Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 7 – ERGENEKON 
205 
very title is meant to suggest the moral filth of occupied Istanbul and its 
collaborators. Whether life in occupied Istanbul was quite as debased and horrible as 
is presented in the novel may be debated. Yakup Kadri himself seems to have 
operated with relatively little molestation as a novelist and as a newspaper columnist 
promoting a strongly Nationalist line. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar wrote of agreeable 
literary séances in various cafés in the years of the occupation and consorted in a 
friendly manner with the signatory of the Treaty of Sèvres and Yakup Kadri’s bête 
noire, Rıza Tevfik, whom he even witnessed dancing the zeybek
11
. 
It could be suggested accordingly that the publication of 
Ergenekon 
is Yakup Kadri’s 
own response to 
Nutuk,
a very different one from Halide Edip’s. The selection of 
articles he wrote in 
İkdam 
between May 1920 and August 1922 show him 
consistently to have been a true believer. They are not only a validation of his own 
Kemalist credentials from the very beginning but also, when the “dreams” of the 
War of Independence were being obliterated by “filthy realities”
12
at the time of 
republication, a testimony of the sentiments of those heroic times. An additional 
consideration arises from the change of script. If, as seems more probable, the book 
was published in 1929, it would preserve in the new Latin script writings that could 
otherwise only be found in old newspapers and readable in a script that was meant to 
be superseded. Whether intended or not, this has certainly been the effect. The 
choice of title for the collection was also ideologically charged. Ergenekon is an epic 
myth related to the Göktürks, purportedly the ancestors of the modern Turks and to 
11
Tanpınar 2010, 172-3 
12
Karaosmanoğlu 1973, 228

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