Many of our readers will have read Leyla’s articles from the Daily Sabah. Leyla is a very popular columnist which you will find under the expat corner section. This month she has very kindly written an article about her life and how she ended up living and working in Turkey.
Here’s hoping many an expat has read my corner called “Expat Corner”, which has been published twice a week since the newspaper’s foundation in 2014. Since then I have written nearly 900 feature-length articles aimed at introducing Turkey and Turkish culture to foreigners as well as to share with readers the traditions and successes of expats residing in Turkey. I truly feel that bridging the gap between western and Turkish culture is my life’s mission.
While my name is Turkish, I only recently became a Turkish citizen as I actually grew up in the United States. My mother is British and my father was a Turk, yet both spent the majority of their lives in California, despite separating when I was a child.
Nonetheless, my mother, who had a popular café in the Pacific Palisades, also had a lifelong dream of retiring in Bodrum, which she eventually did with her American husband and have lived there happily for nearly two decades now.
My father ended up returning to his family estate in Istanbul’s Moda and I have spent every summer visiting him in Turkey since the age of nine, which if you do the math was 36 years’ ago. My father also had a lifelong dream of owning and living on a trihandil, a gulet-style sailing yacht, which he did and together with a small crew, we spent three months sailing from Istanbul to Italy and back.
As for me, I have lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Spain, Holland and made the permanent move to Turkey in 2004, when I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study Turkey. This was the culmination of my formal education of receiving a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Taxes at Austin’s graduate program in Middle Eastern Studies. As part of my position as a Fulbright scholar at Boğaziçi University, I toured visiting academics around Istanbul and other sites in Turkey.
I began working at Sabah newspaper in 2005 and for many years would single-handedly translate headlines news on Turkey into English on what was the original version of what was to become Daily Sabah. I have also translated two volumes of an Ottoman Cookbook as due to my family’s ancestry being a long line of Ottoman generals (paşas), I have always had a vested interest in the era. My father was also a well-known language professor in Turkey, who had developed a method, which he taught to the highest echelon in Turkey as well as taught me Turkish. Meanwhile, you can also find me explaining in Turkish the Battle of Gallipoli and sites in the Çanakkale region, including Troy as a presenter on a travel program aired by TRT Belgesel.
In the past 16 years I have lived in Turkey, in addition to Istanbul, I have resided in four different villages in the Assos and Mount Ida region, three in Bodrum and now Dalyan as well as extended stays in locations in Fethiye and Antalya. This, my fellow expats is me in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy my stories as I enjoy conceiving and researching them and hope that by explaining a little bit of my background, I can enlighten my readers on how and why I ended up becoming the author of “Expat Corner”.
To read more of Leyla’s articles copy the following link into your search engine. dailysabah.com/expat-corner
