While coming from the Antep road, I was surprised when the driver pointed to a distant place and said "Maraş": A green shadow stretches towards the skirts of Ahır Mountain, which has an earthen back, gray color and is bare, the small houses inside it are barely distinguishable, something like a village and clinging to the mountain, is this the famous Maraş, where the Dulkadiroğulları ruled for so long? The oil paintings are viewed from afar. It turns out that one should take a closer look at Maraş. Here we come to the cemetery on the city shore. Across the mountain, to the right and to the left, entwined with trees, wavy, wide and wide scattering with hills. What did I just look at from so far away? A little while after we entered the city, we dived into the bazaar, which resembles a road like a tunnel. Fragments of light pour from slits in the tunnel's cylindrical dome. In order to break through the crowd, we honked non-stop, and after a few hundred meters we came back to the light. As I pass in front of Grand Mosque, I look at it from the courtyard: The stone fountain with rushing water from its three grooves and the mosque door with its upper stalactites, embroidered like a mihrab. I remember that when İbrahim Pasha of Egypt took Maraş, he performed his first Friday prayer here. Seeing him enter through the door, the preacher immediately stands up. The whole congregation stands up. İbrahim Pasha is so tenderhearted that he immediately sits behind that door in order not to keep the congregation standing for a minute or two by saying "everyone is equal in the mosque". That pasha who, since a soldier drank someone else's milk, broke the stomach of the soldier so that he would provide justice; he had his beloved slave named Osman killed for going to the bathhouse without his permission, and had half of his body left out of the grave so that dogs could eat it; exactly a century ago, the crowd in that mosque called him "what a religious man"!
Our pasha is like this, like that, but he also knows how to be witty when he finds a suitable opportunity. The voice of the muezzin in the mosque was terrible. After the prayer, he said to those around him: If Sultan Mahmud had sent five or ten muezzins instead of sending armies to get me out of Anatolia, I would have left on my own! We watch the whole panorama of Maraş from the castle built on a hill in the middle of the city: The castle area consists of a plain of five or six acres. Neither bastions nor walls, only a few foundation reliefs remain from the old body. In the east, Divanlı Hill is above the houses that hang down like a flock of goat descending from the hill to the creek, with its minaret with two balconies, the Divanlı Mosque is watching its herd by erecting its long scepter! Abarabaşı location between the east and the north, the church belonging to the Italian Jesuits on the top looks like a villa buried in greenery. Kayabaşı district, which leans against the mountain in the north; above this the German colony with its orphanages and hospitals; a little further west of it, the American colleges with their familiar big structures. All these foreign buildings, which are lined up in the most panoramic place of the city, no longer have flags on their eaves or their people inside. All are but memories from the danger of old ambitions. The crowded barracks on the far side, sitting in a form of stretching rectangle, are looking at them in a manly manner by stretching the protruding part in the middle like a chest. The south side is the place called Maraşaltı. The only zigzag path down from the top is lost in the darkness of the bazaar, which looks like the mouth of a den from here.
The Grand Mosque, with its flat earthen ground, is not ostentatious at all. The houses of this district are always adobe. While trying to climb the hill on the right, the skinny houses of the valley stopped out of breathe. The whole ornament of the south is the rice mill at the edge of the city. Especially its chimney: A steel stove pipe the size of a minaret extended in a raven line into the air space. Before us is a vast plain. Fevzipaşa road stretching straight like a white geometric strip in the middle of the plain. The Aksu, which feeds the rice fields stretching along the plane with curves, is exhausted; we can see the glimmer of broken glass from the river. A most majestic frame on the opposite horizon of the plain: As the mountains of Gavur get longer in waves, it heaves layer by layer and stretches, covering the half sky. Don't look too far into the western part of the city; Acemli Neighborhood on a mound, and Mağaralı Neighborhood on top of that, both of them are poor villages, they have bowed their heads to orphanhood. After seeing these two neighborhoods, take a look at the house lines surrounding the skirts of Kaletepe, which we are above; the panorama of Maraş has been completed. Why aren't even the best houses of Maraş, covered with tiles, but always zinc-coated, in this lush green city full of trees, with creeks and hills on the foot of the mountain, sprinkled with a playful mood? When the northeaster from Central Anatolia crosses the 1300 meter Ahır Mountain, it suddenly falls like a cannonball into the light air of the hot plain. The mad northeaster would not let the tiles stand on the roofs. We tour the interior of the city: It turns out that there is a town in the middle, there is no municipality. There is the road from the bottom up, and the road from the government office to Pınarbaşı; the rest are crooked, narrow, neglected streets. I comprehended. One should look at Maraş neither from distance nor from interior. After all, people of Maraş are probably proud not of its city, but of its highland above and plain below; there is a saying that is said like a parable there. They asked the Prophet, "Where is the most beautiful town?" The Prophet replied: “Wherever there is paddy below and partridge above!”. Here the partridge must have been said for the sake of the rhyme. Otherwise, the highland is famous for its thyme-eating goats. Look at the tale told by Evliya Çelebi: In the time of Omar, when the Muslims came here for holy war, Kayser aka Cimcime in Maraş had seventy thousand goats fed on the hill. The shepherds pour the milk into the marble pool on the hill with the scales they milk, and the milk comes to the palace through marble pipes. A fairy tale is a fairy tale, but there is an obvious truth hidden in it.
We are in the dense treed garden of Pınarbaşı promenade. A strong arc flows beside us, the heat of the midday sun is out; some stray bits of light filter through the green leaves, flickering, and mottling on the grass. While two folk poets with inlaid sazs in their hands, black mustaches, sunburnt chests, and half sleeved jackets with overflowing shirts from under their waistcoats, tune their instruments to sing the folk song of Maraş War, I listen to that legend from the people next to me: On Friday, the Grand Mosque is full. An unexpected news: Instead of the Turkish flag in the castle, the French flag was drawn. Immediately, thousands of valiant, arm-in-arms, weapons in their hands, flags in front of them, despite the heavy enemy fire falling from the hill, attacking from the top of the overthrown climbed up to the castle in one move, and the enemy collapsed and the red flag was planted again. In Colonel Abadi's book, they also confess: After three weeks of brutal street warfare, the French evacuated the city and escaped; the winter of February 1920 was so severe that hundreds of French soldiers froze on the roads, and thousands of Armenians who had retreated died. Antep withstood, Maraş chased away. Antep became both rightful and legally Gazi (veteran); Maraş is also commonly called a Kahraman (hero). The people of Maraş exactly perform the attack on the castle every year on the day of liberation: A continent soldier sent from the barracks, pretending to be the enemy, lowers our flag from the castle, and the first day's attack is kept alive in the noise of the war that fills the area with fire and smoke with the special maneuver cartridges. This is not a representation; this is not a theater played on the ground; this is the repetition of truth on its own stage. The people of Maraş made this twenty-three-day war epic from beginning to end, and sang it into poetry and saz. The words of the lyrics are simple, the tempo of the composition is the same, but it does not matter, the sound of the two daggers that enliven that unique bravery is pouring into the souls. The folk song begins by describing the days of preparation:
A five-bullet mauser is for fifteen liras.
Take brothers, it is the day of honor.
The day of attack:
We heard that they climbed up to the Mercimek Hill
We attacked and hit from twelve fronts.
And the day of escape:
They escaped leaving the cannons!
Well, Maraş was liberated. But Antep was besieged. Those who saved Maraş were then rushing to the aid of Antep. The folk song ends as follows:
Withstand Antep, withstand, Maraş is coming!
What is the flag? A magic which unites us. I saluted that single line of Turkish unity like a flag in Pınarbaşı's garden.