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Alexander Christie-Miller
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been published in Newsweek, the Times, the Atlantic, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to The White Review.


Articles Available Online


Ada Kaleh

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Issue No. 17

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May 1931, it was said among...

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October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

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October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

Suicide without a cause, or silent sacrifice for an apparent cause which, in our age, is usually political: a woman can carry off such things without tragedy, without even drama — Julia Kristeva   I   I return to a former self, ghost or shadow self emerging from a glimmering light;   Woolf’s ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’   Life as circularity, inevitable return to a womb-like space, a space of the maternal?   Where do the dead go after they die? What nether region do they inhabit?   Where did the Hakka people come from? Peripatetic tribe from north-east China   She comes from people without a home, or fixed position She is condemned and doomed to wander looking for her place in history   I conjure up the past, delving into the recesses of unknown memory and time   I am returning to the source The original source The point of all our origin But these origins go further back beyond Western tradition, beyond the story of holy innocence fabricated in the myths of Adam and Eve, and the notion of a God the father And it does not reside in the maternal womb either, that place of warmth and nurturance, which begins with love   I invite mystery I return to our innate energy, excavating deeply layer upon layer of our consciousness   I breathe in the light; I inhale deeply and exhale   Where is the point of our origin?   I am digging deep I have to go further than the surface of things, back through space and time   I uncover hidden treasure buried for centuries, and carefully retrieve it for future purposes   Filtering through the coloured papers of memory, those delicate, fragile and carefully processed pieces of our past and history felt in my bones and body   In the beginning there was the Word And the Word is me My words become me, and I become the word, a flurry of mixed phrases, half-spoken sentences, articulate in their gibberish   I try to find the language that defines me, become a whirling dervish, caught up in a veil of spinning letters They fly around me, and I try to catch them   In the beginning there was

Contributor

August 2014

Alexander Christie-Miller

Contributor

August 2014

ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been...

Forgotten Sea

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Issue No. 11

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 11

I. As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near the town of Arhavi, the...
Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

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July 2013

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus routes, a destination and a...

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Art

March 2015

Tropenkoller

Lothar Hempel

Art

March 2015

Taking the title Tropenkoller (Tropical Madness), German artist Lothar Hempel’s latest exhibition at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (Feb 27-Mar...

poetry

April 2012

Jules & moi

Heather Hartley

poetry

April 2012

80% of success is showing up. —Woody Allen   A morning of tiles, park benches & sun, green, un-...

poetry

July 2012

Fig-tree

John Clegg

poetry

July 2012

He trepans with the blunt screwdriver on his penknife: unripe figs require the touch of air on flesh to...

 

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