Egyptian Twitter Post Pushes Turkey's Buttons
A Twitter message that suggested the interim government in Cairo might recognize the Armenian genocide exposed a raw nerve in Turkey.
I learned what "khachkar" meant some years ago in Egypt.
I had always known the word, of course. All Turkish school kids do. It is the mountain range in the northeast that we used to paint in a dark shade of brown on our hand-drawn maps of Anatolia. We would even leave a speckle of white in the middle to suggest a summit of never-melting snow and write there on the top: Kaçkar.
It was an undefined word, but in my young dreamy mind, I associated it with glimmering ski slopes — an image doubtlessly fortified by the literal meaning of the word’s two syllables, kaç (escape) and kar (snow).
That image melted away three decades later as I stood before a green marble wall inside the St. Gregory The Illuminator Church on Avenue Ramses in Cairo. There, fixed on the wall at eye level was a frame with two bird icons facing each other and a stone carving of a cross above them.
