Sevan Nişanyan

The couple settled in Şirince, a former Greek-majority village in the Aegean hills of Western Turkey which had been semi-derelict since the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

They were instrumental in having the village declared a national heritage site, and they undertook to renovate ruined historic houses using the original materials and building techniques of the village.

Several of the renovated village houses were eventually converted into a highly acclaimed "Hotel de Charme" by the name of the Nişanyan Houses.

Nişanyan wrote The Wrong Republic (Yanlış Cumhuriyet), a critique of the founding myths of the Republic of Turkey, which was established in 1923.

Sevan Nişanyan (born 21 December 1956) is a Turkish-Armenian writer and lexicographer.

Nişanyan was born in Istanbul in 1956 to an Armenian family.

His father was architect Vagarş Nişanyan.

After graduating from the Private Armenian School of Pangaltı, he attended Robert College, then studied philosophy at Yale University, concentrating on Kant, Hegel, and Thomas Aquinas.

He did graduate studies in political science at Columbia University, where he worked under Giovanni Sartori, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Seweryn Bialer, and Douglas Chalmers.

His unfinished PhD thesis concerned the competitive strategies of political parties in unstable South American regimes.

During his university years Nişanyan became fluent in several languages, including Latin, Arabic and Classical Armenian.

In 1985 Nişanyan returned to his native Turkey to complete his compulsory military service.

He spent the next two decades as a professional travel writer and guidebook editor in both English and Turkish language media.

With journalist Thomas Goltz, he published a series of guidebooks on Turkey's regions.

He wrote the American Express Guides to Athens, Prague, and Vienna & Budapest.

Nişanyan married Müjde Tönbekici in 1992.

In 1998, with his wife Müjde, he brought out the first annual edition of The Little Hotel Book, a guidebook in Turkish and English to Turkey’s small and characterful hotels.

The guide was immensely successful, topping national bestseller lists for ten consecutive years, and developing into a cultural icon of the ‘00s.

Nişanyan's Sözlerin Soyağacı: Çağdaş Türkçenin Etimolojik Sözlüğü (Etymological Dictionary of Contemporary Turkish), published in 2002 was the first and so far the most significant reference work in its field.

Author of a number of books, Nişanyan was awarded the Ayşe Nur Zarakolu Liberty Award of the Turkish Human Rights Association in 2004 for his contributions to greater freedom of speech.

He is also known for his work to restore Şirince, a semi-derelict village near Turkey's Aegean coast.

Nişanyan was awarded the Ayşe Nur Zarakolu Liberty Award of the Turkish Human Rights Association in 2004 for his contributions to greater freedom of speech.

After 2006 Nişanyan collaborated with Ali Nesin, son of the writer Aziz Nesin and prominent mathematician and philanthropist, in developing the Nesin Mathematics Village near Şirince.

Constructed strictly along the lines of traditional Aegean rural architecture, the village offered summer courses in college-level and postgraduate mathematics.

It ceased to publish after the couple's highly publicised divorce in 2008.

Popularly known as "The Nişanyan Dictionary", a revised and expanded fifth edition was published in 2008.

The full contents of the dictionary are available online at Nisanyansozluk.com, with new material added on a continuous basis.

The current version covers detailed etymological data on over 15.000 words, in most cases including text quotations of earliest attested instances.

In addition to being an indispensable source for Turkish, the dictionary is now recognised as a valuable tool for Semitic and Iranian etymology as well, on account of the analysis of more than 5000 Arabic and Persian loanwords embedded in contemporary Turkish vocabulary.

Sevan Nişanyan was given a cumulative prison sentence of 16 years and 7 months for alleged building infractions, after he criticized the government’s attempts to prohibit The Prophet Muhammad's criticism in a blog entry in September 2012.

It attracted prominent lecturers from around the world, accommodating over 300 resident students by summer 2013.

Nişanyan also built Tiyatro Medresesi, a theater institute and actors’ retreat in the manner of mediaeval Muslim seminaries.

The Nişanyan Memorial Library was completed in 2013.

A philosophy school became operative on the grounds of Mathematics Village in 2014.

He escaped from the prison in July 2017 and moved to Athens, where he intended to apply for political asylum, as stated in his interview to the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique.

He subsequently went to live in exile in Samos, stating that he is "grateful to the providence that the goatfuckers who run Turkey gave him, unintentionally, this splendid opportunity."

In October 2021, while visiting Albania, he was reportedly declared persona non grata by the Greek authorities and banned from re-entry, with reason said to be a state secret.

His undesirability, according to Athens Voice, was the information passed to the police by local Samos agents as if "the Turk is buying real estate", which, if it happened, would violate the law on non-purchase of real estate by foreigners in some border areas.

On January 7, 2022, the Greek justice dismissed the case, prohibiting any deportation to Turkey.

The Armenian Embassy in Greece said Nişanyan must leave Greece voluntarily within 15 days according to the court decision, adding that as he is a citizen of Armenia, "he can leave for Armenia if he wishes”.