
Now they’re ten years old
the children who fell from their mothers’ womb
that year I came to jail,
And the colts of that year who had long thin shaky legs
have long since become docile broad-rumped mares.
But the olive shoots are still shoots
and they’re still children.
New squares have opened up in my distant city
since I’ve been in jail.
And our family
is living in a house I’ve never seen
on a street I don’t know.
The bread was pure white, like cotton,
the year I came to jail.
Later it was rationed out,
And we here on the inside beat one another
for a piece of black crust the size of a fist.
Now it’s free again,
But brown and tasteless.
The year I came to jail
The Second One had just begun.
The ovens in Dachau Camp were not yet lit,
The atom bomb was not yet hurled upon Hiroshima.
Time flowed like the blood of a child with his throat cut.
Later that chapter was officially closed,
Now American dollars are talking about a Third.
But in spite of everything, the days have brightened
since I’ve been in jail,
And about half of them
“put their heavy hands on the pavement
and on the edge of darkness
straightened up.”
Since I’ve been in jail
the world has turned around the sun ten times.
And again I repeat with the same passion
what I wrote for them
the year I came to jail:
“They
whose number is as great
as ants on the earth
fish in the water
birds in the sky
are fearful and brave
ignorant and learned
and they are children,
And they
who destroy and create
it is only their adventure in these songs.”
And for the rest,
for example, my lying here for ten years,
it’s nothing...