Eda Tarak, while she was an undergraduate student at the Sabancı University Cultural Studies Program, interviewed “uncle” Kamil in Akşehir, where there used to be a large Armenian population. “Uncle” Kamil recounted various architectural traces, local stories and habits that he grew up with.
Eda: “People’s stories have always appealed to me since I was a child. I have listened with pleasure to everything that was recounted, ranging from my grandfather’s childhood memories to rumors about neighbors. Oral history is appealing to me due to my curiosity about listening. I’m lucky that my first oral history interview had this flavor. Uncle Kamil was very enthusiastic about telling stories, he was almost a professional oral history narrator. He told stories about the place I lived and of the people I knew. I may not always find narrators as good as Uncle Kamil, but I can always be a good listener.”
From Eda’s interview Uncle Kamil:
Uncle Kamil: “Both of my grandfather’s masters were Armenian. My grandfather is a ladder artisan. He makes wooden stairs. Like those fancy, masterpiece ladders… His master taught geometry to my grandfather Ali. In those years, a master who had compass, ruler, miter, protractor… His Armenian master used to stop my grandfather Ali while cutting the wood, and say ‘Ali, my son, did you measure this, did you make an example, a small plan of this?’ What I understand from this is that these men were really craftsmen, real artisans. And my grandfather used to say that they read and translated the Qur’an better than the Turks. Very knowledgeable, cultivated people… And when those men were gone, the Turks were shocked, ‘Who will make our stairs, who will sew our clothes, who will do our iron work’?”
You can listen to Uncle Kamil:
