A Family Story: Grandfather

We all have deep stories in our lives and pasts. Some we live alone and tell around. Some are told from generation to generation within our families.

In our Turkish family tradition, there is always telling memories but no writing. In Western societies, there are many families, the number of which is significant, who have written memories, diaries, and memoirs. When you delve into those written texts, you sometimes find something of yourself. You are constantly amazed at how many things that you find uninteresting or unexciting under current conditions actually become interesting years later, simply because of the change in time.

Sometimes I complain that nothing I experience has any historical significance. My daily experiences seem like very dry stories. But when I read other people's memoirs, the excitement and interest of telling what I experience today in the future fills my heart. Well, I read such a family story from my father's pen years ago. He told about his grandmother.

My father's grandmother, but Dedede as I call her. I saw my father's grandmother because she passed away in 1975 when I was 4 years old. My grandmother Ayşe Tunca and my grandfather Orhan Tunca lived in the Yeşilyurt neighborhood of Istanbul. Dedede lived in a small detached house right next to them. She was extremely meticulous. I was the only one who could enter her house. It was a huge privilege for me to be able to enter that house.

Ayse - Orhan Tunca

Thinking that I could define the next generation by adding a "de" to the word dede, as my grandfather's mother, I called her Dedede with my child's mind. However, I never knew why only I could enter that house and no one else could. Indeed, when I went to Dedede's house, there was no one else but me. I do not vaguely remember anyone else in the house as a guest.

Those who remember the 20 TL banknotes from the 1970s know the red color of the banknote. When he would give me pocket money, I would insist on taking that red coin. I remember it even though I was very young. I even remember the way his bones, which were very prominent on his hands, touched my face when he kissed his hand. It's interesting, but I remember.

Makbule - Irfan Tunca

Here is the story of Dedede, as written by my father:

"Sharp features, blue eyes, high cheekbones, very thin, but her most distinctive feature is her hands and arms that are cracked down to the elbows, the meticulous Makbule Hanım. My grandmother. My late father once counted that there were fifteen taps in the house in Kırklareli. I was afraid of her.

Downstairs, a large hall, on the right, a guest room. Clean cushions on the divans, lace curtains, cushions like gum, newspapers on top, so as not to get them dirty. On the left, three interconnected rooms, accessed by a flight of stairs. The curtains are always closed. A strange dimness and coolness that still gives one peace in the heat of summer.

Right behind the guest room on the right at the entrance, a corridor leads to the large garden on the right. The toilet is in this garden. There is also a pool and laundry in this garden. My grandfather had the pool built. He would draw water into the tank with a pump. Then he would release the water.

The pool had a fountain and ping-pong balls bouncing on the fountain. At five o'clock exactly the fasıl would start on the radio back then. There were two radios in Kırklareli, my grandfather owned one. He would turn on the fountain, then the radio. He would start drinking his rakı.

The trees in the garden are peach, mulberry, apricot. My father brought the sapling of one of the trees in the garden facing the front from Bursa when he was studying at Işıklar Military High School. It is a very beautiful peach tree. Peaches like peaches, so sweet.

There is also a veranda in the front garden. A flat, screeded veranda. I was afraid of my grandmother. My friend Ersan would wait in the street behind the three-meter-high garden wall, and I would climb the peach tree. I would throw the peaches over the wall to Ersan. He wouldn't get mad if I ate them. Maybe if I said we would eat them together, he wouldn't get mad. But I'm afraid! I would throw the peaches over the wall. Ersan would keep them outside, and then we would eat them together.

I saw my aunt very rarely, but I loved her very much. When I was a child, adults would talk about how she supposedly loved someone and my grandmother didn't give her away, She took a lot of medicine one night and never woke up again. What took her away from his life? It was never possible to find out.

The house also had an upper floor. You go up a wooden staircase. There are two or three rooms on the right and left of a wide hall upstairs. I went up once or twice out of curiosity. Every time I went up, my grandmother would say, “Come on downstairs.” Why would she say that? Did she have memories? I don’t know if she didn’t want anyone to interfere or stir things up, but that’s what she would say, and I would go downstairs.

My grandfather was also an officer. That's why he fought in all the wars. He fought in the Balkan War, in Baghdad in World War I, in Arıburnu in the War of Independence, and during the rebellion. He was wounded a few times and then settled in Kırklareli because the weather was good for his health. Maybe because the wind blows from the Balkans so often...

He has a medal, the "Medal of Independence", my father gave it to my son as a gift. I never had the medal.

Sometimes I would insist a lot. I would say, tell my grandmother, and she would tell me how they went from Diyar-ı Bekir to Suruç, and from there to Baghdad. The boil scar on my father's face was a souvenir from there. He had brought out an oriental boil from dirt. Who knows what my grandmother had experienced. Meticulous Makbule Hanım's son is bringing out an oriental boil from dirt. It's impossible. Maybe the circumstances made him meticulous. I don't know.

My grandmother changed the three stone steps at the entrance to the main door because a child had urinated on one of them. Why? Who knows what came to her mind from what she had experienced. Then she came to Serencebey to stay with her relatives, and my grandfather had gone to war again.

My father was 5-6 years old when he first saw his father consciously and he was very scared and cried. He was in a military uniform with a mustache like a scimitar, with cartridge belts running from shoulders to right and left to right down to his waist, he was very scared when he wanted to hug him. He would sometimes laugh and sometimes his eyes filled with tears after my grandfather died.

He was a man who was afraid of guns as a child and later became an artillery officer. One day, after retiring, he went to the unit where he worked as a lieutenant. That night, he both drank and cried. "They made water pipes and gutters from the barrels of my cannons that I cherished and looked after like the eyes of my own." Technology, of course. But my father, my father who was afraid of guns as a child, cried like this for his cannons one night.

Now I think about what that generation went through. What my grandfather went through. My grandmother with her two children, the young, helpless, but strong officer's wife who had to be strong while her husband was constantly at war. What my grandmother went through. Maybe she was right to be meticulous.

"Zafer Tunca"