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CHAPTER 7 – ERGENEKON 
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impropriety of maladministration. They say: if it was not done like this it 
wouldn’t be like that, and if it wasn’t like that it wouldn’t be made like 
this. All these are superficial judgements. Those who put their ear on 
Anatolia’s heart must listen at great length and in depth. These voices 
coming out of this heart are not of one kind; there are among them the 
death rattle of a consumptive and the moans of a person who suffers 
from malaria; but these rattles and moans are definitely like the hoarse 
uproars heard from inside a mountain whose volcanic crater has not yet 
opened. 
Do not look for the meaning of the so called prolonged anarchy, of the 
taking to the mountains, of the conflicts and the strife, of the lethargic 
calmness and stillness and of these frenetic cries anywhere else than in 
this dormant volcano. 
In Anatolia, exactly as in the old Spain there is no distinction between 
love and passionate love, heroism and brigandage, faith and doubt, 
worship and ecstasy. The country where the hopeless lovers take refuge 
in asylums or in religious lodges is the land of covert exuberance. 
For the most part in my childhood I used to go and watch the insane in 
the asylum of Manisa. For the asylum was one of the excursion spots. It 
was my ritual to ask those beside me about every ill person, “Why has 
this one become mad?” I remember now that most of the time they 
would answer saying “Matters of the heart.” For some of them they 
would say “Because of karasevda (impossible love)”. I later saw and 
learnt that in Anatolia, every love ends either in insanity or in murder. 
How many girls I know who are lost in eternal love like St Theresa 
without knowing exactly who the person they love is; but their eyes fade 
away from day to day, the colour of their face goes pale and at night their 
pillow is soaked in their tears. Older people look at these young girls as 
if they are under a spell and say prayers to release them from the spell. 
They hang talismans around their necks. But these girls carry on loving 
the unknown lover to the end. What else are these girls but saints whose 
spiritual exuberance had not found a form like that of St Catherine or of 
Jean d’Arc. 
In my childhood I knew a young man who had killed his sweetheart 
because he loved her very much. What an excessive heart one must have 
in order to go that far for the sake of love. Again in my childhood I knew 
a brigand who was nothing other than a poet. More than on the trigger of 
his gun he ran his fingers on the chords of his cura and when he became 
drunk he liked either to strum it or to dance. But when you looked 
carefully at his face he would blush like a shy girl. Then I thought many 
times, “why this man had become a brigand?” Because he did not like 
money, he distributed all the money he took to his friends. Undoubtedly 
this man was a victim of his exuberance and his only crime was that he 
was a slave of his epic heart.
The religious lodges in Anatolia, like the monasteries of ancient Spain, 
are full of perverted worshippers and characters like St Francis are very 

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