Turkish Publishers' Meeting: Publishing in Languages Besides Turkish

I recently attended an interesting and informative panel at the Turkish Publishers’ 3rd General Meeting on publishing in Turkey in languages besides Turkish. The panel shed light on the experience of publishers in Turkey’s minority communities. It was rather sobering in what it indicated about decreasing linguistic diversity in Turkey, but also inspiring to see that publishers are persevering in spite of this trend.

Ragıp Zarakolu (Belge Yayıncılık), the moderator, began by noting that although İbrahim Müteferrika (who was in fact of Hungarian origin) is well known for starting the first Ottoman printing press in the mid-1700s, publishing in the Ottoman Empire in other languages had begun far earlier: in Hebrew and Ladino soon after Jews arrived in the Ottoman Empire from Spain in 1492, in Armenian in the 1500s, and in Greek in the 1600s.

Rober Koptaş (Aras Yayıncılık) talked about Armenian publishing in Turkey. Aras was founded in 1993 and publishes books in Armenian and Turkish. While one goal is serving the Armenian community in Turkey, equally important is exposing Turks to Armenian culture, particularly Armenian literature. Koptaş believes it’s important to publish literature (along with works of research on politics and history, etc.) because the “human” aspect of literature means that it can communicate things that, for example, political works cannot.

Koptaş also spoke about how the Armenian community in Turkey has shrunk and how the number of Armenian speakers (and potential readers) is therefore decreasing. A related problem is that there are few trained Armenian-Turkish translators, in part because Turkish universities do not prioritize the teaching of minority languages spoken in Turkey.

Mihail Vasiliyadis, the publisher of the Greek-language Apoyevmatini Gazetesi, discussed Greek-language publishing in Turkey. Apoyevmatini newspaper was founded in 1925, at a time when Istanbul was the center of Greek life and culture. Historically, “the cultural center was Istanbul,” he said. (Later, with the departure of most of Turkey’s Greeks, Athens came to eclipse Istanbul as the center of Greek culture and intellectual life.)

From over a million readers (or potential readers) in 1925, the newspaper’s readership has now shrunk to about 2000, the size of the Greek community in Turkey today. Vasiliyadis described his efforts to keep the paper alive despite the dwindling number of readers. He very much hopes that an archive of the newspaper can be made, to preserve its more than 80-year history.

Lal Laleş is the director of Lis Basın Yayın, which publishes books in Kurdish and Turkish and is based in Diyarbakır. The history of Kurdish-language publishing goes back to 1898, when a Kurdish newspaper was started in Cairo by Mithat Bedirhan. (The paper moved to Geneva and then to London, but folded after not too long.) In Turkey, the publishing of books in Kurdish began in the 1960s and 70s; however, this was politically difficult and after the 1980 coup, impossible. Kurdish publishing in Turkey did not really start again until the 1990s. There are now 16 presses in Turkey publishing books in Kurdish, however these still only represent a tiny fraction of the publishing industry in Turkey. Last year, a total of only 119 books were published in Kurdish in Turkey. There are several difficulties for Kurdish-language publishers, including the limited number of readers who are fully literate in Kurdish and the small number of Turkish-Kurdish translators.

Laleş mentioned the TEDA project, which gives financial support for translations of Turkish literature into other languages. He asked, why they are not making an effort to get any Kurdish literature from Turkey translated into other languages? “These citizens [Kurds] also live here, serve in the army, and so on, but they [TEDA] don’t want to translate our literature,” he declared passionately. At the same time, he said, it’s important for more Turkish literature to be translated into Kurdish for the benefit of native Kurdish speakers. [Aside from Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, few works of Turkish literature have been translated into Kurdish.] “This language is going to die” if more efforts are not made to keep it alive, Laleş said.

Moris Levi (Gözlem Gazetecilik), who was to discuss Jewish publishing in Turkey, was unable to attend. Gözlem is the primary publisher of Jewish writing in Turkey and also publishes the bilingual newspaper Şalom.

Vanessa Larson