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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...

2011   I In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself   On July 23, at 3:29 in the afternoon, my death set out from Catania Its epicentre was my thin, supine body, my three hundred grams of human heart, my small breasts, my puffy eyes, my brain clubbed senseless, the wrist of my right arm draped over the edge of the tub, the other wrist submerged in a grim mojito of mint bubble bath and blood   On July 23, in the full heat of summer, down the dusty steps of my apartment building, oozing downward insidiously like oily, boiling veins of asphalt, my death propagated from Via Crispi 21 through all the neighbouring streets, to the cathedral with its pigeons and shorts-clad tourists, to the Amenano River, which reeks of carrion, and then vanished underground From my central nervous system to the streets of the city centre, from cold to hot, a perfect breakdown from which there is no return Down into the black heart of the lava stone, from the Roman aqueduct to the dirt paths of the Parco Gioeni, overgrown with weeds and littered with empty beer cans, to the scalding steps of the Church of the Santissima Trinità, to the dingy gray faces of saints Peter and Paul outside the Church of Sant’Agata al Borgo From there it shot off to the narrow sidewalks of the Scogliera, a scream in the depths of the sea, a puff of air in the seagulls’ lungs Amidst the noise of the beaches, the sweat, the wafting clouds of deodorant and suntan lotion Geometric under the spray of the shower, brutal down in the drains, down among the cigarette butts, inside used condoms, swirling down, martyred, into the sewers, down into the darkness and shit, tangled up in hair and the tails of passing rats After four hours my body temperature plunged, especially that of my internal organs   First the brain   Then the liver   Then the epidermis   Then the Ionian Sea: it hardened like a fist   At that point my death once again took wing It flew all the way up to Mount Etna, darting among

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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poetry

October 2015

Two Poems

Robert Herbert McClean

poetry

October 2015

Another Autumn Journal Chaos (AKA Do Not Put This to Music Because You’re How Fish Put Up a Fight)...

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September 2012

Moscow - Petrozavodsk

Maxim Osipov

Anne Marie Jackson

poetry

September 2012

  Mark well, O Job, hold thy peace, and I will speak. Job 33:31     To deliver man...

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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-...

 

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