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The first Arabic bookshop in Istanbul opened its doors in June. It is run by Syrian refugees, together with Turkish publishers. They want the shop to become a meeting place for Arabs and Turks. It already offers much more than just Arabic literature. Ekrem Guzeldere took a look around “Pages”
Turkey is one of the principal countries taking in Syrians who have been fleeing from war, terrorism and expulsion in their homeland since 2011. The United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) speaks of nearly two million Syrian refugees in Turkey. The majority of them live in the large cities near the Syrian border, like Gaziantep, Urfa and Antakya. An estimated 300,000 Syrians have sought refuge in Istanbul. A few thousand Iraqis and Arabs from other countries also live there.
Although it has almost no Arab infrastructure, Istanbul is a major “Arab city”. “The Arab population of Istanbul is already large and still growing, but you can’t get Arabic books. That was where the idea to open a bookshop for this section of the population came from,” explains Samer Al Kadri, the founder and manager of “Pages”, Istanbul’s first Arabic bookshop.
Al Kadri has been living in the historic Fatih district of Istanbul with his wife, Gulnar, and two daughters since September 2013. The 41-year-old is originally from Hama, but moved to Damascus with his family following the 1982 massacre, and finished school there. “At that time, I started reading books that I found in my father’s house, Arabic and international literature,” says Al Kadri. Later he studied art, and in the early 1990s he worked in Damascus as a graphic artist and painter. In 1998, Al Kadri went to work for the first Arabic children’s TV channel, “Spacetoon”, and seven years later he founded the publishing house “Bright Fingers”, specialising in children’s books.
Source: en.qantara.de