About Bizim Anadolu

Bizim Anadolu

Overview

Bizim Anadolu (Turkish for "Our Anatolia") is a Turkish-language community publication based in Montreal, Quebec, serving Turkish Canadians in the Montreal area and beyond. It began as a print periodical — in its early years it was styled Bizim Anadolu Dergisi, "Bizim Anadolu Magazine" — and today it operates primarily as a Turkish-language news website, bizimanadolu.com, supported by a video channel that records community events. Reference listings of Turkish-Canadian media, including the "Turkish Canadians" survey of the community's press, name Bizim Anadolu among the handful of Turkish-language newspapers published in Canada, alongside titles such as Canadaturk and Referans.

The publication covers the life of Montreal's Turkish community in Turkish, the language its readership uses at home, and it does so from inside that community: its reporting is of openings, commemorations, festivals and association events that mainstream Quebec media rarely record. It is a small, independent operation, and no circulation or traffic figures for it are published.

History

The documented history of Bizim Anadolu reaches back to the turn of the 2000s. Faruk Arslan's history of the Turkish Canadians, Kanadalı Türkler, describes the Turkish-media landscape of that period as extremely thin: apart from Bizim Anadolu, produced by members of Canada's Alevi community, and the Canadian distribution of the Istanbul daily Zaman printed in the United States, there was effectively no Turkish media in Canada. Bizim Anadolu was therefore one of the first Turkish-language publications created in Canada by and for the community itself.

Its magazine-era presence in Montreal is independently documented from 2002, when Bizim Anadolu Dergisi serialized Ferhan Şensoy's humorous book İngilizce Bilmeden Hepinizi I Love You in a bilingual French–Turkish version translated by Nicole Gagnon — a publishing choice that captures the publication's position between Turkish, the language of its readers' origin, and French, the language of public life in Quebec. The paper grew out of a Montreal Turkish community whose institutional roots are older than the publication: the city's Turkish presence dates to the late nineteenth century, grew after the liberalisation of emigration from Turkey in 1961, organised itself in the Turkish Canadian Cultural Association in 1964 (renamed the Association culturelle turque du Québec in 1970), and expanded sharply in 1986–87, when roughly 2,000 Turkish asylum seekers arrived in Montreal in the episode remembered as l'affaire des Turcs. No formal founding date for Bizim Anadolu is published by the outlet or recorded in the sources consulted; what the record shows is continuous activity from the early 2000s to the present day, with the publication migrating over time from a print magazine format to its current web-and-video form.

Content and Coverage

Bizim Anadolu's coverage is community journalism in Turkish. Its website publishes written news reports on the Montreal Turkish community — institutional openings, cultural events, commemorations and association activities — together with material on Turkey and on Turkish-Canadian affairs of interest to its readers. A representative recent item is its coverage of the opening of the Atatürk Library (Atatürk Kitaplığı) in Montreal, an initiative of the Kanadalı Türkler Platformu (Platform of Canadians of Turkish Origin), which the publication reported in a written article on its website and in a video report on its channel, inviting viewers to read the full story online.

That combination — a written report on the website plus filmed coverage of the same event — is characteristic of the publication's current output. Its cultural remit, visible since the magazine era when it serialized contemporary Turkish literature in translation, extends to books, theatre and community celebrations, and its pages have historically given space to the community's Alevi heritage, reflecting the background of the circle that produced it, while addressing the Turkish-speaking community as a whole.

Bizim Anadolu is also distinctive within Canada's small Turkish-language media field for its setting. The country's other documented Turkish publications are centred on Toronto — the newspaper Canadaturk, published by Hasan Yilmaz (who closed it in 2016 after receiving death threats following Turkey's failed coup and relaunched it in 2020, according to the Globe and Mail), and the Referans Turkish business directory, published since 2006 — while Bizim Anadolu reports from francophone Montreal, where Turkish community life is conducted between Turkish and French. Its early decision to publish Turkish literature in French translation was an expression of that position, and its current event coverage similarly documents a community negotiating two host languages rather than one.

Audience and Reach

Bizim Anadolu addresses the Turkish-speaking population of Montreal and Quebec within a national community that counted 76,745 people of Turkish ancestry in the 2021 census; Quebec's Turkish-origin population was 15,060 in the 2016 census, the second-largest provincial concentration after Ontario. Montreal's community is long-established and institutionally dense — cultural associations, places of worship, businesses and annual events — and it is this readership, including the large cohort that arrived in the late 1980s and their Canadian-born children, that the publication serves.

No audited circulation, subscription or web-traffic figures for Bizim Anadolu exist in checkable sources, and none are claimed. Its reach today is best described in terms of availability: the website and its video reports are free and open, so its Montreal reporting is accessible to Turkish speakers across Canada and to the wider Turkish diaspora, while its subject matter remains rooted in Montreal community life. The institutions whose activities fill its pages — among them the Turquebec Cultural and Friendship Association, a member of the Federation of Canadian Turkish Associations, and the community platforms that organise events such as the Atatürk Library opening — are the same bodies through which Montreal's Turkish community organises its public life, which is what makes a small community publication of this kind a record of that life rather than merely a news source.

Digital Presence

The publication's digital home is bizimanadolu.com, a Turkish-language website carrying its written news reports, which remains active with current community coverage; the site's material is presented under the Bizim Anadolu name with a 2026 copyright line on its video descriptions. Alongside the website, the publication maintains a video presence on YouTube, where it posts filmed reports of Montreal community events — such as the Atatürk Library opening — and links viewers back to the written coverage on the website. This web-and-video model has replaced the print magazine format of its early years, following the path of most small diaspora publications, for which print distribution costs are hard to sustain. Its published contact email is banadolu@bizimanadolu.com.

Ownership and Organisation

Bizim Anadolu is an independent community publication, not part of any media group. Its origins lie in Montreal's Alevi Turkish community, which produced it in its early years, as documented in Faruk Arslan's history of the Turkish Canadians; no corporate owner, parent company or external publisher for the title is recorded in any checkable source, and the publication does not publicly document a formal masthead. Its operation is of the small-scale, community-embedded kind typical of diaspora media: reporting is produced around the events and institutions of Montreal's Turkish community and published under the Bizim Anadolu name, with banadolu@bizimanadolu.com as its public point of contact.

Contact and Availability

Bizim Anadolu is published online at bizimanadolu.com, where its current Turkish-language reporting can be read free of charge. The publication can be contacted by email at banadolu@bizimanadolu.com. Its video reports of community events are available on its YouTube channel, which links back to the written coverage on the website. The publication serves Montreal's Turkish community in the city of Montreal, Quebec.