Young woman at the top

TURKEY — Tamar Karasu’s birthday is on September 12 – a day associated in Turkish minds with the day in 1980 when political deadlock and civil unrest prompted a military coup and the imposition of martial law.“People call me a ‘revolutionary’ when I’m talking,” she jokes. In fact, anyone less like the stereotypical ‘revolutionary’ it is hard to imagine.

Tamar Karasu, Executive Secretary of the Bible Society in Turkey, in her Bible Society office. Photo: UBS/Dag Smemo (TUR05DJ-14.JPG)

Even so, it must be said that this young woman cuts a surprising figure as Executive Secretary of the Bible Society in Turkey. And she still remembers her own surprise when her Armenian patriarch suggested that he put her name forward for the vacancy. At the time, she was aged just 28 and was working – quite happily – in a travel agency.

Asked whether it is difficult to find acceptance in the position of Executive Secretary, she says that although some people show brief surprise at finding that she is the person at the top, “They accept and welcome me.” Social changes in Turkey as a whole mean that women are being appointed to senior positions more often. And in any case, she points out, the advancing of women’s rights was one of the social reforms introduced by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk. Tamar and her brother, two years her junior, were born into an Armenian Orthodox family who went to church regularly, and at an early age she came under the influence of her grandmother, who read the Bible at home.

Her father had his own manufacturing company and when Tamar left primary school her parents were able to enter her for a private Catholic college. She passed the entrance exam and was duly admitted.

“It was a French lycée so we were taught in French by the nuns – and the Catechism was also in French,” she says. “We used the Traduction Oecumenique de la Bible as our edition of the Bible.”

As she started to learn her Catechism, she found her prayer life beginning to develop significantly. “Before that, I had never talked with Jesus, but from that point I began to. He became a significant guide in my life.”

She also started going to the Catholic church on most Sundays, where she enjoyed playing the guitar, singing in the choir and doing the public readings. “At that time, I was only going to my own church on special occasions like Christmas and Easter,” she remembers.

Having finished her higher education at another Catholic college, she then went on to Marmara University, Istanbul, where she took a four-year degree in Economics. She never intended that this should determine her career, however.

“I loved Economics but I didn’t think of working in a bank. I prefer to do something more active,” she says.

While she was thinking what to do, fate intervened in the form of a request to help a friend who worked in a travel agency.

“Someone was busy and asked me to meet two tourists at the airport. So I took the tourists to their hotel and when I went to collect my money, the person at the travel agency said, ‘Do you want to work with us?’ I said, ‘OK – I’ll try it!’ I never applied for the job.”

Meanwhile, she enrolled at Anadolu University, Turkey’s major public distance-learning system which has some half-a-million students. The course she enrolled for was Public Relations. She is currently studying Banking and Insurance the same way.

Good relations

Another academic area in which she is strong is languages. Having learned French and English at secondary school, she went on to take private courses in Spanish and Italian and, later, German.

Interviewed for the position at the Bible Society, she was honest about her lack of experience and knowledge of the Society, but said she would still like to be part of it.

As well as a good business sense, she could justifiably claim to have good relations not only with her own Armenian Orthodox Church and community but with the Catholic Church and with the Greek Orthodox Church, as well. In a country where personal introductions are often qualified by information about a person’s ethnic origin, good relations with the different Christian communities are important: many of them work together through the Bible Society’s Advisory Committee.

She acknowledges that when she first took on the position she found it challenging. Her predecessor, Ameniel Bagdas, had spent 31 years as Executive Secretary, and was bound to be a hard act to follow. But now, helped by initiatives such as her decision to take all staff and their spouses away for two days, the atmosphere among the seven of them is like that of a family.

Chatted and served

Tamar shamelessly and unselfconsciously ‘mucks in’: at the Tuyap Bookfair, for example, she chatted and served on the Bible Society stand like anyone else. And one Sunday per month, instead of going to her own church, she is one of a group of eight – six Catholics plus herself and one other Armenian Orthodox – who visit an old people’s home to hold a service for the residents.

“Then we go to the day room and sing funny songs to entertain them,” she adds. “And we dance with them!”

She pushes away a question about her lack of theological training with a pragmatic answer. “I can talk in a church – talk about the Bible Society work or give my testimony – but I don’t have to preach in the church. I have very good staff – two priests – who can do that,” she says.

After two-and-a-half years in the job, she is considering strategic changes. The work of the Bible Society in Turkey is based on the registration of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society, dating from 1820. Its relationship with these two ‘foreign’ Societies is unique in Turkey and has, in the past, given it a measure of independence from official interference. There are drawbacks as well as benefits to it, however.

Things are changing in Turkey, though, and Tamar is therefore exploring ways in which the Society might be able it to expand its activities.

She talks of staying in the post for perhaps ten years: five in which to learn all she can and five to put all that she can back. It will be interesting to see where the Bible Society in Turkey stands eight years from now. (WR 399/11 - 01/02.06) [5 photos]