"Mm-hmm. They call it Pan-Turkism. The government says their minority groups are Jews, Greeks and Armenians... and nothing else. Which is untrue... there are like, 9 million Kurds. Um, ethnic minorities in Turkey often aren't allowed to speak their own language, everyone is supposed to speak Turkish. That's a law, actually. It makes it hard to live there if you don't, but in the bigger cities it's not too bad of a problem, they're pretty multicultural, very used to tourists. I got by all right in Arabic until I learned a little Turkish. They thought I was a European tourist."

Wolfgang Einhorn. And he's pale, blonde and blue-eyed. His choice of pseudonym was deliberate.

"They want to assimilate all their ethnic groups so that there aren't any, just... one big Turkish nationality. And they'll do a lot of things to make it that way. In terms of language policing it's like the opposite of Israel -- they don't want to assimilate, they want to exclude, and fuck everyone else." He clears his throat. "Excuse me." That's less for his choice of language and more for blathering on about politics. He brushes his hair out of his face, looking a little sheepish. "So it's very different from when you were last there, yes. Lake Tuz, that's, what, Aksaray? I never made it out that far from Ankara. What's it like out there?"