History in a Stack of Old Newspapers

With the Turkish Republic now celebrating her 85th year, a neat co-incidence landed a pile of 53-year old newspapers into my possession. Here is a selection from their funny, nostalgic and occasionally horrifying contents.

All dating from the time between 1954 and 1955, these newspapers shed a light to the recent history of my country, and illuminate some interesting parallels between the media of then and now.

I found a number of titles, including Vatan, Yeni Sabah, Milliyet, Dünya and the ever-present Hürriyet. Remember, all of these photos are large-sized and you can zoom-in on them by clicking on the pictures.



The typography, graphics, design and the language of certain ads in the papers were a boon to contemporary graphic designers, who are attracted to such artifacts with an exaggerated passion for the ironic and the kitsch.

Here's another...

And another... Kayo is supposed to be a foot ointment, while Opon is a headache remedy.

Here is a sexist ad in comic-strip format, for a brand of razors called Poker-Play. "If she is avoiding you, it's your fault! Buy a Poker-Play now and get a nice, clean shave. Oh, how nice..."

Some of the news are also hilarious. Here, we are informed that the "Society for Those Who Want to Go to the Moon" has been disbanded due to the lack of interest and public ridicule. How surprised must those disinterested, mocking masses have been when, sixteen years later, mankind did walk on the Moon.

The plight of the Society for Those Who Want to Go to the Moon also neatly illustrates why it was the United States, and not a country full of incompetent, arrogant oafs like Turkey who achieved that momentous feat.

What about this one? A kid supposedly put his boss to sleep using a form of magical earth from someone's grave, and was duly caught by the police. This article is written in such a form that the sleep-inducing properties of graveyard soil is mentioned like an established fact. Science education must not have been very advanced, by then.

This one is rather cute; a baby bear in Siberia was damaging phone lines by climbing to the top of the poles and plucking the phone-line cables "...harmoniously, as if he was playing a guitar."

This one is bizarre: A woman, identified only as "Ayşe from Konya," has supposedly kept a snake alive in her stomach for over a year! Well it's either her stomach or uterus, for the newspaper uses a very vague language when referring to the snake's location as "Karın;" a word that can be used for both organs.

I think something like this is faintly possible if the snake was indeed in her vagina, but for the stomach - no way. Perhaps the paper's editors didn't know the difference between a snake and a tapeworm. Judging from their previous errors, I wouldn't put it past them.

While some of the news are funny or just plain weird, others are simply depressing. Consider this article: Two villages from the around Samsun, on the black sea coast, had a little "war" involving more than two thousand people rushing the opposing village and burning it down to the ground and klling all of their livestock. Fortunately, "only" one person was killed.

What the f*ck?!? Modern Turkey can still get pretty ugly, but this is a huge event even by today's standards. I wonder what other horrors must have taken place?

Another sad Turkish classic: After a moderately large earthquake in Smyrna, or Izmir, religious shit-heads have run amok, harassing women in modern clothes and urging them to wear the characteristic Mohammedan rags lest the "wrath of God" strike their city again.

The exact same shit happened in my lifetime after the big 1999 earthquake that killed my grandmother.

This small snippet, on the other hand, is possibly the scariest piece I've ever read in the entire stack of newspapers. All copies of an encyclopedia on the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey from 1703 to 1924 were forcefully collected and burned in a Nazi-esque bonfire organized by a cheerful Turkish Students' Union. The reason? The book had not mentioned Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. What's even scarier is that a "group of youths" were at ready for the spectacle.

Imagine what such a generation would do when they were adults. Actually, don't - for here in Turkey, we are seeing them, grown up and in action right now. The recent spate of internet bans, including that of Youtube for hosting a video that insulted Atatürk, represents the exact same diseased mentality. From burning books to banning the internet in fifty three years - what a shame.

Make no mistake about it, I'm not against Atatürk, or his principles. Heck, I adore the guy for actually achieving his wildest dreams and forging, in blood and fire, the world that my generation grew up in. However, censorship and bigotry are still censorship and bigotry, whether they are done in the name of Atatürk or not.

It gets worse. All of these newspapers all date from around 1955, during which the horrifying "Istanbul Kristallnacht," the pogrom against the Greeks of the City, took place. What's shocking is that almost all newspapers engage in purposeful propaganda against the Istanbul Greeks until the events, and then immediately bigan wailing and crying about the "unfortunate tragedy." Here is a page from the infamous Hurriyet, pointing out to a (completely fabricated) link between the Greek Patriarchiate in Fener and the Greek terrorist bands in Cyprus, who were gering up for an ethnic cleansing of the island's Turkish populace.

What happened after all of those provocations will live forever in the history of this country.