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Turkish Muezzin Who Couldn’t Lie Is Exiled

The muezzin of a mosque in central Istanbul lost his position after he denied Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s assertions that alcohol was consumed inside the mosque during the Gezi Park protests.
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Turkish might be a relatively lean language when it comes to the number of words in it (barely more than 111,000 words, according to the official Turkish Language Institute, compared to English which tops a million), but it is rather rich in wisely-quipped proverbs that have stood the test of centuries.

One such adage that I find especially relevant to current-day Turkey is, “The one who speaks truth would be expelled from nine villages.”

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