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CHAPTER 7 – ERGENEKON 
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and you will ask like those refugee women and like those martyrs’ 
children (where is the end of this road to exile? Hey dear Turks, where 
are you?). We are here, we are here; we are on the other side of the hills 
behind Üsküdar.
Another associating and recurring theme is the resignation and indifference of simple 
Muslims and how strange they seem to a Westernised compatriot. In ‘İstanbul İçinde 
bir Gezinti’ (A Stroll within Istanbul ) originally published on 28 March 1922
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Yakup Kadri observes that the people in a poor quarter of Fatih have a lot in 
common with the people of Anatolia:
The remote neighbourhoods of Istanbul are like a restrained sob. While I 
was wandering on the other side of Fatih the metaphor “the stones and 
the earth cry” appeared to be true in every step of mine. I was saying to 
myself: “God, enough of this sadness, I cannot endure it any longer!” 
Still, the weather was sunny, the places I passed from clean, the 
loneliness, into which I was plunging, unaggressive even sweet. I could 
not understand where this gloominess was coming from. Truly this area 
is half a ruin. The sparse buildings which seemed to be houses and shops 
were uncared for, older and more dilapidated than ruins. The people who 
every now and then were passing by me are not like the ones I always 
see. Their attire is different, the way they walk and the way they look are 
different, in short their facial expression is different. There was an aspect 
of depression in all of them. As if this sparse population was the remnant 
left over behind a travellers’ convoy. Where are they coming from? 
Where are they going? As if they all know nothing about it.
Here an old grey haired hoca, who emerged from the stone piles of a 
burnt building site I passed by, stops when he comes round, looks to the 
left and to the right and his face has the worrying doubt special to the 
bewildered travellers who have lost their way. Here this old woman is 
walking in house slippers whose heels are worn out, the çarşaf on her 
back no longer has a definite colour, she turns from street to street 
holding the hand of a small girl. I think that until the evening this woman 
will not be able to find the place she is going to. Here a refugee child of 
ten or twelve (…) He comes straight to me as if he wants to ask 
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Karaosmanoğlu 1973, 132-135 

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