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black sea

ArAs özgün

I left my father’s hometown on the Black Sea coast a few months after the
military coup, not knowing that it would take so long before I went back
there. I was eleven years old when I left; so many things that you remem-
ber from childhood start to fit into their places and make sense only after
you grow up. For example, as a kid I knew that “fascism” was a bad thing,
but it was only much later that I figured out why, that year, all of a sud-
den, people stopped cursing it in public. I came from one of the “older,”
well-known families of the small town, and I used to play mostly with
kids whose families my folks knew. “Children’s playground” did not
exist as a concept then; we used to play on the rocks at the seaside, in
the backyards of country houses, in the narrow alleys separating them,
and, preferably, in the old cemetery behind Demas’s shabby corner store,
which was turned into a weirdly terraced playing field after the grave-
stones were removed. Nobody knew or cared much about whose
unmarked graves we were playing soccer on. We would stop by Demas’
store before going back home after the match. He was an unshaven man
who wore thick wool sweaters even in the summer; he would always greet
us with a big smile and give us candies, “gazoz” (soda), and other kinds of
forbidden foods. I was one of his favorite kids in the neighborhood.
Perhaps he felt some affinity toward me because of my name, which was
as strange as his. Or, at least, it must have been something easy for him

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to remember and utter out loud, joyfully, each time I walked into his
store. Against our parents’ consent, on adventurous days we would
extend our playground toward the ruins of the abandoned church,
inside which the moldy air was thick with the smell of urine, shit, and
dust. Ruins of abandoned churches were scattered throughout the cen-
tral neighborhoods of the town, in the vicinity of large stone buildings
and mansions that stood out among the indistinct modest country
houses and newer concrete apartment blocks. Only one church was still
intact and in use as a children’s library, which became one of my favorite
hangouts after I had learned to read. Some of the kids I played with lived
in those stone mansions, they also came from the “older” families of the
town. One of them was this chubby freckle-faced kid, with whom I
shared my desk at school from time to time. His family owned a car
dealership, but that wasn’t their only source of prestige; he was the
grandson of a national hero, “Topal Osman” (Osman the Hobbler). Topal
Osman was buried on top of the citadel overlooking the city, his marble
tomb stood next to the old cannon that pointed toward Russia across the
sea. He was a hero of the national liberation war, he commanded his band
of Black Sea militia and fought next to Atatürk against the Greeks, we
were told. He was wounded in the war and walked with a limp, hence his
nickname “Topal.” After the liberation war, he was honored and deco-
rated for his bravery and deeds, and subsequently became a high-ranking
army commander. But then, we were also told, at some point in the early
years of the Republic, he fell prey to a political conspiracy; he was executed
without trial and his body was sent back to his hometown, which still
embraced him by burying him in a place of honor on the highest ground
in the town. Even a child would know that history has never been fair
and just in this part of the world, especially to good people, so it all made
sense and nobody asked what the conspiracy had been. Topal Osman’s
sword hung proudly on the wall at my friend’s house, and no other kid, no
other house had that kind of prestige. My great-grandfather was a vet-
eran of the liberation war too, but all that was left to my grandmother was
a small golden medallion attached to some silly red ribbon, something
you could actually buy at the flea market because after the war most vet-
erans sold them for their value in gold. But Topal Osman’s huge shiny
sword hung spectacularly alone in the middle of the big empty stone wall,
and it meant something. I ran into my friend years later once again in
Istanbul, where he was studying law apparently. He told me that, unlike

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me, he was going back and forth to our hometown almost every week.
He was taking the overnight ferry; there was this university student work-
ing as a tour guide on the ferry, and she didn’t mind fucking him during
the trip to earn a few extra bucks.

It was much later, when I worked with a German filmmaker who was
tracing her Greek grandfather’s deportation from the Black Sea to Greece,
that I came across Topal Osman’s name again. I had to translate an inter-
view she made with a ninety-year old villager from the Black Sea who
couldn’t recall coherently anything related to the fighting between the
Greek and Turkish gangs after the fall of the Ottoman central authority.
In the middle of her incomprehensible murmurs the old woman paused
for a moment, consumed with a terrifying image; she mumbled: “And
then, there was Topal Osman, he was worse than the Greeks.” I had to
rewind the tape over and over to make sure that she was indeed men-
tioning the name of my hometown’s local hero. After years of “schooling” in
the history of the Republic, by then I was almost convinced that Topal
Osman had been a small guy who was exaggerated out of proportions in
his little town, since the books hardly ever mentioned his name. I fig-
ured out that it was indeed the same Topal Osman by bringing together
bits and pieces of stories that never made it into the official history books.
He was an Ittihat ve Terakki (Union and Progress Party) officer, a veteran
of the Balkan wars, which left him lame. After returning to his home-
town, he commandeered a small band of thugs in the mountains of the
region. In the aftermath of World War I, with the British fueling their
hopes, the predominantly Greek population of the region began to dream
of reviving the Pontus Greek state in the Eastern Black Sea. That gave
Topal Osman, who was still a nationalist Ittihat ve Terakki member, carte
blanche to attack the rich Greek families and pillage their properties. His
fearful gang grew in numbers as he spread his operations from Samsun
to Trabzon. Topal Osman’s terror had political repercussions on an inter-
national scale: the Greeks’ failed bid for independence, followed by ter-
ror between Greek and Turkish gangs, provided an excuse for the mass
deportation of the former population. The Governor of Samsun, who
still wanted to resolve the issue under state authority, declared Topal
Osman an outlaw who would face the consequences if he and his gang
entered the province. In retaliation, and Topal Osman’s gang laid siege
to the deportation convoys exiting Samsun at the border and annihilated
the deportee families en masse. By the time of the Independence War, the
“Pontus problem” was resolved that way, and Topal Osman’s small but

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reckless guerilla army was ready to be deployed first at the western front,
and after the war, to suppress the Kurdish rebellion in the southeast.
Ittihat ve Terakki became the sole governing power after the founding of the
Republic. Topal Osman was appointed as the head of the elite army unit
that served Atatürk directly—the Presidential Guards, who were com-
posed of his Black Sea gang. Within the same year, as soon as the splits
in the first parliament appeared, a vocal member of the opposition was
found dead in Ankara. A few months later, when another representa-
tive opposing Atatürk’s power clique was found dead, such terror was
deemed no longer tolerable for the new Republic. Topal Osman and his
men were surrounded at Papaz’in Bagi, a valley close to the Presidential
Palace in the outskirts of Ankara. After an intense battle lasting four days,
he was killed, and his body was sent back to the Black Sea. The town had
changed a lot since I left. The abandoned churches that once smelled of
piss, shit, and dust had been restored, and opened to tourism as histor-
ical sites. Fancy apartment blocks had risen on the once empty ceme-
tery. Topal Osman’s marble grave did not stand out quite as
magnificently as before, within the newly restored walls of the citadel. I
asked my uncle who was showing me around and telling me about the
old days, “What happened to the Greeks?”—as if I didn’t know. His blue
eyes looked away, “None are left, all went away” he said, as if he didn’t
know. “What about Demas, isn’t he Greek?” I asked sincerely. He smiled,
“Well, Demas is not his real name. He used to be a fisherman. Before
you were born, he was selling at that little store the fish he caught. He
called his store “Deniz Mahsulleri Satis” (Seafood Sales Store), but the
tiny storefront didn’t have enough space for the whole title, so he short-
ened it to “De.Ma.S.” The fish store went out of business, but its name
stuck to him. Even I don’t remember the poor sap’s real name, Ahmet or
something?” I didn’t ask, then, why my Muslim mother would give me
painted eggs at a certain time of the year.

Paul Klee, in order to dismiss the tired question “is art for the people,

or for the sake of art?” from an avant-garde position, once said that “art
is for the people who are not there yet.” In that case, photographs—always
arrested somewhere between the past and the present—are for the
people who are not there anymore.

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