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CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
131 
chapters which follow, Yakup Kadri deviates from the Kurtuluş topos of the female 
teacher and looks at women’s disadvantaged place in society.
To the first short stories he published in the periodicals mentioned above between 
1909 and 1911 Yakup Kadri added few more and in 1913 collected them in a book 
under the title 
Bir Serencam
(An Adventure/A Conclusion) which was the title of 
one of them
61
. 
Yakup Kadri wrote a great number of short stories between 1909 and 1922 which are 
a panorama of the society and the people in Anatolia and Istanbul
62
. Huyugüzel 
observes that out of the fifty eight stories he wrote until 1922 thirty three are set in 
western Anatolia, twenty in Istanbul and five in Europe, his place of birth, Cairo, and 
Rumelia
63
.
The Fecr-i Âti movement did not last for long. It was dissolved and its members 
followed different paths. At about the same time Yakup Kadri abandoned the Faculty 
of Law without graduating.
In the period which followed a plethora of novels and poetry, short stories and 
articles were being published on a daily basis drawing subject directly from the 
Balkan Wars each advocating and propagandising the conflicting ideologies of 
Turanism, Ottomanism, Modernism, Islamism and Turkism. The debate was 
naturally around the definition of 
vatan 
(patria, fatherland)
64
. The practical 
61
Yücel, 111-2 
62
Uç, 161-2,
63
Huyugüzel, 101 
64
Köroğlu 2007, 61 

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CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
132 
impossibility of recapturing the lost lands in the Balkans was one of the reasons 
which made the intellectuals to focus eventually on Anatolia. But the Anatolian 
soldiers had been dragged to wars beyond their own territories and families and did 
not perceive the war as their own
65
. Some of these publications are didactic and aim 
at a national awakening by inciting revenge and hate and by projecting an ideal 
future for Turkey
66
.
Yakup Kadri did not contribute in this period to the ideologically based debates 
about what was or wasn’t the motherland. This may be because, unlike Halide Edip 
for example, his birthplace and early upbringing had been in the periphery of the 
Ottoman Empire. During the Balkan War period he published short stories but 
without the strong nationalistic element which he showed after the War of 
Independence had begun in Anatolia. His own national battles at the time of the 
Balkan wars were on a different front, that of Turkish literature. He was striving both 
to define Turkish Literature at home and establish its place on the world map.
Two articles published in 
Rübab
on 13 and 20th March 1913 under the title 
‘Edebiyatımız niçin Vatanperverane Asardan Mahrumdur’(Why is our Literature 
65
Köroğlu 2007, 149 quoting
66
Köroğlu 2007, 46-71: A spritual homeland different to the Turanic ideal of Ziya Gökalp was put forward 
through an irridentist work by Mehmet Ali Tevfik. His ideal homeland was not made up “of a physical territory 
only: it is a spiritual fiction and consists of an attachment to historical moments of glory”(61). Further on Kılıç 
2015, lists and analyses irridentists fiction and non-fiction works which do not feature in the established literary 
canon but which were utopias each referring to an ideal past or future seen through a specific ideological point of 
view. For example Mehmet Celal Nuri İleri Bey’s four volume 
Tarih-i İstikbâl
(The History of the Future) 
published in 1913 (194-198) or İbrahim Hilmi Çığıracan’s series entitled 
Kitaphane-i İntibah 
(The Library of 
Awakening) works published during the Balkan Wars. Kıliç calls him “The scribe of the Balkans” (199). In the 
list he mentions also Ahmet Cevat’s 
Kırmızı Siyah Kitap
(The Red Black Book)
, 
Mehmet Tevfik’s 
Turanlının 
Defteri
(The Turanist’s Book) and Satan Bey’s 
Vatan İçin
(For the Motherland)
 
(201).

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