Diyarbakir Book Fair
I liked this article I read on a new book fair in Diyarbakir which is taking place for the first time in this city. This comes from the Palestine Note website. Hopefully, this will become an annual event for the citizens of Diyarbakir and tourists alike.
The Bookfair in Diyarbakir
“A book fair in Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, took place for the very first time in this far-flung, Kurd-populated region. Nearly 125 exhibitors unpacked their boxes full of books in the halls of the Tüyap exhibition centre, which until recently featured cars and agricultural machinery. For an entire week in May, nearly 89,000 visitors from Diyarbakir and the surrounding areas used the opportunity to survey the Turkish-Kurdish publishing landscape and to generously stock up on books.
The shopping bags of fair visitors were full of language, grammar and poetry books, all of which are highly valued in a region noted for the oral transmission of its literature. Sales were also brisk for many standard works on the history of European politics, sociology and philosophy.
Publishers at the book fair confirmed that readers from this region have a greater interest in sociological and political issues than elsewhere in the country. “It is striking how totally different readers in Diyarbakir are from those in Istanbul. People in Istanbul pursue extremely varied interests and that is reflected in their book purchases. Here, people seem to be searching for books with political solutions and on new ways to live their lives,” said Gazi Bertan who works at Kaos Publishers Istanbul.
“It has taken Turkey a long time to recover from the restrictive policies imposed after the 1980 military putsch. Now there is a great thirst to freely discover new paths and possibilities. Perhaps this is why many political and religious books are so popular – because they were unavailable for so long,” explained a book dealer at the fair.
The crowd in front of author Iskender Pala’s table where he signed autographs bore witness to this theory. The professor of Turkish language and classical literature, as well as a writer of mystical love stories, Pala provides a voice for the emotional world of a young, religiously conservative generation, which for the first time is consciously creating a path for itself that includes both its traditional faith and participation in modern life.
Kurdish publishing houses such as Avesta, Lis, Nubihar, and Belki were notable at the book fair in Diyarbakir. These small Kurdish publishers often can’t afford a stand at the large book fairs in Istanbul. But here, in the overwhelmingly Kurdish populated east of the country, their books were certainly the public’s favourites.
Written Kurdish was illegal in Turkey for much of the 20th century, which makes the event all the more poignant. “In addition to textbooks on the Kurdish language itself, people here primarily buy the classics, such as poetry by [16th century Kurdish writer and mystic] Melaye Ciziri or epic poems by Ehmede Xani.”
