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A PERCEPTIVE STUDY OF MODERN TURKEY The New Turkey: The Quiet Revolution on the Edge of Europe. Chris Morris. Granta Books. £17.99. 320 pages. ISBN 1-86207-790-8.
Turkey is stuck to Europe by a small wedge of land, several millennia of uneasy, bloody and exploitative history, and by the contemporary hopes of much of its population. From the dripping forests of Bulgaria and the aromatic scrub of Greece you come to Istanbul, a gleaming city built on water; throbbing with fervour, aspiration and despair. This is where the heroin passes to Europe; where Russian girls sell fur coats by day and themselves by night; where the greatest church of Christendom became a mosque and then a museum, but still remains a church to Christians and a mosque to Muslims; where the ships queue to get to and from the Black Sea; where everyone is a refugee.
Then, going east, you are into the hot plain of Anatolia. Here, in the little villages, are the attitudes and farming practices of the Homeric Bronze Age, lightly but increasingly Islamicized. East of the Euphrates, Anatolia rises to meet Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Iraq. Mountains tend to breed trouble, and they do here. Southeast Anatolia is a running sore in Turkey's side. It embarrasses the government, kills soldiers and polarises the Turkish people. On the Turkey-Iran border, huge pictures of Ataturk scowl at Ayatollah Khomeini. 'Turkey is a secular state', the Turkish posters scream. Well, not here it isn't.
Every guidebook on Turkey oozes clichés: straddling Asia and Europe actually and metaphorically; secular and Islamic; liberal and authoritarian and...