No Bones to Venerate
By Vincent Czyz
Come see Sinope Prison, the Alcatraz of Anatolia! Its three-meter-thick walls unrestored for that authentically gritty look! Tens of thousands visit annually. Bless dark tourism!
Yes, yes, Turkey’s most famous poet, Nazim Hikmet, was imprisoned here—you had to ask. It’s always Nazim this and Hikmet that. A Hollywoodesque tragedy with a poet as the fallen hero. And it is a great story (as long as it didn’t happen to you). Seventeen years in jail, exiled, stripped of citizenship, alone in his last moments, now moldering in foreign soil among tombstones inscribed in the Cyrillic alphabet. Without ever recanting his communism or giving up verse. If you weren’t dying to see his cell in Sinope, you are now (aren’t you?).
The prison began with a noble calling: a citadel. Not far from where the Greek historian Xenophon and remnants of the Ten Thousand came upon the Black Sea. Yes, it’s that old. Its foundations laid more than six centuries before that tragedy cooked up by the Gospel dramatists began. By Greeks of course. Centuries later, under the management of the Seljuk Turks, a few walls were added, and the fortress was demoted to a dungeon. It was the Ottomans, their empire slipping away, who upgraded it (ever so slightly) to prison status.
Though it commands the high ground above an isthmus poking into the Black Sea, its cells face the courtyard. Of course. Inmates could smell the sea, hear the sea, feel the sea rocking their thoughts and sloshing against their insomnia but never see the sea. (No such restrictions for tourists!)
And dankness? Few European dungeons compare. Inmates could barely light a match. Their clothes were perpetually damp. They woke up under wet sheets. Imagine the cold during winters in Sinope, the northernmost tip of Turkey. Even in spring the stone walls went on cupping winter’s piercing chill. What wouldn’t a jailed journalist or poet have given to have a fire crackling away in a corner stove?
The republic finally shuttered the prison in 1997 but wasn’t quite done with it, overseeing its final incarnation as a museum. Voila! A new income stream (rather than an old expense).
The architecture, defaced by time, is generic, institutional—hardly distinguishable from a dilapidated hospital or school. The red trim around stone doorways and windows has faded to the color of old blood. The wan yellow of the façade has flaked down to bare stone and brick. When I close my eyes, I see it in black and white as if sketched in charcoal. Color consumed by its dark history.
Never mind the spooky emptiness of the halls and cells, see for yourself where some of Turkey’s greatest writers, poets, and journalists enjoyed a bit of solitude while they reconsidered their socialist convictions: Refi Cevat Ulunay, Hüseyin Hilmi, Ahmet Bedevi Kuran, Mustafa Suphi (whose death was likely Turkey’s first unsolved murder), Refik Halit Karay, Sabahattin Ali.
With his round wire-rimmed glasses, thoughtful gaze, and the compassion embodied in his face, Ali reminds me a bit of Walter Benjamin (another lefty!). He earned his first prison sentence by penning poems critical of Ataturk, the founder of the Republic. In 1933 he was granted amnesty, part of his penance being an obsequious poem dedicated to Ataturk: "Benim Aşkım"—literally “My Love.” Ali was rewarded for his groveling in verse with a post in the Ministry of Education. The reconciliation between state and author, however, didn’t last. Ali reverted to old habits—writing politically subversive articles, co-founding a satirical political magazine—and was yanked from the ministry. Not long after joining the ranks of the unemployed, he once again found himself in jail.
His cell, now thoughtfully hung with Ali’s carefully framed photo, is a recreation of itself as it looked during his imprisonment: an iron-frame bed, a dresser with a broad mirror, a tiny end table, a suitcase (a prop) tucked under the bed.
No promises, but at no extra charge you may run into Ali’s daughter, Filiz, wandering the cold halls, her clothing weighted with dampness, her hands slightly sticky from the sea air. Though the last time she saw her father she was an unskeptical 11 years old, she remembers a gentle man of indulgent smiles and inexhaustible patience, a reader whose intellectual curiosity was insatiable, a writer who could compose sentences amid the din of a busy kitchen or a crowded teahouse. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she stops in now and again to stare at the ceiling her father started at, to be enclosed by the stone walls that enclosed him, to taste whatever trace of himself he might have there. After all, there’s no grave to visit.
By 1948 her father was reduced to driving a truck for a living and, on the verge of being arrested again, renounced Turkey. The fact that the state had rejected his passport application notwithstanding, he told his wife and daughter he’d next send word to them from Paris or London and hired a smuggler to take him into Bulgaria (his place of birth, incidentally, and in 1907 still a year away from disentangling itself from the eroding Ottoman Empire). Ali was going home.
Ali Ertekin, the Turkish coyote, later confessed to murdering the writer—with a shovel—in a violent fit of “patriotism,” but it’s an open secret that he handed Sabahattin over to the secret police, who beat the author to death during an interrogation. In view of his patriotic fervor, perhaps, Ertekin was given a four-year sentence. But even that seemed a bit much, and he was released after a matter of weeks.
Ali’s badly decomposed remains, which weren’t discovered for months, were trucked off by the authorities and dumped in an anonymous hole. (The state’s funeral arrangements for Ali call to mind an Assyrian king who, after laying waste to Elam, boasted of desecrating the tombs of its kings: “I left my enemies no bones to venerate.”)
Nor were Ali’s personal effects returned to Filiz and her mother. These survive only in a newspaper photo published in January of 1949: Ali’s wire-rimmed glasses, a sturdy briefcase, a jacket of soft leather, a watch, a shaving kit, his ever-present notebook, a pencil case, a Balzac novel, a novel-in-verse by Pushkin, a collection of newspapers, and a handful of snapshots. I found the newspaper reproduction of Ali’s last possessions in the archives of Beyazit Library. The snapshots don’t show up well. The only one I could make out was the one propped against Ali’s briefcase: his wife, Aliye.
Abundantly available, however, are the poems, articles, short stories, and novels Ali authored. One of the latter, Madonna in a Fur Coat, drew scant attention when it was published in 1943 (I doubt sales paid more than a month or two’s rent). In 2014, however, it was suddenly on must-read lists all over Istanbul. By 2017 it had sold a million copies in Turkey and was the talk of the international community. Why the decades-long delayed reaction? Who can say? Perhaps it had something to do with a less credulous public taking belated revenge for Ali’s murder and the state’s refusal to admit complicity.
Whatever the case, put Sinope Prison on your vacation itinerary. Bring a copy of Madonna if you like. Or, if Sinope lands outside your comfort zone—it’s more than 300 miles from Istanbul—you could always list yourself as a visitor at a local penitentiary. Surely there’s a prisoner or two, perhaps even a locked-up journalist, who wouldn’t mind a little company.
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The recipient of several awards and fellowships, Vincent Czyz is the author of Adrift in a Vanishing City, a short story collection; The Christos Mosaic, a novel; and most recently, The Three Veils of Ibn Oraybi, a novella set during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire.