Şahin Alpay

Şahin Alpay — Biography

Şahin Alpay was born in 1944 in Istanbul to Sabiha and Ahmet Alpay, a family from Ayvalık whose parents had arrived from Serres and Lesbos under the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange. After primary school in Nişantaşı and Robert College, he spent a year in the United States on an AFS scholarship, studied political science at Ankara University, and in the late 1960s joined Doğu Perinçek's Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Party of Turkey, receiving guerrilla training in Palestine. He later sought asylum in Sweden and completed a doctorate at Stockholm University. His journalism career spanned Cumhuriyet, Sabah and Milliyet from the 1980s through 2001, and he was a columnist for Zaman from 2002 to 2016 while also teaching Turkish politics at Bahçeşehir University and hosting television programs including Entelektüel Bakış and Akıl Defteri. Detained after the July 2016 coup attempt on charges of belonging to the Gülen movement, he spent around twenty months in Silivri Prison before his release to house arrest in March 2018; Turkey's Constitutional Court found his rights violated three times, on March 20, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights found violations of his rights to liberty and to freedom of expression and awarded him EUR 21,500, and at a retrial in November 2022 he was sentenced to two years and six months for aiding the organization. He has since continued writing, publishing memoirs including Bir Hikayem Var and Hikayemin Sonu, and remains a columnist for Medyascope.