In the same city you were not able to turn gray 2

In the same city you were not able to turn gray?

Inhabiting place is in the past, in memories ?

Derekoy in Gokceada has a peculiarity of being the biggest village of Turkey according to 1950 population numbers. An important part of the village has been subject to a mandatory migration to Greece as a result of the exchange agreement in 1923. Most of the people left behind, however, have had to leave their village during the Cyprus events. Today in the village, apart from a couple of Greek families, there are only a few families coming from the south-east and east Anatolia, which left their lands because of the terrorist activities in the region. It seems that their destiny intersects with that of the island inhabitants at this point. Silence nowadays is dominant in the village which has been very lively once-upon-a-time. Have you ever been in a place where you cannot hear any voice of children?

The second part of this work can be done for the Turkish villages in Greece, which have been vacated as a result of the exchange between Turkey and Greece. It is a known reality that the same hassle has also been faced there. While I was preparing my exhibition, I always thought unbearable sadness that I faced when I had to leave a place where I had settled down for a while. My main concern was to be able to pass on my bare emotions to you, the spectators. For all time, I imagined how the feelings might be when we had to walk away from the places where we lived our childhood leaving behind all of our memories overnight which had been actually built up in years. While walking around the dead houses, the old inhabitants of them might even have grieved with me again. I touched the remembrances of the dead houses? residents. Their hands might also touch to their memories together with me. I was crushed under the heaviness of the memories.

Here is Gokceada, Derekoy. This is where a population exchange took place. I would like the observers to watch this exhibition from this point of view. I wish this exhibition to be remembered not as a population exchange documentary, but a conceptual work. At the end of the day, the actual truth is the pure emotions lived there, isn?t it?

The short lines under the photograph squares are from the poems of Ritsos, and Kavafis who also comes from a family, which has lived the same exchange adversity while ago. I came across them at the end of my work, and I have realised that those lines were amazingly overlapping the things that I have seen while taking photographs. That is actually why I have chosen the title of my exhibition from a poem of Kavafis, named as ?The City?:

?New places you shall never find, you'll not find other seas.

The city still shall follow you. You'll wander still

in the same streets, you'll roam in the same neighbourhoods,

in these same houses you'll turn gray.?