Terror Years

Terror Years is the name given to the period of escalating political violence before Turkey’s 1980 military coup. In Kemal’s account, it is not only a national crisis reported on television: it reshapes Istanbul’s streets, empties cinemas, and threatens the repeated evening visits around which his private life has come to turn. The contrast between public danger and the fragile routine of supper gives the period its force.

Violence in and around Çukurcuma

By 1978, bombs were exploding at night in Çukurcuma, and political factions contested nearby streets and gathering places. According to newspaper reports, many murders had been planned in coffeehouses in the area. Streets leading toward Tophane and Karaköy were controlled by nationalist factions; higher up Çukurcuma Hill, along the crooked cobblestone streets toward Cihangir, residents included petty bureaucrats, workers, and students sympathetic to the Kurds, the Alevis, and left-wing factions. The opposing sides were armed, and clashes could erupt over control of a street, coffeehouse, or small square. The account also describes fierce battles following bombings attributed to gangsters controlled from afar by secret services or another arm of the state.

The danger reached the Keskin household’s doorstep through the journeys of Çetin Efendi, who drove Kemal there and was often caught in crossfire. He could not be sure where to park or which coffeehouse was safe to wait in. When Kemal suggested going to the family’s home alone, Çetin refused. After supper, the streets of Çukurcuma, Tophane, and Cihangir were unsafe; as posters and slogans appeared on the walls, the two exchanged fearful looks in the mirror. Inside, the Keskin family took comfort in being at home, but worried about what was coming. The violence was so difficult to discuss that they preferred to talk about the evening’s newsreader instead.

A private routine measured in visits

The visits that continued through this period began on October 23, 1976, and ended on August 26, 1984. Across seven years and ten months—2,864 intervening days—Kemal went to the Keskin home for supper 1,593 times, over 409 weeks. That works out to an average of about four visits per week, though the pattern varied: some weeks he saw the family every day, while at other times he stayed away, telling himself he could forget Füsun. He never remained absent for more than ten days, since longer separations brought back the misery he had experienced in autumn 1975.

The family gradually came to expect him, and kept a place for him at the table without needing to invite him formally. For Kemal, that welcome was both comfort and a source of hesitation. He sometimes worried that another visit would impose on the family; staying away, however, meant not seeing Füsun and fearing that his absence might offend them. His reason for coming could not be stated openly. The family settled instead on the euphemism that he came to sit with them, a phrase that made the arrangement easier to live with while leaving its emotional purpose understood.

These evenings had a steady shape but no precisely recorded duration. Kemal usually arrived around seven and left shortly after the nightly television closing ceremony, around midnight; he estimated that an average visit lasted five hours. The ceremony itself lasted four minutes, with soldiers marching and saluting as the flag was raised and the national anthem played. Its end, rather than a clock or a clear decision to leave, made the hour unmistakable. The account’s many small repetitions—sitting in silence, listening to rain or a car passing, watching television, or tending the stove—show how a routine could consist of apparently uneventful moments and still become the structure of a life.

Official time and the household clock

The Keskin home’s German-made wall clock, housed in wood and glass and fitted with a pendulum and chime, stood by the door. It marked continuity and connected the household to the official world outside, even as wall clocks lost practical importance. Watches and radios had already made them less necessary; by the mid-1970s, television had taken over the work of organizing domestic time. The clock remained, sometimes chiming unexpectedly, while family members joked about its sound and about the modern age it seemed to announce.

In practice, television became the household’s timekeeper. Each evening, a large clock appeared on screen a minute before TRT began its seven o’clock news. Füsun checked her wristwatch against it, while Tarık Bey consulted one of the pocket watches he used during the years of Kemal’s visits. Kemal watched Füsun carefully adjust her watch, then meet his gaze with a smile when she had the time right. The public clock thus supplied the measure, but the small exchange around it gave the ritual its intimate meaning.

Television also brought the political crisis directly into the dinner room. The family watched films, quiz shows, weather reports, and other programs; the news, by contrast, repeatedly announced the country’s slide toward civil war. The screen could organize an evening and give the household a shared point of attention, yet the reports of bombings and killings broke the sense of peace Kemal associated with being there. His account sets the regularity of meals and broadcasts against a public time increasingly defined by danger.

Cinema, curfew, and the changing rhythm

The Terror Years also disrupted the film industry. As bombs and street battles intensified, fewer people went to the cinema, damaging a business already losing investment in the kinds of films audiences had enjoyed. Film workers increasingly struggled to find work, taking jobs in commercials, domestic pornographic films, and fight films. The bars frequented by film people remained crowded even as families stopped going out at night; Kemal heard that unemployment had helped fill them, with Yeşilçam’s workers drinking heavily.

The 1980 coup brought a new constraint on Kemal’s visits: martial law and a ten o’clock curfew. He had to leave the Keskin home at a quarter to ten. The drive through dark, rapidly emptying streets turned the journey home into another measure of deprivation, because the permitted hour cut short time with Füsun. In retrospect, Kemal remembered the coups less through their political declarations than through the repeated necessity of leaving before his evening with her felt complete.

The period’s effects on cinema did not last unchanged. After the success of Broken Lives, cinemas regained audiences who had stayed away during the years now called the Terror Years, and the Pelür Bar filled again as film workers returned to make deals and be seen. The recovery contrasts with the earlier collapse, but it does not undo the violence that had altered the city’s evenings. Across Kemal’s account, the period is registered in a double rhythm: the nightly return to a family table, and the growing force of events that made both the streets outside and the act of staying until midnight increasingly precarious.