Aydın Tiryaki (2026)

Aydın Tiryaki Date: August 27, 2011

When we lost my uncle on December 20, 2009, I wrote the following after his passing (1):

“We used to live in the village of Yeşilöz (Ibras), 3 kilometers away from İnebolu. We would walk back and forth between our village and İnebolu. It was one of those days, I was five or six years old, and my Uncle Ali and I were going to walk to the village. The return trip was tiring because it was uphill. Before setting off, we stopped by the confectioner, and they weighed sugared almonds and put them in a small paper bag. I never forgot the sugared almonds I ate from that small paper bag until we reached the village that day. Even after 45 years, sugared almonds are still my favorite candy, especially if a bitter almond occasionally pops up among them. Every time I eat one, I feel that day’s taste inside me.”

A few days ago, while buying “holiday candy” for the “Sugar Feast”, the details of this memory, which had entered that article as a single paragraph, came to my mind.

The confectioner in the backstreets of İnebolu is still as vivid in my mind as if it were yesterday. I had entered through the narrow door of the shop and watched the candies being filled into a tiny paper bag with a small scoop from a snow-white pile of sugar inside a round glass jar, abundant enough to adorn a child’s candy dreams, and being weighed on the scale. I was startled by the clacking sound of the weight being tossed onto the other pan of the scale. That confectioner shop was either Halil Macit or Ali Küllü.

That day, on our way to the village, I didn’t just eat those sugared almonds; we did calculations with them and played math games. My uncle was a math teacher and loved playing with mathematics.

During my childhood years, the holiday candy boxes in our region used to look alike. A row of Turkish delight would be lined up at the bottom, sprinkled with either powdered sugar or coconut. A thin piece of paper would be laid over this layer. From the bottom row of some boxes, marzipan would emerge. On top of the paper, there would mostly be candies wrapped in cellophane. I would be overjoyed if sugared almonds turned up among these candies. I would eat these candies, which I likened to large and small white beans, with great appetite. Back then, there was always an actual almond inside a sugared almond. Especially the bitter almonds that occasionally appeared like a lottery prize would give a distinct flavor.

Sugared almonds were the best candy of my childhood, and they still are. May our Sugar Feast days be as beautiful as a sugared almond.

Ankara, August 27, 2011

Footnotes (1) My Uncle Ali lives in our memories: Ali Tiryaki (1941, İnebolu – 2009, Ankara) (Milliyet Blog, December 23, 2009)

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A Note on Methods and Tools: The original Turkish version of this work was authored entirely by the author, without any assistance from artificial intelligence. (Note: AI was utilized solely as a translation and writing assistant to prepare this English version of the original text.)