The Murdered Author: Sabahattin Ali and the Epic Escape from the Republic

Sabahattin Ali’s name appeared fleetingly in some documents I read about İsmet İnönü, but I paused when I encountered it. Something about the name itself stirred a thought: could he have belonged to one of those Bulgarian Christian families who paid the “blood tax,” providing sons to the Ottoman Janissary Corps? But Sabahattin Ali was not Christian; he was a Turkish Muslim, born in Bulgaria in 1907. His family migrated to Istanbul in 1921 after the Greco-Turkish War destroyed their home and turned them into refugees.

What was the nature of the conflict between him and İsmet İnönü? And how did this novelist meet his end? He gained broader recognition after 2000, not necessarily because “Madonna in a Fur Coat” was his best work, but because a new generation found an echo of their own inexpressible feelings within its pages.

I pieced together his fragmented biography and delved into Turkish newspaper archives from the day of his death and the subsequent coverage in the spring of 1948. The name seemed familiar from my own library. I discovered two collections of his short stories and read them consecutively, without interruption. The story “Voice” is particularly striking. It’s the title of one of his collections translated into Arabic (Dar Mosaïque), and it served as the inspiration for the song “Leylim Ley,” which first emerged in 1941.

The story of this song unfolds at a rural bus depot, where passengers endure long waits. There, the narrator hears a beautiful melody played on a Saz, accompanied by a captivating voice performing a heart-stirring song. The narrator decides to help the young man from Sivas, “Ali Sivaslı” (Ali of Sivas), showcase his talent in the capital, securing him meetings with art competition organizers.

But the city proves unwelcoming.

This young villager, a gifted musician in the bus station waiting area, attempts to achieve recognition but fails to pass the initial auditions, facing insults and class discrimination. Even before hearing him perform, the committee favors a young, fair-haired Turkish man who seems to be a “favored son,” while Ali Sivaslı is dismissed. The young man feels deeply humiliated and ashamed, because he has let down those who believed in his talent, those who expected him to impress the committee, not provoke their contempt.

Ali’s dreams were modest: to play and sing, to make his contribution to the world through music. He wouldn’t have dared to dream of all this if his new acquaintance hadn’t appeared at the bus stop. In truth, Ali was a creative force in Anatolia and on the rural roads, but the city betrayed him, causing him to lose his talent.

His dream collapsed instantly. It wasn’t simply rejection, but humiliation. He decided to return to his village, but he lacked the necessary funds. Consequently, he sold the only thing that gave his life meaning: the Saz.

Sabahattin Ali wrote the lyrics in his story in 1941 and published them in a weekly newspaper, later including it in his collection of stories titled “Voice.” Zülfü Livaneli transformed it into a protest song in the 1960s, while İbrahim Tatlıses revived it as a teenage pop song in the 1990s, drifting far from its original meaning, almost like an experiment in post-structuralist philosophy applied to literature.

Ali Sivaslı was more than just a fictional character. He was a symbol of every peasant displaced by the new regime, every talent crushed by the city’s discrimination against the countryside, every soul rejected because it didn’t originate from the elite.

Ali Sivaslı became an Anatolian social icon created by Sabahattin Ali, representing the entirety of the Ottoman East/Kurdistan and Anatolia in opposition to the narrative of “urban progressivism” and “rural backwardness” that plagued Turkish politics until the late 1970s. It’s as if this character embodies society’s trauma related to the Republic and its inherent value biases, which contradicted its own identity. He represents a break with the city’s elite. This concept evolved into an enduring phenomenon and reemerged in the 1970s, not as a specific individual, but as a broader archetype. Ali became a cadre within the Turkish left, a rural man who had moved to the city, confronting another rural Anatolian from the far-right (the Grey Wolves). The Anatolian countryside had spawned two extremist movements that corrupted political life in society: the left and the right, resulting in “Ali versus Mehmet.”

“Madonna in a Fur Coat,” translated by Jihad al-Amassi, is the jewel in Sabahattin Ali’s literary crown.

I read the novel, and while I didn’t find it particularly enjoyable, the character of Raif Efendi, resigned to his wife and in-laws, and enigmatic during his youth, is intriguing. His peculiar attachment to a painting of a girl in Berlin, and the subsequent fantasy that this girl from the painting has materialized as a dancer living a life of nightlife, leading him to fall hopelessly in love, is compelling.

His other, more famous novel, “The Devil Inside Us” (which is currently on my reading list), isn’t as widely known.

President İsmet İnönü, notorious for his intolerance of opponents, especially writers, hated Sabahattin, and the state apparatus relentlessly pursued him in response to his poems and stories. This persecution even extended back to the era of Mustafa Kemal; he was imprisoned in the early 1930s for publishing a poem interpreted as a satire of Mustafa Kemal. Released a year later, he found himself blacklisted, with every department refusing to employ him. Eventually, the Minister of Culture – at İnönü’s prompting – demanded that he provide proof of his changed allegiances. Desperate for work, he wrote a poem praising Mustafa Kemal. He secured a job briefly before being fired again.

During İnönü’s time, Sabahattin, Aziz Nesin, and Nazım Hikmet became friends. They collaborated on publishing satirical magazines titled “Pasha,” such as “Cow Pasha” and “Maalom Pasha.” İsmet Pasha, claiming he was the target of their ridicule, used his influence to harass them. After the publication of his novel “The Devil Inside Us,” Sabahattin was imprisoned and faced financial ruin. He was also subjected to a smear campaign by Nihal Atsız, a leading theorist of Turanist nationalism and a mentor to Alparslan Türkeş.

Sabahattin Ali decided to sever ties with the Republic forever, state, institutions, and personalities. He chose to end his affiliation with Turkey and embarked on a journey to Bulgaria on foot, heading to a country where he was born but did not know as a nation. His desperation had reached a boiling point.

The official murderer of Sabahattin Ali was Ali Arslan Ertekin, his cellmate who introduced himself as a smuggler. This led to the tragic end of Sabahattin’s life at the age of 41. Ertekin justified his brutal act by citing ‘national duty.’ He was sentenced to four years in prison but was released a few weeks later after benefiting from an amnesty. It’s believed that Sabahattin was brutally murdered under torture, particularly since his body was not discovered until several months after his death. Ertekin voluntarily took credit for the crime.

Sabahattin Ali left behind an only daughter who is a prominent figure in the Turkish music world. Feliz Ali, an 88-year-old pianist and university professor, is a testament to her father’s enduring legacy.

Sabahattin Ali’s life ended like that of most of his fictional characters: he was murdered in the spring of 1948 while attempting to return to Turkey. Unlike the peaceful death of Raif Efendi on his bed as he reminisced about the film of his life, where the men of the Republic’s “second man” relentlessly pursued him to the grave, Sabahattin Ali’s story is an exceptional case of literary-political significance. His narrative is that of a Turk fleeing in terror from the Republic. What horrors did he witness?