Sons of the Conquerors - Interview with Hugh Pope

...been meaning to write a post about Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey's
Republic and its first President... but I don't think that will be today, as after a long day of work, we're headed to a group dinner on a boat around the Bosphorus.... :-) so in lieu of a bio of Ataturk, here's something I found on his site, an interesting interview with Hugh Pope about his book "Sons of the Conquerors - the Rise of the Turkic world"... Click on his name for the full interview...

HUGH POPE: Thank you, Joanne, for that generous introduction. The first question I should ask is, is there a Turkic world? We invented it fifteen years ago, when I had no idea that it existed. Even when preparing this book, it took me about two weeks working with a cartographer in Wales to find the right framework for what should and should not be in the Turkic world.

When I went to Turkey in 1987, it was like going to the end of the universe. No one could understand why I had gone. Some people thought I was betraying Western civilization by settling in such a country. But above all, what we forget is that the Iron Curtain, which divided East and West Europe, had an extension across the Black Sea, through Caucasus and Central Asia, and between the Soviet Union and China. That Iron Curtain divided the Turkic peoples. It kept them uneducated. Their countries were not on the path of progress.

In those days, I first became aware that the people that we thought of as the Muslims of the Soviet Union spoke languages that were still closely related to the language of Turkey. We became very aware of this in 1990, with "Black January" in Azerbaijan, and suddenly the Turkish television stations were full of Azeris phoning in from houses in Baku, in a language that we could understand. It was astonishing. No one had been aware that that connection had lived on. One of the most interesting plane trips I took was the first-ever direct flight between Istanbul and Baku...