Pick up a copy of Cyprus Today, the TRNC English weekly newspaper. Or at least it used to be English language. Probably three years since we’ve bought it, and in the interim it has acquired a six page section of news in Russian. And am reminded that the local private hospital has information pamphlets in Turkish and Russian, but not English. Which is itself a reminder that one of the chief favours that Kemal Ataturk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, did the Turkish people was to replace the old Arabic style Turkish script with a Latin-based Turkish alphabet. Which means that we are better off using a Turkish pamphlet where we can look up the words, unfamiliar though they all are, in a Turkish English dictionary, than we are using a Russian pamphlet where many of the words are probably similar to the Polish but the letters are Cyrillic. And the final reminder in this bit of free association is that one of the many famous guests of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria, where we stayed several years ago, was Ataturk, who is said to have mounted machine guns on the roof during the First World War to ward off attacks by the British or Arab Legions.
JAWORSKI TRAVELS