Aydın Tiryaki (March 18, 2009)

The news in the newspaper was from Şebinkarahisar; a political party accidentally sent posters prepared for İstanbul there, leading to scenes reminiscent of a joke (1). Seeing posters that read “You are İstanbul. Think big” a thousand kilometers away from İstanbul must have brought quite a bit of joy to the people.

It was the late sixties or early seventies, meaning forty years ago. My grandfather worked as a laborer at Etibank in İnebolu. At that time, Etibank was a public enterprise. Ore transported from Küre to İnebolu by cable car was stored and loaded onto ships that arrived from time to time. Most of the employees were in Küre, while some were in İnebolu.

My grandfather used to talk about how the workplace had a cooperative for employees in İnebolu and Küre, where some things were very cheap. The cooperative was in Küre; when they wanted to buy something, they would order it from there, and it would arrive. He would even tell us that sometimes items were placed in the cable car buckets used for transporting ore and sent from Küre to İnebolu.

Even though forty years have passed, I remember it as if it were yesterday. Word came that cheap bed sheets were being sold at the cooperative, and my grandmother said we should buy some. My grandfather ordered two sheets. A few days later, a friend of my grandfather brought them to the house and handed over the ordered sheets wrapped in packing paper.

Together with my grandmother, we opened the package; there were two folded white sheets. We unfolded one, and there was a large pattern on it, but it wasn’t quite clear what it was. My grandmother didn’t like it—the quality of the fabric and the hem stitching… When we opened it completely, we saw that this was not a sheet; it was a cloth banner with a very large black-and-white portrait of Atatürk on it. There was a holiday during those days, and the cloth banners sent to be hung on the building that day had come to us by mistake.

Thinking about it now, I wonder how surprised the person must have been who received bed sheets from a package they expected to be cloth banners.

The next day, my grandfather took the cloth banners with Atatürk’s portrait to the workplace and returned in the evening with the bed sheets.

I remember feeling very excited when I saw that banner hung on the road leading to the harbor a while later. It was a banner that belonged to us in every way; it had our Atatürk on it, and we had seen it first.

(1) AKP İstanbul posters hung in Giresun’s Şebinkarahisar District! (18-3-2009, Milliyet)

Ankara, March 18, 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.) This text has been prepared within the scope of the “Verbatim” project for the purpose of transferring previously published articles to the present day.