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The ghost of an Armenian captain threatens Turkey's attempt to subvert the forthcoming 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, writes journalist and honorary OU graduate Robert Fisk. 

Confronted by the chilling hundredth anniversary of the genocide of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, Turkey's Government is planning to swamp memories of the Armenian massacres with ceremonies commemorating the Turkish victory over the Allies at the battle of Gallipoli in the same year. Already, loyalist academics have done their best to ignore the presence of thousands of Arab troops among the 1915 Turkish armies at Gallipoli – and are now even branding an Armenian Turkish artillery officer who was decorated for his bravery at Gallipoli as a liar who fabricated his own biography. In fact, Captain Sarkis Torossian was personally awarded medals for his courage by Enver Pasha, Turkey’s war minister and the most powerful man in the Ottoman hierarchy.  

The greatest hero of Gallipoli was Mustafa Kemal who, as Ataturk, founded the modern Turkish state. But in view of the desire of some of Turkey's most prominent historians to brand Torossian a fraud, the word ‘modern’ should perhaps be used in inverted commas.

Now these academics are even claiming that the Armenian army captain invented his two medals from the Enver.  Yet one of the most the outspoken Turkish historians to have fully acknowledged the 1915 genocide, Taner Akcam, has tracked down Torossian’s family in America, met his granddaughter, and inspected the two Ottoman medal records; one of them bears Enver Pasha’s original signature.

His memoirs, From ‘Dardanelles to Palestine’, were first published in Boston in 1947.  Ayhan Aktar, professor of social sciences at Istanbul Bilgi University, first came across a copy of the book 20 years ago and was amazed to learn – given Turkey’s attempt to annihilate its entire Armenian population in 1915 – that there were officers of Armenian descent fighting for the Ottomans.  The eight month battle for Gallipoli – an Allied landing on the Dardanelles straits dreamed up by Winston Churchill in the hope of capturing the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) and breaking the trench deadlock on the Western Front – was a disaster for the British and French, and the mass of Australian and New Zealand troops (the ANZAC forces) fighting with them.  They abandoned the beach-heads in January of 1916.

In his book, Torossian recounts the ferocious fighting at Gallipoli and other battles in which he participated – until, towards the end of the Great War, he found his sister among the Armenian refugees on the death convoys to Syria and Palestine.  He then turned himself over to the Allied forces, meeting but not liking T.E. Lawrence of Arabia – he called him a mere “paymaster” – and re-entered Turkey with French forces.  He eventually travelled to the US where he died.

The gutsy Professor Aktar, however – noticing his colleagues’ unwillingness to acknowledge that Arabs and Armenians fought in the Ottoman Army – decided to publish Terossian’s book in the Turkish language.  Initial reviews were favourable until two historians from Sabanci University took exception to Ayhan Aktar’s work.  Dr Halil Berktay, for example, wrote 13 newspaper columns in ‘Taraf’ to declare the entire book a fiction and Torossian a liar, a view that came close to what Aktar calls “character assassination”.  “It is a ‘trauma document’ of an integrationist Armenian officer who fought in the (first world) war,” Aktar says.  "But his family were deported to the Syrian deserts in spite of the fact that Enver Pasha (the Turkish war minister and the most powerful man in the Ottoman hierarchy) had clear orders to the local governors not to deport officers’ families.”

Lower-ranking Armenians in the Ottoman army were disarmed and later massacred amid the genocide, in which women were routinely raped by Turkish soldiers, gendarmerie and their Circassian and Kurdish militias.  Churchill referred to the massacres as a “holocaust”.  Taner Akcam, the Turkish historian who discovered Torossian’s granddaughter, was stunned by the reaction to the Turkish edition of the book;  one critic, he says, even claimed that the Armenian officer did not exist. “This book, along with Aktar’s introduction, pokes a hole in the dominant narrative in Turkey about the Gallipoli war being a war of the Turks.  As Aktar shows in his introduction, not only Torossian and other Christians played an important role in Gallipoli, but some of the military units were also composed of Arabs.”

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke at Gallipoli two years ago and gave a perfectly frank account of how Turkey planned to define the Armenian genocide on its hundredth anniversary.  “We are going to make the year of 1915 known the whole world over,” he said, “not as an anniversary of a genocide as some people claimed and slandered (sic), but we shall make it known as a glorious resistance of a nation – in other words, a commemoration of our defence of Gallipoli.”

So Turkish nationalism is supposed to win out over history in a couple of years’ time.  Descendants of those who died among the ANZAC troops at Gallipoli, however, might ask their Turkish hosts in 2015 why they do not honour those brave Arabs and Armenians – including Captain Torossian – who fought alongside the Ottoman Empire.
Robert Fisk Posted 12 July 2013

Robert Fisk of the Independent was awarded an Honorary Degree by The Open University in 2004. This article originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday on 12 May and is reproduced here with kind permission of Robert and the Independent. 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Academics in arts and humanities disciplines are building on IT developments such as linked open data and uniform resource identifiers to put a huge range of disparate resources within easy reach.

Dr Elton Barker, Open University Lecturer in Classical Studies, describes here how the linked ancient geodata project PELAGIOS is painting a richer picture of the ancient world. Watch this presentation. (The introduction is in German, English begins 3 minutes into the video).

Elton Barker also works on Google Ancient Places.

The world of odd book titles is wonderful to behold, writes Dick Skellington.

For every good book title there are some really bad choices out there. The author trade magazine, The Bookseller, holds an annual competition for those titles you wished would go away. You have to wonder why some of these titles were chosen, but some of them may end up as classics of the genre. 

Take your pick from the good and the bad. Here are some contenders for the silliest book title of the past two years. 

The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Hysteria by Scott D. Mendelson. A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares. Testicle Balls in Cooking and Culture by Blandine Vie. Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong. The Adult Spanking and Discipline Handbook: a Comprehensive Guide to Corporal Punishment by governess Gemma Forbes. Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praaki. A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume 2: The Welsh Coast by Peter Gosson. And The Erotic Rissole by Tanveer Ahmed.

Cooking with Poo won the previous year. But what would win the 2012 accolade? You might find some clues in past winners to guide your choice. These include The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, Highlights in the History of Concrete, Bombproof Your Horse and from 1992, a vintage year it seems, the unforgettable How to Avoid Huge Ships. But perhaps the greatest clue to the 2012 winner, announced on 22 March, can be found in the title of a previous prestigious winner, The Joy of Chickens.

The winner of this year's Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year is Goblinproofing one's chicken coop by Reginald Bakeley. Goblinproofing faced very stiff competition from, among other titles, Was Hitler Ill? by Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle; Lofts of North America by Jerry Gagne; God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis by Tom Hickman; How Tea Cosies Changed the World by Loani; and How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees.

Had I been on the panel I think I would have gone for a shortlist of How tea cosies changed the world, How to sharpen pencils, and God's Doodle. But I am sure your choices would be just as inspired. My personal favourite of all the above titles is Estonian Sock Patterns All Around The World. 

However, Goblinproofing, which gives valuable advice on how to protect chickens from fairies and banish the fairies from your home, won convincingly with 38 per cent of the judges' votes. 

"Books such as A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time all owe a sizeable part of their huge successes to their odd monikers."

Having once written a book which bombed at the bookseller called Minority Group Housing in Bedford, I think he has a point.
Dick Skellington 1 May 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoons by Gary Edwards and Catherine Pain

Tell us about your writing career so far
I have written for as long as I can remember and won a UNESCO medal when I was eighteen in 1979 for a book of poems on the Year of the Child.

I stopped writing when I went to Trinity, University of Dublin, to study English – the academic work on literature that I did for the next ten years silencing the writing side really. I took up writing again seriously in 2001 and took a three-year career break from teaching in that year and did the MA in Creative Writing in Queens.

My main work has always been teaching – English at secondary level and now Creative Writing with the OU also – and in a lot of that time as an English teacher I would see ‘gaps’ in texts – like the sixteen-year gap in the middle of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale – which I’d want to fill with story or narrative. That was one of the first projects I undertook when I started writing – to create a poem-sequence that would account for the lost years of Hermione!

How did Luscus come about?
I’ve worked mainly in poetry so far and now have a manuscript of poems that I hope to find a publisher for. I have just started to consider prose – partly because there is a strong narrative drive in the poems and I have an idea for a novel that I want to try.

The short memoir piece for the Fish is something I’ve wanted to try to write about for some time. I tend to use competitions as deadlines sometimes so that was the idea of this – to give me a date to aim to have a completed piece written by. It was something I knew I’d write at some time and I’d tried it in poetry but it didn’t work. This was my first memoir piece for print though I have written memoir pieces for radio – BBC Radio Ulster and RTE – which may have helped.

What are the rewards of teaching creative writing with the OU?
The thing I like about working with the OU is the close personal contact it affords with students through online teaching. If it works well it is a very intense and personal exchange of ideas and of practice. I love being part of the journey that writing can be for students – sometimes a journey just to finding a way to telling a story that needed to be told, but also when someone discovers a facility or love for a genre that has previously been closed to them – perhaps by negative learning experiences in the past. That often happens with poetry and being able to help in those discoveries and share in that excitement is what makes the work so enjoyable. It also adds to greater self-awareness in my own writing to be doing such close reading of other writers’ work in the course. 

'I love being part of the journey that writing can be for students' 

The benefits of OU study include the wonderful resources – I think they are exemplary – and the sense of inclusiveness of the institution and its structures of support which are of a different quality than anything I’ve seen in other universities where I studied myself. I think the structure, breadth and the feedback given on A215 is in some ways better than many MA courses since it matches reading, close written feedback and workshopping possibilities.

Why study creative writing?
In my own study the main benefit was in helping to take the writing seriously and to think of yourself as a writer, which is a hard thing to do sometimes. The other great plus is the contact with other writers and the interactions with them – of support and of ideas – that is very important. You need to have some people whose advice you trust and you begin to find that by studying Creative Writing.

I’m delighted to win the Fish. It is especially lovely when you win a prize chosen by a writer whose work you admire and Molly Mc Closkey’s feedback is perhaps the best part of it for me since I thought her memoir Circles Round the Sun was hugely impressive. I think winning it may make attractive the idea of doing more work in prose – in both memoir and fiction.

Any tips for students entering writing competitions?
Find a competition which suits something you already know you have or you want to work on. Make sure the work stands outside of any reference to a competition – that you have a sense of its quality yourself. Follow the rules carefully and avoid gimmicks – present the work carefully so that it is the writing alone that is being judged.

Maureen Boyle is based in Belfast and teaches A215 Creative Writing for the OU in Ireland. Luscus will appear in the 2013 Fish Anthology to be launched at the West Cork Literary Festival in July 2013, at which she is also invited to read.

Posted 29 April 2013

Philosophy and counselling may sound like unlikely bedfellows, but they have come together in a novel form of therapy called existential counselling.

One of the leading exponents of the British school of existential counselling is Dr Darren Langdridge, head of the OU's department of Psychology. He's just published a new book, Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy.

So what is existential counselling? "It's about bringing together a particular type of philosophy – existentialism – with a particular approach to counselling and psychotherapy," says Darren.

"Existentialism is a practical philosophy which looks at how we can live better lives. In existential counselling we draw on their ideas of how to live well, and apply them to therapy."

One well-known name who was an early exponent of existential therapy was RD Laing, the 'anti-psychiatry psychiatrist'. At a time when people suffering mental distress were being heavily medicated or locked away in mental institutions, Laing argued that therapists should be trying to connect with their patients as fellow human beings.

The key principles for an existential counsellor are: to try and understand how the person you are counselling sees the world, not to impose your world view on them; and to treat them as a unique human being. "We don't treat a person for 'depression'," says Darren. "We see a person who is having a low mood but we don't approach this as though they have a pathology.

"We have a dialogue with our clients. It is very engaged and active. The point about existentialism is that it wants to change the world."

Darren says his book is an introduction to existential counselling and psychotherapy but for those who are already well-informed in the subject, it also pushes the boundaries. 

For those not so well informed, there is also an introduction to existential counselling authored by Darren in D240 Exploring fear and sadness, a course which looks at a range of therapies. 

Darren has also contributed material to DD307 Social Psychology: critical perspectives on self and others on phenomenological psychology. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy linked to existentialism, and the phenomenological method is used to understand what the world is like from the point of view of others. 

If you want to learn more about how philosophy can inform counselling there's no need to be put off by any unfamiliar philosophical terms. These are all translated into practice in the book and course material on existential counselling, says Darren. "You don't need any background in philosophy to understand them."

Find out more

For those completely new to counselling, the OU offers a 15-point, 12-week introductory course Introduction to counselling (D171). 

BBC's Mastermind is looking for contestants now.

For more information, or to book a place on one of the nationwide auditions, visit the Mastermind website and click on Audition Information; or call 0161 836 0315; or email mastermind@bbc.co.uk

Posted 25 March 2013