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CHAPTER 3 – SOME TOPOI IN THE KURTULUŞ EDEBİYATI 
99 
Bir noktada birleşmiş vatanın dört bucağı. 
Gurbet çeken gönüller kuşatmıştı ocağı. 
Bu parıltı gördü mü gözler hemen dalıyor,
Şişesi is bağlamış bir lâmbanın ışığı,
Her yüze çiziyordu bir hüzün kırışığı. 
The poem is structured around three 
koşma 
which the traveller finds inscribed on the 
walls on the three inns the he spends the night. These 
koşma
are attributed in the 
poem to a Maraşlı Şeyhoğlu Satılmış who embodies the suffering of the people who 
live in these remote and harsh parts of the country
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: 
On yıl var ayrıyım Kınadağı’ndan 
Baba ocağından yar kucağından 
Bir çiçek dermeden sevgi bağından 
Hudûttan hudûda atılmışım ben 
 
Apart from a beautifully portrayed vast Anatolia and a people left forgotten in it the 
poem carries no overt political or didactic message. Still, Faruk Nafiz portrays the 
Anatolia of 1926 as remote, distant and difficult just as the Kurtuluş authors do.
Anatolia as a different and distant place/topos in need of enlightment is presented 
differently in three almost contemporaneous literary works of the early Republic. It 
will be extensively discussed in the chapters on 
Yaban 
and 
Ankara.
In order to achieve progress in Anatolia secular education is of paramount 
importance both in 
Çalıkuşu 
and
 Vurun Kahpeye.
This task is reserved for two 
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A similar character representing the suffering from 
gurbet
is Şerif Çavuş in 
Yaban. 

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CHAPTER 3 – SOME TOPOI IN THE KURTULUŞ EDEBİYATI 
100 
female characters, two young and courageous but determined teachers, albeit with 
different motivations.

There is a diversity of styles and approaches to the same topos by each of the 
Kurtuluş writers in their early works and this diversity has been overlooked by their 
common classification as supporters of the Kemalist ideology. 
Backwardness, spiritual and material poverty, neglect and religious fanaticsm as well 
as treachery are topoi of Kurtuluş literature given much more emphasis in the novels 
which are discussed in the chapters to follow.
As will appear in the discussion of the Greek case, the persistent themes in the 
Turkish writings, the gulf between the Westernised intellectual and the common 
people of Anatolia, the conflict between enlightenment and reaction which have been 
explored in this chapter, Myrivilis’s 
Η Δασκάλα με τα Χρυσά Μάτια
(The Teacher 
with the Golden Eyes
) 
of 1933
 
excepted, are absent in the Greek works. For their 
authors Anatolia is the motherland stripped of her people who were forced to leave 
after the war. Those who stayed in Anatolia were either experiencing the torments of 
a brutal captivity, forced labour and marches into rural Anatolia or by pretending to 
be Turks managed to remain there. It is from the 1940s and especially after the 1950s 
that Anatolia as an ideal lost homeland becomes the main topos in the Literature of 
the Asia Minor Disaster. Of course, the real Anatolia that corresponded to this 
dreamland was its western fringe which anyway had a quite different character from 
the interior.

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