Dino Buzzati’s Lieutenant Drogo, who slowly exhausts his life waiting for the Tartars at Fort Bastiani, seems almost to tell the story of Turkey and its diaspora—a life held hostage to the word “soon.” Because sometimes a country’s greatest loss is not the money stolen, the economy wrecked, or the institutions destroyed, but entire lifetimes sacrificed to tomorrows that never arrive.
Before I begin, let me share a sigh of my own. About a quarter of a century ago, I wrote a book called Waiting for the Barbarians, which I believed, in my own way, was something different. Naturally, in a country under the influence of Islamist fascism, I suspect it is now virtually impossible to find a copy. I am currently translating it into different languages and, God willing, hope to publish it again.
But let us turn to today’s subject.
Dino Buzzati, the Italian master whom we lost some 55 years ago, was a writer, journalist, and painter. His works explored loneliness, time, waiting, death, and humanity’s helplessness in the face of absurdity, often through fantastic and allegorical language.
His most famous novel, The Tartar Steppe (1940), tells the story of Giovanni Drogo, a young officer who spends his life at Fort Bastiani waiting for an enemy—and for the great event that will finally transform his life. The novel is a powerful allegory of how we consume the present for the sake of a “great moment” we believe will happen sometime in the future.
Fort Bastiani is not merely a frontier outpost where the enemy never attacks. It is a laboratory in which waiting slowly turns a human being into his own grave.
Buzzati sends the young Lieutenant Drogo north, to a forgotten fortress on the edge of the desert. Drogo intends to stay for just four months. His plan is quite serious: he will obtain a medical report, request a transfer, and return to the city—to the real life waiting for him there.
But he stays.
First for a season, then a year, then thirty years.
Because a rumor circulates within those walls:
The Tartars will come!
No one has seen them. No one even knows anyone who has seen them. But everyone is certain that they will come. And when that day arrives, all those years rotting away on that barren rock will suddenly acquire meaning.
For a long time now, perhaps Turkey can hardly be described in any language other than the grammar of this novel.
We have a peculiar tense called “soon.”
“Soon there will be elections. Soon the economy will recover. Soon there will be a new constitution. Soon there will be a major operation. Soon justice will return. Soon we will go back home.”
The most insidious thing about this tense is that it is not necessarily a lie. Most of these things are theoretically possible. The Tartars of Bastiani are possible too: the north really is a desert, and there really is something beyond it. The issue is not whether the enemy exists. The issue is whether an entire society mortgages its life to that possibility.
And what is being mortgaged is quite tangible. People do not buy homes, have children, start businesses, return, leave, protest, or plant trees. Their justification always comes down to the same sentence:
“Let’s wait a little and see what happens.”
When waiting ceases to be an interim period and becomes a way of life, what remains is no longer a country.
It is a garrison.
Hope as a Method of Government
At Buzzati’s fortress, there are little signs that keep hope alive. Far away in the north, a road is being built—a thin black line advancing slowly across the landscape over the years. They watch it through binoculars. As the road advances, excitement grows.
“They must be coming!”
Then the road stops.
Then it begins again.
For thirty years, what keeps the fortress alive is not an attack, but the periodic renewal of the possibility of an attack.
Is this not exactly how Turkey’s political calendar works?
An election, a party congress, a court hearing, an indictment, an opinion poll, a new “process”…
Each is another stretch of road observed through binoculars. And every time, the same sentence is uttered:
“This time it’s different.”
Then the road stops. Somewhere else another road begins, and the fortress rises to attention once more.
What is really being managed here is uncertainty itself. Because whoever controls tomorrow controls today as well.
The Tartars Are Not a Fact, but a Necessity
The true horror of Buzzati’s novel is not that the Tartars fail to arrive. It is that the fortress cannot survive without them.
Bastiani stands not because it has an enemy, but because it needs one. Without the Tartars, its budget, ranks, guard duties, and all the lives squandered on that barren rock would lose their meaning.
Turkey’s last century, meanwhile, reads almost like a history of constantly renewing the cast of enemies.
Sometimes foreign powers, sometimes lobbies, sometimes internal enemies, sometimes “parallel structures,” and sometimes simply a large segment of the country’s own citizens.
The cast changes. The fortress’s need does not.
Declaring an enemy is, after all, the cheapest form of government. It requires no budget, no reform, and certainly no justice. All you need is a sentry staring north through a pair of binoculars.
There is a subtle distinction that separates Buzzati from Orwell’s endlessly reproduced enemy, Kafka’s unreachable authority, and Beckett’s never-arriving Godot: Buzzati does not blame the victims of the mechanism.
Drogo is not stupid. He is certainly not a coward.
Each time, he has simply had a perfectly reasonable reason to stay for one more year.
That is the story of millions of people as well: every individual decision was reasonable; added together, they amounted to an entire lifetime.
One of the novel’s most unforgettable scenes is not about the enemy, but about rules.
A young soldier is stranded outside the fortress and tries to return, but cannot remember the night’s password. The sentry recognizes him. He knows his voice. He knows he is a friend.
And that is precisely why he shoots him.
Because those are the rules. Such is military order.
In thirty years, this is essentially the fortress’s only casualty: its own soldier, killed by its own rules, under the shadow of fear of an enemy that never comes.
A society’s true losses are likewise suffered not in the great confrontation it awaits, but in what it does to its own people while preparing for that confrontation. Those who forget the password are shot—and afterward, a report is filed declaring that order and discipline functioned perfectly.
And One Day, They Really Do Come
I went back and looked at the book again, only to realize that Buzzati’s ending is far more merciless than I remembered.
The Tartars finally do come.
Troops appear in the north. For the first time, the fortress genuinely prepares for battle. Activity erupts everywhere.
But by then, Drogo is ill.
And here is the cruelest part: when the very thing he has spent his entire life waiting for finally appears, they throw him out of the fortress.
They need to make room for the young officers.
He is put into a carriage and sent away from the fortress to which he has given his life. The long-awaited day has finally arrived—but that day no longer belongs to him.
On the road, in an inn, in an unfamiliar room, he dies alone.
In the final pages, Buzzati reveals that the real battle had always been somewhere else. Drogo’s true enemy was never the Tartars, but death. And in that dark room, the only thing left for him to offer is the manner in which he faces it.
And he does.
And dear reader, this is where our closing metaphor awaits us.
Every society can become Drogo.
For years, it waits for freedom, prosperity, justice, “normalization.” And when the long-awaited day finally arrives, the energy, institutions, memory, lawyers, teachers, and young people needed to welcome it have already been exhausted.
Worse still, when that day comes, those who spent their lives waiting will not be greeted with gratitude and invited in.
They will be asked to make room.
Let us turn the lens on ourselves.
The diaspora has built its own fortress. For ten years, we have lived according to the same grammatical tense:
“When it’s over.”
When this process is over, I’ll do that job. When it’s over, I’ll write that book.
Meanwhile, the children have grown up here, languages have changed, graves have moved here—and our decisions have remained perpetually deferred.
Because looking into the distance through binoculars is always easier than building a life where you actually are.
The Tartar Steppe is not a war novel. It is a novel about time.
Perhaps Turkey’s greatest loss is not its economy or its institutions, but the years that have disappeared. We calculate GDP per capita; sadly, no one calculates the amount of deferred life per capita.
Buzzati’s lesson is not pessimism either.
Whether the Tartars come is perhaps beyond our control. But whether we organize our lives according to their timetable is entirely up to us.
What keeps a fortress standing is not stone, but the watch.
And abandoning the watch is also an option.
Perhaps there is only one thing to do: stop treating today as a rehearsal for a tomorrow that may never come.
Embrace life now. Build our own renaissance. Spend time with our families. Teach. Establish associations. Write books. Plant trees.
In other words, build a life on this side of the desert.
Let the Tartars come if they will.
Let them find us ready—not waiting.
NOTE: During this past week, as I have struggled with the pain of losing my dear friend Hakan Şahinli, this novel has never left my mind. I would be grateful if you could recite a Fatiha for his soul.
