Turkey Talk

An indomitable modernizer is Turkey's swart Dictator Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Having forbidden public reading of the Koran in Arabic, decreed substitution of the Latin alphabet for the old Arabic and given Turkey a new calendar, Dictator Kemal lately turned to history as taught in the schools. He caused an official textbook to be prepared for cheap and universal circulation. The first volume tells how Turkey passed through the Old Stone Age 5,000 years before Wrestern Europe. The famed Amazons were Turkish women. The early Chinese dynasties, the Indo-European Hindus, the Etruscans, Trojans and Cretans were really of Turkish origin.

A resume of this appeared last July in School & Society, written by Professor Walter Woodburn Hyde of the University of Pennsylvania, who observed that "such a history would be comparatively worthless outside of Turkey." Professor Hyde acknowledged he was indebted to History Professor Edgar Jacob Fisher, dean of Robert College in Constantinople, for translation. Last week, Dean Fisher lost his job.

By the Treaty of Lausanne, all Turkish education is controlled by Turkey's Government. U. S.-founded and U. S.-supported, Robert College must teach the official Turkish history in Turkish. Robert's teachers must be satisfactory to the Ministry of Education. When the Ministry beheld the School & Society article it grew choleric, telegraphed Dean Fisher --en route from a vacation in the U. S.--that he would not be readmitted to historic old Turkey. Robert officials were confident last week they could get him reinstated. Dean since 1922, Historian Fisher was ousted in 1924 because he was supposed to have made uncomplimentary statements about Turkey to a party of tourists. Later the ouster was rescinded, the Ministry confessing it had misunderstood.

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