Turkey: A Balancing Act
from How to Invent a Country Hosted by BBC Radio 4
Misha Glenny and Miles Warde take a ride over the Bosphorus to see the old Hyderpasha railway station - the Asian bulkhead of the Berlin to Baghdad railway which opened in 1909. The Ottoman alliance with Germany had implications for the Middle East that are still being felt to this day. "This was a place of intrigue, spies and glamour. For four and half centuries Istanbul had been the centre of the empire, right up until the end of the first world war. At which point the empire was divided up, broken up, partitioned into mandates – Syria and Lebanon under the French, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq to the British, this based on the famous Sykes-Picot line agreed in 1916. The Ottoman empire had joined the wrong side in the war, and was going to pay. You could say this region is still paying, such has been the failure of those lines drawn in the sand." Contributors include Soli Ozel of Kadir Has University; Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans; and Suzy Hansen whose Notes on a Foreign Country was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde
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