Butterfly of the Night

By Haydar Karataş, Caroline Stockford (translator),

Book cover of Butterfly of the Night

Book description

Haydar Karataş, the author, of Gece Kelebeği - Perperık-a Söe (Butterfly of the Night) now lives in exile in Zurich. The book's child-narrator, his mother, was swept up in a series of tragic historical event in the mountainous region of Dersim in Northeastern Anatolia. Dersim (renamed Tunceli in 1935). The…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Butterfly of the Night as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This very impressive documentary novel tells the true story of a Kurdish mother and child surviving famine after the massacre of Kurdish Alevis in Dersim, Turkey.

Most scholars today consider the 1937-8 military campaign in that region in Northeastern Anatolia a genocide. It was the last one in a series that accompanied the making of the post-Ottoman Turkish nation-state, whose birth the Lausanne Treaty had certified in 1923.

From Hans-Lukas' list on anti-democracy in Turkey & the Middle East.

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