Martial law and curfews after the 1980 coup in Turkey

Martial law and curfews after the 1980 coup in Turkey transformed Kemal Basmacı’s regular evenings with Füsun and her family into visits governed by a hard deadline. The ten o’clock curfew forced him to leave before his longing was satisfied; the journey home became a race through emptied streets, and a national restriction on movement registered in his private life as a fresh deprivation of Füsun.

The Coup Enters a Daily Routine

Kemal’s visits to the Keskin Family Home had begun on October 23, 1976. Over the following seven years and ten months, he went there for supper 1,593 times across 2,864 days, averaging roughly four visits a week. He usually arrived around seven in the evening and, before the coup, left near midnight after the television broadcast’s closing ceremony. By the time martial law was imposed in September 1980, the dinners, the family’s company, and the long hours at the table had become the structure of his emotional life.

The household had its own overlapping measures of time. A German-made wall clock stood as a reminder of continuity and of the official world outside, but television had become the family’s practical timekeeper. Each evening the broadcast displayed a large clock before the news; Füsun checked her wristwatch while Tarık Bey consulted one of his pocket watches. Their small act of setting the watches to the broadcast’s time gave the evening a recurring rhythm. After the coup, that ordinary domestic schedule was constrained by a different clock: the curfew deadline.

The Ten O’Clock Deadline

The curfew required Kemal to leave at a quarter to ten, long before the evening had given him what he felt he needed. The change did not simply shorten a visit. It made the final stretch at the house a countdown, and the prospect of going intensified the very immobility that had often kept him sitting there. After the coup, the crisis began around half past nine. He could not make himself stand despite urging himself to move; by twenty to ten, panic had become nearly unbearable.

When Kemal finally got downstairs and into the car, he and Çetin would hurry, anxious about reaching home before the restriction took effect. They were invariably four or five minutes late. The soldiers did not stop the last stragglers during the first minutes of curfew, but the allowance did not make the journey feel safe or ordinary. Later, the curfew was extended to eleven, easing the deadline without erasing the years in which the rush home had become part of every curtailed visit.

Streets Under Restriction

The streets on the way home showed the cost of everyone else racing the same clock. Kemal and Çetin passed cars crashed at Taksim Square, Harbiye, and Dolmabahçe; some drivers got out and fought after the collisions. One night a drunken man emerged from a smoking Plymouth with his dog. Kemal also remembered a head-on collision in Taksim whose taxi radiator steamed so heavily that it recalled the vapor of Cağaloğlu Hamam. The dark, half-deserted avenues turned the drive into a passage through the visible disorder produced by haste.

The state’s curfew also acquired meaning through contrast with Kemal’s own private restrictions on movement. Trying to stop himself from returning to places associated with Füsun, he had drawn a mental map of Istanbul with prohibited streets in red, places he could enter only in necessity in orange, and other routes marked as dangerous because they might trigger painful memories. The Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, and Kuyulu Bostan Street belonged to this geography of self-denial. His map was an attempt to govern his movements for the sake of recovery; martial law, by contrast, imposed a public and enforceable deadline. Both narrowed his routes, but only one made the city’s nighttime streets subject to soldiers and a curfew.

Private Loss and Public Time

Kemal later recalled the coup’s evil most vividly through the small, personal injury of being hurried home before he had seen enough of Füsun. That response does not make the political crisis disappear: the danger on the roads, the soldiers, and the empty avenues remain part of the account. It shows instead how public time entered his memory through the intimate routines it interrupted. The curfew’s hours became inseparable from the measure of his visits and from the ache of leaving.

Before the coup, television’s closing ceremony often marked the point at which the family remembered the hour and Kemal finally went home. Under martial law, the deadline arrived before that familiar ending and drove him away while the evening still felt unfinished. The curfew thus sharpened the contrast between the official time governing the city and the private time he wanted to prolong at Füsun’s table: the state could determine when he had to leave, but it could not make the longing that followed feel complete.