In the tormented run-up to the start of Turkey’s membership negotiations with the European Union, the ghosts of the past are haunting the government of Tayyip Erdogan.

Orhan Pamuk, a novelist, currently faces prosecution for “insulting the national character” in a newspaper interview in which he referred to the death of a million Armenians during the first world war. It was only after a flurry of legal threats and patriotic violence that a path-breaking academic conference into those same events went ahead recently in Istanbul, bringing together leading Turkish and foreign scholars to discuss the subject for the first time on Turkish soil.