The Book Harbour in Ankara

It was the late eighties, the early nineties. In Ankara, the center of Islamic bookselling was Hacı Bayram. Among the old-looking shops around the mosque there were quite a few bookstores. These shops, in which the most traditional prayer, ritual prayer, pilgrimage and catechism books, and Güllü Yasins were sold together with pilgrimage supplies, miswak sticks, prayer rugs and essences, appealed to the regulars and expectations of a holy place of visitation.

Amid the architecture and urban fabric left over from traditional Ankara, with its remains extending even to pre-Islamic history, the surroundings of the tomb of Hacı Bayram, one of the people of gnosis who Islamized Anatolia, were like a refuge for those clinging to whatever remained in the name of Islam in a country, and especially in Ankara, that had passed through a heavy trauma of secularism. Because of the effect of this trauma, it was quite abstracted from the world outside Hacı Bayram, so to speak quite far from current history as well. Despite this, for religious people this place, left outside history and the world, was like a breathing space. It was also the first venue of Islamic thought publishing in Ankara. Fecir Yayınları, the Ankara branch of Pınar Yayınları, whose headquarters is in Istanbul, Nur Yayınları, Akçağ Yayınları, gave here the first seeds of the new Islamic thought publishing from the seventies and eighties on.

In those years Islamic thought was opening to new horizons and quests, but the Hacı Bayram environment was not sufficient for this. As far as I remember, at that time the idea of opening a bookstore in Kızılay in Ankara was itself cited as an important breakthrough in the world of Islamic bookselling. Whether it was Fecir Yayınları with its place first on Necatibey Avenue, or Birleşik Dağıtım under the Türk-İş Passage that put this idea into practice, I do not remember. It needs to be verified.

But both venues quickly became the center of Islamic publishing and bookselling in Kızılay. They hosted much more than a bookstore. In particular Birleşik Kitabevi, with its spatial breadth and, though in Kızılay, its basement-floor atmosphere that allowed one to quickly isolate oneself from the world right next to it and return to that world again, had become a haunt of every booklover in Ankara and every booklover whose path led to Ankara. On stools it allowed deep conversations, acquaintances and debates.

The owners of Birleşik Kitabevi, Metin Özer and Gürbüz Deniz, who in those years was a student at the Faculty of Theology and later a research assistant, drew attention with their commercial intelligence in the field of books. Opening a bookstore in Kızılay was easy up to a point, but sustaining it and bearing its financial burden was not so easy. Metin and Gürbüz were able to come up with creative ideas to achieve this. For instance, there was a practice such as selling books by the kilo, which had a tremendous advertising effect that was on everyone's lips in those years. Then they had prepared and put on sale a guaranteed Arabic-learning set.

I think they also had the idea of bringing Islamic bookselling, which had come up to Kızılay from the basements, above ground with better ideas. It remained, I think, a suspended idea. Metin Özer and Gürbüz Deniz moved quickly into the University Preparation sector. In that sector they published Sınav Dergisi and ran the Sınav Dershaneleri, whose branches opened all over Turkey. I think, after doing business together in other sectors too, so to speak sailing the oceans, they have now become able to realize the dreams of their youth and have landed a magnificent book harbor in the middle of Ankara.

From that harbor, every day thousands of booklovers encounter books, people and ideas coming from different oceans of thought, can choose and buy what they want, and can become acquainted with what they encounter there though it was not in their mind, and buy that too.

I have been visiting the magnificent Book Harbor opened in Çukurambar, Ankara, since the first day. At the first sight, the stories of my dear friends Metin Özer and Gürbüz Deniz about bookselling pass before my eyes like a film strip; this story alone suffices to make sense of this harbor.

Nothing has been spared in the Harbor. Everything has been designed according to the wishes and tastes of every kind of book reader. As the place is quite large, it has easily made it possible to see to and meet all these needs, but if desired, the whole place could have been designed differently down to the centimeter. Yet in the Harbor it does not matter whether the book reader has money or not. An environment has been arranged where even a reader without money can hang around for hours and read the book he wants as if in a library, without buying it. Right next to every bookshelf a small chair-table, on the upper floor rooms for groups to read or discuss, thought workshop rooms, and different reading and working environments. For those who stay a long time, tea, coffee service, cafeteria services.. these are paid, of course. With its spotlessly clean toilets and its gleaming prayer room, again with no material spared, it is a Harbor that has turned the book environment into a real living space.

Of course, this bookstore, where you can find every kind of book from left and right, has no equal in Ankara, or even in Istanbul.

We are facing a repetition, far beyond, of a revolution made in the nineties by moving Islamic bookselling from Hacı Bayram to Kızılay, even if in a basement. This is a magnificent breakthrough not only in Islamic bookselling but in the whole idea and practice of bookselling in Turkey in general. It is so obvious that Metin and Gürbüz did not do this to make money, that they did it with great love and belief, to realize virtually the dreams of their youth... One also wishes that this respectable idea would at least earn money to be able to sustain itself.

Let me not neglect, even if at the end, the joke that comes first to everyone's mind because of the name.

If there is a harbor in Ankara, this is how it should be.

I congratulate and thank Metin Özer and Gürbüz Deniz for this Harbor, which triggers in a person the feeling of opening to worlds different from the ones we have closed ourselves into.