Necip F. Bahadır
This piece reflects on the death of Ahmet Turan Alkan, a Turkish writer whose life was shaped—and ultimately worn down—by political repression, imprisonment, and enforced silence. More than an obituary, it is a meditation on how sensitive, principled voices can be broken not by a single act, but by years of pressure, abandonment, and fear.
“Every death is an untimely death.”
Ahmet Turan Alkan was seventy-two years old. He had been in the hospital for ten days. His heart—sensitive, worn, and long burdened—finally stopped. There was still hope. One never gives up hope in God. But this time, hope was not enough. Medicine, too, was helpless.
He never left the hospital.
I learned that he had taken his last breath from a message shared by Mümtazer Türköne. I was shaken. My chest tightened. My heart hurt.
Turkey has become a kind of hell for people with fragile hearts.
Yes, destiny exists. Of course it does. But it was not fate alone that killed him. It was the disappointments he endured, the betrayals of friends and companions, the way he was gradually erased from public life—condemned to absence—that broke him.
If one must speak of a “culprit,” there is no need to look beyond the AKP government, which left no oxygen for people like Alkan to breathe in the neighborhoods they once belonged to.
Alkan spent 22 months of his life in prison. His crime was writing. According to the prosecutor who drafted the indictment, his articles “contained no apparent criminal elements”—yet he was tried and sentenced anyway. For nearly two years, he lived between four walls, deprived even of a handful of sky.
But what truly destroyed him was not prison alone—it was abandonment.
The publishing house Ötüken, which had published his books for years, did not merely distance itself from him; it openly turned its back. It devastated him. He swallowed the poison in silence.
“I can’t carry this,” he said.
It was said that he lost an alarming amount of weight in prison. He became skin and bones—something clearly visible in photographs. I heard that he weighed himself every day. His weight loss concerned even the prison administration.
In court records, I saw him explain it himself:
“It’s grief. Nothing else. I’m not ill.”
Even the judges must have noticed. He felt compelled to explain.
He was sentenced to 10.5 years in prison, along with five fellow writers from the now-shuttered newspaper Zaman. His courtroom statement was nothing short of a manifesto:
“I am proud of what I have written and of my intellectual stance. I have no regrets. I did not apologize to the government, and I will not. I would rather remain imprisoned by its oppression than walk free by its favor. This is a matter of honor for me. I will not lick the blade that cuts my throat. I will not beg tyrants for mercy.”
Those words stand on their own.
Alkan was also a thinker deeply concerned with language and culture. He argued that one of the Ottoman Empire’s greatest achievements was not military conquest, but the fact that it governed for six centuries by elevating Turkish into a language of science and administration. He believed the modern Turkish state had a responsibility to teach and preserve Ottoman Turkish.
When he was expecting a reversal of his sentence, the Supreme Court instead upheld it. The shock was immense. One does not need to experience returning to prison to know how devastating that is. Reason and conscience suffice.
Friends searched for a way out. Wasn’t there a path? Political contacts—particularly among nationalist circles—proved useless. Even the old power brokers, the “crocodiles,” offered no help.
Eventually, someone came to him with a document. If he signed it, they promised, the ruling could be revised.
He read it. Thought about it. It was a heavy text—coarse, humiliating. Under pressure, reluctantly, he said “yes.”
After his death, that very text was circulated online. A pro-government tabloid published it with a disgraceful headline suggesting he had been “deceived.” Even death was not respected.
I searched other outlets. Some remained silent. A famous theater figure’s death had been breaking news; Alkan’s passing was barely mentioned.
In difficult times, the heart and the tongue do not always say the same thing. Many moral traditions acknowledge this—there is allowance, no blame. Part of me says, “I wish he had not signed it.” Another part understands him completely. Prison is unbearable—especially for someone as sensitive and fragile as Alkan.
He said “yes,” but it never sat well with him.
He withdrew from the world. He closed his door—not metaphorically, but literally. He did not return to prison, but he turned his home into one. He saw very few people. One room became a small woodworking shop. He wrote about this himself—trying to endure through manual labor, through family, through his grandchild.
But he was a man who breathed through writing.
The AKP government took his pen from his hand. Shackled his wrists. For a writer like Alkan, being cut off from writing is worse than death. He was turned into what one might call a civilian dead man.
He once told a prominent journalist that he was writing a novel in prison. He even named it: “My Right Side.” It was a political novel—critical of nationalism and conservative ideology. He managed to get it out. But it was never published.
Eventually, he no longer had the strength. He didn’t want to be discussed, or visible. He could not survive another imprisonment. He knew it.
A former ruling-party figure later wrote on social media:
“They branded him a terrorist because he criticized the aesthetics of the Çamlıca Mosque. They imprisoned him for two years. He turned his back on the world. He died of heartbreak.”
Turkey, under AKP rule, has long ceased to be a place where delicate hearts can survive.
Ahmet Turan Alkan was widely regarded as one of the finest stylists of the Turkish language. Some even called him “Turkey’s Sartre.” Like Sartre, of whom De Gaulle once said “He is France,” one could say: Ahmet Turan Alkan was Turkey.
But no one dared say it out loud.
He had a singular voice and style. The country failed him. It squandered a rare talent. He authored more than twenty books. I read many of them. Rivers Resentful of Their Beds still lingers on my palate.
Let me share two paragraphs from its back cover—words that now feel prophetic:
“If one day you meet someone whose eyes light up with a quiet smile when they say ‘Turkey,’ greet them in a deep, wordless language. They too are a crocodile. And the only rhyme for ‘crocodile’ in Turkish is ‘Ah.’ Ah—this is a bitter story…”
Generations resentful of their beds… How many have been sacrificed on these lands? A geography that embraces strangers yet denies its own children the right to live.
When asked “How did you know him?” my answer is simple:
“I knew him well.”
He was a gentle man, with a broken heart.
A beautiful soul, shattered piece by piece.
And yes—he had his reasons.
May God forgive his shortcomings.
May he rest in peace.
