Today is the last day of the vacation I never had the chance to take. I sit on a wooden chair on the stone porch of my house, listening to the silence.

There is no sound except the noise of a magpie couple living in a linden tree just 5 meters away. They have so much to tell, despite the rustling of the leaves of the plane tree...

The hedgehogs that used to roam in the evenings are now as if they never existed. The cats of our street have already taken their place, nibbling on the leftover food...

Although it was still early in the morning, the sweet breeze that blew across my face reminded me of my childhood.

Streets adorned with ivy vine leaves, with wooden handrails, the streets of my childhood...

Narrow cobblestone alleys filled with sadness and yet overflowing with peace...

Those narrow dead-end streets where the clatter of horse carts mingles with the sound of horseshoes...

The cheerful women sitting in front of the cast iron doors of the white-washed, red-brick, shabby houses stretching left and right, with their white sashes on their heads and lace braids in their hands...

Snotty boys hanging from carved wooden moldings.

Streets of poverty-stricken, yet smiling and kind-hearted people, unaware of the traces left on their faces by dramatic destinies, almost like the stories of Tolstoy's novels and O. Henry's stories...

When we heard the fatherly voice of Uncle Hakkı, the horse carriage driver, we knew that the horse carriage, our playground, had arrived. All the girls would gather on the horse carriage, while the boys would spin in a circle and spin a spinning top.

I used to play on the cart until my mother tapped on the glass and wagged her finger from the huge framed deep window of our rented stone house with stone stairs.

I couldn't get enough of the market bread I would buy from Uncle Ali, the grocer's red leather-bound credit book, and the 100 grams of cheese that would last for a few days even for the family of five that lived with my grandmother. The olives we would add in four bites were either different from today's olives or we loved them very much.

It used to snow knee-deep in winter back then. On my way to school in the mornings, despite the snow water seeping through my hole shoes and not drying until the evening, I would run up and down to leave my footprints on the smooth and flat snow-packed streets.

Icicles up to a meter tall would hang from the rooftops, and my father would strictly warn us not to walk under them.

We never wanted the coal we heated ourselves with to go out, not knowing that people had died and lives had been snuffed out for it. But winters were harsh in Afyon and we usually ran out of coal in the middle of winter.

Nevertheless, the taste of chestnuts roasting on our luxurious zinc stoves was insatiable. Especially the morning breakfasts with toasted bread on the stove...

Despite the poverty and the sadness that has fallen over almost the whole city and despite the cold and frost in the four seasons, we... We...

Children of the land where the war of liberation was won...

Which is perhaps why we were poor, why we were sad. That's why these lands, washed with the blood of our ancestors, were grieving and in mourning.

And we... Despite everything, we dreamed, we never gave up on our dreams. We drank the holy water of struggle. Like King Arthur's knights all over Turkey, we set out to find our own destiny. That difficult and sacred journey...

MY DEDICATION TO THE PEOPLE OF AFYONKARAHİSAR AND THE GRADUATES OF AFYON HIGH SCHOOL 1982.....

Mukaddes Pekin Başdil

Researcher-Author

Source: Denizli Haber