In a rich man’s house (Șanlıurfa)

Mehmet and his wife Mehtap own a flat of 200 square meters on the fourth floor of a new apartment building in Șanlıurfa. An average German couple would look jealous at the kitchen equipment, the rich carpets and the huge flat screen in the TV room (and the second, only a little smaller, in the kitchen). The couple and its three children obviously enjoy displaying its wealth and it can do so without being angered, as in the Turkey from 1971 that I remember, by bad roads leading to the house, poor gardens and a general feeling of disorder in front of one’s door.

We found fine solid roads even far east in Anatolia, the automobiles sheltered by security rails against accidents. The Aut0bahn-like roads that connected the mayor cities in the South East had toll-stations where you paid a cheap fee for travelling. We found a vivid but nevertheless comparatively well ordered traffic in the down town areas. Traffic lights were everywhere, and they were, again others than in former years, respected. Above all we found, most visible of all, an enormous amount of new buildings under construction. This is a country on a giant leap forward into a completely modernized economy.

Our tour guide’s interest in historical sites and old buildings lead us most of the time to the inner cities with their old bazaars and small shops. They looked like the Turkey I had remembered. But driving into town we would pass supermarkets, mainly run by the French Carrefour but also by Migros and others. We saw Burger Kings and signs of all the big global firms that deliver their goods to the Grand International Bazaar.
Ömer told us about his conversion to the Gülen-Movement 9 years ago. He was looking for something deeper, something that his wealth could not buy. Now he is glad to be member of a vivid community, many of them, as I guess, as successful as Ömer and as welcoming to new international connections as he is.

Serving a crowd of 14 guests and 5 family members a rich dinner he and his young sons did a great job. There was nothing left of the old Pasha-mentality that Old Turks often display. This was a modern man, and a pious one.

Digging Gold (Șanlıurfa)

Turkish Schools are players in a Premier League of competing institutions that try to bring a maximum number of undergraduates through a tough national test system, similar to that in France. Every year a statistic of those students is published that qualified for the best places in the countries universities. And it is no longer the noble Robert College in Istanbul that ranks as number one with the highest number of qualifiers, like a Turkish kind of Eton. Other schools from all over the country have taken the first ranks.

Some of the newcomers pride themselves that their students come from the poorer regions of their hometowns: gecekondus, shanty-towns built in a fast illegal effort over night and tolerated by a law that gives squatters a right to stay where they successfully claimed a piece of ground for more than 24 hours.

The Gülen-movement knows about the human gold that can be found in these gecekondus. Their teachers visit the home of each child regularly and help poorer families to keep children at school even if the father’s little business requires the 10 years old son’s permanent presence. They sometimes just buy him out from his father if he is considered to be gifted enough.


Education is a good that private tutoring programs are competing for. In Șanlıurfa a big advertisement on a house front proudly showed the top four kids that were brought to university through such a particular tutoring program. The Gülen program that we saw (photo on top, okuma salonu meaning "reading saloon") equally displayed brass trophies with the names of the students that run particularly well.

Maybe statistics will soon show that a gecekondu is not a bad place to start an academic career from. The shanty-towns obviously are not a place for drugs and crime but stations of hope that a hard working county family soon leaves for one of the TOKI-apartments that the Turkish state subsidizes for those that sell their illegal squatter’s right back to the state and exchange a brand new flat for it.

Once you have learned what a gecekondu is you immediately see them everywhere at the outskirts of bigger towns – and also see how many of them are gradually torn down and replaced by big apartment structures, often four or six in a group, eight stories and more high. The white gold that lived in the gecekondus, human gen capital, is transferred to better dwelling places.

And it changes the face of the cities. We were told that oil and the big water dam projects rapidly improved the economy of Eastern Anatolia. But it obviously would be a dead wealth like in many Arabian States if it was not combined with the brain power of all these many young people that crowd the streets here.

Turkey is digging for white gold. It calls shepherds from the villages and sends their children to university; it welcomes poor farmers and soon gets skilled laborers in exchange. If the Germans only knew that the same raw material was washed to its shores, too!

New Posts

I wrote a new post about the different stories the Quran and the Bible tell about Job / Eyyup and another one about the Arameans around Mardin and their old Jesus-like language. I put them under the dates of October 20 and 22 to keep a timely order.

Dear Dr. Erkan Saka with his much visited blog in Istanbul put a link to my blog. This is kind of an honorary Ph.D. in the blogger world...

Turkish Friendliness

The most interesting thing in Turkey must be, as judged from the questions it gets and the attention it attracts, the person of the visiting tourist. Turks are curious people, especially the children.

I saw it back in 1971 when I worked in an Istanbul bank and it again amazed me these days: how they all keep a polite distance to the stranger in their midst, a great formal respect and nevertheless a charming openness towards him and a fine and noble way of keeping themselves proud of their own person, their heads and minds high up all the time.


Turks also have a natural talent to serve. I love the way in which the waiters in a restaurant or tea shop serve their customers. Some of them may be school boys, I guess it from their age and from the often casual things they wear. In smaller shops many of them are not professionals, maybe they are working for their family. In general, many shops here look a little bit over-employed, you almost never see just one man working alone, he would always have one or two companions as if labor was a thing you have to share compassionately with your neighbor.


The boys and sometimes girls serve you well and have a good look for what you need. But they are never devout, never showing you that you are from a better class, only because you can by afford to buy the things that they serve.

They keep a straight tenure, they look as if they love themselves, be aware of a hidden dignity in everything they do. You never see them roll their eyes about a nervous customer or reply impolite if offended - a typical German waiter's disease. They behave as if their own professional quality is a value above all others and beyond every doubt.

Turk be proud, work and trust! is one of Atatürks famous words. When I saw the noble looking and fine featured young man in Șanlıurfa cleaning the men’s restroom without the faintest visible awareness of doing a “low work” I had an idea whome he was following. Maybe he will be the town mayor 20 years from now.

Overflow of impressions

Our journey via Nimrod Mountain and Gaziantep (and safely home some hours ago) went on so fast that I could not follow writing everything down. I will use the coming days to look through my fotos and write down what is in my memory an on my mind.

There is an overwhelming impression that I have seen something excitingly new. Let me calm down to write more about that.

I will put some new posts under older dates to keep them in a timely order.

Giza Pyramids in the Alps (Adıyaman)

The tomb of Antiochus I, emperor of the free Kingdom of Commagene, looks like an Egyptian pyramid put on top of a Swiss mountain. I have seldom seen such a spectacular sight (the photos do not give half the impression), visible from more than 50 km afar and looking ever more incredible when approached on long and winding alpine pass roads. The Commagene people have in a worldwide unique way changed the face of a complete mountain range.

Compared with the Giza pyramids in Cairo whose original height is close to 150 m the giant heap of rubble that is collected here is comparatively small (only 50 m) but raises from a mountain top that stands with more than 2.100 m higher than all the other summits around. This is Mount Nemrut.


I had never learned anything about the Kingdom of Commagene in my history lessons. It obviously has left no written witness of its own history. It is thought to be one with Kummuhu that is mentioned in Assyrian texts. The family of emperor Antiochus I. who called himself Theos, God of Commagene claimed to have Alexander the Great and Darius, the Persian King among its ancestors.

Antiochus I. lived from 86 to 38 before Christ. His successors tried to keep their independence from Rome, lost it, regained it but finally lost it in 72 AD for good. History forgot the Commagene people until in 1881 a German engineer, Karl Sester, building roads in Anatolia discovered it again.

The statues around the rubble hill are relatively well preserved. Experts see Greek and Persian art combined in their vivid faces. My favorite figure is the eagle with its harmonic design. The truth is simple, is what the head says. And strong.

The truth about a balanced culture, well in peace with its neighbors, precisely balanced between east and west, might be: if you are good to everyone nobody will remember you forever. Bad boys make history, good boys are forgotten.

I wished it was the other way around.

Nimrod the hunter (Adıyaman)

The first man on earth ever to claim a kingdom was Nimrod, according to the Bible. He was the great-grandson of Noah and his kingdom began, as Genesis 10 says, in Babel. Many nations celebrate his memory; the Turks have Mount Nimrod, Nemrut Dağ, beautifully situated in Nemrut National Park - we are on the way to there today.


The Bible calls him the first gibor, a mighty one, and also gibor zayid, a mighty hunter. In my imagination his wild strength consisted of the ability to reconcile within himself the two poles of prehistoric existence: to either settle down as a farmer or roam as a nomad. Nimrod settled and founded cities like Ninive but nevertheless kept on roaming, being a hunter. Combining the strength of both ways of life he could not be defeated. His name reminds of marad in Hebrew which means to rebel against someone. He certainly was a man to be afraid of.

The Quran makes him responsible for an attempted burning of Abraham (Sura 21), where God personally intervened and called the fire to be cold. Abraham came out of the fire without a single injury.

Nimrods father was a man named Cush, as Genesis 10 says. Cush again was Ham’s son, the second son of Noah, the son that is thought to be the father of all Africans. Cush’s name survived in the Cushitic languages that are spoken in Eastern Africa. Nimrod’s origin from there would put him closer to Ethiopia than to Babel in today’s Iraq and give him a black skin. Anyway – he is an interesting ancestor for many, even for the Hungarians who claim that he fathered the twin brothers Hunor (father of the Huns) and Magor (father of the Magyars).

Green Democracy

The Muezzin’s first call woke me up this morning like on all the mornings here. It comes before sunrise. In a big city like Șanlıurfa with its about a million inhabitants it is a whole choir of Muezzins that you hear around 5:30 on an autumn day like today. The one in the Mosque next to you wakes you up and suddenly you hear dozens of them, far an near.

Yesterday we were the guests of a wealthy man by the name of Mehmet Ö., real estate agent and head of the local employer’s organization. We asked him and his friend Hamit Y., a civil engineer, about a lot of things and then came to the question whether a devout follower of faith can be a good democrat. The picture below shows men praying in the big mosque situated near what is though to be Job's cave here in Șanlıurfa.

I have written part of the following already in Germany because it is very much on my mind and I knew that there would be only little time to write here. Can he, the Muslim but also the pious Christian wholeheartedly support an open modern society despite of all its shortcomings in the fields of moral values? Can he see the freedom of the press turned against the sacredness of his God, the minority rights of gays turned against the holiness of marriage, the freedom of a woman to decide about her pregnancy against the eternal promise that every life is given by God alone?

Yes! Say Catholics in Spain, Methodists in the United States, and Pentecostals in Brazil. No! Says a growing number of organized Atheist and Agnostics who run busses with “There is probably no God” on them around the world and believe that peace on earth will only then come when all religious fervor is finally done with.

Yes! Is my vote, too, and I am on my way to tie this Yes to those Yeses that are expressed in the Muslim world.

Our Yes has to be defended, mutually defended. It has to be defended first of all within our own community of believers against those who think that only a strict and pious and lawfully organized society can gain the grace of God and secure its own survival. That of course would mean that religious principles have to be imposed on that part of the population that does not follow them voluntarily.

It has secondly to be defended against those that expect democratic abilities only in people who are in the inner circle of one’s own faith. These prejudices turn Protestants against Catholics, Liberals against Orthodox, Christians against Muslims. Only in the third place it has to be defended against those who do not believe at all.

My expectation in Turkey is to find people who say Yes to a very special kind of self-government: Green Democracy. This Muslim form of what the founding fathers of the American constitution (as those who found the most common expressions for the freedom of mankind) were convinced of should be based on Islam. From there it might then develop new forms of a government of the people, by the people, for the people that are still unknown to us today.

Every nation and every faith has its own way to let people come together and decide about the fate of one’s own community. The Swedish form of social democracy obviously has some deep tribal roots going back to some old Thing-rites of read-bearded Scandinavians. Why shouldn’t a Pashtun Clan in Afghanistan similarly bring in its own tribal rules into democratic procedures?

The people I talked to yesterday know about a lot of Islamic rules that make sure people will not be governed without being asked for their consent. They are obviously sure that a strict obedience to Muslim laws does not exclude anybody from living in a western style democracy. They agree to live peacefully among people with different ethnical and religious backgrounds. They would accept what most of the people in the big capitals of the world have already accepted since many years: that their neighbor next door is not a member of their kinship.

I discussed with them last night, what the New York Times reported about recent developments in Lebanon. They were a little hesitant to concede what a prominent Beirut journalist was quoted saying there: “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic” and that he opened a door for that idea in the whole region. I will go on to advertise that Bush at least had the nucleus of a good idea and that many people should follow.

Mosque near the cave of Job / Eyyup.

The sufferings of Job / Eyyup (His cave in Șanlıurfa)

Jews and Christians alike live with the rather depressing wisdom that Job’s sufferings raise a thousand questions and leave us with almost no answers. It even looks as if God himself has locked all possible answers away. He asks Job

Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion?
(Job 38:31)

and we silently add if not –shut up! Deep in our judeo-christian soul we nevertheless carry the unspoken optimism that not the answers keep us moving but the questions. Among life's many questions maybe those of Job are the most prominent that make Jews and Christians go on.


Not so the Muslims. Theirs is a simple story of an obedient yet sickly Job / Eyyup who lives in a cave for some times and gets his disease cured by a nearby spring that miraculously occurs out of nowhere. Cave and well can be visited in Șanlıurfa and a huge mosque next to the place invites to offer a thankful prayer, joined by the local population that wears, men and women alike, headscarves in a wonderfully gentle lilac color.


The Quran contains the complete Bible, so the teachers of Islam. But when I read the many shortcuts that the Quran takes to make a complicated Bible story simple, I doubt it. Or should I better ask: what would happen if the faithful followers of the Mighty Quran, peace be upon it, would begin to study the Bible, peace be also upon it?



In Mardin I asked one of the teachers whose university studies had taken him to Islamic Theology, whether he had also studied the Bible in the course of his lectures. Yes, he had read parts of it. Could he tell words from the Bible that he liked and kept in mind? Yes, he said, the parts (in the Gospel of John) where a Comforter is promised, a Paraklete which according to Muslim exegesis of the Bible refers to Muhammad.

I honestly did not like that answer too much. I had made an offert before and had told him that I liked Sura 103 with the order to encourage each other in the pursuit of truth and patience. His answer was given in a way in which people from my home town tease those from the neighboring town: the best thing there is the view on us…

I will not give up the hope that one day I will meet a Muslim that has read parts of the Bible and has found that it unfolds a deep truth of human existence. He may afterwards go back to his Quran. But he should know that the Quran’s wisdom sometimes consists in an abbreviation.

The City of Abraham (Şanlıurfa)

What looks like a Christmas decoration in Germany is Şanlıurfa's welcome to the "City of Prophets". Peygamber is the Turkish word for prophet. The Arabs say Nabi, and so do the Jews. Şanlıurfa claims to be the home town of Abraham / Ibrahim and Job / Eyyup.

The Bible says that Abraham came from the city of Ur and that this city was in Chaldea. A long tradition places Ur into Northern Mesopotamia and makes it one with the Greek city of Edessa, which was later called Ar-Ruha by the Arabs and Urfa by the Turks. This is today's Şanlıurfa.

Now, 20th century's archeologists believe in another Ur in Southern Mesopotamia, situated near Tell el-Mukayya in Iraq. I grew up with the modern southern theory (as shown in the map below, with Abraham's journey into Kanaan as red arrows) but begin to tend to the old northern.

One reason for my newly gained cinviction is that the second city where Abraham settled was Haran. It should better be called Charran with a ch (like in Loch Lomond, pronounced the Scottish way) whereas Haran with only a simple h was the name of Abraham’s brother. Charran is today still called Harran or Charran and is a city in Northern Mesopotamia, today in Turkey. This is Abraham’s Charran, no doubt.

Now Charran is close to Urfa the northern Ur. That would give Abraham’s journey a shorter distance than in the map above (where Charran is the northern turning point) and more meaning. That is one reason why I am changing my mind about Ur.

The second reason of course is that we now are in Urfa and would like to think of walking in Abraham’s footsteps. And in Job’s since also he is thought to be from Urfa. Placing him here, too, is a Muslim tradition, where Job / Eyüp plays an important role in the Quran.

The Bible only says, that he was from eretz (g)uz the land of Uz, the g sometimes pronounced (like in Gaza) and sometimes not. One of the catastrophes that Job meet is an assault of the Chaldaens that rob his camels and kill his servants. So maybe he lived near them or among them (Chaldeans being another name for people in Mesopotamia) and could have been a citizen of Urfa, too.

Urfa was named Şanlıurfa, (pronounced SHUNN- leh-oor-fah) "the glorious Urfa" in 1984 to commemorate its strong resistance in the Turkish War of Independence between 1919 and 1923.
The center of old Harran is a mournful desert of a vast archeological site and poor houses of poor Arabs. I have always felt rather uncomfortable in old ruin fields and have often doubted that the archeologists ever get any real information out of what they look into, the debris of centuries. Here in Haran the only visible result of the digger’s job is a small façade of what is thought to be a mosque and the rest of a tower. They say that the Arabs built it around 700 but that the Mongols came some 300 years later and destroyed it. The peasants around built houses with the old stones and left a sad heap of rubble over the centuries.

The region around is receiving water from the giant Turkish dam projekt. It is a green garden with corn, mais and cotton. In our bus we feel like "Down in Louisiana" and beginn to sing that good ol' Cottonfield song.

Children (from Mardin to Midyat)

When a group of Turkish teachers visited a school in my home town some years ago, a friend of mine who worked in that school brought them to my house. After a polite exchange about the beauty of Germany etc. I finally asked them whether they found at least one thing strange here. After some hesitation one of the teachers smilingly said: “in Turkey there is a lot of noise on the roads and a lot of silence in the schools. In Germany it is the other way around.”

I expected such a “silent school” when we visited our first Gülen school in Mardin but was surprised to find a bunch of lively children between the age of 6 and 16 there. Our group was in a way treated like celebrities, say like Bayern Munich visiting a school in Upper Bavaria, surrounded by groups of children asking questions whenever we stopped to watch. They showed respect but where in no way subdued or shy.

The teachers were, as I had expected, mainly fine slender young men, carefully dressed, obviously giving an example in their whole appearance. The children wore school uniforms, blue the older children, orange and grey the younger, what made them look like a happy Dutch national team.

Gülen was nowhere visibly present, Attatürk was the man, also here, with a statue in front of the entrance and pictures inside. I liked the whole atmosphere and waved the children good-bye from out of our car. They had given me a good time and had made me feel like a star for at least once in my life.

A perishing Aramean (Midyat)

The Syriac Orthodox Church carries an old Aramaic dialect as official Church language through the centuries. A young German member of the Church whose ancestors came from Midyat and who is working for two month in St. Gabriel / Mor Gabriel Monastery (photo above) told me, that the Church often simply calls itself after that language Aramean.

The Syriac Orthodox are spread over the whole world, yet many of them still live here in the region around Midyat and Mardin. The head of the Church is called the Patriarch of Antioch and resided for many years in the monastery St. Ananias / Mor Hananyo in Mardin. After political problems with Turkey in 1933 the Patriarch moved to Syria and resides now in Damascus.

The Aramean language is Jesus’ language. In his time it was lingua franca for wide parts of the region between Egypt and Persia. It is part of the Westsemitic family of languages and thus related to Hebrew and Arab. In Mel Gibson’s Passion Aramean is the language spoken by evrybody except the Romans, a softer, melodic and less guttural version of Hebrew and Arab.

For the Jews the mentioning of Arameans carries memories that reach wide back into the time of Abraham. One of the basic Jewish confessions is written down in Deuteronomy 26,5:

And thou shalt speak and say before JHWH thy God: A perishing Aramean was my father, and he went down to Egypt with a few, and sojourned there, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous.


The perishing Aramean is an eternal picture for someone whose life has not yet been touched by God. His national distinction is unclear. He is roaming about, getting lost in the desert, that is what the original arami obed means. Only when he gets even deeper into despair, Egyptian slavery, he calls to JHWH and He listens.

The ancestors of our guide Gabriel in Mor Gabriel lived here for centuries with a clear ethnic and religious distinction. They and the Turks were good neighbors, the Muezzin’s call and the sound of Church bells got along well. The secular governments that came with Atatürk caused problems, the Arameans obviously feel today more comfortable with the Islam-centered government of Erdogan.

The photo below shows a minaret and a Church steeple in Midyat.


An old Armenean from Bern / Switzerland who is visiting his old Church in Mardin recited the Lord's Prayer Our Father in Aramaic to me. I later found a transciption in the internet:

aboon dabashmaya
nethkadash shamak
tetha malkoothak

Hebrew would read:

avinoo b’shamayim
yitkadash shemkha
tetha malkotekhah

Soulmates and Neighbours (Mardin)

(Foto: Mor Hananyo, the Saffron Monastery, Deir ul-Zafaran, near Mardin)

Manyfold are the Gods that have been worshipped in the land where Tigris and Euphrates are born. Greek and Roman Gods once came – and went again, whenever the Persians took over. The Persian Gods later had also to make room, for the One God of the Christians who in turn was replaced by the One God of the Muslims. His was the final reign after the Buddhist Mongols went back to Central Asia. The Muslim Osmans installed around 1550 what the Arabs, centuries ago could not keep for long, a Muslim government. But even this reign was not undisputed. In Mardin a rest of what in some ways looks like the old Persian faith in Zoroaster or Zarathustra remained until today: the Yazidi faith.

Wikipedia has an article about the Yazidis that live here or used to live here since many of them went abroad just recently. Their origin is unclear, obviously they took elements from most of the other religions in the area, baptizing or circumcising children without making a difference. They believe in transmigration, the walking of the soul from one person or one being to the next.

I like one idea of them: every person has a soulmate, a yonder-brother (biraye achrete) or -sister that will spend eternity with him or her. Your brother or sister will guide you through the heavenly gates, may take over some of your moral responsibilities in front of the eternal judge and so prepare paradise for you. The thought amazes me – in my society where nobody really cares for a second live up in heaven the idea of a friend that is already there seems strange. I wished I had one…

How did the Muslim faith come to Eastern Anatolia and how did it get roots to stay? The Arabs conquered the complete region between Egypt and Syria within 20 years after the death of Mohammed in 632. That included Eastern Anatolia, too. Both superpowers in the region, the Persians and the Byzantine Romans had weakened their respective forces in yearlong fights against each other. That was one of the reasons for the Arabs sudden success. Nevertheless the enormous victories of the Arabs that afterwards went to conquer Persia and parts of India and Central Asia have until today never been fully explained.

The Arabs could not hold the region for long. Other forces came back, first the Armenians. They kept a kingdom for many years. When after them around 1100 the Seljugs came in from Central Asia it was the second Muslim nation to govern the region. Without the exact knowledge of the different ways that the Arabs and with them the Muslim faith took into Central Asia the Seljug Islam looks nevertheless like a “re-import” of a faith that had been there before.

It was later threatened by the Buddhist Mongols who conquered the region around 1240. Other Turk tribes took over some 100 years later and brought Islam back but were again defeated by the Persians in 1502. The Osmans finally installed a Muslim government that lasts until today. Islam was the first faith from then on, but a variety of Persian and Christian faiths was allowed to exist here, also. This variety went along with a broad ethnic spectrum of the old Byzantine and Armenian population blended with people from Mesopotamia, Persia, Arabia and of course Central Asia.

They all were addressed when around 1925 Attatürk came and asked “The Turk” to be proud, to go to work and to trust. Without justification for every hardship he imposed on people to unify his country and to standardize his vision of what “Turk” meant one gets a high respect for a man who at least could think of this colourful patchwork of nations and beliefs to be unified under a single flag, a red one with a moon and a star on it.

From the Monastery St. Ananias / Mor Hananyo we have a wide look into the Mesopotamian plain that stretches, flat like an ocean, below the mountain range of Mardin. Mor Hananyo is called the Saffron Monastery because of its color and has a Syrian Orthodox Church in it that has been there through the centuries.

One of its members tells us that the situation of the Church during the times of the Turkish Republic never has been better than among the ruling Erdogan party, which is under the permanent suspicion to be Islamist.

The directors of a Gülen school in Mardin that we meet at night tell us the same: there is a growing peace between the ethnic and religious groups here, and it can be used to improve education among the many schoolchildren.

These Gülen-men are gentle people, very down to earth, easy going yet with a strong vision of a better life for all the many children they see. I try to imagine them working for a Christian ministry, and I would be glad to have them as ambassadors of my faith.

Competition with a movie star (Batman)

According to Wikipedia this town in the valley of Tigris in times had some fun with the movie character of the same name. One politician came to the idea to sue the filmmakers for using the name. I do not think that the whole thing was a serious act.


The town is in no need to make money from suing foreign corporations for abuse of name rights since they found oil here and made a development out of their own powers. From our first impression the whole region made big steps into a better economic situation – good roads from Van on, the towns on our way with the typical series of small shops, open till late seven days a week and brightly advertising the local products but as well all sorts of consumer goods that the Great International Bazaar (as Fukuyama calls it) supplies, Carrefour-magazines even Burger King fast food.

Buildings are under construction, most of them with a solid concrete framework that is later filled in with brickwork. The whole of Turkey has always been threatened by earthquakes and one hopes that the concrete frames are laid out in a way that they can stand a quake.

Our tour guide says that the water projects brought money to the region. The upper valleys of Euphrates and Tigris were locked with numerous dams to create artificial lakes that are among the biggest in the world. A system of tunnels distributes the water in the whole area. Our guide has no ear for the complaints of Syria and Iraq at the lower course of the two rivers – they get their full share of water, only with a delay, as he says. This is obviously not true, the newest project is in the meanwhile protested worldwide. We will visit the valley where it is planned, Hasankeyf lies in it, one of the oldest cities in Turkey. It would be completely flooded, if a further dam was build. That makes even many Turks protest the project.

Turkey vs. Armenia 2 - 0

Van, site of the old Armenian settlement, destroyed after 1920

Ever since I read Franz Werfels Fourty Days of Musa Dag some 20 years ago I have been convinced that the cause of the Armenian people against the Turks is right. I read the 800 pages of the novel breathlessly, during a short sickness in bed and almost without a pause. I have later searched other books and more recently the internet for the full truth. What I found is that Werfel was right and the killings should be called a genocide.

Nevertheless I came to discover a new truth. It says that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who died in 1915 need a different form of reconciliation compared with what the Jews and my history-haunted Germans achieved after 1945. Three things are different.

First, not too important, but not to be overlooked: the time factor. Germany could begin to regret what it had done immediately after the war. Turkey did something similar in punishing people who were made responsible for the atrocities, even sentencing some of them to dead. But soon after those trials time began to run out for any kind of deeper insight in the nature of the crime. The result was a deep and painful unrest all over the world and also in Turkey, at least for those who were not deaf to morality and international complaints.

The second difference: a more complicated historic truth. Some of the Armenians were openly fighting for an independent state, a re-birth of the great Armenian Kingdom in East Anatolia around the year 900. Turks were killed by Armenians, whereas the Germans never shed a single drop of their own blood from Jewish hands.

The third difference came out only recently: the Turks can support the newly born post communist Armenian State in a very unique way and are obviously about to do so. Armenia is geographically locked in between an unloved post soviet Georgia, some even more unloved small Muslim neighbor states – and Turkey. Turkey could be a natural partner for all kinds of trade, it could even be again what it was before nationalism broke out: a second home for those poorer Armenians who seek work abroad.

The number of illegal Armenian workers in Turkey is estimated to be 70.000. Now a benevolent fate put Turkey and Armenia into one qualifying group for the next Soccer World Championships. Both did not qualify, but both were happy to send their Presidents Sarkissjan and Gül to the two matches in Yerevan and Bursa (that both ended with a Turkish 2 – 0 victory). They used their informal contacts to kick off a treaty that will open the borders and find new forms of cooperation.

In Werfel's novel there is a noble old Turk, the Agha Rifaat Bereket in Antiochia who is an old friend of Gabriel Bagradian, the Armenian hero, and his family. Bagradian turns to him for help and the Agha promises to travel to the "atheists in Istanbul", as he says, the Young Turks that have given up the idea of a government based on faith in favor of nationalism. The Agha knows: nationalism is hatred and thus against the Quran. He recites a Verse from Sura 16 saying that God has "created in different colors".

Maybe the return of faithful people into the Turkish government will help to reconcile two nations whose history has been narrowly connected over the centuries, most of the time peacefully.

Paradise for tomorrow, this city for today (Van)

The city of Van is known for the beauty of its surrounding. "Van in this world, paradise in the next" is an Armenian proverb, dünyada Van, ahirette iman say the Turks similarly ("Van for this world, faith for the next"). Mt. Ararat (5.165 m) and Mt. Süphan (4.058 m), in the photo below seen from the incoming plane, watch over it with a solemn might that reminds of Mt. Fuji in Japan.



Many nations have fought to own Van. The long row of emperors dates back to the mythic people of Urartu with their name connected with Mount Ararat, which lies 50 miles from here. The Medians and Persians and Alexander the Great owned it, before around the time of Christ King Tigranes of Armenia was the first to put it under Armenian control. The name Van is Armenian and means village.

After the conquering Romans the Persians (Sassanides) came again, followed by the Byzantines and for a short time by the Arabs. The Armenians also came again, around 900 and founded the kingdom of Vaspurakan only to be followed by a wave of people from Central Asia. The Mongols took Van from the Seljuks, the Timurid Turks took it from the Kara Koyunlus, the only stable reality from than on was the government of Central Asians and from around 1400 on also the Muslim faith.

The Ottomans, a fifth Central Asian party, finally held Van for almost 400 years. In Turkish they are called Osmans a name taken from their first leader Osman I who lived in western Anatolia from 1258 – 1326 as the head of one of the local Emirates.

He and his family gained an ever increasing control in the West that, under Osman’s grandson Murat I lead to the famous victory over the Serbs in Kosovo 1389. Murat died there but his children and grandchildren went on fighting and finally in 1453 conquered Istanbul. Mehmed II “the conqueror” was the seventh Sultan in the row beginning with Osman.

The series of victories in the West went along with problems in the East – fights with other Sultans, Mongols, Persians. It took the Osmans another 100 years from Istanbul until they could install an undisputed government also in Van.

The Osmans / Ottomans did not ask their people to convert to Islam. At the end of their reign Van had about as many schools for the Muslim Turks as it had for the Christian Armenians, both nations obviously not too much interested in a clear concept what Turk or Armenian meant after centuries of migration from in and out Central Asia and also from the various regions that Armenia did possess and loose in the course of history.


The much contested paradise finally turned to hell when democracy came and claimed that freedom can only exist in a national state with a clearly defined national character. Some people would later say, simplifyingly, that a State is a language with a police. From that it was obvious that Van had one language too much, the Armenian.

Ethnic cleansings, to say the least followed. The Treaty of Sèvres 1920 (after Versailles 1919) to end World War I was rewritten by Attatürk’s Army that took Van by force from what was planned to be the Democratic Republic of Armenia but had problems to come into a short-lived existence before falling into the hands of the Russian Communists.


The Kurdish boys that help uns to climb the old city castle are proud to be Turks, so they say. But new problems arise in the East: illegal workers from Iran and Afghanistan come into the town and "cause problems" by working for lower wages as the local Turks. This is what the boys say. Are there also illegal Armenians in town? The boys say no.

We will leave the city with a fresh sun tan on our skin and the mountain wind in our hair. Paradise is as far away from here as it is everywhere on earth but Van in ggod days certainly is a place where you can get an idea how paradise may look like.

Cuneiform and Kyrgyz riders (Van)

A bright day with Mt.Ararat shining in the distance, when our early morning plane from Istanbul took a long curve over the lake and then landed in Van. With an altitude of almost 1.700 m the lake is situated as high as the lakes near St. Moritz, Switzerland in the Upper Engadin.

The bare mountains around the town are impressive, we went some 20 km east to see the remnants of an Urartian stronghold, witness of one of the oldest cultures in the region, giver of the name Urartu/Ararat.


An old man sold stones with tiny inscriptions in the writing of the Urartians (and later the Hetites, Assyrians and others). Yes, it is “Keilschrift”, he knew the German word for cuneiform, and he was an expert. He had neatly carved the stones himself and claimed that he, Mehmet Kuşman, was among the only 36 people in the world that could fluently read and write this ancient kind of scripture. Some years ago they were still 38, when Mehmet Hoca followed an invitation to California for a gathering of experts. Two Russians had died since and now 36 of the wise and learned men remained.

The stronghold was beautifully placed over a wide fruitful plain behind which higher mountains rose. They were close to Persia from were in the course of history many invaders came to claim their ownership of this rich mountain country near the big lake.

Later, in a visit to the old castle that overlooks the southern part of the town of Van, we were happy to get into a televised Kurdish wedding. It was a real wedding except for bride and

bridegroom who were actors. The colorful gowns of the young people, the horses, guns and horseman of the Kyrgyz riders, the muttons roasted over an open fire, everything was real.


The Kyrgyz faces obviously were part of the feast, and not strange, although for us almost belonging to a Chinese kind of people. The only strangers here were we. Happy strangers in the golden light of a warm setting sun.

Great Expectations (II)

Apart from looking forward to see paradise (which, of course is not a serious expectation) my wish is that our journey will take us to fresh waters of Green Democracy, that is: to people that are likewise pious Muslims and modern citizens of this world. Our tour is guided by people of the Gülen-movement and the hosts that will open their houses for us will be part of that movement. They are believers inspired by the philosopher Fethullah Gülen. In 2008 the readers of the US-Magazine Foreign Policy put Gülen as Number 1 among 100 world’s top public intellectuals.

Gülen is 68 years old and lives in Pennsylvania/USA. Gülen's inspiration is leading my friend Nureddin Öztaş, our tour organizer, into a life as a devout Muslim with regular prayers and a deep awareness that his life is filled with God’s presence. To fill more and more of the world with that presence Gülen teaches first of all one thing: education. Muslims should, according to him study a lot and so get to the front of modern science. Since God is the creator there is no taboo in research. It will always lead into finding God’s traces anywhere.

Gülen-schools are opening in many countries around the world. A homework-support for schoolchildren was what my friend Nureddin started with. He is now about to open a complete regular school in a town near Cologne/Germany.

Gülen teaches that obedience to Islamic rules does not contradict life in a modern society. He encourages Muslims to meet Christians, Jews and people of other religions and to learn from them. Nureddin’s and my friendship is on his side deeply rooted in the optimism that Nureddin is getting from Gülen. Without him we would not be on this journey to East Anatolia together. Nureddin obviously likes me not although I am a devout evangelical Christian but because.

My expectation is to find conservative Muslims with an open heart for a modern life in the framework of an open society. Words like liberal or western or democratic are over-used but they nevertheless still give an idea of what people all over the world are searching for. If they combine their search with a deeper desire for spiritual foundation it should not necessarily lead to contradictions.

There has been a long period of secular government in Turkey. People have thought that faith would rather hinder the development of a western kind of democracy. Today the ruling AKP is more open to religious influence and has tried to prove the secularist point of view untrue by installing democratic reforms. The Kurds are treated as an acknowledged minority for the first time in Turkish history, the Armenians are welcomed in again (a treaty to open up borders again was signed last Saturday, see photo above) the demands of the European Union for better civil rights have been accepted not as a burdensome requirement for economic cooperation but as a chance for renewal.

There is a lot of modern Muslim democratic reform on the way. My hope is to find it proved also in Eastern Anatolia.

Through Twitter and Facebook I have been in contact with Muslims worldwide that also strive to reconcile faith and life in a world with almost no borders. I greet Adel in Bushere / Iran, Ashfaq in Mauritius, Ahmad (an Egyptian) in Abu Dhabi / Dubai. I also greet Bijan, a Bahai-Persian in Mecklenburg / Germany, David, a Jew in Tel Aviv, Joshua a Texan in California (and a conservative with a heart for immigrants) and, of course Erkan in Istanbul who encouraged my blogging a lot.

And a river went out from Eden

Paradise was in former days thought to be near the sources of Tigris and Euphrates. The bible says in Genesis 2 that a river is going out from the Garden of Eden and that this river splits up into four arms which are called Pishon, Gihon, Hiddeqel and Perat. Hiddeqel is thought to be Tigris (arab.: Didschla) and Perat/Pherat is used for Euphrates in all parts of the Hebrew bible.

The medieval Ebstorf Map found 1830 in a monastery in Lower Saxony has the paradise with its four rivers in it.

Paradise is, in the imagination of Islam full of irrigating channels. My old German translation of the Quran says there are creaks rushing through (durcheilt von Bächen). In the Biblical imagination paradise is itself a source of rivers supplying the world around.

The Bible begins and ends with a river or stream flowing from paradise – first the four-armed river from Genesis 2 and then at the end a crystal clear river from Revelation 22, the last chapter in the bible.

Here the crystal river in the old English of the King James Version:

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God.


A River Runs Through It is the title of a book and a film about two brothers who go out fly-fishing. It contains all the beauty that is in the quick flow of clear water. Paradise must be a lot like this. Will we get an idea of how it looked liked, before time began?