An Allegory of 21st Century Turkish Fairytale Deniz Ozcan
The following story is a profile of a Turkish person in his mid 40s. While creating the life events of this person, almost everything was chosen as what the majority of the society in that specific time did or been through accompanied by real historical happenings. So the character becomes a combination of fragments where almost every Turkish citizen would see a parallelism to their own family history. It can be said that the character almost becomes a prototype rather than a specific persona. It is set in one day yet the timeline through the story switches between the present and the past. Certain elements or happenings within the space trigger this switch where the present becomes a representation of the past and the past becomes an explanation of the present. The character sees himself in his ideal state of living, almost in his own faulted utopia. Through these flashbacks the reader gets a sense of how this understanding of ideal living is shaped for this specific person and also gets an idea of the temporality in terms of what ideal means through time.
It was 10th of August 2018, his alarm went on exactly at 6:30 like the rest of his days. Hamit woke up. He opened the venetian curtains that they temporarily placed on the windows of their bedroom. He bought this house 6 months ago. It was a French chateau with 4 bedrooms, perfect for their expanding family. He decided to buy the house when his second son was born and his wife insisted on a better life with their kids in a private, guarded compound with a house that has a garden where children could grow up the same way she grew up, when it used to be safer in Sakarya (the city where his wife spent all of her life and where he spent his adolescent and adult years). In 13th and 14th century French chateau used to mean a castle, or a structure arranged for defense rather than for residence,1 so Pictures of Burj al Babas in Mudurnu, Turkey. Where the story is set, the house of Hamit
their reasoning to move here for safety was one of the only things that showed a parallelism between the actual concept of the French chateau and their lifestyle but they would never know or accept this even if they knew. It had a tower and a pointy roof so it looked foreign and big enough for them to love the house. But Hamit was a smart spender, of course his only reason for buying this specific house wasn’t about how it looked, the house was also close to his work, which was a chicken farm in the outskirts of Sakarya. His company would export the products of the chicken to the Balkan countries. He was one of the hundreds of businessmen who profited from the free market economy that Turgut Ozal implemented in Turkey back in the beginning of the 80s. 2 When he was first establishing a business, he wanted to become a part of this trend of producing in Turkey and selling in foreign currency to double maybe even triple the income but still wanted to remain local to where him and his wife had their lives. So
1 Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Château." Encyclopædia Britannica. November 09, 2011. Accessed March 19, 2019. https://
www.britannica.com/technology/chateau-architecture.
2 Tuleykan, Hayrettin, and Selcuk Bayramoglu. "24 JANUARY DECISION IN TURKEY STARTED WITH TODAY'S ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL
STRUCTURE FINANCIAL LIBERALIZATION REFLECTIONS." International Journal of Social Science, March 31, 2016, 401-20. http:// www.jasstudies.com/Makaleler/1361580091_30-Öğr. Gör. Selçuk BAYRAMOĞLU.pdf.
he found out about the chicken business that was happening in near villages and established on that. His father used to work in an iron factory where his oldest brother joined him after he graduated from middle school to help his parents, two younger brothers and one sister. Hamit always wanted to have a comfortable life so he chose to go to university instead, now he was living in a chateau, a Turkish chateau. He slowly made his way to the kitchen under the white fluorescent lights that had just been fixed through out the long hallway and the spiral staircase. The breakfast was already ready and the kids were eating in the next room in front of the TV. He sat in his usual chair, his wife poured some fresh turkish tea in his traditional turkish tea glass. This was the tea set that his parents left him when they passed away. It was one of the few things they could fit into their car when they were migrating from their hometown, which was Kahramanmaraş (a city located at the south-east part of Turkey), to Istanbul. Before they migrated they used to live in a small farm house just outside the city centre. His mom gave birth to two of his brothers -one in 1970 and one Diagram of how Hamit and his family moves through out his life. 1. Kahramanmaraş 2. Istanbul 3. Sakaray 4. The House, Mudurnu
in 1971- while they were living there continuing the family business which was cotton farming. After the coup that happened in 1960 the newly established government decided to change their policy in modernization from agriculture based economy to industrial economy.3 So this meant the money moved towards the big cities where the factories were starting to operate. They could manage the family only for 10 years after this change happened. Than Riza Bey (Hamit’s father) made the choice of leaving their family and hometown after he gained enough money to build a house for them in Istanbul. When they arrived there in 1972, the first thing they did was to find an empty flat land in the slum areas which were formed by hundreds of
3 Demirturk, Sinan. "1960-1980 Perıod In Turkey And Foreign Socio-Economic Changes In The Orientation Of The Social Dynamics." 4, no. 12
(December 12, 2015): 155-82. http://dergipark.gov.tr/download/article-file/367631.
other families that migrated to Istanbul with the exact same reason; money. These houses had a specific name in Turkish which was “gecekondu”; “gece” meant “night” and “kondu” meant “staying for the night, being put”. Just like the phrase suggests most of these houses were built almost over night when there was no control or any sort of inspection, with very temporary techniques.4 Hamit was born a year after they arrived, to a house with no electricity and plumbing. The houses in the neighborhood he grew up in were not authorized, there for ignored by the government as long as possible by being not given the basic infrastructures that the streets of a city needs. So contrary to his two older brothers he did not spend his childhood “Gecekondu” area
years in endless fields, he rather spent them in narrow streets formed by the leftovers of the houses, hearing the stories about the fields and the forests. They only stayed there for 8 years and left everything behind, a house and a land that never actually belonged to them from the beginning. If only they knew, 3 years after they left the government accepted a new law that enabled people to own the plot of land that they’ve lived on for a certain amount of time. 5 Their house that they built out of the scraps of the city, which didn’t belong to them could have become a very valuable asset for the whole family, maybe even more valuable from the chateau he was sitting in now. Hamit got very uncomfortable all of a sudden. All of these thoughts about what could’ve happened in the past. He consoled himself with the fact that him and his family were living in the actual fairytale which was advertised to them when he first saw about this project on the newspaper. He got up and went to the living room to check on the kids. They were sitting on a huge american style
4 Mutlu, Selcan. "TÜRKİYE’DE YAŞANAN GECEKONDULAŞMA SÜRECİ VE ÇÖZÜM ARAYIŞLARI: Ankara Örneği." Master's thesis, T. C.
ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ KAMU YÖNETİMİ VE SİYASET BİLİMİ (KENT VE ÇEVRE BİLİMLERİ) ANABİLİM DALI, 2007. 5 Tercan, Binali. "Illegal Buildings Amnesty Since 1948." Mimarlık, September 2018, 20-30.
sofa. The sofa was filled with pillows which were covered with “kilim” textiles that they bought from their trip to Capadoccia. They were watching Disney Channel in Turkish. He gazed at this sight for a several minutes and couldn’t help but think to himself how his childhood was so different from his own kids’. He tried to give them what would be his dream childhood and agreed that he managed to achieve that. When he first saw a TV he was 4 years old. Their neighbor bought a second hand TV that only worked with a generator which they placed in the basement of their house. The generator used to give off a toxic gas which would make everyone in the house sick if it was excessive. So they could only watch TV for a specific amount of time and that would be when their favorite cartoon aired on Tuesday afternoons. It was called He-Man. As far as his childhood memory could remember that was the only thing that actually got him excited through out the week. The cartoon was about the adventures of a superhero that tried to defend the realm of Eternia and the secrets of that castle that he couldn’t remember the name of from the evil forces of… of… someone. Now he had his own chateau to The castle in He-Man
protect, he was the He-Man like he imagined 30 years ago. He also remembered Heidi, which was the favorite show of the girls of the neighborhood including his sister. He never actually enjoyed the plot but really liked the settings of it, the German Alps with the perfect scenes of snow and forests and lakes like the stories his brothers used tell about their own childhood. It was so far away than what he would see if he would get up and look outside the window. He used to think about how free it would feel to be German, to
Heidi and the German Alps behind her
be Heidi. “Can we order burgers for lunch mom?” shouted his 10 year old daughter. 1982; this was the year when Hamit was 10 years old. He imagined the house they used to live in in Istanbul, the bell ringing and a man getting off of his motorcycle to bring burgers and fries in a piece of paper.
He probably wouldn’t even know if the hamburger tasted sweet or salty. Even though the first place that served hamburger in Turkey, which was called Kristal Bufe, opened it’s doors in 1962, 6 he was 17 years old when he first tasted it in 1989. He was visiting his middle brother who was studying at a university in Istanbul. He visited him several times when he could afford to. He hated the fact that he loved his brother’s life in the city. Whenever he went he had a hard time on even understanding the conversations that people were having in the first couple of days. They would often use English words in the middle of the sentences and talk about music bands and places that he could only imagine what it sounded or looked like. Going to Istanbul felt like being in a foreign country that he only saw on the movies that were constantly being played on the TV. He remembered watching Braveheart in one of the times he was in Istanbul. He couldn’t understand the conversations but still very much enjoyed the film because of the action. He enjoyed it so much that it almost made him want to live in that era, with those people, events and settings. Now that he thinks about it maybe unconsciously The castle from the Braveheart
his decision in terms of buying this house was affected by his admiration to that film. He never forgot how it felt to see the images of those castles so large with such a high volume in a dark cinema. Now him and his kids went to the cinema on the weekends regularly but he never saw his kids react to the movies the same way he did back than. Maybe they were too used to seeing these digital images in an enhanced way. Sudden sounds of gunshots disrupted his nostalgia. They would regularly hear gunshots these days through out the day because of the hunting season. The compound they lived in was surrounded by a forest where the wild-life was very active. At first kids used to get a bit scared but later on
6 Okumus, Irem. "Kristal'in Yerinde Artık Kahve Kokacak." SABAH, December 01, 2002. http://arsiv.sabah.com.tr/2002/12/01/s0903.html.
they didn’t even realize them. Hamit hasn’t realized them in a long time as well. This was the first time that it got his attention, maybe because he was in deep silence for a long time floating around his childhood. The last time he heard gunshots so clearly was when he was 9. It was the beginning of 1979 when he first started hearing them during the night. The gunshots were fired from afar and it was rare through out the night. He could see most of the people waking up to see what was happening when it first started. After several months, the gunshots started to get closer to their neighborhood, it started to get more regular yet no-one woke up this time except Hamit. After a while it Newspapers on 13th of September 1980
became a part of daily life, the incidents. He never saw anything but witnessed this era through the sounds because their parents didn’t let the kids out of the house. Later on in his high school history class he learned that those sounds belonged to people who were members of far right or left wing organizations. Than he found out that it wasn’t his parents who didn’t let him out of the house, it was the government. They banned people from going out on the streets after certain hours and arrested anyone who is out
A picture taken after the coup in the streets of Istanbul, 1980
without any other reasoning than simply being outside their house. 7 He couldn’t go to their neighbors house on Tuesdays to watch new episodes of He-Man. Just when he thought he couldn’t be any more restrained, there he was unable to get out of simply four walls that made up this space of eating and sleeping. In 12th of September 1980 another coup happened and that was when his parents decided to leave the city. They thought it got so dangerous that somehow every citizen became prisoners of their own home. His father found a job at that iron factory near Sakarya, so that was how he ended up moving to the city they lived in until they moved to their new chateau. He always saw living in a big city as a struggle, it gave him a
7 12 Eylül Belgeseli. Directed by Mustafa Unlu. Performed by Mehmet Ali Birand. Turkey, 1998.
suffocating feeling because of the trauma this incident caused during his childhood. The gunshots were still going on, so he wanted to close the window to lessen the sound which was bothering only him. The windows were hinged French doors leading to the garden. He loved that these large windows were placed everywhere around the house; there was a nice lighting and view in every room. “Dear,” said his wife when he returned back to his place on the kitchen table with this satisfied feeling in him about the house, “the electricity bill just came. Can you take care of it today?”. “Ofcourse. How much was it?”, than his wife said an amount which was 6 times more expensive than what they used to pay. His wife saw the shock on Hamit’s face so felt the need to justify; “It’s just during mid day the house gets too hot because of the sun so I keep the air-conditioning running and also these lights that we have in the corridors at night… Such a big and lovely house my husband got me what can we do?” she smiled, “It will be better in winter.”. Hamit wasn’t smiling, he was thinking if they need so much energy to keep the house cold during summer, they would need as much energy to keep it warm during winter. “Damn these windows.” he thought maybe it wasn’t worth having the view and the light. He lost his appetite, it was 7:30, time for the morning news. He went back to the living room and kindly asked the kids for the remote control. His 10 year old daughter who was just beginning to have her teen crisis from time to time gave a cranky answer and said “When I go to Istanbul for high school I will watch anything I want whenever I want.”. Her dream was to go to a private high school in the city and live there for the rest of her life. She wasn’t interested in the stability and the immobility of where they were living, though she very much liked to be the princess of the chateau. Hamit never could fully understood what seemed so ideal about living and suffering in a city after his experiences. “I guess the times have
changed.” he thought. He sat on the couch and opened CNBC. “Breaking news. President Trump just tweeted ‘I have just authorized a doubling of Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum with respect to Turkey as their currency, the Turkish Lira, slides rapidly downward against our very strong Dollar! Aluminum will now be 20% and Steel 50%. Our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!’. After he threatened to sanction Turkey last month if they refused to free an American Pastor, with the negative respond, he’s putting full pressure on the Turkish economy as the Turkish Lira dropped 20 percent since the the tweet has been published 3 hours ago.”.8 Hamit froze, he immediately thought about the debt he had to the bank for the house, which he had to pay in USD. It raised 20 percent in three hours and it was still rising every hour. He knew he couldn’t afford it after all of the new furniture they bought for the house which was inspired by the interiors of the old Ottoman Palaces. In 2011 his wife became addicted to this Turkish TV show called “The Magnificent Century”, like the rest of the middle east. It was set between 1520, following “Suleiman the Magnificent” and his relatives from his great conquests to the "Battle of Szigeth”. So with this trend created by this TV show, everyone became obsessed with everything about that era. Since than she dreamed about having a full oriental Topkapi Palace of her own. She not only had her palace but it was also a French An advertisement for a furniture which was used in the Turkish TV series Muhtesem Yuzyil
Chateau which sounded “classier” and “more expensive”. But who cares how expensive it sounded when they couldn’t afford it any more, most certainly Hamit didn’t. He tried many things to get the money to pay the monthly debts on time, but after several months it became impossible for Hamit to gather enough money so he had to sell the house. Couple of weeks after they moved to an apartment back in Sakarya which was very similar to the
8 Pramuk, Jacob. "Why Trump Is Attacking Turkey with Sanctions and Tariffs." CNBC. August 10, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2019. https://
www.cnbc.com/2018/08/10/why-trump-is-attacking-turkey-with-sanctions-and-tariffs.html.
one they lived in before, Hamit got the phone call saying his dream house was sold and it now belonged to another person. It was a German businessman who bought the house. Hamit couldn’t help but picture Heidi’s grandfather, that he used to watch in his childhood, as the buyer. Even though it had been almost 40 years since he watched Heidi with the children from the neighborhood, he had the exact same though on his mind; “How free it would feel to be German, to be Heidi.”.
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