His friend Pablo Neruda relates Hikmet's account of how he was treated after his arrest: ``Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nazim was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced to walk on the ship's bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength failing him: my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began to sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remeber, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people's battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. Ans so he vanquished the filth and his torturers.*'' In prison, Hikmet's Futurist-inspired, often topical early poetry gave way to poems with a more direct manner and a more serious tone. Enclosed in letters to his family and friends, these poems were subsequently circulated in manuscript. He not only composed some of his greatest lyrics in prison, but produced, between 1941 and 1945, his epic masterpiece, Human Landscapes. He also learned such crafts as weaving and woodworking in order to support himself and his family. In the late Forties, while still in prison, he divorced his second wife and married for a third time. In 1949 an international committee, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre, was formed in Paris to campaign for Hikmet's release, and in 1950 he was awarded the World Peace Prize. The same year, he went on an eighteen-day hunger strike, despite a recent heart attack, and when Turkey's first democratically elected government came to power, he was released in a general amnesty.

Within a year, however, his persecution had resumed full force. Simone de Beauvoir recalls him describing the events of that time: ``He told me how a year after he came out of prison there were two attempts to murder him (with cars, in the narrow streets of Istanbul) And then they tried to make him do the military service on the Russian frontier: he was fifty. The doctor, a major, said to him: ``Half an hour standing in the sun and you're a dead man. But I shall give you a certificate of health.'' So then he escaped, across the Bosphorus in a tiny motorboat on a stormy night -when it was calm the straits were too well guarded. He wanted to reach Bulgaria, but it was impossible with a high sea running. He passed a Rumanian cargo ship, he began to circle it, shouting his name. They saluted him, they waived handkerchiefs, but they didn't stop. He followed them and went on circling them in the height of the storm; after two hours they stopped, but without picking him up. His motor stalled, he thought he was done for. At last they hauled him aboard; they had been telephoning to Bucharest for instructions. Exhausted, half dead, he staggered into the officers' cabin; there was an enormous photograph of him with the caption: SAVE NAZIM HIKMET. The most ironical part, he added, was that he had already been at liberty for a year.**''

yasamak

Yasamak bir agac gibi,
tek ve hür,
Ve bir orman gibi
kardescesine,
Bu
bizim Hasretimiz!


Nazim Hikmet

I think the idiot is gone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vm7UpkSOnk&feature=related

The fountains of Istanbul are the patrimony of Ottoman and Islamic civilization. Şadırvan fountains in the courtyards of mosques give Muslims water with which to wash prior to prayer. Streetside Çesme fountains once provided the people of Istanbul with water for cooking, washing, and sanitation. Kiosk-like Sebils once dispensed water and cool drinks to quench the thirst of passersby. In Ottoman times, the building, donation, and maintenance of Çesmes and Sebils -- like many religious and secular structures -- was a pious act endowed by the public-spirited, who also conserved wealth to pass on to their heirs by assigning ownership of their gifts to specially established charitable foundations or Vakfıye.

BEDREDDIN
Outside of the Turkic world, Bedreddin is best known through the Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin, a narrative poem by famed leftist poet Nazim Hikmet. In Osman’s Dream, a magnificent newly-published single-volume history of the Ottoman Empire, author Caroline Finkel quotes an English translation of Hikmet’s imagined ode to oneness sung by Bedreddin’s followers as they prepared for their final confrontation with the Sultan’s forces:



To be able to sing together
pulling the nets all together from the sea,
together to forge the iron like a lace,
all together to plow the soil,
to be able to eat the honey-filled figs together
and to be able to say:
everything but the cheek of the beloved
we all share together
everywhere
To achieve this
Ten thousand heroes sacrificed their eight thousand


In Turkey and in isolated corners of the lands that once comprised the Ottoman Empire, the memory of Bedreddin is still very much alive

http://www.thy.com/en-INT/corporate/skylife/article.aspx?mkl=304

A life on the Bosphorus
Sinan Genim
Known more for his architectural and restoration projects, Sinan Genim recently published an important book on Istanbul as well.