This lack of social intimacy didn't affect my appreciation for her journalistic work, and when I came across Arthur Schulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times in Washington, D.C., I conveyed my sincere feelings on how lucky he must have felt to have a correspondent in Turkey as meticulous as Ms. Tavernise. Her pieces datelined Turkey carry great understanding and thoughtfulness toward Turkish people and politics.

Many in the Turkish media don't share my view of her. Not a single day passes without someone in one of the major papers coming up with a column denouncing her for an analysis in The New York Times. Her latest piece, “In Turkey, Bitter Feud Has Roots in History,” is a case in point, in which she was trying to describe that what we are witnessing in politics now bears traces of footprints from the early Republican era. She conducted interviews on the street and discussed the issue with some intellectuals and politicians. It was a thorough piece of journalism.

Some didn't like it at all. She has been in the paper ever since as a journalist pushing the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) agenda. While they direct their accusations at her, they also direct their fury at her source, who claimed that Turkish society had been traumatized: “Overnight they were told to change their dress, their language. Their religious ways were dismantled.”

Her source is Dengir Fırat, deputy chairman of the AK Party, who himself is on the list of politicians who would be banned from politics if and when the AK Party is closed down by the Constitutional Court. When he used the word “trauma,” he was referring to a unique timeframe in our history, the time when the founding fathers of the Turkish Republic were transforming the people who were multi-cultured subjects of Ottoman Empire into the citizens of a nation-state.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the leader of modern Turkey, forced new ways by adopting some harsh measures that have not been taken in any other society for fear of backlash. He was successful in his method, since only a small fraction of Turkish society resisted change and made their unhappiness known. The changes took place within a very limited period of time but caused a lot of anxiety and trauma, nevertheless.

With a change of alphabet from Arabic script to Latin script, all sectors of society became illiterate overnight. What a psychological shock people of the time must have lived through. Some intellectuals isolated themselves in their own society, some left the country and sought sanctuary in different parts of the world. Mehmet Akif Ersoy, the poet of our national anthem, went to Egypt in protest.

“Trauma” isn't a word strong enough to depict the psyche of the Turkish public when they were forced to change with reforms introduced in early the republican era. This doesn't make those reforms, the fruits of which we enjoy today, any less valuable, but it is a description of what really happened at the time.

The reforms of that era are considered “revolutionary,” and we call them “Atatürk's revolutions.” Every revolution, from the French to the Iranian, created traumas in the societies they occurred in. With the introduction of new ways for the sake of European Union membership, Turkish society is experiencing a new wave of trauma -- a trauma in reverse. A book by Esra Özyürek -- incidentally, she is the daughter of Mustafa Özyürek, second-in-command of the Republican People's Party (CHP) -- “Nostalgia for the Modern” (Duke University Press, 2006), portrays a new mindset in which the modern-day Turkish family and its members turn themselves into representatives of staunch Kemalism after they feel a threat coming from new ways introduced by the AK Party.

I think we can easily call their feelings “trauma in reverse.”

Tavernise opened up that chapter in our history to make us understand present-day Turkey. What we are witnessing today in politics is an attempt to get over and leave behind our traumatic past, which would enable us to adopt changes more easily.

It was easier in a time when many major foreign papers were represented in Turkey by our own. Mehmet Ali Kışlalı, a veteran journalist who is the closest newspaperman to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) and whose articles are a must-read in understanding what the military thinks at the moment, represented both The New York Times and the Time group of magazines single-handedly for years. You can easily surmise that in those “golden times” there would be no heated debate, no war of nerves, since Kışlalı hadn't written anything of that sort.

I am sure you have noticed that a war of nerves has been started in Turkey with the piece written by Ms. Tavernise that cornered Fırat and harmed his party's position, but the Times correspondent is accused by some in the Turkish press of serving the AK Party. A contradiction, eh? Yes, but who cares about contradictions as long as both axioms serve the purpose.