Cold War history, how businessmen avoid politicians, stray dogs, the Olympics

Hi everyone,

Nick and I recorded the second episode of the podcast. You can click on it above, or find it in your favorite podcast app.

Below is a link to the first episode on Spotify!

This second episode was a mixed bag - where we went through a few relatively unrelated topics, the first two of which were in reaction to two interviews the journalist Cansu Çamlıbel recently published at the Turkish news website T24. Cansu’s work is well-worth following if you don’t already. She used to write a lot in English, but these are Turkish only I think.

Here are the topics, in order:

• How Athenogras became Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople 1948, and the Cold War politics behind it. (This is based on Cansu’s interview with Cavit Çağlar, a businessman and former politician who is also making news because he suggested that Turkey could sell the S-400 to Pakistan or India.)

• How Mehmet Ali Yalçındağ, a Turkish businessman who happened to be friends with Donald Trump, got stuck being a go-between with Erdoğan after 2016. I thought this interview was revealing of how the relationship between powerful businessmen and Turkish politicians has changed.

• We went over the latest concerning the stray dogs in Turkey. The government has passed a law laying out a plan to kill millions of stray dogs, but there’s now reports from some shelters where dogs are being killed without much of a process.

• We went over Turkey’s performance in the olympics, a subject I have already touched on over the weekend.

We got some great feedback for the first one, so do please keep sending us your thoughts.

All the best,

- Selim

Prime minister Adnan Menderes visits Athenagoras in the summer of 1952.