Are You Afraid To Write? Turkey And The 21st Century
The world has one remaining newspaper that prints its pages in both Turkish and Armenian. Its name, Agos, is a word used in Armenian and Turkish that means furrow, the groove in which one plants a seed. Like nearly everything else Armenian in Turkey, Agos makes itself inconspicuous — I couldn’t even find the paper’s offices the first time I tried to visit, a few Julys ago in Istanbul. Agoswas founded there in 1996 by a Turkish-Armenian journalist called Hrant Dink. Against state pressures and censorship, the paper has been published every week since its founding.
On a rare 100 degree day, I spent much too long hiking up steep and curvy alleys on the European side of the city before learning that the address listed on Google Maps isn’t quite accurate. Eventually, an elderly man sitting on a balcony pointed me in the right direction and I soon spotted what he had described: a building with a big black metal cage covering its entire façade. I rang the doorbell and big metal doors buzzed open.
I found myself entering a small, dimly lit room with marble flooring and a single bench pressed against the wall. The room offered cool relief from the sun, but it was so small that after a couple of exhales, my breath spiked the room’s temperature and I was uncomfortably warm again.
Many buildings across Istanbul — universities, mosques, hotels — are converted prisons from the Ottoman Era. Agos’ office, in contrast, is a building that could someday, be converted into a prison. A small window slid open to my right. I rotated myself, and stood face to face with a man whose graying five o’clock shadow provided a rather distinguished backdrop for his scowl. “Why are you here?” he asked in Turkish.
I dodged the question and asked the man whether he spoke English. I was hoping to rely on my native language and be as articulate as possible.
“No,” he said curtly — in English. I waited for him to say something else, or even confirm I was in the right place. He, however, was the one who had me stuck in this little room. So I continued in Turkish. I explained to him that I was an American who has Armenian family in Istanbul. As a young girl, my grandmother lost her father to the Genocide. She never even knew his name. After he died, the family never talked about what happened. My hope was that the paper might have records that could lead to recovering his identity.
The man walked away from his window, and the doors creaked open. He welcomed me to Agos and stood in front of one more barrier, a set of metal detectors, smiling. I walked through the detectors, and he stuck out a warm and calloused hand for me to shake.
The paper did not always have such rigid security. In fact, up until a little more than a decade ago, Agos was located on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, in a public office building a couple kilometers aways. But today, in front of the old office is a plaque on the sidewalk. It is big and bronze with script in both Turkish and Armenian, two languages one rarely sees together in public. It reads: “Hrant Dink was murdered here, 19th of January, 2007, 3:05 P.M.”
For years, Dink was the exception among Istanbul’s Armenians: He made himself known, across the city and country. Indeed, he was so exceptional that one afternoon, as he walked out of the old building and while trotting down its cement steps onto a busy sidewalk he was shot three times in the nape of his neck at point blank range. He collapsed, face down on the sidewalk. As blood pooled around his limp body, the murderer ran brandishing his pistol.
“I killed an Armenian!” he shouted.
Over the past couple of decades, Turkey has distinguished itself in the global trend of democratic backsliding. One of the many ways to gauge the strength of a democratic society is to examine its treatment of minorities. Another measurement of a democracy’s strength is the independence of its press. Thus, Agos is uniquely vulnerable. Six months before he was killed, Dink claimed that “For us, the people of Turkey, this is our greatest trouble: We have not come to terms with our history. And because we have not managed to come to terms with our history, we relive our experiences in almost the same manner and taste the same defeat over and over again.”
The tragedy of Dink’s life is that he was murdered by the antidemocratic forces he had spent a lifetime fighting. His murder was a testament to the failure of his own cause. But since his death, the paper still goes to print every week. It publishes pieces about political corruption in spite of a regime that targets dissent; it covers minority life in spite of a society that abhors pluralism. Its pages track for us how a regime chips away at democracy; and its work tells us how civil society might work to preserve it.
Agos disappeared and then emerged at its current location not long after the murder. Past the security gates, the ground floor has a library which is always locked. There’s also a store with books for sale about Armenians in Turkey and, more generally, the country’s diminishing minority groups, which include Kurds, Greeks, Arabs, Circassians, and Laz. Above the store is the newsroom; above that, the offices of the Hrant Dink Foundation; above that, the foundation’s archivists, who work on long-term research projects — mostly on the country’s media landscape or minorities’ civil rights — that end up online or published as books, sold in the store down on the ground floor (though in all my time at the paper, I’ve never once seen someone come off of the street to buy a book in the store).
Hrant Dink’s current successor as editor-in-chief of Agos, Yetvart Danzikyan, is the only employee at the paper with a private office. But he always keeps the door open, a standing invitation to anyone to come and talk with the boss. Everyone else — a few young reporters, an online editor, and the editor of the Armenian pages — share a few large desks in the main room of the first floor. They work on their laptops and often move around to confer with each other.
Danzikyan takes up a lot of space, physically and temperamentally. The first time I met him, he stuck out a hand that felt more like a bear paw. His lazy right eye is fixed on some point in the distance, while the left patrols the office, or his computer screen. When he types at his desk’s keyboard, below a large, framed picture of Hrant Dink, he sways forcefully, like an organist playing a complicated fugue. When he speaks, his voice booms like a basso performing recitative in a Romantic opera. He is a genial fellow with a bushy gray beard and basically tidy hair who always looks the part of a seasoned public intellectual. I’ve never seen him in anything other than a pair of khakis, a collared shirt, and a colorful knit sweater. On warmer days, like that 100 degree day in July, he wears vests.
The boom in his voice reverberates in his writing. In 2024, the Turkish government shut down a radio station called Açık (pronounced “Ah-chuck”) after a guest mentioned on air “the 109th anniversary of the deportations and massacres, referred to as genocide, that occurred on Ottoman soil.” Açık had been on air for 30 years, and the government’s revocation of its license came after the Turkish Constitutional Court (the highest judicial body for constitutional review) decided it could stay on air.
But the regime didn’t follow the court order, claiming that Açık’s “expressions are incompatible with the understanding of public responsibility and responsible broadcasting, as well as inciting the society to hatred and hostility.”
Danzikyan was a frequent guest on its airwaves, and when the closure was announced, he quickly published an obituary for the station on Agos’ website. “It is not only the voice of Açık Radyo that is being cut off, it is the voice of all of us,” Danzikyan wrote.
The paper goes to print every Wednesday night, meaning that Monday is a jog, Tuesday is a run, and Wednesday is an all-out sprint (and Thursday a crawl). The paper prints breaking news stories, along with enterprise pieces that have taken weeks to report. Generally, the enterprise pieces are about Armenians, though often enough they’re about other minorities still in the country.
Open its Turkish pages, and one will find cultural reporting, perhaps a piece about an Armenian concert in Istanbul, or a church banquet. There’s also international reporting — the paper closely follows any news about diplomatic talks between the Turkish and Armenian governments, and it occasionally runs stories about Armenians doing notable work in the diaspora (usually unknown people doing volunteer work, though Kim Kardashian and Cher have appeared in Agos, too).
Sometimes the stories in Turkish are translated for the Armenian pages, and sometimes there are wholly different stories in each language. Stories that run in Armenian only are generally about Armenia or the Armenian church. Every year on or around April 24, the annual day of commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, a memorial is printed to honor the victims. Every January 19, the day of Dink’s murder, Danzikyan will write an epistle addressed to Dink, about the current state of minority life and the investigation into his murder. In 2023, when the murderer of Hrant Dink was released from prison, weeks of coverage were devoted to various court proceedings — most at Agos believe that government officials orchestrated his murder, but courts have banned any further investigations.
The Hrant Dink Foundation, founded after the murder to advocate for freedom of the press in Turkey, continues to receive threats, like a 2020 note demanding that the foundation leave the country and threatening the life of Dink’s widow, Rakel, who serves as an advisor to the foundation. “We may turn up one night, when you least expect it,” the letter read.
But Rakel remains unfazed, and her determination guides the editorial voice of the paper— as long as the Dinks are around, the mission of the paper won’t waver, even if the regime cascades further into authoritarianism. Agos will still cover minorities in the country; it will still write about Armenians around the world; it will still print in Turkish and Armenian; it will still refer to the Genocide as such. As one foundation employee put it, “This is a [matter of] principles.”
The Dinks’ determination is infectious. One morning late last March a reporter came into the office just as the week’s copies came off the presses. She had a front page, above-the-fold story about young political demonstrators who took to the streets earlier that week, protesting the unwarranted arrests of hundreds of city employees. In the past few days, journalists who covered the protests had also been arrested and held by the police — publishing such a story with the reporter’s name in the byline was a genuine risk. When she saw the freshly inked front page, her eyebrows jumped. “My God!” she shrieked. She yelled to get the attention of her editor. They looked at each other for a moment, and then the reporter began to jump and dance. It was her first cover story.
Proponents of tourism to Turkey — i.e. Turkish Airlines marketers and government officials — often quote Napoleon Bonaparte: “If the world were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital.” In the eighteenth century perhaps, but not today.
Istanbul’s current population is at least sixteen million, not including millions of uncounted refugees, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan. These uncounted masses are spread beyond Turkish borders to 2,000 square miles of metropolis spanning Europe and Asia. Like Agos’ office, Armenian churches and schools and cemeteries lie in corners of the transcontinental city, behind unmarked doors, covered by overgrown grass, or hidden by cement or steel walls. Many of these Armenians, some of my family among them, have acquired names that “sound more Turkish” by removing the characteristic -ian surname ending.
The 50,000 Armenians in Istanbul today make up about a third of one percent of the city’s population. At the end of the nineteenth century, Armenians made up about twenty percent.
Compared to their Muslim compatriots, a greater percentage of non-Muslim Ottomans were members of the Empire’s haute bourgeoisie: By the middle of the nineteenth century, non-Muslims did the vast majority of the Empire’s trade with Europe and owned a disproportionate percentage of Ottoman businesses. Generally, non-Muslim minorities had greater access to education and thus higher literacy rates. So, Ottoman minorities were central actors in the Empire’s robust print culture: For example, Jews brought the first printing press to the Empire, and the first-ever published Turkish novel was printed in the Armenian alphabet (rather than the Arabic script used by the Ottomans). By the start of the Genocide in 1915, the Ottoman government had already begun to expropriate minority-owned businesses and give them to ethnic Turks, who formed a nascent Turkish bourgeoisie. These acts were concealed, in part, by the censorship of newspapers, and eventually by the arrest and murder of Armenian intellectuals — many of whom were journalists — and Turks who sympathized with them.
It’s not just demographics, or securitized built infrastructure like Agos’ building, that bears the scars of this “Turkification.” There used to be an official holiday in Turkey: Journalists and the Press Day. The holiday commemorated July 24, 1908, the day that Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid II reinstated the Ottoman constitution and parliament. That bygone holiday is now called by some, like those at Agos, the Day of Struggle for Freedom of the Press.
Regardless of the political organization of the empire at any given time, the Ottoman press was always multilingual like Agos today. Before the revolution in 1908, the Sultanate subsidized the press and was also the sole arbiter of press permit applications. A few prominent papers were in circulation, and those were translated into the empire’s languages: Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Ladino, even Persian and French. Far from pure press freedom to be sure, but back then barons of the press were not chosen by ethnic or religious background; instead, ownership of a paper was based on fealty to the Sultan.
In the early summer of 1908 a group of mutinous military leaders began marching to Constantinople from Macedonia, merging with other disgruntled officers along the way. Frustrated with waning Ottoman influence in the Balkans, these officers generally agreed that their future lay not with an absolute monarch, but a parliamentary empire with a constitution that enshrined equal rights for Muslims and non-Muslims.
These military leaders had been influenced by a group of writers — mostly journalists and editors — who had been forced into exile after criticizing the Sultan’s weak military leadership and despotic rule. Though not a homogenous group, they all opposed Abdul Hamid and generally identified as part of the nascent “Committee for Union and Progress” (CUP). These exiles printed a magazine twice a month from Paris that was known as “the media organ of the Ottoman CUP.” Followers of the party came to be called the Jeunes Turcs, a name fashioned after the “Young Italian” unionists of the early-nineteenth century. The pages were generally friendly to the Empire’s minority groups, including Armenians, and various Armenian political parties joined up with the CUP.
Once the Young Turks arrived in Istanbul on July 3, 1908, they offered a choice to the weak Sultan: Vacate the throne, or reinstate the constitution and reconvene parliament. On July 24, the day that would become Journalists and the Press Day (Gazeteciler ve Basın Bayramı), he chose the latter. Later that week, an Armenian journalist and soon-to-be Unionist member of parliament, Krikor Zohrab, gave a speech in downtown Istanbul — not far from where Dink was murdered nearly a century afterwards. “O Ottomans! O free citizens! Our religions are diverse, but we all share the sect of freedom,” he orated. Tens of thousands cheered. Zohrab was an inspiration to Dink, and since Agos’founding, Zohrab has often been quoted in its pages.
After the revolution, the Ottoman press boomed. Within a month, the government received hundreds of requests for press permits. From Istanbul to Beirut, Thessaloniki to Cairo, Jerusalem to Baghdad, papers flew from printing houses, in many languages and some in multiple languages themselves. Across the empire of the multilingual papers in print, about a third ran Turkish as one of their languages, while 20% included French; 15% Arabic; 10% Greek; 10% Ladino; and 5% Armenian. This multilingual press was a reflection of the diverse population that it served, and of the diversity of the Ottomans invested in a robust press: An Armenian who did not speak Armenian but wanted to know about her country could read about it in French or Turkish.
After the revolution, the Young Turks quickly aged into old ones. In 1913, an extremist faction of the CUP — a triumvirate called “the Three Pashas” — took power, which they consolidated in time for WWI.
Pluralism was transformed into Turkism, liberalism into despotism, and Istanbul moved further away from the cosmopolitan, if still undemocratic, capital city it had been. Starting on April 24, 1915, leading Armenian journalists, academics, and public figures were rounded up by authorities across the empire under the pretense that they had secretly helped the Entente Powers make plans to march on the capital city. One need not be familiar with the Armenian Genocide to predict the fate of these intellectuals — horror generally awaits minorities rounded up en masse. They were publicly hanged in the city or deported to the Anatolian desert, where they marched alongside millions of other Armenians who had been expelled across the steppe. Most were killed. The few who survived went on to live broken lives.
One of those arrested was Krikor Zohrab, whose writings are held today in the Agos archives. Zohrab was not arrested immediately — perhaps because he was friends or colleagues with those who ordered the roundups. In fact, after the first roundups, Zohrab quickly met with the ministers who directed the arrests and told them that he would demand an explanation in the next parliamentary meeting. Within a few weeks, Zohrab disappeared. En route to a court martial almost 1,000 miles from Istanbul he was taken into a forest where his murderers shot him in the chest before crushing his head with a stone.
Like with Dink’s murder today, there was widespread doubt about who specifically bore responsibility for Zohrab’s death — no one knew the specifics of his fate until in 1959, when one of the murderers — an Ottoman sergeant — confessed on his own deathbed. Minutes before the murderer died in a Jerusalem hospital, he asked doctors whether anyone on staff was Armenian. They brought an Armenian nurse into his room, and he described the murder and also the directive he and his colleagues were given to tell no one about Zohrab’s fate. He asked the nurse, “How could such a thing be kept secret? Zohrab’s eyes were closed and the great crimes that were to sweep the nation eventuated. But I found Zohrab’s eyes looking at me all the time, as if saying, ‘I will never allow you a moment of peace.’” The man began trembling uncontrollably, and a few minutes later he was dead.
By the end of 1916, there was little carnage left to be done: Of the two million Armenians that had lived in the Ottoman Empire, some 1.2-1.5 million had been killed. The contemporary Ottoman press covered the “massacres” (the word genocide wouldn’t be coined for another few decades), and after WWI ended, some of its perpetrators were tried in Ottoman courts for war crimes. But in the Empire’s waning hours, they escaped for continental Europe. When the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, everyone responsible had been pardoned or escaped, and fewer than 400,000 of the once two million Armenians remained. The country could now begin convincing itself that there was never a concerted effort to liquidate Armenians and their property.
“How happy is the one who says he is a Turk,” the country’s founding father Mustafa Kemal rejoiced in 1933, on the tenth anniversary of the country’s founding. This became a motto for the country and remains an oath in public schools where children are still taught that in the fog of World War I, Armenians mostly supported the Russian Empire; according to the taught account, deadly but inevitable battles occurred between the Ottoman military and disloyal populations.
The number of Armenians and other minorities in Turkey continued to decline throughout the twentieth century. In the decades after the founding of the country, the Turkish government plundered the wealth of the remaining Armenians. One 1940s tax law that targeted fixed assets led to the confiscation of $4 billion worth (in today’s money) of non-Muslims’ property. Those targeted were given fifteen days to pay; if they couldn’t, their relatives had to help, or they were shipped off to labor camps in eastern Turkey and their property was simply confiscated.
By the time Hrant Dink was born in 1954, about 60,000 Armenians remained in the country, most in Istanbul. A year after Dink was born, a pogrom in Istanbul destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property, belonging predominantly to Greeks. Dink’s contemporary, novelist Orhan Pamuk, wrote about Istanbul in the time of their upbringing: “I witnessed this cultural cleansing as a child, for whenever anyone spoke Greek or Armenian too loudly in the street, someone would cry out, ‘Citizens, please speak Turkish!’ — saying out loud what signs everywhere read.”
Later in his life, when Dink was asked why he founded Agos, he said: “I am the one who understands his nation’s pains and bears that burden.” He bore it indeed, up until his death. And Agos still bears it alongside a dwindling number of independent publications — along with Agos, there are fewer than five newspapers regularly printed in multiple languages left in the country. In 2025, Turkey ranked 159 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom index. The Turkish government mimics the Ottoman assaults on the press a century ago: In the past few years, scores of journalists have been arrested and held indefinitely in prison — especially those covering the country’s Kurdish population. Press credentials are often revoked by the country’s judiciary, so are online publications which are ordered to be taken down. Outlets critical of the regime are starved of key revenue streams, often unable to place ads on their site or pages. Sometimes, heavy fines are directly levied to cripple an outlet.
The same 2025 Reporters Without Borders report on Turkey estimates only one in ten media companies in Turkey is able to operate independently of the government. Still, any breaking news story will be covered by Agos, and nothing is taboo for the paper — even if covering the subject risks retribution. Dink himself faced numerous criminal charges and in 2005 was found guilty of violating Turkish Penal Code 301, which prohibits any “denigrations of Turkishness.” After Dink’s murder, his son, Arat — also a journalist — reprinted some of his father’s writing that used the term Genocide. Arat Dink was convicted of the same crime his dad had been, and the son was sentenced to a year in prison.
But there’s reason to think that Dink would still believe in a more democratic version of Turkey if he were alive today; even after the Genocide and decades upon decades of its denial, he remained steadfast in his determination to build a pluralistic Turkey that protected the civil rights of all citizens. He thought that Agos, the only Turkish and Armenian newspaper since the founding of Turkey, was a way to put the two groups back into conversation — to normalize a more cosmopolitan Istanbul.
Fewer than two years before he was killed, Dink wrote a column commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the Genocide. He quoted Krikor Zohrab, the Armenian writer who had been killed in the forest. Dink wrote:
So now, in an effort to appeal to our consciences, let us remember the words of Krikor Zohrab, another intellectual, and a member of parliament. Let us take a look at the final letter written by this idealistic lawyer in 1915: “My final word of advice to my children is that they should always love each other, that they should worship you and never break your heart, and also, that they should remember me.”
One day, on April 24 everyone in these lands will join together in remembrance of all these people and wish peace upon their souls, and our shared pain will give rise to a multitude of joys. Not only will that day soothe the pain of the Armenian people, but it will also be the very democratization of Turkey itself.
Dink was committed to a democratic Turkey, which he felt was only possible if the country acknowledged the Armenian Genocide and the resultant Turkification. And so, he started Agos not only to provide news for the country’s Armenians, but in part to remind Turks — in their language — that Armenians remain in the country, that they are descendants of Genocide survivors, and that they have as much of a stake in the country’s future as anyone. In the words of Yetvart Danzikyan, Agos’ current editor, after a court decided it would halt any further investigation of Dink’s murder: “Truth has no statute of limitations.” In a country so intent on forgetting the past, Agos is committed to memorializing it.
Landing in Istanbul on my most recent trip, I was greeted by the face of a man who had been arrested a few days prior: In the terminal, I saw a photo of him above a note welcoming new arrivals to the city. No one stopped to look at his picture, which sat beside Uber advertisements and posters wishing travelers a blessed month of Ramadan. Outside, walking towards the bus that would take me to the city, I passed dozens of fliers with his same tired smile, but this time above the face there were different words: “Everything will be beautiful.” These words became a mantra for the Turkish opposition after a little boy shouted them at the now-imprisoned man, Ekrem İmamoğlu, in May of 2019, just after his first mayoral victory in Istanbul. He had been elected a month prior, narrowly beating Turkey’s ruling party’s candidate. But the national government annulled the results and ordered a revote.
His party likened the decision to “plain dictatorship,” but the candidate-turned-winner-
But it is still 2025, and everything is not beautiful yet. In the few days following İmamoğlu’s arrest on charges of corruption and terrorism, demonstrations grew exponentially; the government declared protests illegal; police arrested scores of people; the regime restricted local access to much of the internet (focusing on social media — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, WhatsApp), leaving VPNs as the only option. When I arrived, one million Istanbulites had just hit the streets.
In front of the fliers at the bus station, police roamed with automatic assault rifles held at their chests. My bus was delayed because the driver didn’t know whether our stop, located in the middle of the city, was closed to traffic due to the mass demonstrations. But he got word that he had permission and soon our bus was whizzing from the airport, through rural green hills and past the stray dogs that inhabit them. Once we were in the city, billboards shone in the dark and banners with the imprisoned mayor’s face fluttered in the wind.
I didn’t expect Agos to report on the demonstrations as much as it did. The paper dedicated weeks of front page stories to the arrest and ensuing protests. Prima facie, these protests were concerned with Turkish democracy not minority rights or ethnic equality in Turkey. But, at least in the eyes of Agos’editorial staff, Turkish democracy will always be intertwined with the civil rights of minorities. And İmamoğlu endorses a more pluralistic version of Turkey. He has visited religious leaders on holidays and once posted a “Merry Christmas” tweet in Armenian. In 2021, he facilitated the restoration of the Hrant Dink’s childhood orphanage which had once been confiscated by the state. As İmamoğluo once said, “Another point is not to use the term ‘minority,’ because we are all ‘citizens’ and members of a community with equal rights and duties,” he said in an interview in 2022. “This applies to the city I administer and to the country: this is my wish for the future!”
Alas Erdoğan, the current president, has no such vision. Over the course of his more than two decades in power, Erdoğan has cultivated a far-right nationalism. He rubs shoulders with authoritarians around the globe — such as Hungary’s dictator, Viktor Orbán — who antagonize their country’s minorities for the sake of a nationalist base. While campaigning for president in 2015, Erdoğan screeched, “Some called me a Georgian. Others even shamefully called me, excuse me, an Armenian. I am a Turk!”
For decades, conservative Turkish politicians have promised to turn the country into a “little America,” a vague pledge that mostly meant bringing international capital into the country and increasing its military might. But when I was last at Agos in early 2025, both Danzikyan and Agos’online editor, Nazan Özcan, warned me that “the US is becoming a big Turkey.”
One gray morning after a night of raucous demonstrations, I was sitting at a desk in Agos’ empty offices. The reporters and staff generally follow what my mom has always called “Armenian time”: a sort-of time zone, in which one’s schedule is planned in increments of 30 minutes, meaning that being a half hour late to something is unremarkable.
But even in Turkey money imposes a strict schedule and staffers from the advertising department were in their office. After a few minutes, one of them, Lerna, asked me in Turkish whether I’d like some coffee. I hesitated and asked whether Agos didn’t have any soorj, using the Armenian word for coffee. Lerna laughed. “Actually, I misspoke. We only have Greek coffee,” she said. “Is that okay?” I nodded — Turkish, Armenian, Greek coffee is all the same: fine, almost powdered grounds brought to boil on the stove in a little pot. In a couple of minutes, Lerna brought me a mini mug with a thick shot of coffee. “Afiyet olsun,” she said in Turkish. Enjoy. It warmed me up as I sat and waited for the staff to trickle in. It was Thursday, and the weekly paper had just come from the printing press. Danzikyan was out of the office, so the online editor, Nazan Özcan, acted in his place.
Özcan, who isn’t Armenian, recently returned to Agos after working for a number of other independent newspapers in Istanbul. I asked her to explain to me how the week’s issue had been organized. She grabbed a copy of the fresh paper from her desk and unfolded it. She started on the front page story above the fold. It was about the protests. “This is the biggest story here, so of course we cover it first,” she said without much thought. I stopped her. Dozens of journalists had been arrested since the demonstrations began. Just that day, a couple of online outlets were shut down by the government. “Are you afraid about this?” I asked her. She paused. “You have to be kind of stupid to do this job,” she said. “But no, I am not afraid.” In 2016, Özcan was the front page editor of a paper in Istanbul when a coup was attempted against the government. In the days following the coup’s failure, the government targeted its opponents, whether or not they were tied to the plotters. One hundred and fifty news outlets were shut down across the country. Nine employees at Özcan’s paper were arrested, including the editor-in-chief and a number of board members.
“I came into work after they were arrested, and the police were circling our office,” she said before taking a puff of an e-cigarette. It turned out that she was the only editor not arrested and she suddenly found herself in charge of the paper. “Everyone who remained at the paper was asking me if I was afraid then,” she said as smoke plumed from her mouth and nose. “My response was this: ‘Yes, I am afraid. I am afraid that our editors, in jail, will find a copy of our edition and think that it’s terrible. This is what I am afraid of. Nothing else.’” She smiled before taking another hit of the e-cig.
Özcan mentioned to me that she is often asked by friends and colleagues how she summons the courage to keep doing this work, and I interrupted to say I wondered the same. “I don’t do this because of courage,” she said dispassionately. Despite her steadfastness, as Özcan keeps working, she — like all independent journalists in Turkey — risks being arrested or targeted by the government. In fact, in 2023, after Özcan wrote about the alleged bribes that President Erdoğan’s former attorney had taken, she was investigated by the Press Crimes Investigation Office and charged with “abasing” the lawyer’s social standing. She was acquitted, but not without three hearings.
It’s difficult to gauge exactly how dangerous Özcan’s daily work is: Political dissent and independent media aren’t completely criminalized in Turkey, but journalists, editors, and publishers are monitored, harassed, and threatened. If there is a next time, maybe Özcan won’t be acquitted. For many journalists, the possibility that they might be arrested — or worse — for their reporting is enough for them to self-censor.
“Well, is it scarier for minorities?” I asked her. She nodded her head yes. “When I became a journalist, I thought that the goal was to be…” she paused. She was speaking English up until this point but had come across a word she didn’t know how to translate: Tarafsız. In English, it literally means “without a side.” I told her that she probably meant impartial, or evenhanded. “I thought the goal was to be. . . tarafsız,” she continued. “But now tarafsız is impossible.” In authoritarian regimes, democracy is itself a side. And the press must be on it. Call it journalism, or call it advocacy.
“This kind of advocacy is okay with me,” Özcan said. “If a story is true, then it needs to be told.” And Agos will tell it. She returned to the week’s edition of Agos, picked it up and read the headline of the story about the demonstrations aloud to me: “This is not just about İmamoğlu,” she read in Turkish. “This is about all of our futures.” Özcan told me that the reporter got that quote while at a demonstration a few nights ago. “We don’t know if that person was Armenian, or Turkish, Greek…. whatever” Özcan said. The future doesn’t discriminate. But if the future doesn’t discriminate, how is it that Dink was murdered nearly a century after over a million Armenians were liquidated from this place? It seems like the future had discriminated. Özcan nodded. When the mayor was arrested and thousands hit the streets, she told me, her nephew called her, distraught. “We let them ravage the Armenians, and we let them ravage the Kurds, and now they ravage us. If we helped them all those years ago, this wouldn’t be happening.” “First they came for the Armenians,” I said to her, thinking of the German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem written in the wake of the Holocaust. “Exactly,” she said. Now, the state comes for the next group: democratic Turks. And there is no one left to speak out for them — no one except for those, like at Agos, whose understanding of the past tells them that no group in a polity is guaranteed civil rights when another’s rights are under attack.
I left the office in the late afternoon to meet a family friend for dinner. By dusk I was out walking in the oldest part of the city, down alleys that were built by Byzantines in the early days of the Common Era. Looking for a metro stop, I walked down a long, curvy road, past old Ottoman cemeteries. At the bottom of the hill, a cop told me to keep walking — it’d be another 200 meters before I’d see the station. I kept on. As I approached the station, hordes of people began spilling out from the escalators bringing them up from the trains. They held signs, rattled bells, chanted slogans. It hadn’t occurred to me that the metro was a natural gathering place for demonstrators getting off of work or school. It was like the station gates were a dam that had broken, bodies gushed outward like droplets in a stream: they moved in such a large blob that I couldn’t make out any one individual, only the herd.
The amoebae of people grew closer to me on all sides, and before I had a chance to run backward, I was stuck in the middle of it. No one could take an individual step — we were all subject to the movement of the crowd. “Pardon,” I said weakly, trying to weave my way through and out of the group. No one could hear me over the chants of the crowd. “Erdoğan diplomasız!” they roared. Erdoğan is incompetent! Cowbells clicked and clacked in between the chants. “Herkes için adalet!,” they erupted next. Justice for all! The herd screamed as bells rattled from every direction. Once I jostled for a view ahead, I could tell that some of us were slowly making our way to the metro. I calmed down, my time left in the crowd ticked down.
Suddenly, between chants one man behind me shouted something in Ukrainian and started clapping and hollering. It was the first time on the visit that I heard a language other than Turkish or English on the street. He yelled out again, and I recognized “Putin” in his outburst. I wondered whether he was one of the many thousands of Ukrainians in Istanbul displaced by the war with Russia.
A voice ahead yelled back towards us, in Turkish. “Don’t worry, brother! We will handle him next!” The man behind me hooted and hollered some more, and even if just for a few seconds, I found myself in Hrant Dink’s Turkey.
