In the Wake of the Kızılırmak Cinema
What is the relationship between humans and place? This is a question that seems simple but is actually very difficult. In recent years, a great deal of research has been carried out on this challenging question and much has been written and said about it. Yet it is only when the spaces we know vanish from before our eyes that we can truly grasp the emotion their presence evokes within us. Especially when these vanishing spaces accumulate and our surroundings take on a completely different form, we find ourselves becoming strangers to that place. The feeling this evokes in me is akin to the loss of a pair of large teeth. They had been there for years, but now they are gone, and their absence fills me with an almost existential anxiety. It is like the pain of death; it is rather difficult to describe. It feels as though the things that are fading away, both within and around us, are making us feel a little more alienated from this world. One day, we too will vanish from here, and others will take our place...
Other people, other conversations and relationships will take our place, but is that all there is to it? Is there not a deeper, more brutal and heartbreaking aspect to the disappearance of the places we live in, where we’ve shared a few words, and which serve as the cradle of our memories? When we see them in a photograph-though ‘photograph’ doesn’t quite capture it anymore-doesn’t our heart ache, doesn’t our soul twist in pain? Doesn’t the stillness of this silent memory, which stores our memories, descend upon us like a dark cloud, casting a shadow over our own souls?
Years ago, I read Sigmund Freud’s ‘Complete Works’ series and came across something else that caught my attention just as much as the thinker’s research. All the books translated as part of the publisher’s project featured the same biographical foreword, and as far as I recall, the opening lines stated that Freud had lived in the same house from the age of two until his late seventies. This statement must not have affected others-particularly the European readers for whom the text was intended-as much as it did me. But I suspect that Turkish readers other than myself felt something similar. For a long time, I tried to visualise this, and indeed to sense how it might foster a sense of trust in a person.
For someone who has moved house at least twenty times in their lifetime, this was certainly no easy task. In this regard, I would say I am closer to the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski than to the Austrian psychoanalyst Freud. In a biographical documentary, whilst talking about how often they had moved house, the director mentioned that as a child he used to climb onto the boxes and sit on them. What a familiar memory... Moreover, how very much it is our own, and how it contains such a quiet, bitter irony. Just like when my mother would tell me how my grandfather had mastered the art of ‘making bales’, each time spreading her hands wide to demonstrate it and making me laugh...
In a previous piece, I wrote about the Gaziantep Earthquake and tried to highlight how the loss of life-which has torn at all our hearts-would soon be forgotten along with the earthquake itself, and how Anatolia is a region with vast experience in this regard, yet one that is, sadly, ‘without a history’. Not much time has passed since I wrote ‘Anatolia In the Shadows’, and this enigmatic region has, alas, taken another bundle of memories into its embrace-along with all its lived experiences-hidden them away, and put them to sleep forever. It is difficult for me to describe the emotions this has stirred within me. Despite straining every ounce of my intuitive power, I cannot conjure it in my imagination, nor can I grasp it. I cannot manage to remove a lived experience from the plane of existence as if it had never happened. I cannot comprehend time because, in this regard, human understanding is limited; we are made that way...
My high school years have a rather hazy atmosphere. It is, to some extent, only natural that they should be interwoven with the strange, melancholic, ambiguous and uncertain mists of adolescence... At that time, our home was in Sokullu-a neighbourhood where the spread of shanty towns had not yet been fully curbed-next to Ahmed Arif Park. It was a council flat, and like in any such block, we were children of similar social backgrounds-playing football together, going to school, falling in love, falling out-whilst our parents went to work in the mornings. I had a friend who was a few years older than me, though he was only a year above me at school because I’d started early; for instance, we’d smoked our first cigarette together, hiding it from our families. We’d ‘stolen’ our fathers’ car together for the first time and gone for a spin. We’d play football on the artificial pitch now and then, or go to the cinema. These relationships just formed naturally between us.
The relationships between us were so natural that they often came down to our fathers exchanging greetings whilst parking their cars outside the front door, or our mothers asking after each other’s well-being when popping round to borrow some washing-up liquid from a neighbour. We started talking to our next-door neighbour, for instance, when the building’s automatic light went out and he switched it on. He had colourful eyes and exceptionally sharp vision. We met our friend on the second floor when a football rolled onto their balcony. That’s how we were; that’s who we were. In contrast, the shanty house opposite us-stubbornly resisting demolition and the only one left standing-seemed to gaze at us from across an endless sea, even though it was clearly visible from our fourth-floor balcony and there was literally just a stone’s throw between us. We would meet and exchange greetings with them as we parked our car next to the small, empty garden right beside that shanty. There was always a patch of green onions growing in their little garden. The daughter of the house, now of an age that could be considered past her prime, would put on her baggy trousers, wrap a white headscarf around her head, and wash clothes in a basin. She would then hang these clothes out to dry on a simple line. Her brother-whom I assumed was unemployed or worked only occasionally, who was always smoking, and who wrapped his thick woollen scarf right up to his mouth-was always angry; in my own childish world, I thought of him as a ‘troublemaker’. Sometimes he would kick the stones on the ground as he walked, or shout as he left the house. They had an elderly father, and I suppose he was bedridden. He died some time later. I don’t remember their mother at all. I suppose she had died too. Years later, there was a fire in that house, and later, during my university years, we saw that it had been demolished overnight...
Ankara changed before my very eyes, and we changed along with it. Right next to our house there was a slope leading downwards, and at the bottom of this slope lay an area that was plunged into darkness at night-almost as if it vanished-because it wasn’t lit. In winter, this slope would freeze over. I remember falling over countless times because I never managed to learn how to walk on ice. I’m talking about the short connecting road between Sokullu and Öveçler streets. Back then, the road hadn’t been tarmacked yet, and the modern neighbourhood market we have today didn’t exist either. That market was built after we’d grown up, and we used to play ‘Japanese castle’ football on the construction site. Somewhere down that slope, hidden beneath that darkness, lay a large shanty town. It was as if they’d draped a veil of darkness over it to hide it. As I mentioned earlier, the distances between us and the shanty towns were actually very short, yet we lived in completely different worlds. This was the case even though we were the children of middle-class civil servants.
One day, during my secondary school years, my desk mate had an epileptic fit and collapsed on top of me. When he came round, our teacher asked me to take him home. His name was Ercan. He was an immigrant boy with bright blue eyes. I remember getting on very well with him and that he was a good footballer. On that rainy winter’s day, Ercan and I walked together and reached the top of that hill that ran past our street. It was at the end of that road—right next to our house, yet a world I’d never seen before-that we saw that other world.
That other world was called Erzurum Mahallesi. Its winding, labyrinthine streets were filled with puddles and mud. Small children, far from their mothers, played barefoot in these filthy puddles, their noses running; when they saw me, they would stop and stare at us intently, as if we were strange creatures from another world. The air was thick with the acrid smell of cheap coal and such dense smoke that you’d have thought a fire had broken out. It was on that day—when I took my classmate, who was having a seizure, by the arm and walked him home—that I first encountered the reality of shanty towns and destitution. This encounter would have an indelible effect on me over the years; this impact would rise to the surface like a volcanic eruption every time I encountered that same social reality and experienced it in my own life, striking me one after another like the shocks of an earthquake. So much so that whenever I encounter deprivation, poverty or injustice, I feel exactly the same things as I did back then; a deep sense of anger mixed with sorrow...
I have never forgiven injustice. It makes no difference whether it was done to me or to someone else. To forgive injustice is beyond human capacity.
It was here in Ankara that we lived, shaped our personalities, socialised, formed our values and became individuals-to the extent that we could... Ankara is that sort of city. It gives people an identity. It provides the tools to build it. It educates and offers a holistic, complete reality in a way that is found nowhere else. It can bring people from all walks of life into a kind of common ground. It can bring together the child of a civil servant attending secondary school and a child from a shanty town within the same social context, fostering bonds of friendship and mutual support between them. It also provides certain tools: its cinemas, bookshops, bars, parks and schools-that is how it is. In a way, wherever you go, you leave a mark, however small, and build connections that bind you to that place.
Or rather, that’s how it used to be...
The Ankara of old is no more. Nor is the Turkey of old. The middle class, for instance, no longer has the same easy and direct access to the means that would allow it to socialise. I am talking about a Turkey where one could take a secondary school student to the cinema and a bar every week, buy them a few books a month on installments whilst sending them to a cram school, and even cover their travel expenses. It used to exist. Here, ‘the old’ refers to a period of no more than twenty years.
That is how it is, and that is how it was. Even when speaking of the hazy, turbulent twilight of adolescence, a place that no longer exists came to mind, for example. The Derya Cinema, where we watched some of the most striking examples of that charged atmosphere on the big screen… It was on Necatibey Street. It’s gone now. That’s where we first saw the film “Ağır Roman”. We also watched Yılmaz Güney’s “Yol” (The Road) there first, once the censorship had been lifted. We went on the very day it was released. We were in our sixth-form years. We’d meet at the corner, in front of the Ministry of Public Works’ annex building at the start of Kumrular Street, and head there from there.
Come to think of it, that’s gone too...
One of our regular haunts in Ankara during our early youth, with our first loves and first thrills, was the Shadow Bar. Later on, we started calling it ‘Gölge’. I suppose it was because the way it sounded in our language was just as mysterious and cool as the original. It was on Bayındır Street, opposite what is now the Çankaya District Population Office, next to Rumeli İşkembecisi (thank goodness our soup shop is still there; passing by feels like bumping into an old friend, so we’re grateful for that too...) Gölge Bar was for weekend outings or the occasional visit to soothe the pain of unrequited love-at least that’s how it was for us. After all, we weren’t exactly ‘trendy’ types; we were just the children of middle-class civil servants, and we didn’t have girlfriends very often. The Gölge Bar -also known as Shadow Bar- had a unique atmosphere. Inside, there was a strange sense of anonymity. A feeling of being both ‘one of us’ and yet ‘everyone in their own world’-it was, in a way, a hallmark of Ankara at that time. The Gölge Bar was like a distillation of that. That feeling would begin at the tables in the dimly lit inner room. The ground-floor hall, windowless yet spacious, created a true sense of ‘our place’. The popcorn served at the tables in winter, and occasionally chestnuts, added to that. A sort of island from a bygone era, yet utterly modern. There was live music at Nefes Bar on the upper floors of the SSK Office Building just two streets away, but we rarely went there back then. The ‘more serious’ older lads were there; we used the toilets downstairs. When we started university, we’d go there, enchanted by the sounds of the violin and the kaval, but after a while, it too would move to another place. A place that no longer had the same old charm.
Where can you find that old-fashioned charm these days, anyway...
Kuğulu Park in Çankaya and, I think, Kıtır-which is still open, I believe-were a bit of a luxury for us back then; I’m talking about our secondary school days. Still, I remember going to Kuğulu Park with the ‘picnic provisions’ our mums had prepared, and starting to have ‘kokoreç and beer’ at Kıtır. Later on, we’d start hanging out at the second-hand bookshops in Tunalı, building our own collections of records and books. Back when we started collecting records, the revival of records as a ‘trend’ and their return to production—at least in our country --wasn't even on the cards. What’s more, there was no such thing as the ‘imported record’ craze we see today. We collected old records, just like old books. Each one carried a sense of history, a weight of memories. There are two in particular that still give me goosebumps whenever I listen to them today. One was a wedding anniversary gift; I think it belonged to a diplomat. It was Herbert von Karajan’s recording of Dvořák’s ‘New World’, and I suppose it was a gift because the back was inscribed with ‘To my dear wife, with wishes for new worlds…’ and signed. The other was a Doors record, and on the back there was a stamp from Kabul, Afghanistan. Back when we started collecting records from second-hand bookshops, books weren’t nearly as expensive either. The book stalls we now call ‘pirate’ stalls could also be found in side streets. For a while, during our ‘pimply teenage’ years, as a high-school friend of mine whom I loved dearly put it, we were obsessed with Stephen King. Back then, for some reason, being scared was in fashion. Perhaps because, during adolescence, never being “scared” was seen as a way of proving one’s maturity. We watched horror films constantly and weren’t scared. We told terrifying stories and weren’t scared. Just like in the Grimm’s Fairy Tale story of “The Man Who Sought Fear”… I remember buying many books on suspense and, in particular, ‘horror’ themes from that charming little stall on Konur Street-the one we miss so much-run by Dost Kitabevi during those long summer holidays that eventually started to get a bit tedious, and later from another bookshop that opened in its place and stayed there for a short while. We weren’t just scared by books, of course; we were scared by VHS videos too, and we’d practically become addicted to 80s horror. Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” still sticks in my mind today.
Buying pirated books and cassettes wasn’t exactly ethical, though back then we weren’t really in a position to get into ethical debates; all of this was simply a necessity we had to resort to, of course. I bought my first Metallica CD from one of those ‘pirate’ stalls on Yüksel Street. It was a Black album ripped onto a BASF CD, and because the seller had heard a rumour of a ‘police raid’ at that very moment and had hurriedly packed up his stall and fled, I hadn’t even been able to pay him. The CD was left in my hand. For a while, I searched for that seller on Yüksel Street, both to pay him and because I suspected the recording error at the start of the track ‘Wherever I May Roam’ on the album was due to a faulty pressing, so I wanted to exchange the CD. If that seller is still alive today, wherever he may be, my regards to him. Yes, we were buying pirated copies because, for example, we couldn’t always find the money to buy original CDs from ‘Ada Müzik’-which used to be right next to Yüksel Street at ‘Selanik’ and is now a ‘pet centre’. Cassettes were still available on the market and were cheaper, but we couldn’t even afford those. We listened to foreign music, and the price of imported cassettes was very high due to the stamp duty. I suppose it still is, though I’m not sure as we now live in the age of Spotify. By the way, Ada Müzik has closed down too-yet another venue that’s gone... The more I think about it, the more I realise just how many there are...
Before long, CD technology had completely replaced cassettes. Recording technologies were constantly changing. One day, a friend of ours from abroad brought back a device that played small CDs called MDs, and shortly afterwards we began to see such items in the basement of the American Market, another semi-legal shopping spot located at the entrance to İzmir Street. A short while later-and here I’m talking about a timeframe of perhaps one or two years-when MP3 technology emerged, we ‘moved on’ to Maltepe Market. We began acquiring what we had previously bought as individual albums as ‘discographies’ recorded onto CDs. What we were doing back then was, yes, a form of exploitation, but we were poor children from developing countries, and since we couldn’t afford licences, we ‘plundered’ whatever we could find—from cheap classical music CDs to MP3 discographies and pirated books. I say “we”, but there were only a few of us, and perhaps it is because I have come to understand the immense significance that a few people can hold that I now remember those friends with fondness. Perhaps it was done so that we might read or listen to them; I conclude that it is not wrong to think this way. Indeed, even today I can’t help but think that Maltepe Market is the result of a sort of ‘controlled piracy’ logic. It was a place where we’d pick up albums by bands like Dream Theater, Stradivarious, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Iced Earth, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead – bands I listened to back then, some of whose albums might be considered heavy by today’s standards. A friend of mine was also building a collection of films and games. We used to swap things between us. I sometimes wander around there today; there’s a park there now, and it’s a bit unsettling to think that I bought thousands of albums and films from that empty plot of land where the wind now blows. A semi-prefabricated place that left its mark on you in some way—or even a pile of tents-and now it’s gone.
A friend of my father’s was a cinema owner back in those days. He ran the On Cinema on Azerbaycan Street in Bahçelievler-also known as Third Street. It was a charming, upmarket neighbourhood cinema spread over three floors. They had given me a pair of complimentary tickets to the On Cinema. Of course, they couldn’t have known that we were just two film buffs in our early seventeens. It was a ‘crazy’ time for my best friend and me. We went to the cinema almost every day. Sometimes we’d play bowling in the hall downstairs and wouldn’t come home until evening. There were times we’d go to see certain films six or eight times. The cinema owner was utterly baffled. He’d grown tired of signing our tickets and invitation cards. One day, peering at us through his thick-lensed glasses with a look of astonishment, he asked, “It seems you really love the cinema,” and was met with the shy smile of a pair of eyes. Those cinema days went on for several years. We were watching hundreds of films. But not just because they were free. We were already watching a lot, and on top of that, this windfall had come our way. Perhaps it had found us precisely because we watched so much. Film CDs were passed from hand to hand. They were turning up in a huge box under my bed, on the table, on the coffee table, even in the bathroom. My friend was the same. After his mum retired from teaching, she’d started selling jewellery on the ground floor of Limon Bazaar on Yüksel Street, and we’d immediately become friends with the chubby lad copying film and game CDs at the two stalls next door. “Which film was that, the one with the mafia? What was that film, the one where the bespectacled man robs a bank?” We knew them all by heart. Sometimes when I open Amazon Prime today, I laugh out loud; no platform could ever show us as many films as we did back then. Everyone had their favourite director. My friend had memorised Akira Kurosawa’s “The Frog Oil Salesman”, whilst I was gradually drifting towards Polish cinema and the New Wave. But we didn’t just watch “art films” all the time; we watched plenty of adventure, horror and fantasy films.
It was back in those days that I first discovered the Kızılırmak Cinema. We used to find films there that weren’t shown anywhere else. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but since only a few films were ‘rotated’ in the mainstream cinemas each week, we’d go there when the others had run out of films. The Megapol Cinema was right next door. It had a rather old-fashioned auditorium back then. On the streets either side of it was the Metropol Cinema. But I’m talking about the old Metropol Cinema. It hadn’t become so commercialised yet. Later on, the Büyülü Fener Cinema opened on the other side and began showing more high-quality films. But of course, that was much later-at least for us, it was much later... At the Büyülü Fener Cinema, I had the chance to watch directors I loved, such as Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieślowski, because they held film festivals there. But the atmosphere at the Kızılırmak Cinema was something else. It was as if this place had never changed. It was a place left over from the old days, a forgotten place. It was a kind of sanctuary. It had no pomp or advertising. Situated behind the Kocatepe Mosque, just below a private tuition centre, it had a rather steep and narrow staircase—a place that might even make one feel a little uneasy upon entering. Yet those narrow, unassuming stairs, once you stepped through the door, offered a simple, unexpected and indescribable warmth.
As soon as you walked through the door, the ticket office was right opposite a small lobby. I only remember one ticket office. Sometimes we’d have to jostle to get a ticket. There was a cheerful and friendly member of staff there-a woman, I think. It had the atmosphere of an old-fashioned café. Indeed, I remember very clearly that only a few tables could be squeezed into the corner and that the chairs resembled those found in cafés. I usually came to this unpretentious, simple, and intimate cinema with my girlfriend or my closest friends. It was a special place. I don’t even know how many screens it had-perhaps two or three at most—but I always feel as though I watched films in the same one. On summer evenings, we’d leave there and have a few beers at the nearby bars. We’d go for a walk. Back then, Kızılay had a more refined atmosphere, one that didn’t make you feel uneasy, where it was possible to stay out until the late hours of the night.
After leaving the Kızılırmak Cinema, Olgunlar Street was no more than a ten-minute walk away. If we hadn’t been watching a particularly heavy film and it was daytime, we’d pop into the bookshops there and pick up a few books. Sometimes we’d leave Olgunlar and head towards Kavaklıdere. Further up the road, just to our left, was the Akün Cinema. It had just one, but a huge auditorium and a balcony. It was an old cinema, but watching a film there was a different experience altogether. My father once told me he’d watched Yılmaz Güney’s “Arkadaş” in that very auditorium. Come to think of it, that place isn’t there anymore either. At least it manages to preserve its identity and dedication to art and culture under the guise of a theatre.
I said that the Kızılırmak Cinema was a bit like a café. I meant that in a positive sense, because the cafés of our youth were lovely places where we celebrated birthdays and spent quality time with friends. The three-storey Aşgana Café, located further down Ziya Gökalp Street, was just like that. It’s gone now. The Köksal Pastry Shop, where Selanik Street opens out towards Sakarya, was like that. It had customers who’d been coming for thirty years. It’s gone now. I’d written before that the sense of isolation from this place-which, like the great earthquake in our lives, erases and scrapes away our identity as if it had never existed—was the real issue. I didn’t expect anyone to understand that. After all, how seriously can a discussion about places be taken in the face of a disaster like an earthquake? But this is the result. Indeed, it emerges in this essay too. All the places around us—those that shape our identity, occupy our lives, and store our beautiful memories-eventually drift away and disappear. I’ve heard that in cities like Paris, London and Hamburg, there are houses and mansions that have witnessed hundreds of years of history. Just imagine: perhaps your great-grandfather once swung on a swing set up against the very wall next to you… I cannot begin to imagine the sense of wholeness that must bring. As I mentioned at the start of this piece. As I wrote in a previous piece; whilst writing these lines, I see the situation as if I were a pigeon looking down at the earth from an aeroplane flying over Anatolia at night. As the cities shrink, they remain like individual shepherd’s fires vanishing into a dark sea. One by one, they fade from view, and their place is taken by a silence and indifference that resemble death.
The Kızılırmak Cinema was one of those little beacons of light. It put up a valiant fight and was much loved, but sadly it could not withstand the passage of time. Having deprived us of yet another link to the Ankara of our youth, yet always remembered with fond and warm feelings, it has taken its place in the sea of silence.
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