Meet Kemal Kerincsiz. He's holding a placard that depicts Benedict XVI and Bartholomew I as entwined snakes. One wishes the great Churches were indeed so close. Weirdly, they appear to be ready to strike at an Orthodox cross. The text reads, "The Patriarch and Pope are in Fener. Where is the Turkish nation? We don't want the Pope in Turkey." (The Fener district is the part of Istanbul to which the Patriarchate has been relegated since the Turkish conquest. "Fener" is a Turkicized version of the Greek "phanari," or "lighthouse," which used to be the principal feature of that district. Prominent Greeks in the Ottoman era were therefore "Phanariots.")

Kemal Kerincsiz

Kemal Kerincsiz is a sort of archetype of the fanatical nationalism which undergirds the Kemalist state in Turkey. He is well-known as a nationalist gadfly, especially in his role as chief of an ultra-nationalist lawyers' union who has made it his mission to bring Turkish writers to trial. The latest example was that of Elif Shafak, who apparently wrote something a bit too sympathetic to Armenians in one of her fictional works; Kerincsiz swiftly brought her to trial under the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The Article renders citizens liable for "insulting Turkishness," a vague enough crime, and one that has allowed Kerincsiz to haul nearly forty writers into court -- including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. As he says, "We are right to prosecute these cases ... In our culture, no-one can brand their ancestors murderers. Maybe in the West they are more tolerant, but here we can't accept those comments as criticism." The concern for Turkish integrity goes beyond the literary realm. Kerincsiz held forth to Time Magazine last year on his mistrust of Europeans in particular: "History taught us that we cannot trust these Europeans ... Look at what happened in 1920: they divided up the Ottoman Empire, even though they had pledged not to do that. People call us paranoid, but we're not."
 

And so, in the latest episode of a career spent oppressing his freethinking countrymen, and expressing xenophobia born of history that the putative villains have long since forgotten, we now find Kemal Kerincsiz proclaiming his hatred of the Pope and Patriarch. In himself, he is probably irrelevant. But as a prototype of the irate Turk of the coming week, he's a man worth paying some attention to.