Turkish MP dislikes 'Van,' suggests renaming it into 'Wan'

October 31, 2013 - 17:33 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - President Ilham Aliyev's "astounding" statement on the 2800th anniversary of the Azeri people was followed by a similarly inconceivable one: Turkish parliamentarian Aysel Tuğluk offered to rename the city of Van into Wan. As the MP noted, for thousands of years, the city carried the name of Wan, which has to be brought back.

The MP is confident that current name of the city "is incurrent from the viewpoints of democracy and pronunciation." One might wonder what a city name has to do with the democracy. But the pronunciation point is clear enough: everything in Turkey that used to belong to Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians was declared wrong and was demanded to be corrected. Same is the case here: Van sounds too "Armenian" to the Turkish MP, so it has to be renamed. Seems like this is the way Ms Tuğluk interpreted Prime Minister Erdogan's statement suggesting that historic sites will recover their old names. Strangely enough, the PM's remark did not affect the cities listed in the catalogues and historical works. Also, by that logic, the village of Hissarlik should be re-given its ancient name, Troy.

As for Van and the Kingdom of Van, which was one of the most powerful ones back when the ancestors of the Turkish MP never even existed, our advice is a simple one – learn history. And not by Turkish textbooks, but serious world-acknowledged works.

And if renamed, the city should be called Tushpa, rather than Wan. Turks already renamed Ararat into Ağrı Dağı, Akhtamar into Akdamar, Smyrna into Izmir – the list is endless. Is Van the next?