This essay is a personal reflection on the death of Ahmet Turan Alkan, a prominent Turkish writer, intellectual, and public moral voice who died in January 2026 at the age of seventy-two. Some news touches your soul before it reaches your ears. What follows is a meditation on loss, friendship, repression, and the way time continues to move forward even when something essential has been taken from us.
Before a single word is spoken, your entire body trembles—as if the body’s deep memory senses disaster in advance.
That was exactly the moment when the phone rang.
The name on the screen was not calling for casual conversation. The tone itself, the silence between words, the hesitation in the voice on the other end—everything felt wrong.
Life had already been wrong for more than a decade in this country. And then the sentence arrived, sudden and final:
“We lost Ahmet Turan Alkan.”
Does the world stop at moments like this?
No.
The world does something far more cruel: it keeps turning.
People continue walking in the streets. Traffic noise does not pause. The sun does not delay its setting. Only something inside you collapses, as if a vital structural beam has been pulled out. Someone you felt close to, someone you learned from, someone whose existence you assumed would always be there—solid, reliable, a moral reference point—
Is suddenly gone.
So easily. As simply as a heart stopping. In a hospital bed, after days connected to machines.
He is gone… Ahmet Turan Alkan.
Even saying his name hurts. Because for many of us in Turkey, he was never just a writer. He was an elder, a mentor, a moral compass—sometimes even a refuge. Especially in a country where writing, thinking, and expressing ideas have become punishable acts.
When he was imprisoned for 709 days in Silivri Prison, a high-security facility outside Istanbul that has become a symbol of political repression, he once said: “Half of my heart remained in Silivri.” We remained there with him.
How do you explain the pain of a man who spent nearly two years of his 72-year life behind bars simply for what he wrote?
Even after his release, there was always a quiet sorrow in him—grief for colleagues who remained imprisoned or silenced. Yet he never abandoned his insistence on peace, dignity, and social reconciliation.
Thinking back now, I realize I may have been preparing myself for this loss long before it arrived. What hurts most is knowing that I hadn’t even heard he had been placed in intensive care ten days earlier.
In this country, one of the cruel “gifts” of authoritarian rule is fear—fear of even checking on loved ones.
If I call him, will that cause him harm?
Will my greeting become a burden he must pay for?
A poisoned era was constructed by corrupt, power-hungry political actors who cloaked themselves in religion.
We have grown accustomed to losing our best people early—first spiritually, through injustice, exile, and prison, and then physically. But familiarity does not mean acceptance. And it certainly does not mean the pain fades.
When I hung up the phone, my mind flooded with memories of Turan Hoca.
Which one could I possibly choose?
Once, jokingly, I seated my son—who works as a cameraman—beside him and said, “Hoca, give him a couple of slaps.” He couldn’t do it. He simply smiled. That was who he was.
His style blended deep humor with intellectual seriousness. He moved effortlessly between classical Ottoman Turkish and modern language, making complex ideas accessible without ever cheapening them. His dialog-driven writing felt like a conversation with a close friend across a table.
Every line carried his love for Sivas, a conservative Anatolian city he deeply identified with—his sense of home, belonging, and cultural memory. In his book The Sixth City, he symbolically added Sivas to the five cities immortalized by the famous Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.
What loyalty. What depth of belonging.
And now that voice has fallen silent. That pen has stopped.
For ten years, the ruling powers of this era succeeded in silencing him. A thief steals—that is expected. But these thieves stole far more than material things.
They stole our joy of living.
They made us afraid to greet one another.
They did not merely ruin the economy—they hollowed out culture, art, and literature.
They may not care, but they took Ahmet Turan Alkan’s pen from his hand for a decade.
When he lived in Üsküdar, a historic district of Istanbul on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, I visited him often. Later he moved to Bursa, an old Ottoman capital south of Istanbul—farther away, but I still went whenever I could.
At a small intellectual gathering, we once stepped onto a balcony overlooking the Sea of Marmara. He lit one of the few cigarettes he allowed himself.
“Should we go smoke a hookah?” I asked.
“With anything that has smoke in it!” he laughed.
That evening, I took a photograph of him—something he rarely allowed. For some reason, that day he did. He later put it on his website.
Inside, he impressed us again. A painting on the wall depicted a rural scene at dusk. Someone said, “Morning light.”
“I don’t think so,” Ahmet Hoca replied. “Look—women are gathered at the fountain. This isn’t morning. It’s sunset.”
His intelligence was effortless, never performative.
During the period when the government was preparing to seize independent newspapers, we often met at the newsroom. You may have seen the photo of him sitting in the garden with another prominent intellectual, holding a plastic bag of basic necessities.
“However long it takes, we’ll stay,” he said calmly.
Knowing about my health problems, he later told me, “You should go home—you could get into trouble.”
“Hoca,” I replied, “we can’t abandon people like you.”
We had a similar conversation a year ago, during what turned out to be my last vacation in Turkey. Our families stayed at a modest thermal hotel in Sındırgı, a small town in western Turkey. There, I saw how deeply ordinary people loved him—villagers, café owners, strangers in mountain towns all recognized him instantly.
I promised him I would make a documentary about his life. I started it, but never finished. When I showed him a short clip, he said gently, “It’s too emotional. Don’t publish it.”
I didn’t.
But now I promise: if I find it, I will.
Because it has become a debt.
For years now, every time the phone rings, I feel fear. I expect bad news. Perhaps that is the natural condition of living under oppression.
I learned of his death through a ringing phone. My heart already feels like an old, worn-out engine. It was as if a massive stone fell on it.
How can this be? Is Ahmet Turan Alkan really gone?
I wanted the world to stop—but it didn’t. Do you know what it’s like when time keeps moving while you are frozen?
That is how I have been since yesterday.
Prayer is our only refuge.
So I ask the same of you.
Forget the gossip. Forget the petty arguments. The world has lost a good man. It has become a little uglier.
May God receive him with mercy.
With every prayer, I remember him leading the congregation.
I testify: Ahmet Turan Alkan was a man of faith and integrity.
My condolences to his wife Süheyla, and to his sons.
May he rest in peace.
