Menderes thesis: still around today

Monday, April 16, 2012  Back before I began lurking in the shadows of the Russian-Turkic borderlands, I was an MA student at Princeton's department of Near Eastern Studies. And though I've tried my hardest to repress those years, they continue to come back to me on occasion, blasting my hard drive with the occasional memory or sensation. Speaking of hard drives getting blasted, that is exactly what happened to me one evening back in Azerbaijan in 2004. On my computer that night were a number of files--including my Princeton MA Thesis--which were never completely recovered, despite the best efforts of the crack team of computer forensics experts I assembled over there. Fast-forward to a snowy morning in Bozeman, Montana not too long ago. The hard copy of my thesis is unearthed from storage while I'm looking for something else. It sits around on the bed in my guest bedroom for a few weeks before I decide to take it into the office, where I scanned it onto a pdf file.  The thesis is about the political rehabilitation of Adnan Menderes in the 1980s. Menderes had been Prime Minister of Turkey from 1950 to 1960, before he was removed in a coup on May 27th, 1960. He was executed a year later, following a brief imprisonment and trial on İmralı Island, in the Marmara Sea.