Inflation and financial turmoil in Turkey

Inflation and financial turmoil in Turkey shape both the practical choices and the anxious atmosphere of Kemal’s story. As prices rise, conventional savings and business appear uncertain, while private bankers promise extraordinary returns and draw money from households and companies. The resulting crisis is not confined to financial markets: it enters dinner-table conversations, fuels social gossip, reshapes commercial decisions, and makes economic optimism difficult to distinguish from reckless speculation.

Inflation and the sense of a narrowing future

The economic unease appears alongside political violence and personal grief. After drunken evenings, Kemal sometimes fears that his youth is over and that his life has already taken its final shape. He connects this increasingly bleak outlook to the political assassinations, street battles, spiraling prices, and bankruptcies filling the news. At other moments he treats that darkness as an illusion intensified by the headlines. The qualification matters: economic turmoil is both a material condition and part of the atmosphere through which he interprets his own future.

The inflation later becomes explicit in a conversation at the Keskin family table. With the rate nearing 100 percent, Tarık tells Kemal that people are buying gold at the Covered Bazaar, while others have deposited savings with private bankers promising as much as 150 percent interest. At the same time, people are selling gold and closing bank accounts. Tarık approaches Kemal cautiously for advice as a businessman, turning a household meal into a consultation about where ordinary savings can be kept safely. The competing actions—buying, depositing, selling, withdrawing—show a public trying to respond to rapidly changing conditions without confidence in any one course.

The pressure is not limited to household savings. Zaim later asks Kemal whether he has money with brokers and whether he knows a reputable one. The question is practical, but it also reveals how investment in private financial intermediaries has become ordinary enough to enter casual conversation. Zaim himself contrasts the returns advertised by the bankers with the slower demands of operating a conventional company: he regrets that money put into Meltem could have earned far more with Kastelli. Kemal, by contrast, says that he and his companies have no money with brokers. Their exchange sets speculative returns against the headaches of running a business, without suggesting that the promised gains are secure.

Private bankers, advertising, and exposed losses

The bankers’ appeal rests on rates so high that, as Kemal observes, they cannot remain in business indefinitely. Yet their advertising is pervasive and persuasive enough to attract substantial deposits and keep them afloat temporarily. Even people who publicly denounce the bankers, including economics professors who recognize them as con men, are drawn to invest for a short period. The episode depicts not simply deception by financial operators but a broader susceptibility: awareness of danger does not prevent people from hoping to profit before the danger catches up with them.

The consequences arrive in society news as well as in financial discussion. Zaim reports that the Avunduks and the Mengirlis invested everything with Deniz the Banker and lost it. The Avunduks then withdrew their daughter from Notre Dame de Sion and began trying to arrange a marriage for her. A financial loss thus alters a young woman’s education and prospects, showing how a family’s economic exposure can reorganize lives beyond the investors themselves. The report reaches Kemal through Zaim’s stream of gossip, making the crisis part of the same social circulation as scandals and matchmaking.

Another tale Zaim tells concerns Güven the Ship Sinker, whose scheme depends on manipulating official processes. He buys decommissioned, deteriorating ships cheaply, uses government and bureaucratic contacts to make them appear valuable and seaworthy, obtains interest-free loans from the Turkish Maritime Development Fund against them, and then arranges for them to sink so that he can claim payouts from Başak Insurance. He also sells the wrecks for scrap. The scandal becomes public not because the scheme itself is exposed, but because one ship runs aground beside a summer home he bought for his mistress and pollutes the water. The anecdote places financial fraud within a network of paperwork, access, loans, and insurance, while its comic social detail sharpens the contrast between the scale of the scheme and the incidental event that provokes public outrage.

A wider economy of scarcity and commercial risk

Kemal’s earlier account of preparations for his engagement offers a different but related picture of economic constraint. In 1975, the state strictly limited imports of foreign alcohol and lacked the foreign currency to pay importers for the full quantities permitted by quota. Yet champagne, whiskey, and American cigarettes remained available in rich neighborhoods and fashionable hotel bars through black-market channels. Hosts planning elaborate parties sought bottles through networks of head barmen, while society pages scrutinized how much genuine imported alcohol had been served. The episode predates the later inflation crisis, but it establishes a recurring contrast in Kemal’s Istanbul: official limits and shortages coexist with informal supply, conspicuous consumption, and status competition.

The same entanglement of money and institutional access appears in film production. Censorship proceeds through permissions, agents, and bribery, and the possibility of an outright ban threatens a producer with bankruptcy. Kemal recalls sitting with Feridun in the Lemon Films offices in spring 1977, weighing which agent might be suitable for the screenplay of Blue Rain. Later, Feridun is uneasy about making commercials for money, even as his work with a cameraman provides an income. Film-making therefore appears not as a sheltered artistic activity but as work exposed to state approval, commercial necessity, and the prospect of financial failure.

The industry’s economic choices are also visible in the films themselves. Producers use free food to attract people who can serve as extras, and lesser-known actresses such as Papatya play singers whose fictional fame exceeds their real circumstances. After Broken Lives succeeds with audiences in Istanbul and the provinces, cinema crowds return and the Pelür Bar fills again with people seeking deals or attention. The success raises Kemal’s standing as a producer and brings new commercial opportunities, including plans for a record featuring Papatya and a sequel demanded by cinemas and distributors. Economic recovery is presented as contingent and uneven: a hit can revive a business and its social world, but it does not remove the industry’s dependence on audience appetite and market pressure.

Kemal’s distance from the speculative mood

Kemal’s position in these episodes is shaped by his role as a businessman, but he does not present himself as a reliable guide to the crisis. He refuses to place company money with brokers, while Zaim imagines that private-bank returns could have outperformed Meltem. When he remembers their conversation among the crowd at Fuaye, he regards it as empty and meaningless. Rather than blaming the world’s general unreflectiveness, he treats its lack of seriousness as something that can make him laugh and even feel pride. His response gives the financial episodes an ironic frame: he recognizes the absurdity of the speculative conversation, yet the scale of the crisis is borne out by the losses and decisions reported around him.

The contrast between Kemal’s personal distress and the city’s pursuit of returns is also significant. He may turn to objects taken from the Keskin dinner table to sustain a complete memory of Füsun, while his acquaintances discuss bankers, brokers, and yields. These are different forms of attachment: Kemal’s private collecting preserves particular moments, whereas the public financial conversation seeks a future advantage that may vanish. The novel does not make the two equivalent, but places them within the same unsettled world, where people reach for something that can steady them—whether a remembered object, a business investment, gold, or a promised rate of interest. The financial turmoil therefore serves as more than background: it reveals how insecurity moves between public systems and intimate lives, and how confidence can persist even when its foundations are visibly unstable.