Turks, Armenians and Ottomans

Mustafa Akyol

Akdamar Church, Van/Turkey

I really was not expecting to eat the best lahmacun of my life on the western coast of the United States. (Lahmacun, a sort of thin pizza with minced meat, is prominent in Turkish cuisine.) However Jack’s Bakery, a small family restaurant in the greater Los Angeles area, went beyond all my expectations. Not only its lahmacun, but everything I tasted here were both very delicious and very “Turkish.”

Read more »

The Structures of Sinan

Inside Selimiye Mosque

New York Times reporter Andrew Ferren tracks the 16th-century architect and engineer named Sinan. Ferren writes, "Sinan (circa 1490-1588) was chief architect and civil engineer of the Ottoman Empire, working when the empire was at its apogee; his employers, Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and his heirs, were the most powerful men on earth."

Read more »

A memoir out of a culture both deeply Ottoman and deeply Jewish

(c) Stanford University Press

Years ago sitting in the manuscript room of the Israel National Library, Aron Rodrigue came across something and as soon as he laid his eyes on it, he knew it was going to be something very special.

What he had come across that day was the earliest known memoir in the Ladino language, written sometime in the early 1880s by a Jewish printer who lived in Salonica, Greece in the days of the Ottoman Empire named Sa’adi Besalel A-Levi.

After years of having the manuscript sit on his shelf , unsure of what to do with it, Rodrigue and his co-editor, Sarah Stein, finally translated and transliterated the book from its original Judaeo-Spanish text in to English and launched the book at an event hosted by the center for Jewish studies at UCLA, Wednesday.

Read more »