J. Joyce says that, "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." Probably, Yahya Kemal, Tanpınar, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar were after this. Those who view Aziz Istanbul and the Five Cities as a nostalgic retreat are of course wrong. On the contrary, every line of these books is full of signs of loss that happened and will happen in the time-space relations that we live and will live. When Tanpınar says, “We lost the idea of resistance; we cannot resist the new, the old, or anything. We do not own the city, we just live in it; like a guest of the state and the municipality”… he means the disconnection in our lives, lack of identity, which stems from this "lack of resistance".
Yes, people build cities and breathe their souls into the space, but there is continuity in what we do, see and observe, that space breathes into our souls by becoming time. Today, the desire to give the city an identity only in the form of old architecture and landscapes is the result of the modern colonial economy's perception of space being cultural and touristic. After the age of the image began, our sense of space was almost locked in symbolic buildings that showcase goods we can consume. After television entered our homes, we became windowless monads. Our memories, which are filled and emptied with perfectly realistic fiction and images, do not experience either factual or symbolic conversations with the memories of our rooms, houses, streets and cities. It is as if our poets and storytellers are no longer isolated in a place and a person, but only in what they write. As Ahmet Oktay said, postmodern poetry, like a giant collection of images, contains everything and nothing. However, the definitions of the original and the infinitely renewed rest in the memory of the spaces. I keep waiting for an autobiography, a novel, a poem, a city book that will signify that this memory remains compressed in the honeycombs of Maraş. I would probably enter such a book as if I was on the verge of dreaming. I would go in and lie down in Uzunoluk and immediately ask a quilt from the quilt maker a hundred meters below the fountain, and I would drape it over me. In my dream, I would see that this quilt was the roof of the city and each fold of the quilt was a street of Maraş. I would understand that I thought the dew falling from the cloudy people in every street in front of me was damp, I would go to the mode of amnesty, I would mix my tears with the dew. When I turned my head to understand from which side the voice I heard, "Every flower is hidden in its own seed," came from, I would see my mother. I would understand that my mother saw dream in my dream. My mother would say, "We asked Dulkadir Izzettin's daughter for you, the roof of our house would not leak from now on." I would climb the minaret of Grand Mosque out of my joy and look at the castle. When I asked who the men were who were picking olives in the castle, my mother would say, “Don't be afraid, they are nightmares with one hole in their noses.”
I would go into a book that would signify the memory compressed in the honeycombs of Maraş, as if I was entering a dream house. I would tie my horse to a holed stone, collect salep on Ahir Mountain, and race down to the plain like a goat. Suddenly, one day, I would see my knee, which I had injured while going down the mountain to catch one of our childhood prayers. I would remember that the pain I felt from my bloodied knee continued for days with high fevers. My mother would slaughter chickens and make me drink sherbet! Especially those rose sherbets. My mother would say that the most healing roses were at the entrance of the harem entrance of Sezai Efendi's mansion, and she would bring them from there. In my dream, I would lose my mother around Saraçhane. When I realized that the woman whose jilbab I was holding on was not my mother, I would see one of the merchants measuring salwar fabric for me so that I wouldn't cry. Later, I would learn from my father that this merchant was Hacı Muzaffer Efendi, who did not allow his customers to buy more than two pieces of goods from him and sent his customers to the neighboring merchant for the third piece. I would immediately think of this man, we used to gather together in the courtyard of his mansion in winters and in the orchard of his vineyard house in summers and play leapfrog; this beautiful-faced old man was the man we would line up so that he would take one look at us and say, "Scalawags". I would go into a book that would signify the memory compressed in the honeycombs of Maraş, as if I was entering a dream desert. I would fall and I would break the cups of the Marashis who sent their caravans in the middle of my dreams. Then I would fall asleep listening to the stories of Şeyhoğlu İlbeyali from Maraş, who gathered the spoils of conversation by beating homesickness, under the smell of inkpots without a criminal record in the banquet hall. I would see my grandfather in my dream, who was like a lowly flying soul huma. I wuold understand from the fact that my grandfather took the Mushaf in his hand that he closed his commerce house next to Saraçhane Mosque and came to home without any accident. He would be so calm and in trust that I would judge that he was not afraid of the Kanlı Köprü (Bloody Bridge) in his childhood. “Why am I afraid of this bridge?” When I thought about it, I would think of Tommiks, Texas, which we read sitting on the walls of Çocuk Bahçesi. Yes, I am also among the people who wait to dream in a book of Maraş.