We were taken by a vehicle at a very early hour in the morning to that building I’d never seen before. We were shoved and jostled inside. Everything, everywhere was a metallic colour. There were others inside, too. People wearing yellow boiler suits, funny helmets and massive gloves were running about here and there. It was crowded; the air felt sticky with humidity. I had thought whatever was going to happen here would be quite fun, though. Yet there was an odd, unsettling atmosphere inside. We began to tense up. Tension was a contagious disease, it seemed. I wasn’t feeling well at all.

Was tension just a state of mind? Could tension have a smell?

Bright lights were glaring down on us. Creaking, clanking metallic noises heightened the tension I was wrapped up in. Doors were opening, closing, slamming. The yellow people were carrying things from one place to another.

Why am I here? Why are we here?

There was a sharp, damp smell. Actually, no, no… There were many smells here. Dampness, some chemical odours…

Then they bundled all of us into a cold room. Yes, it was cold. Very cold. The people in yellow boiler suits were moving about like robots now. The tension we were caught in had grown even stronger. I tried not to feel this tension for a while. I thought about other things. I thought about my friends back at the farm who weren’t with me right now. I wish they were here with me. Honestly, when will I go back to them? How long is this nonsense going to last? I can’t bear these smells and bright lights any longer!

One of the yellow people lifted a metal lever, and then came a noisy machine sound… If only I could understand what was going on! After a while, I started hearing screams from up ahead. Hey! What’s happening over there? My heart rate was shooting up involuntarily.

No, no… I’m not scared. They’ll round us all up soon and take us back to the farm; I’m sure of it. A few pigs ahead of me were talking amongst themselves. “Humans are good. They feed us. But these yellow, masked creatures aren’t human, I reckon. They look like it, but we’re mistaken.”

Smells were blending into one another. Dampness, chemicals, blood… blood, was it? A river of blood started flowing from the front towards the back. Many of us were peeing involuntarily. The smell of blood mixed with the smell of urine. I needed to be brave, but I started crying involuntarily. Hey! When are we going back to the farm?! Cut it out with this nonsense already. As we drifted closer to the front ranks, I saw them forcing us one by one into a small, metal box. Not a single person who went into that box ever came back. There are about twenty others ahead of me now. Is it possible for me to escape from here? Fifteen left.

And now!

Oh no! What was that? My whole body shuddered with an electric shock. What are you doing? Are you going to kill me?

Are you going to kill me?

My turn was about to come. I don’t want to go into that box.

All I want is to go back to the farm and breathe in that smell of earth just one last time.

From the outside, it might look like I live a comfortable and easy life. But this wasn’t the life I dreamed of. All I ever wanted was to roam the fields, let the wind mess up my mane, sweat under the sun, and then roll around in the mud when it rained.

Things didn’t quite turn out that way.

I was born in a stable, the son of a champion sire and a champion mare — two legends who stormed the tracks for years. My mum and dad named me Arnold, but the racing world knows me by the moniker my boss gave me: Storm Chaser. Irony much? Every single week, my name is a huge joke for all the racing pundits in the morning bulletins.

Anthony, who used to boss my parents back in the day, made a fortune off them. When I was born, because I was their offspring — carrying the genes of two champions — Anthony gave me that name. But forget everything you thought you knew about biology! I was a massive disappointment to Anthony. I’m sorry, but I just didn’t want to be like Mum and Dad.

Yet, Anthony never gave up. Even though I always finished dead last, he stubbornly entered me into every single race. He never lost his faith in me. Or rather, I just never managed to destroy that faith. And it wasn’t just Anthony; there was someone else who believed in me unconditionally because of my bloodline: that guy with the glasses, mustache, and flat cap — you know the one, sitting in the front row of the grandstand for every single race, visiting me in the paddock just before post time, whispering that he trusts me. He’s right here again today, and I bet you anything he placed an each-way bet on me, knowing full well he’d lose his money.

If only they knew how much I loathe running. Running? Why are we even running? I’m exhausted. I don’t want to run at all. Wouldn’t it be nice to just live out a normal life? Why does it never occur to the other runners here that our existence has nothing to do with this nonsense? Honestly, if I could, I’d hand in my resignation.

And here we go again… I honestly don’t know how much longer I can put up with this, folks. Aye, now we’re heading into those tiny starting stalls. Soon, someone’s going to trigger the start. And I’ll run, run, run, drenched in sweat. Though without putting in any real effort, of course. Just for the sake of it. Then I’ll finish the race second from last, third from last — or hey, if there are any horses out there even less conditioned and genetically unluckier than me, maybe fifth from last. After the race, the bespectacled, mustache-wearing guy will leave the stands looking disappointed, though not angry. I know he’ll be right back here for the next meeting… Meanwhile, Anthony will come over, stroke my mane, and say, “Hard luck, Storm Chaser,” with a look full of hope and patience. “There’s always next time; don’t you worry…” I’m really not worrying, Anthony. Don’t you sweat it.

Into our stalls we go. I’m number 7 in this race. I scan the field one by one to see if there are any familiar faces. Aye, I know pretty much all of them — the usual suspects I’ve raced against a dozen times. Just a couple of fillies I don’t recognize. Number 16, for instance — first time I’ve seen her. Must be new to the circuit. Her mane, her eyes… absolutely stunning. If I’d seen her before, I’d definitely remember this gorgeous creature! Strangely, I hadn’t noticed her in the paddock at all.

A distant bell started ringing. What was that? The other horses — and my number 16 — broke into a gallop. Wait a minute, are we racing? Has the race started? Am I supposed to be running? A few seconds late, I broke into a run, too. Number 16 was way out in front. I simply had to introduce myself to her today. I started off at my usual leisurely pace, but I figured I’d better pick it up a bit. I couldn’t exactly trot up to number 16 and say, “Hi, I’m the kid who always finishes last!” I needed to catch up. Right then, she was one of the top three front-runners. I had to impress her, though I wasn’t sure I could actually pace alongside her during the race. Then again, there was zero chance she’d give me the time of day otherwise.

Leaving the rest of the field behind, I overtook them one by one. There were only five runners ahead of me now. My eyes caught Anthony for a second; he was grinning from ear to ear. The man with the cap in the grandstand was literally chewing on his cap in excitement. Number 16 was sitting in second place, and I was right on her quarters. Number 16 wasn’t just breathtakingly gorgeous in her face and eyes; her physique was out of this world, too.

The finish line was fast approaching. With one final burst of effort, I overtook number 16 and the grumpy front-runner. Winning the race would’ve been nice, but I wanted to win number 16 over with a touch of chivalry. I eased up just a bit, whispered, “Ladies first,” and let her pass me. She crossed the line first; I took second.

After the race, I trotted over to number 16.

“Hi, I’m Arnold. What’s your name?”

“Cinderella,” she said.

“Is that your real name, or your racing name?”

“My real name is Sandra. Why did you let me win?”

“Because…”

As I was about to answer her question, one of the fillies we’d just raced alongside trotted over. She pressed her muzzle softly against Sandra’s and congratulated her.

“Arnold, let me introduce you to my partner, Carolina. Carolina, this is Arnold.”

“Pleased to meet you, Carolina.”

“You were saying something before Carolina came over. What was it? Oh, right; I remember. You were going to tell me why you let me win.”

“Why?”

“Yes, why?”

“Sandra… because I’m so tired…”

Gently and carefully, those small fingers tore me away. Folded me. Then folded me again. Folded. Stopped and waited for a moment. Thought. Then folded me once more. Down, up, right, left, folding and folding… Placed me at the head of her bed.

Morning came. Gently, those small fingers held me again. I was sitting in the place of honour at the breakfast table. Beside me was a warm teacup. Directly in front of me, a piece of toasted bread with jam. From far off came the sounds of bombs.

No one was speaking. As if there was simply nothing left to say. Today had been spoken of for days. Spoken about, pondered over; plans and calculations had been made. What remained to be thought through was no longer the part up to this table, but the hours, days, and weeks after getting up from it. Just that much… For it was still too early to think about the coming months, and far too early for the years. The three people at the table stood on the threshold of an unknown. Just like all the other people in that war-torn country. Hope was a spiritual need. But it was not even time for hope yet.

To scatter the clouds of sorrow hanging over those at the table, the man retold an incident from the first days of the clashes — a short story that could easily be a dark comedy film.

“In the city centre, right outside a cinema, a bomb exploded. Seven people died.”

This was what was written in the report of the medical teams arriving at the scene. Seven people, three of them women, were transported to the hospital by ambulances. Since the morgue was overflowing, they were now leaving the dead on hospital stretchers covered with white sheets in one of the cold rooms on the lower floor. The seven people killed in the explosion had been left on stretchers in one of those cold rooms that evening. Night fell, leaving only the nurses on duty, the doctors, and the security guard. In those days, the electricity consumed by the cooling units strained the hospital’s power grid. Because of this, the circuit breaker in the hospital’s electrical panel tripped several times a day, and resetting it was always the poor security guard’s job. That night, after midnight, as the security guard went in the dark to reset the breaker, the door of the cold room opened slowly. Something emerged like a ghost in the dark and called out to him.

- “I am very cold. Could you bring me a cup of tea?”

Colliding with everything in his path, stumbling and falling, the security guard rushed down the corridor. Taking the stairs two at a time, running and shouting, he burst into the hospital yard. While describing the ghost he had seen to one of the duty doctors who had rushed out of the emergency clinic room in panic, he fainted from fear. Later, the doctors — approaching the matter not with superstitious dread, but with a scientific eye — found the ghost and took him into treatment. The ghost was simply one of those brought to the hospital covered in blood and assumed to be dead. It was six people who had died in the explosion, not seven.

The three at the table burst into laughter at this story once again.

In these days, even humour smelled of blood and gunpowder…

“Time to set off,” said the man at the table, who had experienced being dead for a few hours. A teardrop fell right beside me. Those small fingers wiped her face, becoming wet with tears. Those small fingers picked me up and placed me onto the man’s large hands.

“Take good care of this,” said the owner of those small fingers, the little girl. “When you are sad and miss us, talk to it.”

“I will bring you to my side as soon as possible,” said the man. “Take care of yourselves.”

He held me delicately in his palm. He kissed the woman and the little girl. Slinging the rucksack the woman handed him over his shoulder, he set off. From the doorway of the house, he waved at them with the hand holding me. After waiting a while, he got into a car. Through the rear window, he looked one last time at the little girl and the woman. The man opened his palm and looked at me. He smiled. He stroked me. Ever since we stepped outside, the sounds of bombs could be heard more clearly. Slowly and gently, he placed me in the breast pocket of his jacket. I was directly over his heart. I counted the seconds, minutes, and hours by his heartbeats. There were other people in the car too. Everyone was silent, tense, and anxious. This anxiety was not because of the falling bombs or the gunfire. It was a restlessness for those left behind.

Do not dare ask how I know or understand all of this. My essence is tree. I am the memory of this nature. I feed from the same root, the same soil as human beings. Centuries and hundreds of seasons passed before me. I heard so many languages, so many words. So many prayers, so many curses… To me, humans speak but a single language. For the earth is one single earth everywhere in the world. Water is the same water. The same rain, the same snow falls on every corner of the world. The wind that scatters the leaves from place to place in autumn is the same wind everywhere. The sun rises the same way everywhere, warming humans and the soil alike. In its absence, every piece of the world freezes in the same way. The borders drawn by humans have no meaning in my world, nor do colourful, ornate flags. A bee alights on the flowers of two enemy countries to gather honey for its comb. Pollen blown from the blossoms of a tree takes root in the very same soil. For that pollen, there are no borders, no states, no passports.

I am nature; I feel, I hear, I understand…

I began to smell the sea hours later. After a while, everyone got out of the car. There were other people besides those who dismounted. They began to wait for nightfall. There was a full moon in the sky, and its shimmer upon the sea. The man took me out of his pocket, placed me inside a plastic water bottle, and that into his bag…

We began to move upon the foam of the waves. How long we travelled like this inside that dark bag, I do not know. The sounds of waves and screams mingled together. The noise of guns and bombs was now far behind, but an infernal fear reigned in the face of nature’s grandeur and power.

A few days later, the man opened his eyes in a hospital. First, he asked about the plastic bottle in his bag and the paper crane inside it — about me. They found it, brought it, and placed it at the head of his bed. He gazed at me for a long time. With great love and longing. “These days will pass,” he said.

“They will pass; our reunion is near.”

Shortly, I was going to leave this city where I was born, and from which — apart from a few trips lasting a couple of days or weeks — I had never been away in my entire life. A few months ago, on a day scorched by the full cruelty of the summer heat, I had travelled this very same route from Ankara Station to Istanbul for the interview for the Master’s programme in Architecture at Mimar Sinan University. This time, I was taking the same road as a Master’s student. I was travelling from a seventy-year-old capital built in the middle of the Anatolian steppe to Istanbul — a city that had served as the capital for two different empires for hundreds of years, a place that, through its people, culture, and architecture, was neither Asian nor European, yet truly both Asian and European at the same time.

Although I had travelled back and forth to Istanbul many times before, I was setting off with the intention of settling there for the very first time. Don’t let my use of “settling” fool you — I didn’t even have a place to stay yet. To make matters worse, about twenty days earlier, on August 17th, nearly twenty thousand people had died in the largest earthquake in Turkey’s history, striking Istanbul and neighbouring Kocaeli. Nearly three hundred thousand homes were damaged. As a fresh architect and a Master’s student of architecture, I spent those days reading everything written on the subject. When a natural disaster combined with haphazardly constructed buildings and permits obtained through bribery, the outcome turned out far more devastating than anyone could have predicted. Moral failure was creating fragile buildings.

At the station, as usual, I bought a ticket for the second-class compartment cars. A history professor had once said in an interview: “If you want to know a society, travel in the second-class carriages.” That’s what I was doing, though my reason wasn’t really an urge to mingle with society and understand it — it was simply the result of being dead broke. I was hoping to find an empty compartment, but unfortunately, there was little chance of that. As my eyes searched the train corridor for an empty compartment, I stepped into one occupied by two people. For the past few minutes, I had seen compartments with only two people, or even just one, but none of them had evoked this sense of warmth in me.

There were two guys sitting opposite each other by the window. They both looked up at me at the same time. The one with wavy long hair, a moustache — looking for a second like Tony Iommi, the guitarist of Black Sabbath — asked:

“Ozzy or Dio? Who’s the best Black Sabbath vocalist, in your opinion?”

“Honestly, I think Tony Martin,” I said, mostly to catch them both off guard.

They stared at each other for a moment. The other one — with long, curly hair and a beard that covered almost his entire face, wearing a brightly coloured shirt unbuttoned all the way down and a pair of purple leggings underneath — broke the silence:

“I definitely didn’t see that coming.”

In front of them, they were drinking sour cherry juice from plastic cups. They offered me some. “I don’t like sour cherry juice,” I said. They laughed like villains from a 1970s Turkish movie, and the guy in the purple leggings pulled a bottle of cheap, gut-rot wine out of his khaki bag, poured it into an empty plastic cup, and handed it to me. I took the cup and sat down beside them. On the small table mounted under the compartment window right between them, alongside their plastic cups, stood a third plastic cup used for an unintended purpose: earphones from a Walkman were dangling inside it, turning it into a makeshift speaker. Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell album was playing.

I was as certain as my own name that a strange bond called the “long-hair brotherhood” existed. When a few long-haired guys who had never met happened to come together by chance, even before knowing each other’s names, they could find themselves in a warm conversation as if they had known each other for years. It was truly bizarre; a PhD thesis in social psychology could — and should — be written on this.

The guy with the moustache was named Devrim, and the one in purple leggings was Resul. Names in this society were actually a reflection of the ideological background of a person’s family. For instance, the probability of someone named Resul having leftist parents was about the same as someone named Devrim coming from a conservative or nationalist background — which is to say, an extremely low probability. Devrim had graduated with a degree in Philosophy this year. He had been working as a bartender in a bar in Kadikoy for a couple of years. He took some time off from the bar, threw his tent on his back, hopped on the Lake Van Express, and went camping solo on the shores of Lake Van for about a week. He had asked a village headman for permission to camp there. Every day, the gendarmerie would come for an identity check, asking him almost the exact same questions as the day before, trying to wear him down so he’d pack up his stuff and leave. Consequently, he decided to cut short his trip, which he had planned as one week by Lake Van and one week in Hasankeyf, and head back. Resul, whom Devrim met at the Kayseri station, was studying at the Faculty of Theology — which, despite not matching his appearance in the slightest, seemed like a perfectly fitting school for his name. It was his seventh year there. He became a deist in his second year and an atheist in his fourth. He had to finish the degree only because he had promised his father before he passed away two years ago.

“Are you actually going to become a cleric, Resul?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, dead serious. “Why not?”

“But you’re an atheist…”

“So what?” he said. “How many people in this world do their jobs because they actually believe in them?”

He was so right. Was I going to design the world’s most magnificent, artistic buildings just because I became an architect? Nope… I was going to design absurd, cheap buildings and sell those designs.

“Alright,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, it really suits you, but why the purple leggings?” He began to tell his story.

“My girlfriend walked out on me. We broke up in a really tense way. She slammed the door and left. Five minutes later, she called me from a payphone across the street. I watched her through the window while talking to her. That was the last time I saw her. I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing now. I hope nothing happened to her… Anyway, she said on the phone she’d stop by sometime to pick up her stuff. Two days later, the earthquake happened. Like everyone else, I was asleep at the time. I woke up to shaking and screaming. The power was out; in the dark, I threw whatever I could lay my hands on into my backpack. These, and this… were actually hers. Mine are in the bag too, but wearing these feels good to me. And like you said, they suit me anyway. Since my building is severely damaged, no one can go inside. So I’ve been on the road since August 19th. Sometimes travelling as a stowaway, sometimes with a ticket if I get caught, just wandering around. I slept on wooden benches at train stations in Sivas, Kirikkale, Erzurum, and Mus a few times. Now I’m heading back; school is starting, and I need to latch onto someone. Besides, I might finish school this year, maybe even in the first semester…”

While Resul was talking, Devrim was staring out the window. Right after Resul said “…I need to latch onto someone,” Devrim turned his head and said, “Resul, come stay with me; my flatmate graduated and left Istanbul, so I have a spare room anyway.” I made a joke, saying, “In that case, I’ll sleep in the living room,” though if he had said yes, I would have gone. “Do you really have no place to stay, Ozgur?” he asked. “I have a bit of money; I’ll stay in a cheap hostel, find a job, and figure something out,” I said. But the truth was, I only had enough money to stay in a cheap hostel for fifteen or twenty days at most. “Ozgur, you come too,” he said. “You two can start working; we’ll split the rent. It’ll be good for me too.”

I didn’t have the luxury of saying no.

After getting off at Haydarpasa, we went to Devrim’s place in Kadikoy. The next day, Resul and I started working part-time at the bar where Devrim worked.

When we got home after receiving our first weekly pay, the evening news was reporting that a 19-year-old girl had been murdered in a satanic sacrifice by three people her age. For the next few days, talk shows, news programmes, and tabloid columnists talked about almost nothing but Satanism. The way people looked at us wasn’t the same anymore. The three of us agreed that something was going wrong. Devrim was the only one with a mobile phone in the house. I had given his number to my family. One evening, my father called. His voice sounded anxious.

“I know you have nothing to do with this sort of thing, but on TV they’re saying if your child listens to Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin and wears black t-shirts, they’re a satanist. There’s nothing like that, right?”

“Good night to you too, Dad,” I said. “Say hi to Mum!”

The next morning, we woke up to the sound of pounding on the door. Devrim’s landlord, using two months of unpaid rent as an excuse, demanded that he vacate the flat. As he was leaving the doorway, he turned back around.

“You’ve gathered types just like yourself inside the house anyway! What are you, satanists or something? Pack your things by tomorrow and clear out!” We cleared out the flat, and Devrim temporarily put his belongings in the bar’s storage room. As for us, we had nothing other than a backpack each. That evening, since the bar was quiet anyway, the three of us sat down for a meeting. Resul said he could hang out on trains and at stations for a while until he found a place to stay. I said I’d return to Ankara for a bit if necessary and come back once I found a place. Devrim looked both of us straight in the eye.

“No,” he said. “I promised you could stay at my place. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”

“Devrim, there is no place, man! Where are we going to stay, brother? What are you talking about?!”

“I have a plan!”

The next day, we pitched Devrim’s camping tent in an area set up for people whose homes had been destroyed by the earthquake. We squeezed ourselves into the two-person tent like canned sardines.

When we woke up the next morning, Resul came back with a stray cat he’d found somewhere. He spent the whole day from morning till night cradling it in his arms. He even wanted to sleep with it at night. We made room for the cat in the tent too. It was a cat, after all; it could fit anywhere somehow. The next morning, the cat woke all three of us up by walking right over our heads. I got out of the tent and joined the queue for food aid distributed in the tent city. When I returned, I found a police officer interrogating my friends in front of the tent. They put all three of us into the police car and took us away.

At the station, the three of us were lined up like bowling pins in front of the inspector. He scanned us up and down for a long moment…

“They say you’re satanists. What do you have to say for yourselves?”

Resul jumped right in, as if he had been waiting for this exact question.

“No, not at all… I’m an existentialist… Have you ever read Kierkegaard?”

“What’s that?”

“How about Heidegger, then?”

“What are you talking about? Are you on drugs or something?”

“Surely you must have heard of Sartre, though. Everyone knows him.”

“I hear the cat belongs to you… Did you bring it here to sacrifice it?”

“You can’t sacrifice a cat for Qurban; it’s not religiously permissible. Besides, I’m an atheist. I don’t really bother with these matters.”

The inspector stared at our faces blankly for a while, shaking his head. His eyes got caught on Devrim’s t-shirt.

“K-R-E-A-T-O-R… Kreator… Hmmm… what does that mean? Is it a word praising the Devil?” I was anxiously waiting for Devrim’s answer. I was silently praying: Please don’t give an answer like “a thrash metal band formed in the land of Heidegger.”

“Not at all, sir! What are you talking about? Kreator means God in German.”

“Good lad!” said the inspector, smiling. “You seem like a sensible boy. What were you going to do with that cat?”

“We were feeding it for the sake of God, sir,” he said.

The inspector couldn’t tolerate Resul any longer, who was reacting to every question and answer in Devrim’s dialogue with bursts of laughter as if watching a stand-up show. He sent him down to the holding cell. He said he’d deal with him again later. As for us, he let us go. No matter how much Devrim and I tried to convince the inspector to let us leave together with Resul, we couldn’t persuade him. So, the two of us — named Devrim (Turk. ‘revolution’) and Ozgur (Turk. ‘free’) — walked out and returned to the tent, while Resul (Arab. ‘messenger of God’) remained behind.

A month later, we found ourselves a basement flat with windows facing the street pavement. Devrim started working as a philosophy teacher at a private school. I was working on my Master’s degree while giving private lessons in French, English, and High School Mathematics. As for Resul, we didn’t hear from him again.

Years later, I bumped into Resul in a bar. His hair and beard were gone; I couldn’t recognise him. In fact, he was the one who recognised me. He bought me a vodka, and we drank together for a few hours, reminiscing about those fifteen days we spent together. It turned out he had spent two months in prison because he caused a scene in the holding cell that day and got into a fight with the inspector. But at the first court hearing, the judge released him. He had tried quite hard to find us after the court case; he went to the tent area, he went to the bar, but by then we had both cleared out into our flat and weren’t working at the bar anymore.

In case you’re wondering, Resul had finished school in the meantime. He was working as an imam at a mosque in a neighbourhood in Istanbul. I asked him if he actually enjoyed doing this job. He let out that same villainous laugh straight out of a 1970s Turkish movie. He said he took immense pleasure in putting on an act for people and sneaking bits of Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard into his Friday sermons just to mess with their heads. “If you ever cross paths with Devrim, or anyone else who’s curious about me, make sure you tell them this,” he added.

So, as I’m telling you this story now, I’m passing it along so I can finally get it off my conscience.

14.10.2026 | Yoker, Glasgow

I was sitting on a park bench, flicking through an old chess magazine I’d picked up from a second-hand shop. It was a lovely, sunny Glasgow day, with birds singing all around. The park was quite busy, so a well-dressed gentleman in his sixties politely asked if he could sit on the other side of the bench. As he approached, he lit up a cigarette and turned to me.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all, go right ahead,” I said.

Except I did mind. I hated smoking, and I hated being around it. And I certainly didn’t appreciate him blowing smoke right in my face under the guise of politeness. I had no choice but to bury my head back in the magazine, focusing on the moves and problems on the page to ignore him. He, on the other hand, opened up a full-page newspaper and started reading. His tobacco stained fingers holding the right-hand pages were practically under my nose. Then his phone rang. After shouting down the line for a good fifteen minutes, he hung up and stuffed it back into his pocket. If someone had set a quiz on what his phone call was about, I could have easily scored a hundred percent. Judging by his frequent, raspy coughing as he cleared his throat, his lungs were well and truly shot. Like I said, the park was packed, and the chances of finding another bench to escape this man — who seemed utterly determined to annoy me — were slim. Besides, why should I move? He should be the one to leave. Part of me told myself to be patient, but another part was burning with a desire for a little, harmless revenge. I was still holding the magazine open in my hands, eyes fixed on the diagrams, but my mind was playing a completely different chess game. Fiendish ideas were spinning in my head about this psychopath who was ruining my precious day off. The birdsong faded. The sunny day turned dark and stormy in my mind. Just then, a solitary magpie landed on the iron railing right in front of our bench. It perched there alone, glancing left and right, muttering quietly to itself. An elderly woman passing by with her grandson — maybe nine or ten years old — stopped in front of the bird and asked the classic question:

“Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How is your lady wife today?”(*)

The man beside me let out a derisive scoff and called out after her.

“Nonsense!”

He turned to me and repeated, “Absolute nonsense. I can’t stand people who fall for these superstitions.”

To be honest, I didn’t believe in that sort of thing either. But his arrogant attitude, looking down on others’ beliefs, was the final straw. As he rambled on for a few minutes with various examples of why such things were rubbish, a light bulb went on in my head. The tangled knot of thoughts in my mind began to unravel. I started setting up the right counter-moves against this man I’d been observing — or rather, forced to observe — ever since he sat down. My plan wasn’t half bad. I made my first move.

“What’s so nonsensical about it? I believe in these things. Seeing a single magpie is bad omen. How can you not see that?”

“Bad omen? Come on, you don’t look like someone who’d fall for that.”

“Do you have any idea who or what I am?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Who are you? You just look like a sensible person, and sensible people don’t pay attention to this stuff.”

“Right. Then tell me this,” I said. “Just before the bird and that woman appeared, what were you thinking about, even if only for a fraction of a second? Let me tell you: you were thinking about leaving here and popping into a nearby shop, weren’t you?”

It was a gamble. I’d placed my observations on the board and made my move. Maybe it was a blunder, and at worst he’d say, “You’re mad, mate,” and walk away. But if I was right, I was going to have a lot of fun.

“Yes,” he said, looking genuinely startled. “How on earth did you know that?”

“I asked you a moment ago: do you have any idea who or what I am?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment. I pressed on.

“If you had walked off to a shop just before that lone magpie landed, you would have done something that was either in the back of your mind or about to cross it. Someone in that shop would have given you a tip for the afternoon horse races, and you would have placed a bet. By this time tomorrow, you’d probably have been a very wealthy man. But you missed your chance. The lone magpie appeared. Its bad omen pinned you to this spot, and I — who have been part of this setup all along — kept you here even longer. That was my whole mission. Sitting next to me was part of your fate. Had you gone to the shop the moment it crossed your mind, you would have broken the bad omen. Now, someone else got that tip, and tomorrow, they are the one getting rich. Not you.”

The man looked thoroughly spooked. He looked like he wanted to say something, but thought better of it. He stood up and hurried away.

The truth, of course, was far simpler. As he was walking towards the bench, he’d pulled the last cigarette out of his packet, lit it, and crumpled the empty pack before throwing it on the ground. His lungs, bogged down with tar, belonged to a heavy smoker. And a heavy smoker who goes more than fifteen or twenty minutes without a fix gets irritable and snaps at everyone. A couple of minutes before the magpie landed, he had reached into his inner jacket pocket — where the pack had been — and muttered a quiet curse under his breath upon remembering it was empty. That was the exact moment he realized he needed to pop to a shop for cigarettes. Snapping at the woman was just part of the tension caused by his craving for nicotine. And as for the horse races? When he shoved his hand right in front of my nose, I caught a glimpse of the newspaper page he was reading — it was the racing guide for that afternoon. He was clearly a keen punter. Whether the horse won or lost, I couldn’t tell. But my moves had worked, and in the end, I was the one who won.

Checkmate!

07.X.2026 | Yoker, Glasgow.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(*) According to a superstition prevalent in the British Isles, seeing a solitary magpie is considered bad omen. To ward off this misfortune — essentially by emphasizing that the magpie is not truly alone, but that its mate is alive even if absent — anyone who spots a lone magpie will ask it: ‘Good morning, Mr. Magpie, how is your lady wife today.’

A Story about Fake Water Tests, Odd Jobs and Heavy Metal

Have you ever had friends who tried to compose thrash metal riffs on an awful, chronically out-of-tune classical guitar? I had. Either we were genuinely broke, or our parents — who were our sole source of funds — didn’t give a damn about our tastes. Unlike the “normal” kids hanging out at the five-star Falez Hotel’s Olimpos Disco, our teenage years were spent trying to finance our abnormalities. Yet, what we were doing felt far more sacred than dancing to Tarkan at Olimpos Disco or getting romantic to the Bodyguard soundtrack, I Will Always Love You.

I don’t know if any of you ever got dragged into it, but “water purifier marketing” is a ridiculously tragicomic line of work. I believe it was the winter of 1995 when we stumbled into this gig through a classified ad in a local newspaper. The job description was simple enough: about 35 to 40 kids aged 17 to 25 would gather at the company’s office on Güllük Street around 5 or 6 PM, board a battered old Mercedes O 302 bus, and set off for that day’s “lucky” neighborhood. First, to build trust, female coworkers went door-to-door, stating they were from a water purification firm and asking if they could schedule a visit after 8 PM “to analyze their tap water.” Once the appointments were booked, our female colleagues wrapped up their shift and were dropped off at home on the same bus. The rest of us were scattered across the scheduled houses. Finally, when the work was done around 10 or 11 PM, we hopped back onto the bus that brought us.

When the word “analysis” is involved, white lab coats are an absolute must, of course! You’d think we’d just finished an internship at NASA and hit the road at this hour solely out of public service! And isn’t there a sweet, reassuring scent of science, wisdom, and trust embedded in that word “analysis”? Long story short, we had already won their hearts at the front door. I’m not exaggerating — we even had test tubes! I swear we did! We’d step inside, introduce ourselves in the living room, engage in a serious yet charming chat, and then proceed to the kitchen. Under the bewildered gazes of the family, we’d pull out the test tubes from our bags. Naturally, they were attaché cases! Professionalism above all! Holding the tubes, we’d drop a few squirts of a mysterious fluid — the contents of which I still don’t know — into some tap water. We’d shake it a bit and repeat the process. Depending on how the colour shifted through well-rehearsed stages, we’d start spinning our tall tales: “Ma’am, the lime content in your water is way above normal,” or “Now, look, it shouldn’t turn yellow; if it does, unfortunately, it means sewage has leaked into your tap” (and of course, it turned yellow!), “Sir, if it turns blue, it indicates mold in the water” (and naturally, it turned blue!). The next stage was critical, because if you managed to plunge the household into a complete nightmare, the actual trick executed at this point guaranteed a sale. Into the other test tube, we’d pour water purified from their tap by our device. We’d repeat the previous steps, and naturally, no colour change occurred! Now that is what I call wizardry. If the white-coated salesman’s motivation was fully charged during this process, the product was as good as sold.

Our motivation for this job was weak. In fact, calling it weak is generous — it was non-existent. Because the whole job was nonsense… We tolerated this absurdity for two or three weeks. During that time, we once stumbled upon a fiercely sharp, senior chemistry student home for semester break. Describing what happened in that house wouldn’t fit here; that’s for sure! On another occasion, the 190 cm, 250 kg man of the house, fresh off his shift, heard we were from a water purifier company and that his wife had made an appointment for a water test. He immediately slammed the door in our faces and lunged at the woman, roaring, “What do you mean, an appointment?! Who are you giving appointments to?!” We had caused a downright domestic tragedy that evening. It was terrible, absolutely terrible… A few days after this last incident, my friend — the other protagonist of this story, who was still trying to compose thrash metal riffs on that classical guitar — and I sat dangling our legs over a canal running through the middle of a Kepez neighborhood, staring at the flowing water. I don’t remember who asked whom, but half an hour later, one of us blurted out: “Mate, what the hell are we doing?!” Without boarding the purification company’s rickety bus, we walked all the way from Kepez to Şarampol that night… We never went back. Not that we had anything to collect anyway, since we hadn’t managed to sell a single unit. I learned something back then: if you don’t believe in something, it can never make you happy.

In the summer of the same year, we got mixed up in a job we genuinely enjoyed. A basement warehouse with large windows was where part of our work unfolded. Behind the windowpanes stood tired motorcycles and bicycles that had logged tens of kilometers every day. Around a single-speaker YU-MA-TU brand cassette player, album covers were scattered everywhere — to the right, left, top, and back. A few I remember: Motörhead’s 1916, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Paradise Lost’s Icon, Eloy’s Ocean and Inside, Pink Floyd’s Animals and Dark Side Of The Moon. The smell of motor oil and gasoline blended with the cellulose and ink scent of freshly printed newspapers. Added to this mix at noon was the aroma of hot rations served from army-style mess tins. The crew gathered at the warehouse around 7 AM every morning, sorting newspapers according to their subscriber counts to load into the compartments behind their bikes and motorbikes.

An outsider looking at this crew would undoubtedly imagine a job opening like this:

“… Newspaper seeking long-haired, heavy metal/rock listening distributors aged 17–22. Walkmans and cassette tapes used during distribution will be provided by the establishment.”

Yet, since we were the first two people to apply for the distribution crew, we dragged every misfit from Kaleiçi along with us on the second day. If I have a respectable circle of journalist friends in Antalya today, I owe it to those days. To all the formally dressed ladies and gentlemen — from news desks to advertising, features to sports — we were a rather odd yet charming bunch of kids.

The newspaper had been founded by an Antalya businessman. It was the eve of an election, and the paper gave the impression of setting out to support a popular political party of the time. One morning, beside the newspaper stacks, the strange distribution team spotted stacks of campaign flyers. The flyers were to be stuffed inside the newspapers and distributed together. In the weeks that followed, the printing of these posters — and the crew’s attitude and actions toward them — would only intensify. Whatever flyers featured unappealing, ugly, suit-and-tie-wearing, smirking, absurd politicians were stacked onto our bikes and motorbikes. But before heading out on newspaper routes, the crew either dumped them into the sea off the Lara cliffs or burned them at a remote spot in Konyaaltı — which back then was largely barren, desolate terrain. That the political party in question stumbled and collapsed in Antalya during those elections was partly thanks to this distribution team. I mean, honestly, what did they expect from guys like us?! Did they really believe we’d hand those out?! We didn’t believe in them… We didn’t believe in politicians or politics. Well, since we didn’t believe, we destroyed the politicians’ posters. We didn’t believe, and distributing those posters wouldn’t have made us happy…

As we noted inside the inlay card, we managed to bring our demo cassette to life through our own labor and money earned at this newspaper — recorded “between February 12 and March 27, 1996, at Melodi Music and Bora Music in a total of 25 hours.” Given the recording limitations of the era, it hadn’t turned out half bad. Reviews of our demo appeared in 8 to 10 underground zines like Mahzen and Musalla Taşı, as well as on Blue Jean magazine’s Rock Art page and in Rock Kazanı. Between 1994 and 1998, we played 12 or 13 concerts, including shows in Ankara and Istanbul. We enjoyed a tiny, modest sliver of fame in Antalya and across Turkey! Yes, it was all achieved through our own hustle. The lead guitarist who knelt before the Ankara crowd while ripping through the solo of a Seasons In The Abyss cover was, by the next morning, riding the local bus from the Antalya Bus Terminal straight to the newspaper, setting off on a motorbike route to deliver papers with bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes. I vividly recall how, after those two out-of-town concerts where we hit the road Saturday night and returned Monday morning, we couldn’t shake off the exhaustion for days, not getting a proper night’s sleep until Monday evening. Take our state after the Ankara show, for instance! Arriving at the main terminal (AŞTİ) around 10 PM, we collapsed on the floor in front of chestnut candy and souvenir shops, slumping against each other until the midnight bus. Upon stepping off in Antalya the next morning, four wrecked “rock stars” couldn’t even remember how they’d boarded the bus!

While performing metal music comes with universal challenges, doing it within Turkey’s borders — and specifically in Antalya — was a bit harder; it truly was. Think about it: while other cities where heavy metal and punk culture exploded, like İzmir, Istanbul, Ankara, Eskişehir, and Bursa, were at most 5 to 6 hours apart from each other, Antalya was 12 hours from Istanbul, 8 from Ankara, İzmir, and Bursa, and 6 from Eskişehir. Whether it was someone sitting on the breakwaters of the Old Harbor or on a street corner in Kaleiçi, headphones plugged into a Walkman, pen and notebook in hand trying to write lyrics, or working out guitar tabs by ear — it was all “07 Antalya style.” On the rare occasion someone traveled to Ankara or Istanbul, orders for sheet music and guitar tabs were placed at Hayri Music or Akmar Passage. We were just sunbaked, destitute metalheads living behind the Taurus Mountains, sustaining ourselves by dipping a loaf of bread into tahini-laden bean salad (piyaz)!

We had wild, absurd dreams that made us happy and that we chased relentlessly. Speaking for myself, even today, that same mindset breathes within the same body. Just about a week ago, when I resigned, the sentence I uttered to my boss was: “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe in this job.” From never taking civil service exams — which I could never fathom bringing me happiness after all these years — to my choice of city and neighborhood, I suppose this belief/happiness correlation was always at play. Writing all this brings a ton of other examples to mind. In truth, as one writes, one holds a mirror to oneself, forging connections and reflections that had never crossed one’s mind before…

Anyway, speaking of which, let me finally ask this, for God’s sake: Can someone please explain to me within a logical framework why, in those years, we wore heavy combat boots even in Antalya’s brutal July and August heat, roaming around in jet-black t-shirts and tight denim jeans that gave us rashes everywhere? Please, somebody do that! Please.

12.IX.2017 / Antalya

*Originally published in the Turkish underground fanzine Fanzin Apartmanı under the title Kaleici Notes — II (September 2017).

A Nostalgic Dive into 90s Underground Youth Culture

Pay attention to this: tall guys are almost always relatively more creative. Why? Because the education system, completely by accident, leaves them to their own devices. Imagine being short and forced to sit in the front row — you’re constantly right under the teacher’s nose. Aside from listening to the lecture and taking notes, what else could you possibly do for 40 minutes?! Because of my height, my entire school life was spent in the sweet freedom of the back rows. In primary school, I played the “find-the-city” game on the map of Turkey; in middle school, it was “find-the-country-and-capital” on the world map. By high school, I had perfected the art of drawing skulls and heavy metal logos from every conceivable angle and perspective. I flipped through endless books, wrote poetry, and, fueled by my teenage angst, wrote psycho lyrics filled with healthy doses of blood, crime, sword, hate, aggression, and fk for the thrash metal band where I was the lead vocalist. My current grasp of English owes its foundations not to the national education system, but to those back benches! That’s pretty much all I remember about school life before university. Having entered primary school already knowing how to read and write, I sorted that out in a week or two, and thanks to my physical stature, I put the rest on cruise control…

Life outside the school walls is far more exciting for one’s intellectual growth. Education should partly be viewed as a business partner to the printing presses that churn out diplomas and certificates of merit. Beyond that, education teaches obedience, standing at attention, and marching in line. It aims to “raise consciousness” through history — stoking passions, creating friends and foes, teaching who is who, and ultimately instilling the idea that as Turks, we have no friends at all, making us paranoid and isolated. But naturally, this effort doesn’t produce the same effect on everyone. In minds that are slightly defective — minds with a peculiar itch regarding life, the planet, societies, and people — that static electricity triggers action. The real key is to chase that itch.

The Old Harbor (Yat Limanı) and the historic inner city (Kaleiçi) were destinations we frequented from an early age, equipped with hand-line fishing rigs, stale bread for bait, and a paper bag full of small shrimp, simply because they were physically close to our house and schools. Back then, Antalya didn’t have poor kids trapped in the vise of exams, education, and overly ambitious parents, contenting themselves with a few hours on a tablet. What we had were kids chasing fish and crabs around the pier, looking like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — just like the kids I saw a few years ago on the island of Kastellorizo across from Kaş, an island still living in the 1980s. Yes, we knew those literary heroes long before we read the books, because we were them! When we finally read them, we thought, “Man, who are these bastards? I wish we could hang out with them.” We liked Zagor, Tommiks, and Conan too, but compared to those, Huck and Tom felt like remarkably authentic fictional characters.

One of the problems regarding education that bugs me the most is why the educators of the time so shortsightedly erected the building of Antalya High School right where it stands. Back in the day, in addition to two street-side buildings that originally belonged to a Greek family, they slapped down a bunch of extra buildings in the back courtyard — enough space to “educate” a population the size of a small village. However, they failed to calculate what bright but lazy students, bored out of their minds, would do once they crossed the street. Right across the road lay Kaleiçi. After grabbing supplies from the local bakery and Deniz Büfe in Balıkpazarı, we headed straight for the Old Harbor. Cutting literature and philosophy classes to explore Orhan Veli, Ingvar Ambjörnsen, Can Yücel, Nietzsche, Freud, Fromm, Schopenhauer, and Wilhelm Reich on the rocks down by the sea — a spot we simply referred to as “The Rocks” — was, in truth, a badge of shame for the country’s education system.

For the youth of 90s Antalya, Kaleiçi was a real school. In a city of about 250,000 to 300,000 people back then, every single “defective” and wild kid from an otherwise “normal” family loitered around these streets during Antalya’s intoxicated rains, ruthless sun, and various hours of the day. It was an empirical goldmine for all sorts of practical knowledge, ranging from catching fish to opening a corked wine bottle without a corkscrew. To be frank, when I ditched middle school science class to fish down there with a hand-line — even though I felt bad for the fish and threw them back after ten minutes — the joy it gave me couldn’t be compared to any lesson. It was abundantly clear that I learned far more about animal life and physiology that way anyway.

The streets of Kaleiçi and the Harbor were places where you could find anyone you were looking for without a problem, back in the years before mobile phones existed. We had learned — blindly and awkwardly — how to operate old German CRT TVs like Nordmende and Schaub Lorenz, transistors, cassette decks, guitars, and amplifiers. That was the extent of our relationship with technology. Owning a Sony Walkman was an absolute privilege. When I first saw a portable CD Walkman in 1995, owned by my Finnish friend Mikko — whom I’m still in touch with today — I was as stunned as if I’d seen a UFO. That same year, down on The Rocks, when I encountered a group of four or five Japanese tourists holding digital cameras with screens for the first time, if I had anticipated that things would spiral so out of control and that the word “megapixel” would become so invasive and brazen, I would have thrown those tourists and their cameras straight into the sea. I didn’t know; I regret it.

When Oliver Stone’s The Doors, starring Val Kilmer and Meg Ryan, hit the theaters in Antalya, I was still in middle school. I had just started listening to heavy metal — just one of tens of thousands of kids in the country whose parents watched them with deep anxiety. In my bedroom, where a hideous poster of Iron Maiden’s Eddie hung on the wall, my single-deck tape player blasted AC/DC’s Back In Black, Iron Maiden’s No Prayer For The Dying, Slayer’s Seasons In The Abyss, and Megadeth’s Rust In Peace. Meanwhile, the neighbors were making desperate efforts to keep their kids — who were my age or a bit younger — as far away from me as possible. I was up to no good, no good at all… Returning to Jim Morrison: according to our mindset back then, his stuff was for girls; it wasn’t for tough metalheads. Naturally, I didn’t go see the movie! And believe it or not, I only ended up watching it during my freshman year of university on a late-night TV broadcast, and I realized I had done him a serious injustice. But my introduction to Jim Morrison hadn’t been that late. My obsession with The Doors began when I stumbled upon The Lords and The New Creatures, translated into Turkish by Ogan Güner — a book I consider one of the masterpieces of American literature in Turkish translation. I think I was in my second year of high school; (no, no, a girl had absolutely nothing to do with it!) I found the book while browsing through the shelves at Iltem Secondhand Bookstore, and I nearly finished reading it right then and there on my feet. A few days later, I bought a blank Raks ED-SX 90 cassette, gave it to a classmate, and asked him to record The Best Of The Doors for me. Yes, I had lost; that bastard Jim Morrison, who sang “Into this house we’re born / Into this world we’re thrown / Like a dog without a bone / An actor out on his own,” had won. And yes, later on, as I started university, those lines fueled my urge to chase down texts by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger.

The streets of Kaleiçi were the natural habitat for our crew of misfits in Antalya. Years later, while digging into the social history of these types around the world for my book Taşlar Kimin İçin Yuvarlanıyor? (For Whom Are the Stones Rolling?) — a work on social history and the sociology of music — I used various sociological technical terms: I said “subculture,” I said “counterculture,” I said “marginality.” Sure, sociologically speaking, these groups can be defined that way, but let’s be honest: they were just good old-fashioned delinquents! They were all great kids, but outsiders to society. In fact, it was precisely this status that gave them their identity. Around ’95, on an autumn or winter day, a book landed in my hands. Judging by its appearance, at least ten people had read it before me. Its cover was creased, its binding falling apart, its pages stained with rain, wine, coffee, tea, and God knows what else. It was a recently printed book, but it looked utterly exhausted. It had emerged from a khaki army backpack covered in heavy metal logos and lyrics written in ballpoint pen. Though the patches and writings varied from person to person as symbols of identity, almost everyone back then carried one of those bags. Since we were constantly on the move and semi-nomadic, nothing that came out of those bags would surprise anyone — from Swiss Army knives and fishing lines to spare t-shirts, half-empty wine bottles, loaves of bread, biscuits, Walkmans, cassettes, books, and pens, pushing the very boundaries of your imagination. Anyway, knowing who originally owned the book was impossible since I was probably the twentieth person reading it, and I can’t recall whose bag it came out of that day. That book was White Niggers (Hvite negere) by the Norwegian author Ingvar Ambjörnsen. Written in the native tongue of people exposed to the harshest cold, coming from one of the freezing lands of the world, that book knocked the kids of this warm Mediterranean city completely senseless. As I would discover years later, it had the exact same shattering effect on the kids of Alsancak in İzmir, the Konur Street and Kızılay crews in Ankara, the wine-drinking miscreants behind Akmar Passage in Kadıköy, as well as in Bursa, İzmit, and similar corners of the country. We were slapped so hard that we stumbled for a long time… The strange thing is, years later while living in İzmit, I bought a fresh copy from a bookstore and re-read it, only to experience that exact same impact all over again. Certain books, movies, and records have that habit. No matter how much time passes over them, they pass right over you, tossing you around and beating you to a pulp…

On the shores of San Francisco along the Pacific, in the back alleys of Paris, on the breakwaters facing the Sea of Marmara in Kadıköy, along the fjords of Bergen and Stockholm, in Athens, Damascus, Tangier, and Barcelona — people were experiencing the exact same anxiety of the same century. The world isn’t as vast and endless as people think. It’s small enough for its creatures to share the exact same existential dread… After all, we are kids who lived through economic crises, wars of various scales, revolutions, and military coups. And what we didn’t experience firsthand, we witnessed through screens — something kids of previous centuries never had the chance to do. Personally, I started my early childhood watching blood-soaked “terrorists neutralized dead” on television. Then I watched the execution of Romanian dictator Ceaușescu and his wife on the TRT news broadcast. Maybe half an hour earlier, The Bugs Bunny Show had been on the screen. I watched a war broadcast live; we all cursed Saddam together and prayed for General Schwarzkopf. Years later, war broke out again. This time in the Gulf, we all watched Saddam’s execution together. Civilization and democracy were being shoved down our throats through television. Was what we called civilization just MTV?

Among the children of this century, there were some who were true “white niggers.” They were all “on the road,” they were “beautiful losers,” they were “flowers in the dustbin” as Johnny Rotten screamed in Sex Pistols’ infamous single God Save The Queen. They surfaced as Obituary lyrics, as Cannibal Corpse album art. They gushed out as pus from the pen of a young writer born in Portland, Oregon: Tyler Durden, Marla Singer, Brandy Alexander, and Tender Branson were born out of this infection… These were the stories of 20th-century kids. They were fictional, yes, but none of them were foreign to our civilization. They were one of us — perhaps they were us. Sometimes a 20th-century writer didn’t need to stretch his imaginative talents too far to describe the pain and the world he lived in. Raskolnikov is a character from a 19th-century text I love dearly, but his world almost felt as innocent as a fairy tale compared to Tyler Durden’s world, where pus oozes wherever you touch.

28.V.2017 / Antalya

* Originally published in the Turkish underground fanzine Fanzin Apartmanı under the title ‘Kaleiçi Notes — I’ (May 2017)