Life in Izmir
MY LIFE IN
My father having got a modest job with Salih dayi and then another friendly hotelier Necati we were more or less feeding ourselves and paying our rent. Next was enrolling with the local schools. When we contacted the local primary school, namely Misak-i Milli İlkokulu for me and Ertan and then a secondary school for our two elder sisters Umran and Suzan we were shocked to learn that our school reports about our respective last years was not regarded as equivalents of the corresponding years in the schools of Turkey and therefore we either sat exams to prove our competence or re-study at the level of our last years back in Cyprus. Only me rejected this option and volunteered to be tested at the Misak-i Milli school for my competence. There was only a week for the scools to open and myself tested; therefore I started my preparation forthwith. From a neighbour’s son of my age I borrowed all the textbooks for the year concerned and almost memorized them before the test day arrived. I was tested by two teachers and the headmaster, a very serious looking middle aged gentleman related to a famous writer. With some struggle I squeezed my way into success. My last test subject was drawing and painting. I drew such a beautiful rooster on the blackboard that the master gave out a big laughter and said “Even I could not draw such a rooster”. Mind you, back in
So, among all four elder children I joined the class appropriate to my age and ine primary schools in
We soon moved from Kadifekale to Kahramanlar, a district on the front flat part of
As additional entertainment I took on myself to entertain my younger siblings, namely sister Taylan and brother Erdal by acting solo in imaginary motion pictures enacted under the mulberry tree and lasting more than an hour just like at the cinemas. Sometimes, again just like in the cinemas I spoke my role in improvised imitation English filling the gaps between the English words I knew with gibberish made to sound like American English (what else could it be since most films were in American English). My motion pictures created new heroes who repeated their feats like in James Bond films series. My chief fictional hero was Oxford Ahmed, a superman capable of running faster than airplanes when he put on his magic white shoes and one fist hit by him could send an elephant hundreds of metres away and dead. His lackey was a funny and cheeky black woman named Lano. The duo achieved many saving feats either separately or together. Thanks to them many damsels were saved and bogeymen punished.
As for our livelihood, father used all his various skills in pastry making and selling, hair cutting and carpentry sharing his time between the three professions as opportunity arose. I remember one case of carpentry: He was called to a public building by its manager to build a wooden cabin to be used for selling refreshments to waiting visitors. He and the manager agreed to a forty liras price for the job. When it was done and the manager was about to pay the bill he presented a bill showing the price as one hundred liras for my father to sign despite being handed only forty. Long used to such regular corruption he still protested but the manager told him to either take the money or do whatever he wants- he could be arrested for slandering a public official of the republic if he dared to speak up. In all backward and undemocratic countries public officials, even the smallest are invincible tyrants thanks to the solidarity among their kind all of whom are hell-bent on filling their pockets. One cannot be too angry with them because that is a survival issue. They are underpaid and I have seen tax inspectors whose toes show through their broken shoes. One visited a small soft drinks factory to assess and collect taxes from the boss. I and Ertan were working there during summer holidays. The boss sent Ertan to order kabab and raki for the boss and the visitor for lunch and after a hearty lunch and a small wad of cash squeezed into the hand of the tax inspector tax assessment was declared as nil. The factory ‘was making a loss’.
Of course today’s Turkey is quite a well-developed and modestly prosperous country but that corruption culture going back to centuries still survives to an extent. In fact it is in all countries rich or poor but the scale and methods vary. Corruption is in the blood of most people and cannot be resisted. When later in life I was the chief auditor of a very big company I had caught quite a few corrupt officials who had to resign and soon became such an object of fear and hate that I had to resign on some pretext. The culture of Mafia does not cover only Italian style crime and corruption gangs- it also informs the officialdom throughout the public and private sector, although honest people do also exist among them; perhaps the majority are honest.
In passing I must also mention that Ertan and I worked at many odd jobs like selling home-made sweets on the streets of
During summer holidays we both boys worked at the said soft-drinks factory full time as low-paid juniors. Still the wages were good fortune for us: we could feed ourselves reasonably well and go to the obligatory cinema every weekend which entertainment was the universal habit at the time. We also occasionally accompanied our sisters to cinemas and in fact to all places away from home since for girls travelling alone was dangerous. For their part our two elder sisters were earning their share of income by giving private lessons to other families’ daughters, especially English and mathematics. These services often involved long travels like crossing to the other side of
Despite the excellent garden our tin-roofed house was not good enough for us by any standards and in about March 1950 we moved to a new two bedroom basement flat under a two storey house which was newly built and benefited from electric light. There was also a common garden for the three families sharing the two-storey new building, one of which was the grocer Mehmet’s, the owner and landlord. Mehmet was a sparsely educated but very intelligent and well-spoken young man with a young family and other than being our kind landlord and discount grocer he was my delightful personal friend. Despite being about 15 years my senior we could not enjoy each other’s company more and I sat at his shop several hours at a time to discuss and debate political matters which was his main interest and expertise.
The other tenant in the building was the family of a very old man, namely retired cavalry major Emin who was a veteran of the Turkish War of Independence (1920-22). He was a constantly pipe smoking old man with a much younger wife Fatma and two sons, the 25 year old Ayhan who apparently earned his wages from several lines of odd jobs and Okay who was our classmate and study companion at home. In the evenings I and Ertan would move to their upper storey flat and study and solve problems and do home work in mathematics and science subjects all the while being served nuts, tea or sweets by his good mother.
Soon after moving to Mehmet’s I and Ertan started our secondary education at a splendidly built and equipped lycee (six year French style secondary) in Alsancak (pronounced ‘Alsanjak’) district of Izmir only about a mile away from ours Kahramanlar. At the time it was called ‘İnönü Lisesi’ but because İnönü’s Republican People’s Party had recently lost the elections the new government of Democrat Party renamed it Namık Kemal Lisesi after a famous Turkish nationalist poet.
It was in a ‘big trees, flowers and ponds- filled’ garden and boasted also of a proper football pitch on top. The building was colonnaded and marbled a la Ionian Greek style and with its amphitheatres, laboratories and auditorium-cum-theatre hall could be mistaken for a classical university- at least so it looked to my young boy’s eyes. It must have been left by the fleeing Greeks of Izmir when the town fell to Turks in 1922 who recovered it from the Greek army which had occupied it back in 1919 as their bridgehead in their push to conquer and annex Western Turkey which a thousand years before was Greek- an act of irredentist nationalism on the part of the recently too proud and ambitious Greeks. Actually I like Greeks because they have many fine qualities and merits and in individual capacity a Greek makes a very good and loyal friend. What lets them down is their totally opposite herd instincts. If as individuals Greeks cannot be bettered as personal friends, as a herd they cannot be more vulnerable to demagogical agitation in the matter of nationalism. Their national phobia of Turks is to be seen to be believed and is the best vehicle for any politician to be exploited to attain popularity and influence. Contrary to all the golden virtues of the Holy Christ whom we Muslims also accept as the Christ, Greek clerics are most un-Christ-like and the worst offenders in the matter of Turkophobia which is a great pity. This anomaly caused very many clashes and mutual tragedies between Turks and Greeks since the 19th century at the latest and remains as bad as ever. May God help both sides to wake up to better alternatives.
At this splendid school I and Ertan attended the same year class and got honours marks thereby coming first in our class. As a reward we were awarded free lunches at school for the rest of our years there. The food was real generous and about fifty boys from poor backgounds benefited.
As for our elders Umran and Suzan they attended the lycee for girls at Güzelyalı near the famous Konak square on the sea side whose landmark was an elegant clocktower.
In the meantime my mother gave birth to Berkay soon after our move to grocer Mehmet’s and the strain put my parents in such distress as regards our expenses that my father chose to leave us and go to Cyprus to work at his old proffessions and send us money. Soon our mother in Izmir and grandmother Cemaliye in Cyrus had to exchange places: Mother took all children younger than me back to Cyprus and grandmother Cemaliye came over to Izmir to look after us the four elder siblings. Not long after our sisters moved to Ankara for their higher studies and Ertan and I had to fend for ourselves with only one weekend visit from our grandmother who was working as a cook and nanny in an industrialist’s home in the fashionable Güzelyalı district and was almost worshipped by them by her sweet tongue and multiple house-keeping skills. She taught us how to cook and especially I ended up as an accomplished cook. I can make any dish since.
Eventually Suzan graduated from Gazi Teacher’s College and Ümran graduated from Ankara University English Language department. Both proceeded to Cyprus and got teaching jobs.
For a while back in Izmir our grandmother supervised us of sorts while I and Ertan learned all the house chores so that we could cook, wash etc. as already indicated. Seeing that we could look after ourselves our grandmother also returned to Cyprus in 1955 and a year later we two boys graduated from the lycee. The only irregularity was Ertan’s unplanned summer holiday visit to Cyprus a year before his last at Namik Kemal Lisesi: He went to Cyprus for his summer holiday of 1954 and he so liked being back in Cyprus that he decided to get any job there, leave school and grow up to be just a worker if that was the only thing to do without schooling. Mother pleaded with him long and hard to return to Izmir (where was fending for myself all on my own) but could only persuade him to resume his lycee class in Cyprus, another Namik Kemal Lisesi in Mağusa/Famagusta. He studied the 5th year there and returned to Izmir to finish his lycee education after which he moved to Ankara and enrolled at Ankara University faculty of Agricultural Engineering where he studied and obtained his BSc in 1960. Back in summer 1959 he was engaged to a daugher of a frined of my father’s, namely Mehmet Degene, another carpenter and sweets maker. His fiancee was 16 year old Şerife whom Ertan renamed later ‘Gönül’. They married after Ertan’s graduation in 1960.
As for myself, after graduating from the lycee I took a year off because our father culd not affford to keep us all four older children at our studies abroad. Soon after coming back to Limassol in september 1956 I landed with a good job as a store clerk at the British miltary base in Episcopi near Limassol and earned a respectable salary for a year until I could resume my education the next year. What was even more important for me was that each month I handed the salary I was paid to my father in full so that he could look after the whole family in Cyprus since his burden was heavy and the last and tenth child, the girl Feray had joined the family recently. I always took supreme pleasure from helping my family as totally as I could until I married and had my own whereafter I did what I could within reason. For that I can testify that Allah rewarded me with both wonderful spiritual and material gifts; after a few difficult years following my marriage in 1966, difficulties due to the deteriorating political situation because of the intercommunal fighting and the ghettoization of the Turkish community things improved dramatically for me and a modest prosperity pattern was sent my way by the All-Gracious Lord. Since then I lacked nothing.
September 1957 saw me going back to Ankara and enrolling at the Faculty of Science of the Ankara University to study chemical engineering- a five year course awarding at the end a degree of Yüksek Mühendis (High Engineer) a degree copied from a German equivalent (for in science Turkey was following the German model since the last days of the Ottoman Empire) which degree
was equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon Master of Science (MSc). It involved, after studying a large and varied curriculum, 25 original projects for each student to research and accomplish through research and experiment. That was a good prospect for me because I enjoyed originality and free experimenting as nothing else.
My accommodation on reaching Ankara by bus from the port of Mersin where I had landed in Turkey was the same as Ertan’s who had arrived there a year before me. It was a public-owned big student hostel built next to the Faculties of Agricultural Engineering and Veterinary Medicine. Ertan who had already finished his first year helped me to register and settle in and from then on and as usual we were insparable. What is more there was a large population of other students from Cyprus a lot of which I already knew from Limassol and others I came to know soon. It was quite a thrill and pleasure to live among hundreds of young men in an education acommodation setting and our hostel, namely Dışkapı Yurdu (Yurd meant hostel) enjoyed basic but very convenient and comfortable accommodation with generous hot shower and dining facilities at greatly subsidized prices. Normally boys stuck together on the basis of where they came from and therefore we Cypriots made quite a substantial group noticed and acknowledged by others as such. Next to ours but separate was also girls quarters and as was the norm at the time the two sexes kept a respectful distance and members barely dared to advance mutual serious relationships. The culture was so different than today’s then and as far as I am concerned, more responsible and noble were the attitudes. Scandals were basically unheard-off.
The same applied in classrooms. In our class was 35 students with six of them girls and never in all the five years I studied anything unchaste happened. At the end one couple got engaged and after graduation married. That was all. Today’s youth may find it difficult to understand how come we their much older colleagues could keep our distance among the two sexes and still enjoy our togetherness. It was not only quite easy thanks to our strong sense of honour and propriety but also far more pleasant and comfortable than today’s promiscuous atmosphere. The reserve helped to build up each sex morally and spiritually and strengthened and refined character and humanity as nothing else. Psychology called it ‘sublimation of the sexual feelings’, sublimation into noble and responsible attitudes of mind and conduct. Thanks to this kind of preparation marriages lasted and love between the partners matured to almost infallible perfection.
MY UNIVERSITY YEARS
Faculty of Science of Ankara University is situated midway between the
In our department Chemistry and Chemical Engineering the head was professor Otto Gerngross, one of the many a German Jewish scientists and scholars who had taken refuge in Turkey in late 1930s because of Hitler’s impending rise to power. Their numbers in Turkey was close to a hundred and it was they who made Turkish universities good centres of learning. In fact before them and since late Ottoman times there was a wave of German scholars (mostly non-Jewish) coming and teaching in Turkey under the Turkish-German raprochmant effected by Sultan Abdulhamid and Kaiser Wilhelm. These events gave a big impetus to the development of Turkish universities. Our other professors who were Turkish had also German teachers in the main. Among them I can count our Dean late professor Saim Saracaoglu whose signature appears on my diploma alongside with that of professor İhsan Doğramacı who was the rector of Ankara University. As a result I can say that we students had a good education at this otherwise not world-famous university.
We were thirty five students in our class with boys making the majority about four to one.
Overall two students stood out from the rest by their respective interesting characters and influence. One was Fehmi Ersoy, a tall, dark and very handsome boy from
Now this Fehmi had for me, I believe a special affection and sympathy. That was I believe partly because I was the other most interesting young man in our class- I was the maverick.
To begin with, I was the only seriously religious fellow. Secondly, I mainly did not attend lectures but studied the same subjects from books of my own choosing, mainly American books sold in a particular modern bookshop called Tarhan Kitabevi. It was situated in the most modern and vibrant district o
My eccentricities did not end there. I also occasionally challenged my teachers (quite respectfully of course- you cannot normally cross a Turkish academic) who kindly took me in their confidence and debated with me my objections to many queer theories like the Quantum etc. In retrospect I of course see that they were in the right and I in the wrong but I could not help my original-thinking critical mind challenging theoretical claims.
An example of my maverick attitude was my breaking line with our curriculum in my second year at the chemical engineering department. The year introduced us to physical chemistry which I liked instantly as the most interesting subject of the whole curriculum. It laid bare the laws of nature for me like those of thermodynamics and took me into the world of atoms and particles.
But our lecturer the assistant professor Sureyya Aybar had no textbook for us to follow and we had to rely on taking notes as he spoke or answered questions. In fact there was a sorts of textbook translated from German but it was anything but easy to understand. When it was term examination time all my classmates including the most intelligent were very depressed about the outcome of the examination. They simply could not follow either the fumbling lecturer or the textbook offered them. A week before the examinations I solved the problem for myself. I visited the bookshop I named already and bought Samuel Glasstone’s Textbook of Physical Chemistry. In fact I could not do otherwise since I had not attended most of Dr Aybar’s lectures to begin with.
I stayed at home for a whole week before the exam and studied all the subjects our teacher ad lectured on from Glasstone’s. At the exam I got 95 marks out of 100 while the best after me, an angel of a girl named Olcay could only notch up 65. Most failed. Why I got only 95 and not 100 was that in my triumphalism I had neglected to calculate the numerical answer to a mathematical formula simply because I felt I had done very well indeed and 5 marks could not bother me.
When the exam results were read out in the class next week the whole class looked like a bevy of investors soaking in the bad news of a stock market crash in
Soon a circle of admirers formed around Fehmi and never spoilt by his growing popularity he treated his loyal friends to many kind things, like organizing visits to the pretty small theatres and the opera of
I had several other good friends as well: To begin with I had three Turkish Cypriots in my class and two in the class one year junior. In my class closest to me was Ahmed Huseyin, about two yeras older than me. He had lost these two years because he had initially enrolled at the Faculty of Agriculture but not warming up to it despite the two years he spent there had switched to chemical engineering. He was lucky to keep his scholarship since his agreement with his sponsors was to study agricultural engineering. This feat and many others showed me that like Fehmi he was a good diplomat: he was tactful, spoke well and could manipulate others well but of course without any malicious intentions. True he lacked the warmth of Fehmi and was no leader type but more private. For his good friendship with me he received great help from me to study some difficult subjects from English books and I had to help him both to improve his English and grasp some difficult scientific concepts. However this did not amount to his exploiting me; he showed real warm gratitude towards me and his younger brother Mustafa who later studied physics in our own Faculty of Science to this day continues to treat me with great affection and respect. This must be on account of Ahmed’s praising me to him very much. Another unforgettable service Ahmed did to me was helping me in many situations to defend myself against jealous or malicious types. Whoever dared to criticise me or try to harm me Ahmed would come between me and him and tackle him effectively. So, if Fehmi was my best friend in terms of general helpfulness Ahmed was my self-appointed and yet very welcome best friend in terms of day to day problems. I am happy to have helped him academically as I did. He deserved every bit. Allah bless also Ahmed wherever he might be now. My last information a few years after our graduation was that he had married to a Turkish citizen in Ankara and was employed at the Nitrogen factory in Eskişehir, a province about 200 miles to the west of Ankara. I must add that because of his diplomatic skills Ahmad was elected chairman of the then newly formed Cyprus Turkish Students Association in
Another fellow Cypriot classmate was Behcet. We had worked together with Behcet from 1956 to 1957 at the British military base at Episkopi in
Another Cypriot was the girl Erman. She was a slim brunette with large black eyes and beautiful by the science students’ standards- because we had noted that real beautiful girls did not study science but humanities. In other words none of our seven girl classmates were beauties worthy of note but all the same they were very nice and sincere friends. Erman was already engaged with another boy in our class whose name I cannot remember and the two married and settled in
Especially outstanding in humanity among girls was Olcay from Rize on the
I am sure thanks to my blessing mention of Olcay I am reminded of the need to give my dear readers some details of my multiple freelance intellectual and spiritual pursuits in
Religious in temperament from birth and trained on the example of my late grandmother Cemaliye who kept all rituals of Islam meticulously and taught and preached to Ertan and me from youngest age, I found myself rediscovering religion in
In
Another great extra-curricular pursuit of mine was improving my English beyond belief by devouring advanced English books with a big Redhouse English-Turkish dictionary under my palm. My other self-imposed reading subjects was philosophy, history and even haphazard browsing of encyclopaedias as a result of which I learned enormous if often also useless-looking lots of knowledge while neglecting my school attendance as much as I could get away with. My exam marks suffered as a result but my overall knowledge of things shot through the roof so-to-speak. All the same I easily graduated from secondary education with an average of marks about 9/10.
Of course there was a few in my class with 10/10.
In
However my initial reaction to my diagnosis of typhoid had stricken me with terror since my information to day then was that it was often fatal. This fear re-stirred in me my religious emotions and after leaving the hospital having chanced on a copy of an English translation of the Koran (from now on I shall spell it Qur’an which is more correct) I devoured it several times until all my religious health and appetite were restored. Other religious books followed and filled my private shelves at the hostel. Soon I was being regarded an authority on religion and at my first visit to Cyprus on my second summer holiday (1958) I was attending prayers at the mosques of Limassol, three in number, and invited to preach, deliver Friday sermons and lead prayers by imams on duty in each and the congregations were growing, people being intrigued by the sudden emergence of the son of Rusdi bey the carpenter and pastry-maker as a very learned cleric. To make the case fully I must jump four years ahead to summer 1962 when Ertan, recently graduated was the Evdim district agriculture officer (a district of rural Limassol) introduced me to sheikh Nazim who, despite being a Cypriot, was normally living in Damascus and visiting Cyprus occasionally to preach and lead a Sufi order, namely the Naqshibandi. Although I had as a young school boy seen briefly the sheikh back in 1946 who was at the time was a guest at the home of my father’s ‘milk-sister’ Haji Safiye I and my family had soon afterwards emigrated to Turkey and I could therefore could not meet the sheikh.
My meeting with the great Sufi master took place in 1962 at the Köprülü Mosque at the mid-afternoon prayer of a hot summer day and it was mutual love at first sight. Soon we become inseparable and after my graduation from university and starting as a chemistry teacher at the 19th May lycee in Limassol (for there were no great industries in Cyprus then to need employ chemical engineers) our friendship grew from strength to strength. In the meantime I had taught myself Arabic and could translate from the Qur’an impromptu. As a result the great sheikh declared me the most accomplished and learned man of religion after him in