Turkey, the nation not the bird.

I can think of a lot of nice things to say about the place, i went on holiday there last year and will be doing so again this year. A small village/town by the name of Kalkan. The place and the area around it was lovely, scorchingly hot to if you like that kind of thing, not to crowded and not full of drunken morons either. Also not to many screeching children either, so all in a really nice place to enjoy a relaxing holiday and the people were friendly. Certainly nothing like the media portray Turkish football fans, although football fans have a habit of being lazily used to represent peoples stereotypes and prejudices. As for the biggest city in Turkey, Istanbul, well you could write a book and barely scratch the surface of it's history. It's been around since 667 BC and has been Greek, Roman and Turkish. Certainly many hundreds of years before you can find much history of note in the UK.

All this said however i was quite disappointed to stumble across a recent article in the Washington Post. Essentialy the US government appeasing the Turkish goverment because they are important strategic allies. The countrys latest Amnesty International report doesn't make for the best reading either. There was a time i would have considered refusing to go to the place, the treatment of the Kurds is by and large an under reported disgrace, however if we restricted ourselves to only holidaying and residing in places that didn't have questionable policies and history i reckon we'd all have to live somewhere like Norway. No wait a minute damn those Viking marauders! On a more serious note i guess what i'm trying to say is, that as a citizen of the UK i guess our recent history is often viewed with rose tinted spectacles and right now we're certainly no shining light.