[Turkey Through a Traveler’s Eyes] A Wild Sheep Chase Across Anatolia in 1939
On the eve of World War II Frenchman Francois Balsan, in his own words a “buyer of wool for a very important textile firm,” set out from ?stanbul for the eastern provinces of Turkey.
Balsan was very fortunate to receive permission from the Turkish Government to visit the eastern borderlands of Turkey in that period, as he had been told in an initial enquiry to the Turkish Consulate in Paris that “regarding the visit … to the Van district, I hasten to inform you that … the districts detailed in your letter are incorporated in a prohibited area.” Republican Turkey was naturally suspicious of representatives of imperialist France who, following the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in World War I, had sought to incorporate parts of southeastern Anatolia into their overseas possessions. What’s more, the eastern provinces had been rocked by a series of rebellions by the region’s dominant ethnic group, the Kurds. The last and most serious, in the mountainous Alevi Kurdish district of Dersim (modern Tunceli), had only just been quelled. Read the rest of this entry »