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CHAPTER 7 – ERGENEKON 
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were heard chanting. These voices were so exuberant that I thought for a 
moment that a group of dervishes in ecstasy were wandering in the town 
chanting the praise of God and holy hymns and I wandered in the streets 
so that I could come across them.
Undoubtedly a foreigner in such a place and on such a night would feel 
as strange as I did and the source of the muezzin’s chanting would be to 
the same extent obscure to him. Above all who knows how difficult it is 
to descend to the depths of the bosom out of which these voices erupt?
In the wooden burrows which are called a shop the men of Çankırı stand 
motionless like statues of the Buddha among some packsaddles and one 
or two handles of rope. I can say that it is impossible to assign to these 
people the nature and the kind of exaltation which was let out towards 
the minarets after the break of the fast in the night.
How many things the enlightened youth from Istanbul who recently want 
to go straight to the people have to sacrifice in order to reach this goal, 
and how pitiless, brave and enduring they have to be in order to clean 
their spirit which is full of parasites.
Far from wanting to share the feelings and the excitements of the 
Anatolian folk, even as simple travellers on the roads of Anatolia, this 
youth fall into deep pain and, having travelled with a spring cart, staying 
in a village inn which smells of the burning dung, think of themselves as 
convicts subjected to the most terrible corporal tortures.
The gap between the intellectual from İstanbul and the peasant from Anatolia is 
already a familiar theme. It is striking how many of the new elements introduced in 
the last two excerpts also have echoes in 
Yaban.
In the general background is the 
surface greyness of Anatolia
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.
 
The image of the donkey is a significant leitmotif in 
the novel. In its first appearance it corresponds almost exactly to the symbolism 
which Yakup Kadri had attached to it in ‘Anadolu’nun İçyüzü’:
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Oh, the way these donkeys bray! Do you know another sound in this 
world more doleful, more painful? And when they are quiet, their 
expressions are no less melancholy than their cries. In their black, deep, 
velvety eyes, there is a grief; in their long, beautiful ears, a trembling 
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Karaosmanoğlu 2006, 29, 65, 72, 76, 86
44
Karaosmanoğlu 2006, 30, Jacobson 21

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