My Old Wooden Desk: A Keepsake from My Grandfather

I’m excited to share that my new book has been published. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1951312201 I’m also sharing the foreword below for anyone who would like to get a first look at the heart and purpose of the book: I was born in Antalya, Türkiye, and spent my childhood and early youth, until the age of seventeen, in the city my family had called home for more than 750 years. Between the blue of the Mediterranean and the green of the Beydağları, my life moved between modern Antalya and the mountains, where a way of life seemed to have stood still for seven and a half centuries: without electricity or telephones, among Yörük tents and 250-year-old stone houses. There, with the volumes I had carried into the Beydağları, I first discovered the pleasures of reading, thinking, and writing by the flickering light of the kerosene lamp my grandfather called the “lüküs.” I wrote my first pieces at the little wooden desk he had asked Uncle Omar, the sawyer, to make especially for me. There was no television, no internet, no social media: only books, and perhaps the hourly news bulletins on Radio 1. In the quiet evenings, while I read and wrote, my grandfather and his guests listened to plaintive folk songs on the radio. They stirred sugar into their tea glasses to the gentle clink of teaspoons and sipped the hot tea noisily to avoid burning their mouths. At seventeen, I left for Istanbul to study Turkish literature. Could I have imagined that, once I left Antalya, there would be no true return? Those were the days when I walked from Cağaloğlu to Istanbul University, past one bookshop after another; when I offered the noon prayer at Süleymaniye Mosque, then turned into the neighbouring street to enter the Süleymaniye Manuscript Library; when I found rare manuscripts that seemed to have remained unopened for five hundred years, their pages nearly fused together, and lost myself in them. Back at the house I shared with fellow students, I would withdraw to my room to read and write one piece after another. Those were sweet days. Those long, long university years—that immense span of four whole years—passed so quickly. That summer, I returned to Antalya and went back up into the Beydağları, to my grandfather’s old home. For two months, I sat at my old desk, reading and writing, all the while yearning for the Beydağları nights of my earliest childhood. Alas, just as the years had aged me and my vast world of dreams, a mere fifteen years had swept the enduring life of the Beydağları, unchanged for seven and a half centuries, into modernity. Rooms lit by electricity. The clamour of a large television. Worlds abruptly interrupted by ringing telephones… Ah, my earliest childhood… do you know that nothing remains of you but that old desk of mine? I grew up and became a teacher, once again in Istanbul. Yet I held fast to the wistful illusion that one day I would return to my childhood and to my Antalya. My home, my wife, and my children bound me to Üsküdar. Once again, I began exploring its timeworn streets, where surprise followed surprise and the blue of the Bosphorus revealed itself anew at every corner. It was as though the blue of my childhood had never left me, as though it were still watching over me. The years passed, but I never stopped reading or writing. In time, those pursuits came to define my life as a teacher, writer, and editor. Then came another journey, and our whole family found its way to Houston. My reading and writing continued, drawing me further into solitude and into that mysterious realm where thought, reading, and writing meet. For reasons I cannot explain, I read the entire collection of Ottoman newspapers held in a Japanese archive. Again and again, I returned to the works of the Tanzimat and Meşrutiyet eras. In the book now in your hands, I draw on the work of many researchers to ground the narrative in documentary evidence. How closely you resemble my own life, you final century of the Ottoman Empire: how suddenly you brought the telegraph, the railway, and the steamship into your world; how swiftly you transformed your cities; and how, almost as soon as you had changed them, you left them behind. Though I live in Houston, my spirit and imagination remain at my wooden desk in the old stone house in the Beydağları, now uninhabited. No electricity, no telephone, no television. Yet there, in the glow of the lüküs lamp, my reading, thinking, and writing endure. Change is beautiful, yet with it an entire world vanishes. So it was with the Ottoman Empire as it changed; so it was with the world of my earliest childhood. I dedicate this book to the Ottoman intellectuals who understood the necessity of change and acted upon it, yet whose longing for the past never ran dry. I also dedicate it to my grandfather, Murat Yilmaz (“Koca Apil Murat”), who came down from the Beydağları to Antalya on the day I was to leave for university in Istanbul, pressed every last bit of money from his pocket into the breast pocket of my shirt, and then, with tears in his eyes, said, “Perhaps we shall never see each other again, my son. May your road be open.” Six months later, before I could return to Antalya, he journeyed into the beyond at the age of ninety-six, taking my earliest childhood with him. May your reading, your thinking, and your writing be fruitful. Murat Yilmaz September 6, 2026 Houston, Texas