They say that Maraş is the "realm of poets"… It is a city of stories as well… How? The story/tale, a genre of prose that tells about real or imaginary events, which entered our lives after the Tanzimat. Didn't it exist before? There was, of course, but it found a place among the verses as an element of "narrative". The poetry, which sits at the center of literature in our traditional literature, Classical Turkish Literature, also told us the story… If we go back before, the heroes of Dede Korkut Stories talked to each other through verses. Then we met the story in the modern sense. The story sometimes shaped around the event and completed its fictions with 'introduction, development, conclusion' frameworks; sometimes with a few minutes' view of the camera during a moment of shooting on a portrait, giving up the event, the subject; it was content with an inner adventure or a psychological evaluation, an intellectual crisis transfer without even giving the full picture. However, when it comes to the description, the parts that are "missing compared to novel" have always been tried to be determined. The story kept thinking about which of the following sentences to undertake, such as "the number of pages is less than the novel", "it has no "that" unlike the novel, "the type and number of characters compared to the novel...".

Although the transition between genres is becoming transparent at full speed in recent literature, if we are to put it next to a genre and measure its height, I prefer poetry. I don't know if we have loved the taste of stories told with poetry in our lives when there were no story in the modern sense, and read Fuzuli's 'Leyli and Majnun' without getting tired of it, I want to see the story as the 'brother of the poem', not the 'brother of the novel'. Maybe I also prioritize the taste left on the palate of the story, which primarily benefits from the possibilities of poetry and music. The more the story makes use of the possibilities of modern poetry, the more the story goes to its original; it comes so close to what it came from poetry. Every event whose story is written becomes a piece of poetry; like the cities whose stories are written…

It is impossible that Maraş, a city of poetry/poet, does not have a story. If a city has the spirit to inspire so many poets, it also contains many stories. Even though I have read some of them before, I return with a new excitement to the stories that I did not look at from this perspective. I say “I wonder” on every page I turn; “with its repaired roof, rag cushion, bales, northeaster, tarhana maker; with its venues such as 'Castle', ‘Çarşıbaşı’, ‘Yeni Kasaplar Çarşısı’, ‘Kayabaşı’, ‘Arkbaşı’, ‘Abdallar Mahallesi’, ‘Kanlıdere’, ‘Uzunoluk’, ‘İstasyon’; if the city finds its life in the past that even it cannot reach while going backwards in the lines of an author that has turned into a story, then is this the story of that city?" To Ankara for Maraş… For the answer to this question, it would be best to turn to the mind at the origin of the stories, to ask Rasim Özdenören, the owner of the pages depicting all his acquaintances and familiarities... The stories to ponder on, of course, do not consent to an ordinary journey. The train should be chosen for this journey, and the stories should be reconsidered within the historical anecdotes of passing through Haydarpaşa to Anatolia. The questions go along the rails with the amazement of the first encounter with the train tracks, the new acquaintance. The feeling of being able to go to Ankara from Istanbul and talk about “Maraş” and chat with Rasim Özdenören in this city; tries to beat the February cold of Ankara...

Among the huge and cold buildings of the capital, there is the State Planning. By exiting the big elevators, one moves towards the described room with steps that are somehow heavy with excitement. However, the room, which is entered through the door with an embarrassed nod, turns into a familiar environment in the first seconds. Then... The journey to Kahramanmaraş flowing across the deep sounded clocks of the capital. He was born in Maraş in 1940. He completes his primary and secondary education in Southern and Eastern cities such as Maraş, Malatya and Tunceli. He graduated from İ.U. Faculty of Law and I.U Journalism Institute. He worked as a specialist in the State Planning Organization. He stayed in various states of the USA for a period of two years, in 1970-1971, for research purposes. In 1975, he became the Ministry Consultant of the Ministry of Culture. He also worked as an inspector in the same ministry for one year. He resigned in 1978 and returned to the civil service after a while. In 1984, he was deemed worthy of the Turkish Writers Union's Storyteller of the Year Award with his work The Door to the Sea. His essay book, The Two Worlds, was awarded the Special Jury Award in the field of ideas by the Turkish National Culture Foundation in 1978. His stories, A Polyphonic Death and Dissolution, were also made into TV movies, of which A Polyphonic Death received the Special Jury Award at the 1977 Prague International TV Film Festival. This award is one of the first awards of TRT Television. He started writing in 1956 when he was still a high school student, read Kafka, Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, said that he was influenced by these writers, and especially saw Dostoyevsky as a master; the works of the author, who was in the founding staff of the Mavera magazine, which has an important place in our literary world, in 1976, together with Cahit Zarifoğlu, Erdem Bayazıt, Alaeddin Özdenören, M. Akif İnan, Nazif Gürdoğan and Hasan Seyithanoğlu, are as follows: Essays: Essays on Muslim Thinking, Re-Belief, Confusing Words, Living Like a Muslim, The Dialectic of Love, The Tip of a Thread, Me and Life and Death, The Cross Relations, The Urban Relations, The Two Worlds, Writing, Image and Reality, Man Standing on the Doorstep, The Days We Live, The Writings of Refusal, The Novice Traveler, The Faces, The Thoughts of Dog, From Which End to Break the Egg, The Intellectual Stance, The Misery of the New World Order, The Materials of the Spirit. Stories: The Dust, The Distorted, The Dissolution, A Loud Death, The Door to the Sea, The Sick and the Lights, The Well, The Rusting, Sudden Departure. Novel: The Man Who Grows Rose. Arif Ay wrote a different biography of Rasim Özdenören with the title "A Portrait" in the February-March 1999 issue of Yedi İklim Magazine devoted to Rasim Özdenören: “He studied primary and secondary school at Sütçü İmam. He attended Varlık High School. He graduated from the Büyük Doğu University. He completed his master's degree in Diriliş Islamic Civilization Institute and doctorate in Literature, Middle East and Earth Institute. He opened a chair in Mavera and did not graduate his students. He was interested in ethics, not ethnicity. He is a sentence engineer; if you put a compass on his writings, you will see that they always point to the qibla. Undoubtedly Muhammadan man and writer. He smiles with his face; hides his sorrow with his dimples. He does not sit in coffeehouses. He looks at Hell from the seventeenth floor in the Giyotin, in the words of Nuri Pakdil, where he has been visiting for a long time at noon. He used his newspaper column as a magazine. He was not interested in the market agenda. He put his own actuality - the actuality of humanity - on the agenda. On the scale of Türkiye, if the decline in human understanding stops and development starts from today, only a century later, what he wrote will find a response in the minds.” 2 The architect of the idea of ​​going to Ankara roads in 2002 for this question, my advisor is İ.U. Faculty of Letters, Department of Turkish Language and Literature, Professor of New Turkish Literature, M. Fatih ANDI. I would like to thank him once again for the horizons he opened for me in this and future works. Perhaps astonishment to realize that he never looked with those eyes; the difference in the views of a “writer”, a “thinker”, a “man with a problem”, a “depth-seeing eye” on the city… Places/People, Neighborhoods, streets, slopes in stories… when combined, they will form a city map; behaviors, greetings, glances, and conversations are carefully placed within the lines in a way that feeds this map with a common spirit. These places described in the story of Özdenören are places that the author knows personally and left in Maraş. The author tells a life, a story that belongs to us, on the basis of a sketch of the main places of Maraş, which he sometimes distributes in the story, sometimes takes his hero to a high place, and has him look at and list it. The town and town descriptions in the stories in the book "The Distorted" are conveyed exactly as the originals, the houses, streets, mosques in the stories; the author specifically states that they are all Maraş. In one of the stories in this book, "When the Moon Rises at Nights", the narrator, who tells the protagonist and the people of the city, who passes through "the streets formed spontaneously between narrow intertwined houses" at nightfall, from a divine point of view, then brings the word to the main neighborhoods of the city:
“Kanlıdere: Who knows, in memory of what terrible event, the long dry ditch that gives the impression that blood flows from its bed instead of water in the minds of the child/dry creek where the sewers are drained from the surrounding where weeds grow, in a humming silence under the moonlight/a thin swamp Uzunoluk. In the past, there was lush water flowing in a big wooden board, then a stone passage was built with the gutter decayed and demolished, then it is covered and turned into a road and now there is a small bazaar there, with its bakery, kebab shop and grocer, and a small fountain erected in the name of a liberation valiant. The silvery yellow light of the moon is Mount Engizek. Bertiz Highland. A village in the distance. The earthen roofs are not only for preventing the northeaster from flying but also for drying the tarhana in carats. The Mount Ahır. Few people have dreamed of building a very high Chinese wall in front of it, so that the last crumb of a magnificent chain, a dry mountain will prevent the northeaster. After Isha, everywhere is deserted
Boğazkesen. The main road. The lights are shining there only sporadically/the busiest section of the city/boğazkesen/terrible name/there was a big fire at the time now there is a brand new sparkling building at the site of the fire/the road ends in the old municipality area below/it is just the old municipality area beyond the narrow road of the bazaar it is one-way no entrance only exit/abarabaşı on the upper side that's the it tepesi/an old church stone/an old hospital stone/the dogs the junkies The yellow light of the moon is silvery On the left side of Boğazkesen the magnificent body of the castle/the bastions have been repaired/the light bulbs blowing on the northeaster/the houses at the bottom of the castle/Nobody's throat has been cut in Boğazkesen/the bottom of the castle is different/ Tekke is different/houses are on top of each other in Tekke/the roads are impassable/muddy
Çürük. Hortum. Hacaslan's lunatic/if you tied a thread on his finger he wouldn't be able to move in summer and winter barefoot In Boğazkesen area small shops repairmen traveler lahmacun sellers crispy crispy kahkes with oil boiler buns Düvenönü tinsmiths small shopkeepers tinsmith apprentices/dog skin collector children, whose last destination is Şahadil, starting from the castle and heading towards the Arkbaşı/no life/no future Çarşıbaşı. Coppersmiths saddlebag makers merchants glassmakers shoe makers hardware stores liver kebab shops shoe repairers peddlers herbalists yemeni makers pot makers winders old salt inn arasa The moon's light is yellow and silvery" The town of Özdenören does not narrate his town with its venues in his stories. The human relations, habits and attitudes of this intimate place weave a fine web from lines to pages. The warm life of an Anatolian city comes alive in memories. "All relationships in the story 'Stove' are specific to Maraş," the author states. When returning to his city, where he had been away for a long time, after coming out of the prison he was locked up for an unknown reason, seeing that "the red pepper fields forming heaps of red areas have already been removed" and "the barren hills have been purified", the hero is not a stranger to the scene he encounters when he arrives in front of the house:

“I knock on the ring of the door, the place where the ring was pounded is hollowed out, melted. Actually, I can shoulder and open the door, but I can't shake off the strangeness, the strangeness that has come to me after all this separation, the strange shyness towards my own house, my father, my mother, everyone in the house. I have to gather myself up, calm myself down, until the door opens. However, I know that they are waiting for me, that they saw me as soon as the sound of the taxi in front of the door was heard, that they even recognized the driver and the owner of the taxi. As always, these were watched from the cage of the veranda. Behind the door, I am waiting for the rope tied to the banister of the veranda to be pulled from above. The rope is pulled. At the end of the rope, my sister. She looks bent over the stairwell. When she sees me at the door, she goes down a few steps and waits. In a kindly voice: "Welcome" she says. That's when a sharp baby squawk is heard: my son. "Thank you, my son" I say inside me, "thank you". You are welcome too.” At the top of the stairs, we come face to face with my sister for a moment, with the distress of not finding anything to say. Is she a little weakened? A fake smile settles on our faces. I take off my shoes on the stairwell. My sister pairs them with a femininity accustomed to serving and leaves mine with the other shoes. Ah, how clumsy I am in such situations./Come on, say something. Speak./ "Are you okay?" I ask. The rag she took to wipe my shoes stands in her hand, looking down at me with a bright face. "I'm fine." How much we used to run in this veranda, how many secret places it had. We used to play hide and seek when the neighbor kids came. Now how would I fit under that taxi couch that was thrown down in the bouldery. "Is my brother-in-law here?" I ask. "He2ll come in the evening," says my sister, "he was asking about you too." Here's my mom. The skin under her chin is sagging and wrinkled. I kiss her hands. First she shyly hugs me, then she wraps her arms around my waist. I hear her sobbing as she sighs. "May your mom die, let your mom die," she murmurs. “I saw it in my dream, but when it got late…” She doesn't finish her words. "Let's come in," says my sister, "it's cold… my father is in." As soon as the door of the room is opened, the smell of sour and stale sweat fills my nostrils. The smell of pee and earth. They hung the boy's diapers on hangers placed in the stovepipe. But I don't see him: his mother is nursing in the corner with her back turned: she has the end of the cheesecloth tucked into her mouth, turns her head halfway and looks at me for a moment/a brief moment/ our eyes meet. this means hello. Pretending I didn't see it, I turn to my father. My father is sitting on the bed with the quilt wrapped around his knees. I kneel down and grab his dry, calloused hands with both hands. He stretches them without resistance. “God bless you, be prosperous.”/ That's all, that's what the whole ceremony is all about. The attitude and address of this father towards his children is like an old Maraş frame. The father, whom we have witnessed "putting one end of the rope between his teeth", "waxing the rope", "repairing the saddle of the donkey" from time to time, "with blue black veins bulging from his crooked arms", says, "Wear this, deyyus" as he takes the shoes he brought for his children on Eid evenings out of the sack. For the hero, this phrase is a memory to be remembered with a smile: “These were the words he used when he loved us. We were almost spoiled when we heard the word “lan deyyus”.” Like the attitude of the father, the decor of this house, to which the hero returns, and the reproach of his wife, who had not seen her husband for all these years is also familiar: “My eyes are suddenly drawn to the carpet that my father brought from the pilgrimage, with the picture of the Kaaba, hanging on the wall of the sofa. Its place hasn't changed.

I go to the compartment we use as a bathroom to wash my face.
My wife is waiting with a towel in front of the compartment. She hands me the towel when I leave. In a voice that she wanted no one to hear:
'Traitor,' she mutters.
Is it a longing, a reproach, a belated hello, what it is, I can't tell. I just stare at her face.
Pensively."
In another story, we encounter Maraş in the name of a hero: "Ejder"... The original form of this name in the Maraş accent is "Eşder". “Salat Ejder, Malik Ejder, a companion rank,” says Özdenören. “According to a rumor, it is the name of a companion, and according to another rumor, it is the name of the Seljuk commander. I prefer this name, which is not very common outside Maraş, precisely because of this feature.”

The play "Çomçalı Gelin" (The Bride with the Spoon), which the children of Maraş used to play often, but whose name would be strange even if you ask the current ones, also takes place in the stories. The scene about the ignorant children's play troubles, between a seriously ill person and an expected death, is quite vivid: “Mother Cennet give me a rag Zahide shouted What rag my girl my mother said Çömçeli Gelin Zahide said you couldn't find a better time said my mother Come on said Zahide May you not breed my mother said Come on Zahide said Cennet is trying to fasten two sticks together one of the sticks will be the bride's arms she will put the bride's head on the other stick we will wrap the rags and decorate the bride then grab the bride's two arms and go out into the street WHAT DOES ÇÖMÇELİ GELİN WANT SHE WANTS A SPOON OF SALT They will put bulgur in our bag they will pour oil then it will rain we all watched her while Cennet was decorating the bride finally she finished the bride but she has no mouth no eyes Zahide brought coal from the stove now the bride has a mouth a nose and eyes you hold this arm of the bride Cennet said to Zahide let me hold to we shouted with Saniye she does not have four arms follow behind and shout Cennet said WHAT DOES ÇÖMÇELİ GELİN WANT we shouted together we don't do anything the girls said shut up Cennet said it's not a shame çömçeli gelin Cennet said Give me a break We are going to street Cennet said Kick the bucket she said we went to the street WHAT DOES ÇÖMÇELİ GELİN WANT SHE WANTS A SPOON OF SALT IF THERE IS NO SALT MAY IT BE OIL THE DOUGH IS IN THE HUTCH GIVE THREE DAYS OF RAIN ALLAH GIVE We shouted in front of the houses we knocked on the doors no one except sister Dudu gave us anything but she gave us a bowl of bulgur it didn't rain either if they had filled our bags it would have rained too now the north wind is blowing oh well I hope it fill their houses with soil and they see it.” According to the author, “it is one of the previous stories; the story of 'Arasat', which he says is one of the first stories, with his realist references, is a fleshy, bloody and lively Maraş story with its wooden doors, shades, windows, door knockers, earthen roofs, its children playing küsküç (a game played with sticks) and its artisans: “The houses smelled of burning onions. Twisted dusty roads narrow streets wooden doors which are ornamented with horseshoes on the zinc coatings or bare wooden canopies over the doors latticed windows bronze door knockers with lion heads the big trees of the earthen roofs protruding the children with robes licking their snot and playing küsküç while barking at each other near the walls softened by the muddy waters of the hard dusty road, with a dress on the bottom of the walls. children licking their snot birdmen whistling excitedly on the rooftops who unleashed their novice birds into the sky…" He mingled with the crowd of the late afternoon of the bazaar passed in front of spice sellers and hardware stores the sound of hammers of coppersmiths could be heard from afar he turned to the road that turned to the new butchers' bazaar and there he entered a liver kebab shop narrow and filled with smoke."

As seen in the examples, both the places of Maraş and the attitudes of the people of Maraş are scattered in the stories. So, are the old places in all of Özdenören's stories Maraş? In some of the stories about Anatolian life, there is a picture of Maraş, which is marked with the names of places and drawn in a mapping sense, but in the stories where we do not see a clear place or a clear description, when we see a judgment such as "it is a place where the sea is not known, nobody has seen the sea" and hear "the creak of wood", should a needle point to Kahramanmaraş in our mind, or did R. Özdenören carry other towns to his story based on his hometown? We learn that apart from the places related to Maraş, there is also the Eyüp district of Istanbul in the stories; due to the fact that the author lived in Eyüp for many years. That is, sometimes when talking about town, one of the places the author keeps in mind is Eyüp... The author states that when he thinks it is necessary to separate Maraş from Eyüp, he uses expressions such as “the place where the sea is not seen”, “the place without the sea”. For example, the story "The Echo" takes place in Eyüp. In the story, the protagonist says, “When the house was seen from the corner of the street, in the middle of the slope, the passion was suddenly revived. … I found it where I left. When you look from the corner of the slope, it is always as old as it is. With that first oldness right from the start.” Özdenören shares the information that the house he describes in this way is a house in Eyüp, which was inherited from his grandfather and is now an apartment building. The same house is also featured in “The Profile” Story with the following description: “The mansion, a white silhouette with thick, black evening streaks into invisible distances. It's a little over the hill. It's a bit like towards the upper limits of the hill. … The garden door that opens suddenly in front of me, followed by the mother-of-pearl plated interior door. I enter. I know this place, it's like I've seen it before." On the other hand, Özdenören argues that the place in the 'Family Story' that Mehmet Kaplan examined in his work 'The Analysis of Short Stories'; “Maybe it will be interesting,” he says, adding that it is a combination of places in Maraş and places in Eyüp, and that there are such conflicts in some stories. Sometimes the houses can be in Eyüp as a place, in Maraş because of architecture or vice versa. “The house in the 'Kundak' Story is exactly such a house,” the author says afterward. In the story, when the protagonist, looking out the window, says, “In the distance, the sea was misty, complementing the roofs in a thin line", yes, the house where this protagonist lives is in Eyüp; however, the architecture of the house with a courtyard with a wooden bedstead is unique to Maraş. When it comes to deciphering the places in such stories, the author slips out of his mouth that he uses his own house as a place in some of the stories. But he doesn't regret it later, he says "years have passed", "it's okay". “It was a house located on the road that goes towards the castle behind the Sütçü İmam Fountain, on the street that is thirty-forty kilometers from the Sütçü İmam Fountain and whose colloquial name is "Boklu Sokak". It is a house inherited from great grandfathers, where Özdenören's relatives used to shop for socks for a long time, with the Cenik/Cenup Spring opposite. When he says, “here is the house from the Return Story; this is the house”, he almost closes the door of the depth into which he gets lost with his eyes and leaves, I cannot reach there. The silence reigns in the room for a while.

Özdenören's 'The Return Story', which is crowned with a place from his own life, begins with the sound of the spinning wheel crashing against the mud brick walls of the courtyard. In this house, where the sound of the spinning wheel constantly fills the rooms, and in the middle there are sock clippings, rags and hanks of thread hanging from the ceiling; we see the uncle who has taken the responsibility of the house since he lost his father, but he was confused about what to do after years of unemployment and mischief, who looks around with eyes that are tired of the inability to do anything other than taking the spun threads of socks to the market every few days, the sensibility of being a crumb bum, feeling it beneath because of being an old noble, that are the speakers of the vanished agile youth and the trashed life, the aunt and the nanny as protagonists. He says that he refers to the same house in the "Skeleton" story, which is an interesting story. However, there is only one heroine in the house in this story. At the beginning of the story, we come across the main door of the house, its inner courtyard, and the crossbar hanging on the wall next to the door. Then, in front of the house, the narrator says that the spring, which the author had previously informed as the Cenup Spring, has dried up: “The spring in front of their house had dried up. In her childhood, she used to sleep listening to the sound of the spring and the irregular rustling of the water. The spring is dry now. Perhaps the sound of the spring had meaning with the vitality of her grandfather and father.” A heroine, who works in a foreign land all by herself, abandoning her education by embracing her job too much and willing to save some money, is unable to hold the funeral of his brothers, mother and father, who decides to quit her job and returns to the town even though she has no one left to hold or attend the funeral, fights against regrets, is unmarried and leaves behind a dead lover; Zehra Yaşar. Zehra, who refused her suitors since she saw herself as a little girl until yesterday, until the day her father was still alive, realizes that she has reached the age of fifty, matured and even got old the moment she loses her father. Finally at home, she encounters the skeleton of her lover, and even talks to him. Maybe she will think that she has met and talked to him with the psychology of being alone at home and in life and asking herself questions enlessly. Zehra finds the solution by acting to perform ablution; as the part of the story we're told ends. Now she is still in Uzunoluk, in another house told in the story Tutuk. The old woman, whom he sees in the window in this house, has taken its place in Özdenören's imagination of the storytelling and has turned into a heroine between the lines: “The door of the house is inside the street, its facade faces Uzunoluk Street. The old woman here watches Uzunoluk Street on the one hand and the immigrant houses on the other. The plane tree, which is described as majestic in the same story, is also real, that is, it is a one-to-one description. A person cannot be isolated from the place he lives in, from his memories, after all” says the author, makes this old woman look out of the window in the story, just as in reality: “A little below, the narrow street is wider as it starts from the main road, narrowing with a fountain at the other end, nestled into darkness. And there are plane trees that stick their leaves into the windows, row by row, along the unaged house, the decorations of the road, on whose branches the colorful lights hung on special days. Round, thin-necked electric poles. The house is near one of these plane trees, it's bulky. For whom, with his poor but wide, shriveled, majestic stance, it is all alone, it bows it head like this? Unknown. Its cold, disgusting rooms, its huge pillars, its tiled roof: How habitual, wearful, boring. It's not easy, it's always the same stairs, bouldery, same tiled roof, flabby plasters. The woman is staring out the window, her eyes fixed on that curved color of light.” 

Apart from these houses, another familiar place we encounter in the stories is the station; Maraş Station. In the stories, we observe that the author takes people who are tired of family arguments, bored with the environment, life, and even running away from themselves, to the 'station': "He was walking through the back streets towards the station." “I think I was going to the train station, he thought, but he couldn't remember that the road to the station went through here.” “He wanted to walk around after the prayer. But where would he go? Where could he go in this tiny city? He didn't want to meet anyone, speak with anybody lately. He began to walk pensively. … He knew that he had arrived at the station from the hard electric lights hitting his eyelids. There were five or ten lodgings here. He walked to the platform. There was no one in sight. There was no hissing from the black freight cars. The station was not across the road, so it was blind, there was no road beyond here.” Such examples can be multiplied. Even if many of the protagonists do not intend to go to another settlement and do not go anywhere, they take refuge in the station, the train station - almost. When I ask the author whether the distance from the station to the city has an effect on this when it comes to Maraş, I witness Özdenören's astonishment: “Is that so, this is a new and important finding. In some stories it is seen that people experience a sense of escapism - it may be a child, it may be a grown-up. Maraş station, especially the Maraş station in the period when we were describing Maraş, was located in an unmanned area, two kilometers outside the city. There were a few lodging buildings and a station building, which were only reserved for people working at the station. As such, this station itself is already in the position of a place to escape or take shelter. In addition, since Maraş station is a blind station, that is, it is not on the railway route, and it is reached by a suburban line from Narlı, which is thirty kilometers ahead, it is not a place where anyone can escape whenever they want. In other words, the person who goes to that station gets away from the city in a way. But this time he is stuck at the station. (Rasim Bey is sighing, saying "My dear Maraaş," here.) It's desperation…”

This close commitment to Maraş as the place in the first stories of the author, which we see with examples, turns into a form of isolation from certain places in the last stories. Stating that he realized this change himself, Özdenören underlines that “the last stories usually take place in a hotel or motel, whose location is unknown, where the city is unknown, where one can only feel that it is by the sea or on a mountain slope”. It is as if the narrated space and time no longer matter and the prominent human relations have left the space in the background at some point. Saying that, "If we tried to describe today's relations based on a space and time, perhaps we would have falsified the subject we were going to tell, what we needed to tell," the author states that the reflections of the intricacy, complexity and inner world depressions in recent relationships compels the author to "take the subject out of time and space and reveal it only within the type relationship". The human relations in the story "The Distorted", which is closely tied to Maraş and the space, and the relations in the book "The Rusting" or "The Sudden Departure", which include more recent relations, are different kinds of human relations. There is no more Maraş in these last books… Although the author does not act with the concern of showing social development or change, the critics generally say that Özdenören in these last stories refers to the social changes that have taken place since the Republic. However, Özdenören specifically states that he did not do this consciously. He does the same today as he wrote based on what he saw and detected before, he is not trying to go to other places and write other lives, but the place where people and relationships take him is different now. “Although there was at least a tangible, demonstrable place about the space before; like a station, café, motel, now they don't exist either,” he says; “there is only chaos… What is the place where the event takes place – is it chaos, apocalypse or something else – is uncertain.” Why Maraş? Yes, these places we try to show with a few examples are Maraş. These protagonists are from Maraş. The traditions, habits, behaviors and attitudes of the people, the order of daily life and the way of living kinship relations are unique to Maraş. What prompted Rasim Özdenören to treat Maraş as the environment, frame of some of his stories is that he thought that “the realistic basis of the stories can be created with a real environment." The same situation exists in the storytelling of Mustafa Kutlu. In Necip Tosun's work "Mustafa Kutlu in Turkish Storytelling", there was a separate title as 'Station' and it was said, "When we look at Kutlu's chronology, we see that he has written many station-oriented, station-referencing stories". The treatment of the station as "social environment" and "observation place" by the author was evaluated. For detailed information, please look at the Mustafa Kutlu in Turkish Storytelling. The real stories come from real lives, real places. His stories also belong to the most real city of his life; to the city where he spent his childhood… Here, it is necessary to listen to Hüseyin Durukan, who expressed his thoughts on the relationship between Rasim Özdenören and Maraş in his article “The Author of a City or the the City of an Author”: “The place where a person's childhood and early teenage years are spent leaves unforgettable lasting memories on that person.

The years of these childhood memories are years that are lost and longed for, that the person will need to return to, although it is possible from time to time in his later life, but never be able to return. In our future life, we place the photo frames taken at a young age, whether they fit or not, in the gaps that we could not capture as a result of some experiences that we gained in a sweet-bitter way. Most of the time, we take solace by looking at the pictures we place in these photo frames. The achievements reached during childhood inevitably affect and perhaps direct people. The experiences of childhood, the events encountered remain undeleted on the plaque from childhood period. In this respect, the effect we are talking about is continuous and permanent. This is truer for today's people, who are whirling around in the daily whirlpool. Undoubtedly, this effect obtained at a young age manifests itself as more obvious and more expressed lines in an artist's life and is reflected in his works. There is a direct relationship between the event itself and the place where the event takes place. Sometimes space comes to the fore. The child's mind does not only animate the event itself plainly, but also it animates the event itself, the place and other elements together. In one of his essays, when he says that “The storyteller only tells what he sees (these can be relationships, situations, events, anything). Moreover, as a storyteller, he is a product of the culture he lives in, and there are some perspectives that that culture offers him: Like everyone else, the storyteller sees what he sees from that perspective, whether he wants it or not, whether he likes it or not, whether he rejects it or adopts it. That perspective is not inexplicable, but it is the work of others to examine it. The storyteller uses the “current situation” as data while writing his story,” Özdenören actually wrote what he experienced and saw, but while doing this, he was able to immortalize the city with stories, without ignoring the influence of his thinker side, the power of his literary identity and his spirit. Has Özdenören's Maraş Changed? Maraş is the place where Rasim Özdenören spent his childhood and early youth. It's a town where the foundations of friendship were laid for people who would always support each other by arm in arm on the roads that will continue for years and years, that does not tire of telling the story of its self-liberation to those who listen to it, and tries to instill the courage of this liberation in those who understand it; the town of his childhood… Now, when he sees that there is very little left of that town, he can't help but regret. The fact that modern construction has spoiled the face of the original Maraş; seeing new places that he does not recognize and that have lost their soul every time he goes saddens him...

Actually, he has also experienced the state of change in the surroundings and people that, in some stories, the protagonists who left Maraş for a certain period of time see and the sense of strangeness they feel within themselves when they return in some of his returns to Maraş. One of the things he experienced in his childhood days had a great effect on him: “I was astonished the day I visited the primary school I attended when we returned to Maraş for a holiday a year after we went to Malatya due to an assignment in my childhood. The garden of the school, which had seemed never-ending a year earlier, had shrunk. We left Maraş when I was nine years old. It was the holiday when I was in third grade. Within a year, that garden shrank. I remember experiencing the same astonishment over and over again in the following years, each time in different places.” Rasim Özdenören expresses this in an article he wrote on the anniversary of Cahit Zarifoğlu's death in connection with himself: “I cannot capture Cahit's Maraş on any of the postcards I have. I can hardly protect myself from having a similar suspicion like the one he had somewhere in Living as "What if Rome does not exist! I am looking for a city where “people read Yasin, incense” in its bazaars, in these photographs elaborated to look tidy. But what I will be able to see will be to see that time has brought trouble to the waters. I will say that I could not find a spirit in this image of Maraş reflected on the postcards. Because: the mosques, the courtyards of these mosques, the pools in these courtyards, the waters in these pools are not visible on these postcards. There is no way to see the spirit that created Maraş in the postcards that do not include them.” Well, “what have new places added to the city?” "Could Maraş become a 'city' today with its modern construction?" “Even though it is thought to have lost its spirit and the olds may not recognize it, is it now a city by new criteria?” While talking about the answers to these questions, Özdenören insistently underlines that what makes a settlement a city or a town should not be its size or population. Although technically one or two factors can be prioritized, when evaluated from a storyteller's point of view, he states that human relations come to the fore in the criteria of the city's modernity, and in this sense he still sees Maraş as a town. In fact, it is debatable where to call a modern city in Türkiye. In this country, in the sense of the modern city (metropolis), there is –if we force it- only Istanbul and to some extent Izmir; according to his assessment. Ankara is, so to speak, a “young town”; “it is a huge town that has grown up before its time, but has remained a child, still has not grown up, when we exclude the bureaucrats…”

Where does the the Story of Maraş fall within the “Anatolian Storytelling”?
Maraş is an Anatolian city... Our writer, who tells about Maraş in his lines; does he think that Anatolian storytelling, which is directed towards Anatolia and Anatolian people sometimes in a national line and sometimes in a socialist realistic line (even disregarding the technique) from the labor-capital frame, finds a reflection in his stories somehow? Özdenören's face changes as I ponder and try to form appropriate sentences for this question. After the first few sentences of 'a thousand ah', I realize that I have 'touched a wound': “We had a story that was made into a TV movie: ‘A Polyphonic Death’. It was the story of a seventeen-year-old boy who carried his sick father from village to city on horseback. In the movie, the age of this child was reduced to twelve. The hot July sun was transformed into a snowy and cold winter day in order to increase the dramatic emphasis. Plus, during this journey, factors such as the village being lack of roads, hospitals and doctors were brought forward as a social criticism. However, I just wanted to reveal the loneliness of a seventeen-year-old boy without considering any of them.” Yes, even though 'A Polyphonic Death' looks like a product of a social realistic plane and perspective in its movie form, this happened in a way Özdenören did not want or plan. However, the author did not take any action on the subject. “My story still stands at the point I just said now,” he says; “But if anyone wants to get the kind of messages that the guys who made this movie get out of that story, it's just their business. A literary product stands before us like a piece of nature. The piece of nature tells us nothing. But we make it say certain things. If Aristotle spoke against this piece of nature, he would tell us that the stone fell, because the stone is susceptible to falling; he would say that the smoke flew because it is susceptible to flying. If it were Newton speaking, he would say that this falling event was due to the gravitational force within the body. Looking at the same piece of nature, Einstein says "E=m.c2" (Energy=mass.square of the speed of light). A story is like a piece of nature in this sense. The interpreters can find some meaning in it or ascribe some meaning to it. For example, for the "Family" Story, our late teacher Mehmet Kaplan said that "the real protagonist of the story is time"; I cannot make any objections to it. Because these interpretations enrich the story; does not impoverish, even if I do not agree… After the story is published, I look at it as a critic too. As a matter of fact, some of what I have said since now has been said as the author of the story; some of it has been said as an outside critic.” Yes… It has been written… Yes, we had an interview with the author of the stories of a warm city, where he sometimes sat in the chair of an “outsider critic” against his stories. We wandered around the questions about Maraş's story. Yes, the story of Maraş was written; it was written by Rasim Özdenören. Its stories were written by an author who "has a solid plot line" and "has reached a consistent and successful narrative technique within his own logic", "who also influenced many storytellers who came after him while gaining a distinguished place in Turkish literature and Turkish storytelling with his pioneering and competent story understanding". Because, among the poets and writers "who spent a part of his life in Maraş"; there is no other writer who carries the traces of this city, the people of this city in his works as much as he does. Yes, this city made Rasim Özdenören write itself, and breathed the spirit of an author-poet-thinker into him. Just like it breathed into Necip Fazıl, Nuri Pakdil, Cahit Zarifoğlu, Erdem Bayazıt, Akif İnan, Abdurrahim Karakoç, Bahattin Karakoç, Alaaddin Özdenören, Rüştü Şardağ, İsmail Kıllıoğlu, Ahmet Taşgetiren, Hikmet Özdemir, Şeref Turhan, Osman Sarı, Vehbi Vakkasoğlu, Hayati Vasfi Taşyürek, Derdiçok, Âşık Mahzuni, Tahsin Yücel, Şevket Bulut, Şevket Yücel, Fatih Okumuş, Mevlana İdris Zengin, Ömer Aksay, Ömer Erinç, Atıf Bedir, Bejan Matur, Nedim Ali Zengin, Ali Karaçalı, Kamil Aydoğan, Necip Evlice, Mehmet Narlı, Ali Büyükçapar, Mehmet Gemci, Bünyamin K. and many other poets and authors whose name we cannot count... Yes, many more stories, novels and epics can be written about Maraş. Despite those who do not hesitate to show the events in Maraş as if they took place in other neighboring cities; the series and films other than the current one can be shot. If the man of letters/artist could benefit from the spirit of this city...