TRT

TRT is presented as Turkey’s only television station and as a powerful marker of shared public time. In the account of the Keskin household, its schedule does more than provide programs: the broadcasts give the evening a common rhythm, making the television a daily point of contact between domestic life and the state.

Identity and Reach

The narrative identifies TRT as the country’s only television station. It does not describe the organization’s internal structure; instead, it shows the reach of a single national broadcaster through the ordinary routines of viewers. The household television is almost always on, taking over from the radio as the principal source of domestic sound and, increasingly, as the device by which people orient themselves in time.

The Seven O’Clock Signal

Each evening, an enormous clock appears on screen one minute before TRT’s seven o’clock news begins. At the Keskin supper table, family members use that image to check or adjust their watches: Füsun looks at her wristwatch, while Tarık Bey consults one of his pocket watches. The clock is therefore both a broadcast cue and a repeated domestic action. The narrator remembers Füsun concentrating as she sets her watch to the screen, then looking over with a smile when she has finished; a national time signal becomes part of an intimate, familiar exchange.

Broadcast Rhythm and Public Time

Television’s role contrasts with that of the radio in earlier decades. Radio programs had been punctuated by soft signals on the hour and half-hour, but television viewers increasingly needed to know the time mainly to find out what was on. The Keskin family’s old wall clock, with its wooden and glass case, pendulum, and chime, remains a visible reminder of time’s continuity, even as television displaces it as the more useful domestic reference.

The broadcast schedule also gives the evening an endpoint. The four-minute closing ceremony, with soldiers marching and saluting the flag as the national anthem plays, is watched in coffeehouses and gambling clubs as well as in homes. The narrator estimates that his visits to the Keskin household often lasted from about seven until shortly after midnight, when this ceremony had ended. In September 1980, martial law and a ten o’clock curfew forced him to leave earlier, cutting short those evenings and making political time an immediate limit on private routine.

Narrative Significance

The narrator treats the clock before the news, like the flag and anthem on screen, as a sign of the state’s presence in domestic space. As families follow the same broadcast markers, their separate evenings become part of a larger national rhythm. Yet the timing ritual also makes visible the contrast between public schedules and the household’s more private experience: the clock regulates contact with the outside world, while the narrator’s attention remains fixed on the people gathered around the television. TRT thus figures not only as a broadcaster but as the medium through which official time repeatedly enters, and is experienced within, everyday life.