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Soner Cagaptay
40K posts
Soner Cagaptay
@SonerCagaptay
Senior Fellow @washinstitute | Historian, Author, | Turkey, MidEast, Balkans | Cultural Geography, 🗺️s | Pepperdine Prof | Daçka | Yogi | Lover of Mosques
- Hilarious and (very) literal translation of Turkish province names
- Every recored battle in history --also why the EU was such a a good idea
- Sketches used by USSR police to identify suspects based on “race”
- BREAKING: The unthinkable has just happened in Turkey: Ekrem Imamoglu, Istanbul’s popular opposition mayor and president Erdogan’s key challenger, has been arrested (on corruption charges). Turkey’s politics has stepped onto a new terrain on this day (March 19, 2025) 🧵
- 3 secrets of Turkish: 1. No gender pronouns: you can bury someone's gender in an entire conversation 2. Second past ("gossip") tense: to discuss what you didn't witness 3. S-O-V language: verb comes at the end & you have to listen to the full sentence to find out what's going on
- 🧵 How the Turkish language coins names for European countries: 1. If the country existed in the era of Ottoman expansion into Europe, but fell under Ottoman rule ➡️ "ethnic name + istan". For instance: "Bulgar+istan", "Hirvat+istan", "Sirb+istan", "Macar+istan", etc.
- Where the Romans lived: Every Roman settlement and nothing else
- Turkey hosts nearly twice the number of refugees per capita, when compared to the nearest country (Sweden) and 42 times that of the U.S.
- This Trump letter to Erdogan is the most damaging correspondance that could’ve been leaked ahead of VP Pence’s visit to Ankara tomorrow. Now, Erdogan has no option but to delay ceasefire in Syria less he be humiliated in front of his nation as weak and bowing to America’s threatPress office confirms this is real.
- "May the mere memory of Sultan Selim keep your cult.." refers to the 16th century mass murder of Alevis, a faith group to which Turkey's presidential candidate Kilicdaroglu belongs. This tweet encourages mass murder of and incitement against the nearly 10 million Alevis in Turkey
- Birthplace of Ottoman Empire vezirs (prime ministers) by today's countries
