The Assassin from Apricot City. By Witold Szablowski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Stork Press; 210 pages; £8.99 A WEEK before Christmas all hell broke loose in Turkey. A country, that most foreigners had thought was gradually joining the club of developed democracies, took a step backward. Ministers’ sons were arrested for suspected graft and money-laundering; then prosecutors and police, who had rounded them up, were kicked out of office. Businessmen’s assets were frozen; the Turkish media erupted in a volcano of self-examination and mud-slinging. Corruption appeared to reach close to the seat of power.

This more volatile side of Turkey has been there all the time, beneath the surface. That is hardly surprising for a country that harbours so many contradictory traditions: Islam versus westernisation; extreme views of honour next to prostitution and metrosexual living. We need a guide, not only to the politics, but to the complete ant-heap. Witold Szablowski is just that man.

He talks to lorry-drivers, prostitutes, university professors—anyone who can help him explain the bizarre and dangerous edges of modern Turkey. This is not a travelogue: Mr Szablowski is a time-traveller, a disenfranchised Pole who hangs out like Gulliver in a land where politics, crime, humour, home economics and family life seem topsy-turvy yet strangely familiar.

One moment we are in Gezi Park, Istanbul, with a gay protester, part of the movement against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister; the next we are in eastern Anatolia hearing how villagers stoned one woman to death in a field together with her adulterous lover. Honour killing, prostitution, sexual mores, political graft are the backdrop of this fascinating collection of anecdotes and reportage, mostly written for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, peppered with Mr Szablowski’s neat observations and finely recorded dialogue. We are lucky that these gems have been pulled out of Polish obscurity by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, whose translation has a splendidly light touch. No English-language reporting from Turkey seems to have hit the same sweet spot.

Some themes follow subjects that Mr Szablowski has researched in depth, such as the fate of Mehmet Ali Agca, a terrorist who shot and wounded the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1981. John Paul forgave Agca (the assassin of the book's title) and embraced his family as his own. Mr Szablowski meets Mr Agca’s lawyer, his sister and his brother, who later asks him for help to get Polish citizenship. But after Mr Agca is released from jail in 2010 phone-lines go dead and the trail runs cold.

Mr Szablowski also tracks down relatives of Nazim Hikmet, Turkey’s most famous left-wing poet, whose Polish great-grandfather became an Ottoman soldier and strategist. In 1951 after 12 years as a political prisoner, the 49-year-old poet flees to Moscow. On the strength of his ancestral connection he gets Polish citizenship and lives in Poland until his death in 1963. Perhaps more interesting than him are the women who share parts of his life: Munevver his wife, abandoned in Turkey, who later makes him internationally famous by translating his works into French; Gala, a Polish doctor and travel companion, who dotes on him; and Vera, a Russian temptress who a concerned doctor warns him will be bad for his health.

Most entertaining, perhaps, is the tale of the shoe thrown at George W. Bush in Iraq in 2008. It’s a brand made by Ramazan Baydan, a Turk. Mr Szablowski talks to Mr Baydan, to the brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw the shoe, and to random people in an Istanbul shop buying similar models that are now known as “Bye Bye Bushes”.

….one of the female customers comes up to me discreetly. “Are you from a newspaper? Did you know that our scientists cloned a sheep?” Well I never! And I thought it was the British. “They were the first,” agrees the customer, who turns out to be a biology teacher. “But their Dolly died after a year. Our Oyali is two years old now, and is still doing pretty well. To me that’s typical of your West—poor quality. You’ll wear a pair of Bye Bye Bushes for ten years or more. But I bought these shoes from Italy and they fell apart after a week—look here.” And the biology teacher shows me how her shoe is coming apart at the seams. “From Italy? If you please, madam, my cousin makes those shoes just outside Istanbul,” pipes up the salesman. The biology teacher snorts at him and at me, and goes off with her nose in the air.

We need Mr Szablowski at our side as we walk through Istanbul’s covered bazaar, or follow a protest march. He captures the spirit of Turkey in the way that a handful of Turkish writers, such as Aziz Nesin and Emin Colasan, have done.

Mr Szablowski touches on sensitive issues, which might upset some Turks, such as the taboo barring any criticism of Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic, or the erectile problems suffered by local men after the trauma of public circumcision. It may be a bit early for a Turkish translation.