http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJcHbNXG6aU

Sukru Punduk says his family has lived in Sulukule, Istanbul's Gypsy quarter, for six centuries and he won't be driven out by laptop-carrying, stroller-pushing yuppies.

The city plans to bulldoze Sulukule to make way for 620 townhouses as part of its effort to spruce up the area by 2010, when Istanbul will be the European Capital of Culture.

Punduk, a tom-tom player whose home is on the demolition list, is leading the fight against the redevelopment project. He says it will destroy a community that's produced some of Turkey's best-loved musicians and belly dancers, and price the city's Gypsies, also known as Roma, out of their historic home.

``I've seen the models they've made for the new housing,'' says Punduk, 38. ``There are little model people carrying laptops or pushing prams, but no women in headscarves, no horse- carriages, no one playing the tom-tom. The Gypsies don't exist.''

On the streets of Sulukule, the scent of lentils from a soup canteen mixes with the aroma of horse dung and hashish. Children, one carrying a one-legged baby doll, play in the rubble of some of the 20 houses that have already been knocked down.

Other homes in the enclave, surrounded by 5th-century Byzantine walls on the European side of Istanbul, were abandoned by owners who accepted compensation from the city. They now house chickens and the horse-drawn carriages used to ferry tourists on sightseeing excursions. Black numbers on the walls mark another 600 slated for demolition early next year.

James Bond

City officials say the project will improve living standards in Sulukule, where 5,000 people now reside. It will bring amenities such as electricity, gas and water, and replace crumbling houses and canvas shacks with modern row houses featuring landscaped gardens and courtyards.

``The people live in very bad conditions,'' said Mustafa Demir, mayor of Istanbul's Fatih district, which includes Sulukule. ``We aim to provide them with a healthy environment.''

A typical 90-square-meter (968-square-foot) house in the new development will cost $93,000, in line with the average price in Istanbul. Once the land is cleared, the Housing Development Administration will solicit bids from private developers.

Residents of Sulukule, the setting for the belly dancing and Gypsy fight scenes in the 1963 James Bond film ``From Russia With Love,'' were left behind by Turkey's economic boom over the past five years. Their average monthly income of $250 is about half the national figure.

Homeowners are being offered cash compensation. Those who can afford to stay in Sulukule will get 15-year loans to cover the additional cost of one of the new homes, Demir said. Tenants in the Gypsy quarter will get loans to buy less expensive apartments about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away on the fringes of Istanbul.

`Don't Want Us'

The redevelopment ``will be good, because the area is a pigsty now,'' says Ozge Yazici, 29, a Web site technician who lives near Sulukule. ``But what is going to happen to the people? It's a colorful area that should be preserved.''

Huseyin Kucukatasayar moved out of the Gypsy quarter in April, after selling his house to a private investor. He says the housing development is an attempt to stamp out the local culture and reflects the historic prejudice against Gypsies worldwide.

``People look down on us; they don't want us,'' says Kucukatasayar, 53, who runs carriage rides for tourists and still keeps his horses in Sulukule. ``Here, I can still have my tea in the café even if I don't have any money in my pocket, because they know me. You can't find that solidarity anywhere else.''

Turkey's Gypsies originated in northwest India, Afghanistan and Iran. Byzantine chronicles refer to a community in Sulukule as early as the 11th century, said Adrian Marsh, a Romani studies researcher at the University of Greenwich in London.

Song and Dance

Turks and tourists once flocked to Sulukule's ``party houses'' for late-night belly dancing and music, before police shut them down in the 1990s. Today, dancers and musicians mostly earn their living by performing at restaurants in tourist districts, or at weddings and circumcision ceremonies.

The Sulukule Romani Culture Solidarity and Development Association, headed by Punduk, delivered a petition against the redevelopment to the Turkish legislature's Human Rights Commission on Nov. 14 in Ankara. There's been no response yet.

Plans to treat lawmakers to traditional Gypsy song and dance were foiled when security guards confiscated their instruments. The protesters improvised, using trays and water bottles from the parliament's canteen as drums, Punduk says.

The project ``will impoverish these people even further,'' says Marsh, whose European Commission-funded study of Turkey's Gypsies will be published in April. ``That must be seen as a great crime, to destroy the living memory of any community.''

Mayor Demir promises the new Sulukule will include a cultural center where Gypsies can play music and pass on their traditions.

``That's great, but who's going to come if you dislocate the entire community?'' Marsh says. ``They'll end up running Tai Chi courses and yoga, because the only people using the cultural center would be middle-class Turkish people.''

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT6EREzHLkc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhy-eUfOjUo&feature=related

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=92917

The Turkish form Anadolu derives from the Greek version – both of which predated the growth of Constantinople across the Bosporus strait to both continental shores. Turkish folk etymology further breaks down the geographical term into two words: Ana ("mother") and Dolu ("full"). Thus the name means "Full of Mothers" or "Full of Motherliness" and is used to advance a pedagogical ideal: Women's contribution of mother's milk to national masculine bravery.[3] Less literally, it is sometimes interpreted as Mother of Cities, perhaps dating to the pre-Islamic era when the Byzantine Empire was the biggest international power known in that part of Asia, and occupied the entire region.

The Anatolian Peninsula (Asia Minor) provides an important

geographic link between the Middle East, Asia and

Europe. Accordingly, this region manifests an elaborate

genetic constitution reflecting the consequences of numerous

gene flow, admixture and local differentiation processes

spanning from the late Pleistocene to the present

day (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). Both environmental and

cultural influences associated with the spread of the Upper

Paleolithic industries (Kuhn 2002), the Last Glacial

Maximum (LGM) and Holocene warming since the

Younger Dryas cold reversal, as well as the introduction

of agriculture and succeeding Bronze Age, Greek, and

Roman presence, may have left detectable traces in the

gene pool. In addition, resettlements from Central Asia

as well as movements during the

Ottoman Empire, including recent exchanges of numerous

Greek and Turk residents based upon religious affiliation

during the 1920s, would add further potential complexity

to the phylogeography patterns in Anatolia. The question

that we ask is it possible to attribute any elements

of the amalgamated Anatolian genetic composition

to any relatively ancient and recent chronologies/populations?

While most human genetic diversity is affected

by recombination, the low effective population size of clonal

Y-chromosome segments enhances them

with greater sensitivity to detect incidents in the demographic

histories of the populations that may otherwise leave

little imprint on the autosomal elements of the gene pool.

The resulting often non-random correlations between binary

marker defined haplogroups with geography

and corresponding short tandem repeat variance

provide a genetic metric with which to

sieve through complex deposits of human history on both

micro-geographic and temporal scales. To begin to better

understand how the succession and magnitude of events

spanning millennia have contributed to the current genetic

composition of Turkey, we have assessed patterns of Y-chromosome

diversity distributed across Turkey plus Istanbul.

The data illuminate numerous long-standing themes, including

the Holocene expansions, contributions of agriculturalists

to the European gene pool and genetic assessment of

Caucasian and Central Asian gene flows.

http://dienekes.ifreepages.com/blog/archives/000413.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Turkish_people#Turks_Genetic

Underwater museum
Long an important trading center and crossroads of human civilization, the Black Sea has seen the rise and fall of nations over thousands of years. Although its vast waters may have daunted ancient explorers, the Black Sea is, in fact, only barely a sea. Bordered by modern-day Bulgaria and Romania to the west, Turkey to the south and Ukraine to the north, it is nearly landlocked, connected to the Mediterranean Sea only through the narrow, dangerous Bosporus and Dardanelles straits.




According to Greek mythology, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, there was once a kingdom called Kolchis. Located in what is today the Republic of Georgia, this kingdom was said to be the home of the Golden Fleece, the legendary treasure that Jason and his Argonauts set out to find and bring back to Greece.

The Argonauts’ quest across the previously unexplored Black Sea to bring back treasure is an allegory of the Greeks’ own exploration, and eventual colonization, of the region, says Robert Ballard, an archaeological oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island (URI). Searching not only for gold, but also for fish, the Greeks “went in both friendly and as a raiding party,” he says. “They made it into a wonderful journey.”

For more than two decades, Ballard has been on his own epic quest to merge oceanographic tools and techniques with archaeological methods, in an effort to uncover long-buried historical treasures — such as the R.M.S. Titanic, which Ballard discovered in 1985, hidden under 3,800 meters of water in the North Atlantic Ocean.


see: GEOTIMES

http://www.geo.uib.no/seismo/quakes_world/Izmit-earthq/damage/adapazari-damage1.jpg


http://www.geo.uib.no/seismo/quakes_world/Izmit-earthq/damage/

The probability is high that Istanbul, Turkey, will experience a major earthquake in the near future, an international team of scientists report in today's Science.

" In the next 30 years, the chance is roughly 60 percent," said Thomas Parsons, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Parsons and his colleagues urge a calm response to their report. Though an earthquake could occur tomorrow, they hope their finding will serve as advance warning to Turkish citizens to minimize hazards.

Safety measures include fastening bookshelves and cabinets to walls, developing a safety plan in case of an earthquake and keeping a survival kit at the ready, said Parsons.

In arriving at a probability of 62 percent (with a 15 percent margin of error) for an episode of strong shaking in Istanbul, the researchers took into account the stress transfer from a magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Izmit, Turkey in August 1999.

Whenever an earthquake occurs at one point along a fault, it may create a higher stress level at another point.

"Beginning in 1939, there were events well to the east of Istanbul that seems to have started a progressive sequence to the west. The question is, will the sequence continue further?" said Parsons. "Unfortunately, we think the answer is yes."

The researchers say that traditional models, based mainly on the average time between events, underestimate earthquake hazards on the North Anatolian fault system, where Istanbul lies, because they do not reflect the buildup of stress as earthquakes progress down the fault.

The researchers assembled a catalog of major earthquakes occurring along the Yalova, Izmit, Prince's Islands and Marmara Sea faults — all faults in the North Anatolian system — since 1500.

"The basic idea was to convert historical descriptions into an idea of where earthquakes happened and how big they were," said Ross Stein, Parsons' colleague at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Two earthquakes occurred on the Izmit fault in 1719 and 1999, and three earthquakes ruptured the Yalova fault in 1509, 1719 and 1894, the researchers found. The central Marmara fault has been silent since 1509, and the Prince's Islands fault last broke in 1776.