The Magnum photographer Emin Özmen remembers the day in 1993 when radical Islamists set fireplace to the Madımak Lodge in his hometown of Sivas, Turkey, killing 37 individuals. Intellectuals and artists had gathered there for a competition honoring a Sixteenth-century Alevi poet.
A lot of those that died have been themselves Alevis, members of a Muslim sect that may be a minority in Turkey. Through the Seventies, right-wing Sunni teams usually fought Alevi leftist teams within the streets. The violence ultimately subsided, however tensions remained—the horror at Madımak, when Özmen was 8 years previous, was the outcome. It made Özmen need to develop into a witness.
On Sunday, Might 14, Turkey’s first Alevi candidate for president, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, confronted off towards Turkey’s longtime autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a Sunni Muslim who rose to energy in 2003, 5 years earlier than Özmen grew to become a working photojournalist. Over the course of Özmen’s profession, he has watched and documented as Erdoğan has remodeled Turkey from an aspiring democracy right into a polarized autocracy with a failing financial system.
These Turks who’ve suffered from repression, violence, and starvation these previous 20 years believed Kılıçdaroğlu may need an opportunity at successful this week, regardless of the vociferous opposition to him from Turkey’s right-wing populace, which disdains him as a result of he’s an Alevi liberal and since he’s not Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However neither candidate gained the required 50 p.c of the vote. The election will go to a runoff on Might 28, and Erdoğan nonetheless has an opportunity—many Turks see it as a foregone conclusion—to prevail as president for one more 5 years.
“A complete technology and I have been solely going to know this shadow,” Özmen writes in his stunning new guide, Olay. “To develop up regardless of this shadow, to attempt to construct ourselves regardless of this shadow. This shadow remains to be there, twenty years later.”
Özmen sought to seize in his images the sense of fixed terror his technology and his individuals have endured, significantly previously 10 years. As he writes, many Turks have been silenced beneath Erdoğan, and his images, even these of lively violence, have an eerie quietness to them, as if the quantity has been turned off on a TV. (His work remembers Gilles Peress’s influential Telex Iran.) Özmen makes use of this high quality to evoke what he describes as a way of “powerlessness within the face of a lot injustice and violence.”
The occasions (olay can imply “occasion” or “incident” in Turkish) he depicts are well-known ones: the 2013 Gezi Park protests, through which hundreds of individuals revolted over the development of a mall on considered one of Istanbul’s final stretches of inexperienced area; the warfare between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Staff’ Celebration (PKK) within the southeast in 2015; the tried navy coup towards Erdoğan in 2016; the persevering with Syrian-refugee disaster.
Many of the images are black-and-white and with out captions, selections that foster the unusual impact of universality—documenting the tragedies as ones the Turkish individuals skilled collectively, even when they themselves by no means marched within the streets, or ran from bombs, or tried to sneak illegally throughout the Greek border. The occasions are what Turks carry inside them; they’re what their nation has develop into. Özmen calls his personal thoughts “the sufferer of a violent wind.”
Over the course of the last decade that Özmen recorded, Turkey endured a number of pure catastrophes: earthquakes in Van, Elazığ, and Düzce, in addition to raging wildfires within the Aegean area. The federal government’s responses to those occasions struck many Turks as a shocking failure. They have been a harbinger of the nation’s future.
In February, two devastating earthquakes struck southern Turkey in 24 hours, killing at the least 50,000 and as many as lots of of hundreds, whereas making hundreds of thousands homeless. By now a lot has been written about why the earthquake was so lethal. Erdogan had constructed his authoritarian system on a corrupt development financial system and centralized the state a lot round himself that a lot of its establishments failed to answer the catastrophe. In some ways, the weeks after the earthquake felt just like the fruits of the Turkish individuals’s psychological expertise of the previous 20 years.
Turks weren’t solely grieving or terrorized in February. Many knew that the Twenty first-century dystopian future that haunts our collective desires, whether or not due to local weather change or warfare or authoritarianism, had come for them. 1000’s of individuals, wealthy and poor, lay crushed beneath their very own possessions, and as day turned to nighttime, in rain and snow, lifeless our bodies lay on the street with nobody to bury them; males, girls, and kids cried out from the rubble with nobody to avoid wasting them.
These left alive have been compelled to witness this new world: Their households have been gone, their homes have been gone, meals and water have been gone, the roads have been gone, the airports and ports have been gone, the police have been gone, the hearth division was gone. They now lived in a wasteland, the type we frequently say solely nature is highly effective sufficient to create. However solely man may have created such a magnificently rigged apocalypse, and in 2023, the one hundredth anniversary of the Turkish republic, this act of creation was the work of 1.
Turks at all times remind me that their nation has been round for a very long time. The Erdoğan period has lasted solely 20 years, and even this strongman couldn’t crush the Turkish individuals’s historical past—that enduring, democratic want to reside and love that Özmen portrays so heartbreakingly in his images.
One month after the earthquake, I used to be consuming dinner on the terrace of my lodge in İskenderun, the place a bunch of women and men sat at a close-by desk consuming and smoking. A automotive pulled up and a lady obtained out, screaming, and a blond girl from the desk ran to assist her sit down.
“How may I not have recognized they have been lifeless!” she cried. “I simply noticed on Fb … How may I not have recognized!”
They consoled her. She saved crying. They tried sterner phrases.
“Sister, settle down,” one man mentioned. “We’ve got to be sturdy. Look, I’ve buried 40 buddies.”
They have been stealing sips from a bottle of spirits beneath the desk, ordering extra wine. The lady was nonetheless weeping. The blond girl spoke to her once more with a transparent voice.
“Sister, God is testing us,” she mentioned. “Have a look at her.” She nodded at one other girl throughout the desk, who bowed her head. “Her buddy is within the hospital. Once they discovered her youngsters within the rubble, they have been hugging.”
