Frustrated with the speculation surrounding his health, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday, Aug. 15, “Thank God, I am well. I’m learning ... from you about which hospital I was treated at and for what. Nothing as such happened though. I just took time to rest after Eid.”
On Aug. 12, Yurt, an opposition-leaning newspaper of minor circulation, ran the headline: “Was He at the Hospital?” The paper claimed that Erdogan became ill after going to the mosque on the first day of Eid to mark the end of Ramadan. “Although he has the custom of visiting his parents' graves on the eve of the Eid each year, Erdogan broke the tradition this year, and visited them a few days earlier. He disappeared after going to the Suleymaniye mosque for the Eid prayer,” the paper wrote.
“Reliable sources claimed to Yurt that the prime minister got sick and spent time at the hospital.” The paper added: “It was told that Erdogan was treated at the hospital for five days due to unstoppable diarrhea as a side effect of the colon cancer treatment that he has been receiving for some time. ... Erdogan was previously treated for colon cancer at Medipol Hospital at Uskudar on the fifth floor. It was noted that all elevators and stairs going to the fifth floor were blocked back then.”
On Thursday, Erdogan looked well in front of the cameras. "This side of the media is really bad. You need to question yourselves a bit. How do you find so many lies, and write about it? One should be ashamed of this," he said. "They are claiming that the prime minister of [this] country is hospitalized. We have a lesson for them. The subject matter of that lesson is 'decency.'"
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