In 2012, TCF awarded a grant to Billings Middle School in Seattle, WA to support a pilot year of teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The project was spearheaded by Rebecca Timson, Dean of Faculty of the school and an alumnus (2007) of the TCF Teacher Study Tours to Turkey.
For millennia, Turkey’s Marmara has been a physical and figurative bridge between Eastern and Western cultures, religions, and histories. It was here, at this crossroad of civilization, where Persian King Xerxes built his famed bridge of boats over the Dardanelles for his conquest of Europe. Here, on the treacherous waters of the Bosphorus, Jason led the Argonauts to find the Golden Fleece. Up against the legendry Walls of Troy, an impossible beauty launched a thousand ships and a wooden horse destroyed an ancient people. 
On December 17, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) reversed the criminal conviction by a Swiss court of Dogu Percinek, a Turkish politician who publicly challenged that Armenians were subject to genocide in the final years of the Ottoman Empire nearly 100 years ago. The ECHR is an international court whose decisions are binding in 47 countries, including all of the European Union and every NATO member state except the U.S. and Iceland. Some 800 million people are subject to its jurisdiction. It has rendered judgment in more than 10,000 cases since its founding in 1959.
NEW YORK—PEN American Center is thrilled by the news that Turkish translator, writer, and peaceful activist Ayşe Berktay has been released from prison pending trial today, but remains deeply troubled that her ongoing prosecution is indicative of a continued assault on writers, journalists, and scholars whose views the Turkish government disfavors. Ayşe Berktay’s next hearing will take place on January 30, 2014.
