Ilhan Selcuk, the chief editorial writer of the Istanbul daily Cumhuriyet, died on Monday evening at the age of eighty-five.

Selcuk was a partisan of the crusty old-school Kemalism that is no longer considered fashionable among western observers of Turkish politics. Today, Kemalists of Selcuk's style are routinely referred to as representing the "elite" in Turkey, as if an enormously powerful financial and media elite which supports politics diametrically opposed to those of Selcuk had not emerged in Turkey over the past twenty-five years or so.

I was lucky enough to spend my initial years living in Turkey at a time when there was no internet, when in order to obtain English-language news I'd have to walk up the hill (I lived in Muradiye, near Besiktas) up to Nisantasi to buy the Herald Tribune or Turkish Daily News from that Aladdin place that Orhan Pamuk keeps writing about. Sometimes I'd have to walk into Taksim. This was a good thing, as it forced me to read Turkish newspapers more often, and so to improve my Turkish I started buying papers from Ahmet Agabey up the street.

Most Turkish newspapers are filled with photographs of scantily-clad stunning women, and frankly I found it a little difficult to concentrate on my Turkish when reading them. I therefore reluctantly began reading the drab gray columns of Cumhuriyet (joom-hurry-yet) more and more often. Eventually I found that the Turkish in Cumhuriyet was far superior to that of most of the other Turkish newspapers I'd tried reading, and by 1996 or so I was reading Cumhuriyet several times a week. My Turkish was brought up on the writing of Ilhan Selcuk's column Pencere ("window") and those of other Cumhuriyet writers.



In recent years, Selcuk—like hundreds of other journalists, academics, and NGO figures who are known mainly for their opposition to the policies of Turkey's ruling AK Party—was detained as part of the Ergenekon trial. Selcuk spent only three days in jail, but continued to fight the Kangaroo-court nature of the trial even after he was released, pursuing and winning a case against the prosecutors who had originally charged him (Cumhuriyet's Ankara bureau chief, Mustafa Balbay, on the other hand, has been rotting in prison for more than a year in relation to the ongoing Ergenekon process).

There's much about Cumhuriyet and Selcuk's views that I've disagreed with over the years, and it must be said that the type of Kemalism that Selcuk endorsed is one which has often imposed limits of its own upon people's freedom of expression. But especially since the coup of 1980, which came down particularly hard upon center-left Kemalists of Selcuk's variety, both Selcuk and Cumhuriyet have been speaking truth to power in the face of political forces which have become more and more wealthy and powerful with each passing year. A year ago, Cumhuriyet left its front page almost entirely blank to protest the Erdogan government's increasingly authoritarian stance against the Turkish media, a subject that has been almost entirely ignored in international coverage of Turkish politics.

I don't know anything about the financial standing of Cumhuriyet, but I don't get the sense that the paper is long for this world. In that respect, the passing of Selcuk feels a bit like a prelude to the passing of Cumhuriyet itself—though I hope I'm mistaken in this regard. During the course of a long life, much of it lived during an era when just a handful of newspapers mattered in the shaping of public opinion in Turkey, Ilhan Selcuk played an important role in fighting for many things—such as maintaining the Turkish state's sovereignty over its own economy—that at times seemed unfashionable but now are appearing more important, even necessary. Today, Cumhuriyet is a much less dynamic newspaper without Ilhan Selcuk, but Turkey would be an even poorer place without Cumhuriyet.