For someone who has spent nearly twelve years of his life in a mountain village, Maraş is actually more of a mountain village than a city. Because one's homeland is the place where childhood passed. Because he went to a bigger city after spending only six years in the city he came to when he was twelve years old. The fact that Maraş remains a mountain village in the imagination is because that mountain village is remembered when Maraş comes to mind. When the homeland comes to mind, that mountain village comes and sit at the seat of honor... The first memories of Maraş seem to be in distant times. Black salwar and rubber shoes on our feet; the years when we ran from game to game, from stone to stone, from tree to tree, with our sunburned face and dark hair. No one tells us our age; we are not curious either. Six or seven years old. The seventies.
We make our own toy from pine bark. Well, even though we don't make our own toys, what a toy made by a machine is like is far from our imagination. The money in the wallets of our fathers, who went to Maraş once a month, was never used to buy toys. If they had had money left in their pockets after buying basic consumer goods such as oil, salt and sugar when they went to the city, the options before our fathers were as follows: Either spend the money and buy some Turkish delight, some biscuits, or a kilo of oranges and a few loaves of bread. When we saw our fathers from afar, who took some of the road by truck and the rest on foot, since wheeled transportation to the city had not yet been realized from these lands where the snow would not melt for a few months, when had a yellow paper bag in their hands, it meant that they had bought an orange. We definitely rushed out of the house as we grabbed that yellow and round thing that was immediately handed to us. At that age, we never thought that they would buy us toys. People used to make their own toys. Would there ever be a ready-made toy? We are under mulberry trees with a rubber sling in our hand, cranberries in our pocket, fresh walnuts, a pocketknife with a horn-haft. Our eyes are among the leaves, we are waiting for a bird so that we can shoot. Usually we cannot. But for hours we stand with our heads towards the sky, slings in our hands. We leave the birds among the mulberry leaves and go to the pine grove. We collect as much dried and fallen pine bark as we can find and return. Meanwhile, we sweat. Now is the time to immerse ourselves in the icy waters of the creek. We come out of the waters with our teeth hitting each other, we dress trembling. Then we can find a suitable place and start making our own toy... We are carving pine bark without stopping with a pocket knife. How beautifully it is carved, we can give it the shape we want. We make a water mill. Although we have not seen a truck up close yet, we try to make a truck by analogy with the truck picture we have seen in our brother's schoolbooks. We make a jeep. We're trying to remember where we saw the jeep.
Years ago, we saw a vehicle that pierced the darkness of the night with its powerful lights. When summer came, we were moving to the highland, an hour away from our homes. The driveway was right there. When we saw the light leaking through the haircloth tents, all the children rushed out and ran to the vehicle, which we did not understand. Was there a road then? Did the vehicle, whose name we learned later was jeep, (we used to call it jeep) come to take a patient? Would a jeep pick up everyone who got sick and take them to the city? We keep carving the pine bark with a pocketknife. We make a jeep. We take everyone who gets sick to the city. It's getting dark, we forget to go home. If our mothers did not call, we would stay where we play.
Vagabond emotions in our minds, we have windmills in our heads, and we are carefree and unpanged. Our hairs have been buzzcut. We don't know the grief, the sadness and the pain yet. The days are running out fast. The voices of cicadas in the daytime leave the night to locusts. As soon as we eat dinner, we curl up where we are and sleep without even looking for a bed. We pass through a thousand and one dreams at night. We fall off the rocks, we fly, and nothing hurts. The heroes of Billur Köşk Tales, which we listened from Uncle Mehmet on long winter nights, enter our dreams in short summer nights. The sultans have a son whom they can leave their thrones in the last days of their lives. The black snake drinks the milk next to him without touching the sleeping baby, but it makes the world hard for the human beings who killed its wife. The Phoenix takes us in its talons and takes us behind Kaf Mountain. Since the title of hero was not added to the name of Kahramanmaraş in those years, the name of the city was used as Maraş in the article (Kahraman means hero). The basilisk is divided into pieces and thrown into the black cauldrons. While the snakes guard the secrets that no one has been able to solve for thousands of years in the Anavarza Castle, they feed on the honey oozing from the stone cavities... while we are about to solve all the secrets, we hear our mother's voice: 'Get up, son, it's noon'. We get up, rubbing our eyes. We splash ice-cold water on our faces. However, the day has not yet risen. Leaving our dreams and our warm bed, we hit the road...
And one summer, my brother, who works in a hotel in the city, says, let me take you to Maraş. With the joy of the hope to see the city for the first time, I can't sleep all nights long. What a place Maraş is! I cannot think anything. Except for a few pictures I saw in school books, all I know about the city is that this is where the loaf of bread and the orange are. The day we will go to Maraş has come. In order to go to the city, it is necessary to get up early in the morning before it gets light. We get up at this early hour in the morning, rubbing our eyes, and hit the road. After a journey that takes about half an hour, we start to wait for the truck coming from another village. After a while, first two beams of light that pierced the darkness and the roar of the engine, then the huge vehicle coming from behind two strong lights breaks the silence of the morning up. After the truck comes near us, it stops with a loud noise. We hastily climb into the bed of the truck. Yes, truck. In those years, they were trucks that carried passengers and loads from the village to the city in the same bed. Well, although it is still used to take poor workers to the fields, to pick cotton, to distant cities to collect hazelnuts, we made our first trip in the bed of a truck. Our journey continues by taking passengers from other villages along the way. After a while, the sky begins to lighten slowly. When pine and fir trees began to be seen, the majesty of the trees overwhelmed the truck. After a while, when we see the sun rising from Ahır Mountain behind Maraş and painting the whole plain red, our truck is still grunting through the fir and pine trees of Başkonuş and descending towards the plain. That's when my brother holds his finger to the east and says, look, that's Maraş. I jump up and look where he's pointing with his finger. I can see nothing but a reddish and misted plain. Only a meandering river flows through the mists.
Our journey passes through dusty roads, by the banks of the Ceyhan river, which I saw as we were descending from the Başkonuş, over a stone bridge, and by the workers who are picking cotton in the cotton fields. I look around carefully so as not to miss any sight.
Finally, we enter Maraş from the west of the city... The day has risen well, the redness over the city has disappeared; the city has emerged. First impressions: People on the streets, buildings, shops, sacks in front of the shops, all kinds of spices, bulgur, rice, wheat in the sacks; copper cauldrons, copper pots in front of the coppersmith's shops, saddles, chintz, loaves of bread, passing cars. But I cannot see one thing in the shops: Orange. Maybe my eyes are looking for orange the most. But, there is none. Then I can't ask my brother either, why are there no oranges in the shops? Much later I realize that the season is summer and orange grows in winter. No wonder why my father always brought oranges in winter. Why wouldn't he bring it in the summer? We never would have asked. The Kervansaray Hotel. A building in a narrow street. A room of the hotel. The window of the room faces the building next door. There is a huge picture on the wall of the building. An advertisement. I think it's an advertisement for shaving soap. I think much later that it might be an advertisement. A person who has lathered his face with soap and shaved. There's also a big text at the bottom. I think it was the name of the shaving soap. Every day I stay in the city, I keep looking at the same man's face on the same wall. And I watched the first movie on the wooden chairs of the summer cinema called Çiçek on my first trip to Maraş. Before entering the cinema, I ate my first ice cream. It was an extraordinary adventure for a six or seven year old boy who saw the city for the first time. Because until that day, there was very little accumulated about the city in his imagination. Experiencing and seeing so many things in such a short time meant a lot to tell and show off to the other children when he returned to the village.