Sinop Fortress Prison

A few steps down on the main street and there is the famous Sinop Prison. I heard about this prison before but didn’t know why it was this famous. It was a little weird to think of a prison as a “museum” and I didn’t have a clear insight about what I was going to see. I started my “visit” with a very expensive bottle of locally produced organic blueberry juice. I didn’t even know we had blueberries in Turkey. It must be a trend we imported from US. I must say it tasted wonderful, so natural, unlike the sugary plastic taste of most juices in US. Right across the little café I had the juice is the shop
where they sell the handcrafts of the imprisoned (in another prison.) For some mysterious reason I was so very happy to see those little beaded ornaments and jewelry, they brought me joy. I didn’t know of course that deep inside of me something knew how dark the prison was and it was trying to raise my happiness hormones so I could deal with it. There are two main sections of the prison, each has it’s own courtyard, isolated from each other. By the time I finished the second one, my heart already weighed a ton (as you can
see on my face.) The giant rooms were empty, sad, old, damp and very very lonely. I could feel the pain of being imprisoned, it almost emanated from the walls. It was not really like that I was “thinking” what these people must have experienced; I was “feeling” it. It was an “experience”, without much help from my rational mind.
I had experienced something similar to this about 2 years ago when I was listening to a song by Hasret Gultekin. He was a folk musician and was killed (burned alive) in an attack by Muslim extremists 18 years ago. I didn’t even know the guy before I heard his name on the “burned alive” list and although I love his voice and his mastery over his instrument; I find the production/making of his music careless. Nonetheless, when I was listening to his song on YouTube that day, which came as a sudden urge, I started crying uncontrollably. As if I was asked to
experience his feelings right before he died. I had a direct peak into his pain and horror. Even if I can’t explain this, I cannot deny my own experience: my consciousness was somehow carried to some other time and to someone’s experience. My experience in Sinop Prison was not as dramatic and as clear as this (not tied
to one person, or a specific tragic incident) and it was heavy anyway. The darkness I felt in my soul put shadow on actually how beautifully old the building and the surrounding inner castle was. But that beauty would not ease the pain of the inmates here. No way. Or so I thought. But Sabahattin Ali, a Turkish writer, poet and journalist, one of
Sabahattin Ali the many famous characters in the prison’s history, disagrees with me. His poem Aldırma Gönül, written 1933 in the prison and featuring the prison life, was composed in 1977 and became a very popular song by Edip Akbayram. He says in his poem “Don’t worry my dear heart, these days will pass, console yourself in the sounds of the waves hitting these walls.” It is the power of his words that made the song such a hit for years: they tell me that, even when we think things can’t get worse, and the situation is truly terrible, the human heart keeps looking for hope. Always. How come I never saw this poem this way before? I know the song since childhood. Everyone in this country knows this song by heart. How come, we Turks are raised to be such hopeless beings? Along this journey I find my personal definition of what it is to be Turkish in today’s Turkey. One more piece, I claim, is that Turkish people don’t
This way to the "discipline cells" have much hope for anything: we don’t believe we can do better, we don’t believe we can change things, we forget to hope in the harsh reality of everyday life. One might think that the high popularity of this song is due to the lack of hope we have in our bones so we look for that hope in the song. Not really true. We listen to that song to nourish our sadness, not our hope. I remember many years ago, two of my cousins and I used that song to help us cry. We would listen to it over and over to make sure the tears would not stop. The best attempt explaining this Turkish “huzun” (roughly means sadness) is by Orhan Pamuk. He has a whole chapter titled “Huzun” in his autobiography “Istanbul.” This deep melancholic sadness is a large part of our Turkish identity, and we can’t live without it. We feed on it. We nourish it back so stands in us like a giant noble tree. We do complain about it all the time but in reality, we protect it for our lives and we wouldn’t want it to go anywhere.  Sabahattin Ali also says, “The prison days will pass one by one and will end” but unfortunately his life after prison proved to be very harsh also. Upon his release from prison, he was afraid of being killed so
The cells on the right wanted to escape. His request a passport was refused. It is believed that an agent who had been paid to help him pass the Bulgarian border killed him on the way. Another hypothesis is that the agent handed him over to the security services and he was killed during interrogation. He was only one of the many famous writers, poets, journalists, politicians,
Closing the cell door teachers and army officers who were imprisoned in Sinop Prison. In this beautiful land soaked with history and rich culture, we kill writers like Sabahattin Ali and burn our musicians like Hasret Gultekin (together with 36 others) because they expressed their ideas. How do I own this? I remember a moment in January 2007 when I heard the news of Hrant Dink’s assassination from that Armenian girl at my school in Boston. I was checking out some cameras from the school and she was the one to help me with it. She looked me in the eye and said an Armenian journalist was killed in Turkey that day. I felt terribly ashamed and helpless. What could I say to her? I didn’t kill the man myself, but it is my people, my country who has been killing people for what they think and say. It’s easy to ignore and forget, for this happens so many times that you get used to it after a while as a harsh and sad reality of life. What is difficult is to make sense of it. I know if I start talking about this they will kill me too.  The third and most horrifying section is somehow hidden and even more isolated. In the first two sections, the inmates could socialize outside in the courtyards.
In the cell The third section is between the outermost part of the prison and the inner castle that surrounds the whole thing. It is a smaller building and has no courtyard. The first thing I noticed was the darkness. It felt like time didn’t flow inside this building. Something was frozen. The first rooms I saw were darker and smaller than the ones I saw
This is the view the inmates would first see when they came out of the dark cells in the previous sections, but then I saw these cells. You can only take 3,5 normal steps in them, they were so small and pitch dark. On one corner there was a toilet. Nothing else. Dark. Only the darkness and a tiny opening on the door. I got inside one of them and tried to close the door. The old door didn’t close entirely but the isolation, the
Lost in between walls looking for the way out darkness and the timeless frozen horror of feeling for all who were put in these cells shook me deeply anyway. I wanted to stay in but could not handle more than 2 minutes. Last January I spent 11 hours a day in a dark room meditating for 10 straight days, but I could not stay in this cell more than 2 minutes. Even 24 hours in one of these cells can be detrimental to one’s mental health. I don’t think the damage of these cells can be healed afterwards. It would leave permanent damage. I came out of the cell as if I was diving in water after almost dying of thirst. As I walked out, some guide was explaining to a group of people that these were the “discipline cells” and the amount of punishment was determined by the degree of sunlight allowed. The heaviest ones were pitch dark. I remember the story of the Buddhist monks who go into a similar cell with no light for 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days and 3 hours as a way of initiation. Those monks though are trained and prepared for a long time and not all of them are allowed to do this but only the ones that are approved. Would it be possible to endure these cells by diving into the endless universes inside of us? Maybe, and still I claim that if those monks came here, they would have to train much longer to get into these prison cells. The walls, the dampness
Prison chickens and the building just eat your soul. The guide said, people who spent some years in this prison usually died shortly after they were released. The dampness, he said, damaged their lungs irreversibly. I don’t think it would be just the lungs. It is quite ridiculous for me to compare the experiences of a monk to an inmate in a cell: one goes in voluntarily, the other is forced: this "disciplining" cruelness would hurt me the most.   I may sound as if I am exaggerating but indeed after the cells I became disoriented and walked around in circles for a while through the walls and paths looking for the exit. If someone hurt a loved one, would I want the offender to be put in one of those cells? No. After seeing what it is, whatever s/he might have done, I know I wouldn’t want it. S/he would suffer terribly in a cell for sure, but this would also make her/him inhuman.