Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk faces probe for insulting Turkey’s founder
Following an Istanbul court’s decision to launch an investigation into “Nights of Plague,” the recent novel by Orhan Pamuk, many writers and activists are rallying to support the Nobel laureate.
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel Prize laureate in literature, faces judicial investigation once again after an Istanbul court decided to follow up on charges that Pamuk’s most recent novel, “Nights of Plague,” insults Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk.
The charges are being brought by Tarcan Uluk, a lawyer from the Aegean port city of Izmir, who says that Kolagasi Kamil, one of the main characters in the historical fiction, is a thinly veiled avatar of Turkey’s founder. “Nights of Plague” is set in Minger, an imaginary, multiethnic and multifaith Ottoman island on the Aegean Sea in 1901, as a pandemic hits the island and quarantine measures are imposed.
“The figure of Kamil (an ambitious and single-minded military officer whose meteoric rise makes him the president of the island) mocks the figure of Ataturk,” Uluk told Al-Monitor, explaining that he filed a criminal complaint to Izmir’s chief prosecutor’s office shortly after the novel came out based on penal code articles that protect Ataturk and national symbols of Turkey. “We demanded that this novel, which insults Ataturk and the Turkish flag … [be] pulled off the shelves immediately.”
Izmir prosecutors have passed the file to Istanbul on the grounds that the publisher of the novel was based there. Following the testimony of the author, the prosecutors decided on nonprosecution.
