On August 29 and 30, to commemorate a moment of national freedom, an open-air auditorium in Turkey’s capital hosted a magical encounter between two infamous and controversial figures in Turkish creative history. One was the renowned Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say, who not only made headlines in recent years with the success of his mystical Istanbul Symphony, but also with his politically inflammatory tweets for which he almost ended up in jail. The other, somewhat more unexpectedly, was the legendary Turkish poet and playwright Nazim Hikmet Ran. Despite writing almost exclusively about his undying love for his country and his dreams of peace, Nazim died in exile on charges of treason in 1963, having not set foot in his beloved homeland for over a decade.
Through the shared pain and beauty of the politically charged art of these two legends, hundreds of Turkish men, women and children in the audience, some sitting in the aisles and on the stairs while others stood wherever they could in the overflowing auditorium, found new meaning in a national holiday that had been lacking a certain enthusiasm in recent years. The event served as a reminder to the Turkish people that more often than not, history, and especially political history, repeats itself in their country. Perhaps more importantly, it showed them that there are some things that transcend the boundaries of space and time, and break down the barriers of political power, to bring people together in celebration even amid hardship.
On August 30, 1922, a battle of great significance in the Turkish Independence War came to an end with a decisive victory for the Turkish forces as the invading Greek army was expelled from Turkish soil. Since then, August 30 has been celebrated as Victory Day and has been given the symbolic significance of being the day that Turkey was rid of all enemy forces, becoming the sovereign and independent country it is today. Victory Day is one of Turkey’s three major national holidays that relate to the founding of the republic, the establishment of the Turkish parliament and the victorious end of the Independence War. As on all national holidays, there are military and diplomatic celebrations that take place in major cities around the country, accompanied by parades, concerts and air-shows by the Turkish Air Force. However, in recent years, celebrations for Victory Day have not been quite that enthusiastic due to the many serious troubles Turkey has been facing, compounded by a government that seems to have little respect for individual freedom.
In 2015, Victory Day seemed comparatively bleak in the nation’s capital where celebrations are usually most fervent, and for good reason. The war in Syria had spilled over the border into Turkish territory, culminating in several tragic attacks on border cities, the most horrifying being the attack on the town of Suruc where a Turkish youth group was planning to cross the border to help re-build the Syrian city of Kobane destroyed earlier in the year by ISIL attacks. The Suruc attack killed more than 30 people, the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey in more than two years. Furthermore, with the Kurdish terrorist organization PKK increasing its activity in the southeastern regions of the country in response to the political void left from the controversial 2015 parliamentary elections, fresh news of the increasing death toll of terrorism had been headlining newspapers every day throughout the summer. With the failure to launch a coalition government and the announcement of the decision to hold early elections in November, a political limbo in the country led to instability and public unrest. And so, as August 30, 2015 rolled around, there seemed to be very little to celebrate. With so much to mourn and little hope of things looking up in the near future, Fazil Say’s performance of his “Nazim” oratorio was just what many Turkish citizens needed to be reminded of the importance of Victory Day and what it symbolizes: their hard-earned freedom.
The second night of Fazil Say’s concert series in Ankara was sold out and the whole crowd waited in silence for this much-needed reminder as the pianist took his place among a full chorus, the Bilkent Smphony Orchestra, three lead singers and three children all on stage to perform the “Nazim” oratorio. Say’s performance represented an important symbolic victory. Say’s music is characterized by strong melodic and thematic ties to traditional nuances of Ottoman and Turkish culture. These underlying motifs make his music unique, magical and mysterious to many, but immediately recognizable, captivatingly familiar and alluring to the Turkish ear.
Unfortunately, as with most Turkish intellectual, artistic and creative souls, Say was subjected to his fair share of political strife, turmoil and censorship during his career. In 2012, the Turkish government brought charges upon Say for his remarks on Twitter that allegedly insulted Islam and the Muslim identity. Say had retweeted remarks about a poem by the famous eleventh-century poet Omer Khayyam, poking fun at the Islamic idea of an afterlife. He had also, on a separate occasion, joked about hearing a rushed call to prayer, asking if the muezzin was impatient to get away for a quick drink. In 2013, a court in Istanbul handed down a 10-month prison sentence to Say on these charges, later suspended for five years. Say, who is an outspoken atheist and a vocal critic of the government’s social and political policies, denied the charges and after he was sentenced. In so doing, he announced in a written statement that he had committed no crime and was concerned for the state of freedom of expression in his country.
In his latest work, the “Nazim” oratorio, Say pays tribute to a great Turkish intellectual and artist who suffered similar, if not much worse, political misunderstanding and abuse in the hands of his own government. Nazim was born in Selonika, Greece, which was then a part of the dying Ottoman Empire, at the turn of the century. Throughout his life, he endlessly struggled with his two great enemies: his chronic health problems and his unwavering yet misunderstood love for his country.
Nazim’s closest friends describe him as a romantic and a revolutionary. As a poet, he is most acclaimed for the lyrical flow of his poetic expression. However, Nazim is most famous as the symbol of one of the greatest embarrassments in Turkish history. His life of continuous and brutal imprisonment and exile is the embodiment of the paranoia of the early days of the Turkish Republic, remembered now as the tyrannical side of a new, drastically revolutionary and radically patriotic regime. When the newly formed government feared that the public would fail to adapt to the rapid changes it had enforced in social and political spheres, it found solace in suspecting and accusing everyone of being a traitor. The political climate of these years, fittingly recalled as the height of government hypocrisy, was disguised ironically as the height of government patriotism. Nazim, perhaps one of the most devoted patriots in the history of Turkish literature, tragically fell victim to this great hypocrisy.
Nazim wrote “Kuvay-i Milliye: Destan,” the poem that most beautifully expresses Turkish patriotism, while he was in prison on charges of treason. In this masterpiece he writes, “To live, as lone and free as a tree, yet as brotherly as a forest… That is our longing.” These lines echoed in the auditorium in Ankara on August 30 where Say’s compositions accompanied each word, more than half a century after Nazim died in exile in Moscow.
In 2009, the Turkish government announced that it would restore Nazim’s Turkish citizenship of which he was stripped in the 1950s after he fled the country. Yet even as recently as 2005, a teenager was detained and questioned simply for reciting his poetry. In 2013, Say’s prison sentence for insulting Islam was suspended. However, in 2014, the Turkish Presidential Symphony Orchestra dropped three of his pieces from its schedule as the latest in a series of acts of censorship of the pianist’s work. Even as the years pass and those in positions of political authority change, the Turkish government’s irrational fear of the creative freedom to express and produce remains the same.
The political censorship and struggle of the two men whose work was showcased on August 30 not only brought the two together, but also gathered an impressive crowd. As the lead female singer sang one of Nazim’s most emotional odes to his country, written during the last years of his life when he realized he would die in exile and never see his treasured homeland again, tears filled everyone’s eyes. “Memleketim,” she sang repeatedly, a word that has no exact translation in the English language, roughly translating to “my motherland” or “my homeland.” “Memleketim,” she sang, the word expressing a sense of longing and love that one can only feel towards one’s country the way Nazim did his entire life, the way Say proved, with his oratorio, that he does today and the way millions of Turkish people throughout the country remind themselves they do every year, despite all the suffering and loss, on August 30.