Durham, N.C. - Yektan Turkyilmaz wasted no time celebrating his return to Durham on Friday following a two-month detention in Armenia that attracted worldwide attention.

He arrived at his apartment at 11:30 p.m. By midnight, several Duke friends were assembling to welcome him.

"So many scholars supported me while I was under detention," said the Turkish graduate student, who was arrested on June 17 on charges of taking books out of Armenia illegally. "I feel safe back here at Duke."

Turkyilmaz received a two-year suspended sentence from an Armenian court on Aug. 16 but had to remain in the country for two weeks until the sentence became official. He then flew to Durham, where he is finishing his dissertation under Orin Starn of the cultural anthropology department.

Acknowledging that he had failed to comply with the law prohibiting the export of books older than 50 years without permission, Turkyilmaz said he assumed from the outset that his arrest was politically motivated.

"I didn't know about the law," he said. "No one does. Even the booksellers don't know about it. This whole thing about the books was just a pretext."

Turkyilmaz said he was caught in "an internal struggle" in a country still emerging from a Soviet-style government to a more open society. His situation was complicated by the historically strained relations between Armenia and Turkey.

Turkyilmaz, who is Kurdish, was the first Turkish scholar allowed to carry out research in Armenia's national archives. His studies focus on the 1915 genocide of Armenians, and the emergence of modern forms of Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian nationalism.

"I'd gone to Armenia five times and never had a problem," he said. "But the people who arrested me seemed to have other motives and kept asking me about my political views. They didn't seem to understand the idea of what a scholar is or why I'd be doing this research. They certainly didn't know much about cultural anthropology, so I just told them I was a historian. Initially they thought I was a spy but, of course, there was no evidence to support this."

Turkyilmaz said that while he was in prison he heard occasional news reports about the growing numbers of scholars and political leaders protesting his detention. Among these was Duke President Richard H. Brodhead, who described Turkyilmaz as a "scholar of extraordinary promise" in an Aug. 1 letter to Armenian President Robert Kocharian.

The detention "helped me improve my Armenian," joked Turkyilmaz, who also speaks four other languages. But he said it also was "an attack against academic freedom."

"I got caught between groups with their own agendas," he said. "What's funny is that now you have some Armenians officials who don't want me doing research in Armenia, and some Turks who don't want me to talk about the genocide. I just hope the incident will lead to closer cooperation between Turkish and Armenian scholars in discussing some of these painful historical questions."

With another year or two remaining to complete his Ph.D., he wants nothing more than to put the incident behind him. "I'm grateful to everyone who helped me, especially to the Duke community and to the many Armenian intellectuals, journalists and officials who supported me. They range from President Brodhead to the Turkish scholar Ayse Gul Altinay and Amatuni Virabian, the head of Armenia's national archives. I never wanted to be the focus of something like this or to have my name in the news media. At this point, I just want to go back to work."