Martial law and curfews after the 1980 coup

Martial law and curfews after the 1980 coup altered the ordinary rhythms of Kemal Basmacı’s life and his long-running visits to Füsun’s family in Çukurcuma. The coup imposed an all-day curfew on September 12, 1980, followed by a ten o’clock nightly deadline. For Kemal, who had spent years arranging his days around supper and time with Füsun, the curfew made political authority intrude directly into an intimate routine: he had to leave before his desire to remain was satisfied, and even the journey home could become a military checkpoint encounter.

Background: a life organized around visits

By the time the coup came, Kemal’s dinners with the Keskin family had become a durable pattern. From October 23, 1976, to August 26, 1984, he visited their home 1,593 times across 2,864 days—an average of four visits a week. His attendance varied: sometimes he went every day, while at other times indignation or an attempt to forget Füsun kept him away. But he never stayed away for more than ten days. The family expected him, kept a place for him at the table, and had settled on calling his visits “sitting,” a euphemism that avoided naming his real reason for coming.

The routine had its own domestic measures of time. A large German-made pendulum clock hung near the door, a reminder of the continuity of the outside, “official” world, though television had increasingly taken over the practical work of keeping time. Each evening the family watched the screen; at seven, when the clock appeared before the news, Füsun checked her wristwatch against it and Tarık checked a pocket watch. Kemal cherished the small ritual, including Füsun’s focused effort to set her watch and the smile she gave him when she had the time right. Their hours at the table were thus marked by broadcast schedules and familiar gestures long before martial law made time a matter of military order.

The coup and its reach into the household

On September 12, 1980, Kemal woke before the others and recognized the change from the emptiness of Teşvikiye Avenue. Army trucks carrying singing soldiers passed through the avenue. After watching military parades and the generals’ announcements on television, he went onto the balcony, where the silence and the rustling chestnut leaves in the mosque courtyard offered a striking contrast to the broadcast display of power. The view recalled another morning on that same balcony, five years earlier, when he had stood there with Sibel after the end-of-summer party.

The curfew lasted throughout the day. Kemal watched television and read special newspaper editions with his mother; reports and rumors suggested that people were being taken from their homes into custody, and he wondered how Füsun and her family were faring in Çukurcuma. During the following evening broadcasts, the generals criticized politicians and dissident intellectuals and lectured the nation about its supposed bad habits. The crackdown extended beyond political opponents: arrests included common swindlers, brothel keepers, black-market cigarette sellers, traffic offenders, people who had written slogans on walls, and people involved in pornographic films. News of summary executions and other arrests reached the Keskin dinner table. The family fell silent, and Kemal felt closer to Füsun in those moments, as if the shared anxiety made him more fully part of the household.

The coup also affected the places and habits surrounding the dinners. The Pelür Bar was emptied along with similar venues, and Kemal resolved to put his own life in order: to drink less, reduce the disgrace associated with his love, and restrain his urge to collect. Yet the political change did not remove his private attachment. Instead, it made the nightly visit harder to sustain on its old terms. Under the ten o’clock curfew, he had to leave at a quarter to ten, while his longing remained unsatisfied. When Çetin drove him through streets already emptying into darkness, the forced departure felt like being denied his due time with Füsun.

A checkpoint, a grater, and the curfew’s irony

The curfew’s power became tangible four months after the coup, when Kemal and Çetin were returning from the Keskin home. Fifteen minutes before the deadline, soldiers stopped them on Sıraselviler Avenue to check identity cards. Kemal had picked up a quince grater from the house, almost by habit, and had taken it from his coat pocket to look at it proudly. Its presence beside him made him nervous when the soldier’s attention settled on it.

The object had acquired meaning through the evening that preceded the stop. At the house, the fragrance of quince jelly had led Nesibe the seamstress to describe how she and Füsun had spent the afternoon boiling fruit and talking. Kemal imagined Füsun stirring the jelly while her mother attended to something else; taking the grater with him turned that ordinary domestic scene into something he could carry away. Now, inside the Chevrolet, the possibility that the soldiers might confiscate it filled him with anxiety. The radio offered martial-law bulletins—wanted lists, prohibitions, and the names of suspects apprehended—while he and Çetin waited in silence.

Twenty minutes after curfew had begun, a soldier returned their identity cards and told them they could go. When Çetin worried that they might be stopped for being outside after the deadline, the soldier said they could explain that the army had detained them. The state’s enforcement had itself caused the breach, and its agent supplied the explanation that would protect them from the consequences. Kemal nevertheless stepped out and approached the truck to ask for his mother’s quince grater, making the small household object the final focus of the encounter.

Disrupted time and private memory

The curfew did not merely impose a departure hour; it changed how Kemal experienced the time he spent with Füsun. Before the coup, his visits commonly began around seven and lasted until shortly after the televised closing ceremony around midnight, averaging about five hours. The ten o’clock restriction sharply shortened that span. On another evening, his distress left him unable to speak or rise from the table, and he did not leave until five past ten, despite Nesibe the seamstress’s repeated warnings not to be late. His paralysis and the late departure show the strain between the family’s familiar hospitality and the deadline imposed from outside.

That strain belongs to a wider pattern in which shared public time and private time repeatedly overlap. The wall clock represented the modern world and its continuity; the television supplied the household’s actual schedule; the coup broadcast brought military authority into the same room where the family ate. Yet Kemal measured the evenings less by official time than by whether he had seen enough of Füsun. In his retrospective account, the coup’s most vivid evil is not presented as an abstract political judgment but as the memory of being hurried home before his heart had had its fill.

The domestic objects around the visits also preserve time differently from clocks and broadcasts. Kemal associated particular kitchen things with specific evenings, and later believed that looking at an object could summon the experience of sitting at the dinner table with Füsun and her family. The grater episode compresses this larger practice into a single sequence: a shared conversation and the making of quince jelly, an impulsive act of taking an object, a military stop, and a plea to retrieve it. Martial law interrupted the evening, but the very interruption fixed its details in memory. The curfew therefore appears both as a concrete restriction on movement and as a force that sharpened the boundary between state-regulated time and the private duration Kemal tried to preserve with Füsun.