Hatay Province

Where previous generations were predominantly Irish or Italian, Bilisi, like many drivers these days, is from Turkey.

He was raised on a farm in Hatay and got his veterinary degree in Istanbul.

He came to New York in 2001.

American dream, you know, he said.

That's also a Christian holy place.

In Antioch, there's a part of it called Hatay.

which was right on the Syrian border.

And the population was kind of split between Turkic and Kurdish and Arab Syrians.

Off the coast of Adrasan in Turkey's Antalya province, archaeologists have recovered more than 6,500 ceramic pieces from a shipwreck dated to roughly 2,100 years ago.

Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism said the cargo includes 122 different forms of plates, bowls, and serving trays, most manufactured at the ancient site of Rosis, in what is now Hatay province.

The tableware was packed in clay inside wooden crates, which cushioned it well enough that much of the collection survived intact.

Coins recovered from the site, dated to the 1st century BC and originating from Antioch, helped researchers establish a timeline for the ship's final voyage.

For a man who built his entire political identity on the reclamation of Turkish sovereignty from foreign hands, Montreux is perhaps the last great vindication of his life's work, the moment when the world formally acknowledges that the republic he carved out of the wreckage of an empire is no longer a ward of the great powers, but their equal at the negotiating table.

There is one more piece of territory that occupies his attention in these final years, a strip of land along the Mediterranean coast called Hatay, centered on the ancient city of Antioch, Antakya.

Under French mandate as part of Syria since the end of the First World War, the region has a mixed population, Turks among them in significant numbers, and Atatürk regards its separation from the Republic as an open wound, a piece of the map that does not yet match his conception of the nation's rightful boundaries.

Through nineteen thirty-six and nineteen thirty-seven, he pushes the issue relentlessly through diplomatic channels with France, through the League of Nations, through carefully calibrated public statements that stop just short of threatening force while making unmistakably clear that Turkey considers the matter far from settled.

He does not live to see Hatay's final annexation to Turkey in the summer of nineteen thirty-nine.

It comes months after his death.

But the groundwork, the diplomatic pressure, the insistence that pushed the question onto the international stage in the first place is entirely his.

Instead, she simply spends more time near him when she can, flying occasionally to be closer to Ankara, sitting with him on the terrace in the evenings when the weather allows it, listening to him talk about aviation, about the future of Turkish civil society, about a hundred subjects that seem to matter more to him now that time has become quietly a finite resource he can feel diminishing.

injured.

Where we were deployed in Hatay province to Antakya city, which was previously known as Antioch, so it's an ancient city, birth of civilization, 80% of that city has been razed.

So a...

Yeah, a devastating, unusual earthquake, mainly because it was shallow.