The Kurdish name of Bilge, which is reportedly still used by the residents themselves, is Zanqırt. As Turkey is now discussing the steps that should be taken to solve the country's long-standing Kurdish issue, which many say is at a critical threshold, the restoration of the names of towns and villages in southeastern Turkey is seen as an important move to this end.“You change the name of a town or a village and give them random names and think that you will be able to completely eliminate thousands of years of history. And then that old name one day embarrasses you like a pentimento appearing in an oil painting,” says Radikal's Haluk Şahin, who thinks the policy of changing the ancient names of places with a state order represents perhaps the harshest form of nationalism. Şahin notes that it is not only Turks who change the original names of places, as Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbians also adopted similar policies in recent history. “The names of 213 villages out of the 280 in Plovdiv were originally Turkish until a short time ago. I wonder how many of them are left in Turkish now,” Şahin remarks. In his view, the best thing to do is to not change such names and to continue to refer such places with the names the locals use. He thinks if the state starts to change the names of these places because they are of different ethnic origins it will be impossible to stop this. “If one place has two names, you can make one of them the official one and that is it. Anatolia is like a multi-layered canvas that has an abundant amount of pentimento. As the current residents of this region, we should not be disturbed by this. To the contrary, we should enjoy it. It is high time for the republic, which is nearing its 100th year, to have sufficient confidence in itself so as to not bother with the names of villages,” Şahin suggests.
The policy of changing the names of villages and other places is not limited to Kurdish names, as Greek and Armenian names were the first to see their names changed, explains Vatan's Okay Gönensin, noting that the Kurds paid the cost of revolt beginning in 1925 with the name changes. “Actually, the people living in the places that had their names changed use both the old and new names. They use the original names among themselves and the new names in their relations with official institutions,” Gönensin explains. In his view, such state policies disrupt the ancient culture and social fabric of Anatolia. “We have just begun to learn our history, but since it is not easy to get rid of some complexes, we are proceeding slowly. The fact that we have begun to discuss the changing of place names is important. There is one thing that should be done, which is to restore the original names of these places,” Gönensin suggests.
