Alkan Chaglar

Who is Alkan Chaglar?

Alkan Boudewijn de Beaumont Chaglar, born August 5, 1981 in London, is a Canadian and British journalist. He used to be editor and columnist for the Turkish Cypriot weekly bilingual newspaper Toplum Postası. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the UK-based The Cypriot Chronicle and a member of the L'Association des journalistes indépendants du Québec. Alkan was educated at Leicester, Liège, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, with a background in languages, political science and history. He currently lives in Montreal, Canada.

In his weekly column Cultural Encounters Alkan Boudewijn de Beaumont Chaglar writes with a passion for cross-cultural influences and diversity in multi-ethnic countries and the state of minority languages in the World. Coming from a Turkish Cypriot background, Alkan expressed an interest in the phenomena of Crypto-Christians and the issue of conversion to Islam in Cyprus. On the 5th of May 2006 in Toplum Postasi Alkan wrote about the Latins and Maronites in Cyprus who proselytised to Islam during Ottoman rule. He argued that "The fact is a substantial number of today’s Muslim Turkish Cypriots have a Christian past, and are partly descended from those Venetian, Genovese and French families that had estates on the island who proselytised to Sunni Islam. "Cypriot historians from both sides of the divide tend to focus too much on our Greco-Turkish heritage, at the expense of objectivity, but Cyprus has and always will be a convergence of cultures".