THE MODERN TURK

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1022, 12 July 1930, Page 28

THE MODERN TURK

VERY UP-TO-DATE The 1: oung Turks are not so young as they were when tliev revolted against the Sultan in 190 S, but the new crop is much younger, and. to all appearances, a good deal more modern. The notion that Turks are swarthy fellows who all carry knives has to be altered to meet the fact that the youngest Turks, at least in Constantinople, are more interested in sports than knives. Dressed in hats from Italy and shoes from America or Switzerland, packing canes, wearing golf socks and golf pants of the latest cut and clashing colours, the Turkish lads who just missed the war are as up-to-date a bunch of fellows as one will see anywhere in Europe. Indeed, in some respects more so. Under the influence of the American college in Constantinople the Turkish youth have got the latest styles not only from the European markets, but from Brown, Harvard and Princeton.

The rapidity with which Islamic Turkey has tended toward modernisation and Europeanisation, inspired from above by the rule of Mustapha Kemal Pasha, the “Ghazi,” or Con queror, is freely criticised bv some economists in Constantinople on the basis that the Kemalist Turks have attempted and put through reforms toward modernisation at a speed too vapid for the country, with insufficient money and without devoting first attention to the basic agricultural development of Turkey.