I admit that I have a positive feeling for Turkey. My grandmother went from Moscow to Constantinople sometime between 1909 and 1912 and requested and received a visa to live and work (as a dentist) in Ottoman Palestine. After the First World War broke out in 1914, she was asked, as a national of a country at war with Turkey, to please leave Turkish-held territory or accept Turkish citizenship. She chose the former, and together with many others, left in orderly fashion for Alexandria, in British-held Egypt. The Turks have an innate sense of decency about them.

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. I immediately headed for the used book shops to see what I could find in English before the inevitable price rise. I was lucky to find his masterpiece, the Black Book, about a man who discovers that his wife has left him and her journalist half-brother has disappeared at the same time. The book is the story of his search for them through the streets of Istanbul.

While reading the book, I received a translation project centered on a woman of Turkish-Jewish birth who had married an Israeli. She had since left him and took their daughter into hiding in Istanbul. The distraught husband, extremely well-to-do, stopped working and set out to find his daughter. While I was reading about a search through the streets of Istanbul, I was translating a document dealing with that very subject. For some time I found this nothing more than a coincidence.

Recently I began reading Harold Lamb’s Suleiman the Magnificent, about the Ottoman Sultan who built the walls to the old city of Jerusalem. Obviously he did other things, such as conquering Buda and thus dismembering Hungary. He also threatened Vienna, but when he heard that the Habsburg emperor was not there, he changed his plan, and after letting his army loot the countryside, he withdrew his troops from Austria. This is what I was reading during the Euro finals, played in Switzerland and Austria this summer. At the same time the Turks were defeating, first the Czechs, and then the Croats, two former Habsburg territories. This second defeat took place in Vienna, the same city that Suleiman had decided to leave alone, and the Turkish fans, now rooting for a team going into the semi-finals, trooped through the streets like conquerors. As I said before, however, the Turks are decent people. Rather than looting and/or causing wanton destruction, they honked their horns and waved while their children kissed passersby.

Another coincidence I guess. How many related coincidences does it take before we have a pattern?