Diyadin Diaries,  Approximately 1900 km in Eastern Anatolia - 1975

During my university education, again, on a holiday, my destination was Eastern Anatolia. Journey to Agri Diyadin, the hometown of my mother's colleague Ismet, again for 1 month. In July, 1975, we got on the bus from Izmir bus station together and reached Diyadin after 36 hours late at night. At that time, roads were one lane, buses were not as comfortable as they are today.
This time there were Pentax and Voigtlander 24x36 and Yashica Mat 124-G medium format cameras. The first days were spent traveling around the district, meeting many people and drinking tea. I took beautiful photos in the Murat River, which passes near the district.

I said I wanted to go to the plateaus and take pictures. After talking in Kurdish between each other, they called someone named Mustafa Seven and entrusted me to him. In the time of Mustafa Seven, he was a person who was a bandit in the mountains and knew the roads. When another person joined us, we became 3 people. We climbed the mountains by taking a minibus. Minibus went back and forth once a day. After a long time, we landed at a place where I learned that its name is Zeynel Plateau. We walked towards the hair tents in the distance. "Alas" Mustafa said after a while. "These are a tribe hostile to us". But we had no chance to come back, they saw us too. We met, they told about me. Tribal chief came to me and pointed to the two people next to me and said, "These are our enemies, but you are our guests". We were relieved when he said, "You're safe here." Teas were drunk together, meals ate as if nothing had happened. In the evening, rugs were lay on the ground in the plateau, and quilts came. One person lied down on my right and the other to my left side. I was in the middle of them. Maybe for security reasons.

The next morning, after breakfast, we set off on foot. We had our way until evening. Mustafa had a transistor radio in one hand to keep me busy, and a thick stick in the other. With him he protected us from dogs several times. There was a radio but the folk songs were in Kurdish. He would summarize what the lyrics were saying to me when the song was over. When we were hungry in between, he would cut the thick-stemmed herbs, peel them off and offer them. We ate them instead of cucumber.  We were a guest in a house to rest in a village we encountered, but we saw fleas swarming on us and immediately hit the road.  We came across a small hut in a valley with caves on steep slopes. A husband and wife lived in a dark room. I told Mustafa that I wanted to take pictures of them inside the hut. Mustafa's words were like orders. While taking this opportunity, I took a photo with a high-speed film with my medium format camera, with the man in the front and the woman in the back. I chose an open aperture to make the portrait of the woman blurry behind the clear male image.

This photo was going to win the first prize in a national competition at the end of the year. (14th photo) The subject of the contest was "Woman in Life". Some of the photographs took place in the Istanbul Cinematheque exhibition in 1975.