ÇEVRE HIGHLIGHTS - 29. SAYI

47 OCAK 2026 Süleyman BULUT Interview The writer Süleyman Bulut, who has opened the door for us—since childhood—to a world that is both entertaining and educational through his books, is here with us today. Hearing the real voice behind the pages we have read is truly exciting. Thank you for accepting our interview. We would like to get to know you better. Could you briefly tell us about yourself and how your journey as a writer began? I was born in a village on the shore of Lake Beyşehir. Lake Beyşehir is Turkey’s second- largest lake, located in Central Anatolia on the Konya–Isparta border. I was born in a village by that lake. I completed primary school in my village, and this may sound very strange to you now, but during my primary school years I never saw any books other than textbooks—nor did I read novels, short stories, poetry, or plays. Because in those years, only textbooks reached my village. I first encountered what a short story was and what poetry was through my Turkish textbook. In the 5th-grade Turkish textbook, three short stories and one poemaffectedme deeply. The poemwas Behçet Necatigil’s “Kır Şarkısı,” a poem about the countryside. I liked it so much that I memorized it. And I still remember those three short stories—I memorized them too, almost line by line. They were Ömer Seyfettin’s “Kaşağı,” Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s “Kirazlar,” and Refik Halit Karay’s Gurbet Hikâyeleri. These three stories influencedme greatly. For middle school, wemoved to our district center, Beyşehir. There, one of my teachers told me there was a public library and described where it was. I went to that public library, and the first book I read outside of textbooks was a book I borrowed from there. I fell in love with reading, and throughout the six years I lived in Beyşehir, I was the library member who read the most books every year. I love reading; I enjoy it a lot, so I constantly made use of the public library. Later, I came to Istanbul for university. My score was enough for other places too, but I chose Istanbul University’s Faculty of Economics. I had chosen the finance and business department—fields that are largely based onmathematics. When I started thinking about this, I realized that I loved letters more than numbers. Perhaps the greatest benefit of studying at the Faculty of Economics was that it made me realize this. Once I understood it, I said, “Let me work in that area,” and I beganmy first attempts at writing. I don’t know if I could have decided to become a writer if I hadn’t been a good reader—but even if I had, I don’t think I could have been this productive. The gains I made through readingsupportedmegreatlywhenIwaswriting.IfirstbeganbywritingplaysforIstanbul Radio. Later, I started writing books for children, and I never stopped. As writers of Mesafe Literary Magazine, we are young people who study at different grade levels in high school. We are also curious about your high school years. What kind of high school life did you have? Did you have an experience related to literature—like publishing a literary magazine, as we do? And if we asked you to recommend a book for us to read, which book would you suggest? Recommendations from an experienced writer like you are very important to us. In our time, in high school—when you moved from middle school to high school—you had to choose between two tracks: science and literature. You had to choose one of them. Now, I was a very good reader. I was close to literature and did a lot of literary reading, but if I chose the literature track, the number of university fields I could enter would be very limited. If you chose science, it was much broader. So in high school, even though I loved literature, I chose the science track and graduated from it. During high school, we published a “wall newspaper.” There were no social media possibilities like today, and there was no option to print magazines or newspapers. We would handwrite pages and paste them onto a large board to create a wall newspaper, then hang it in a suitable place in the school corridor. I think we published about 6–7 issues. That was what my literary work looked like in high school. AnovelIreadinthosedaysinfluencedmealot.Istilllovereadingit—manyofyouprobably know it: Ferenc Molnár’s The Paul Street Boys. Very few novels describe friendship and loyalty so beautifully. It affectedme deeply andmultipliedmy love of literature. Also, make sure you read a few Jules Verne novels in your life. Jules Verne is an incredible writer. In a novel I read by chance, Jules Verne described Istanbul. The novel began in a mosque in Tophane. I immediately went on Google and saw that the mosque still stands there—yes, it was the same mosque he described, and yes, the details were correct. I was amazed. Then I researched Jules Verne’s life—had he ever come to Istanbul? Since he described it so realistically, I thought he must have. But Jules Verne never left Paris in his life. If you want recommendations from Turkish writers, for example, if you have never read Sait Faik, reading Sait Faik will be very beneficial. After reading a few of his books, you will naturally want to read the rest. Reading a few Aziz Nesin books will also be useful for understanding your sense of humor—or the sense of humor our society had in the past. In your works, we read Mustafa Kemal Atatürk not only as the founder of a state, but also as an individual who thinks, reads, and questions. For young readers to better grasp this intellectual side of Atatürk, which scene or event in your books is especially important for you? II’d like to answer this question based on a real anecdote about Atatürk. In the final months of his illness, during his last weeks at Dolmabahçe Palace, a friend of his—an former Minister of National Education—comes to visit him. He enters the room and sees Atatürk sitting on a sofa, reading a book. As he approaches, he says, “My Pasha, did you set off for Samsun while reading a book too? Put that reading aside.” Atatürk smiles and says, “Since childhood, I always set aside half of my allowance for books. If I hadn’t been a reader—if I hadn’t read those books—I couldn’t have become Mustafa Kemal. I couldn’t have done what I did.” It’s a wonderful anecdote that explains the importance of reading. Halide Edip Adıvar, who was at the front as a corporal during the Battle of Sakarya, also describes what she witnessed there. There is a largemap on a table. All the commanders— Commander-in-Chief Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, İsmet Pasha, Fevzi Pasha, Ali Fuat Pasha—gather around themap. Whatever development happens on which hill is reported immediately by telephone, field telephone, and marks are placed on the map. Then Mustafa Kemal Pasha looks at those marks and understands whether events on a hill are developinginourfavororagainstus.ThisiswhatAtatürkcalled“seeingwithyourmind”— but to be able to see with your mind, that habit of reading is very important. In your work titled Nüktedan, which includes valuable figures of our literature such as Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Rasim, and Süleyman Nazif, the witticisms reflect not only the humor of the past, but also the subtlety of our language, the elegance of thought, and the depth of our cultural memory. However, as today’s forms of communication change, we see that the impact of such rhetorical art seems to be diminishing. In your opinion, what should we pay attention to in order to keep the value of wit alive? How can young people understand and preserve it? Wit is the art of verbal joking. In other words, wit exists in speech, not in writing. I focused on the people you mentioned in my book because these writers were truly witty and quick with comebacks in everyday life. By putting these into written form, I believe I helped prevent them from being lost. At the very least, later generations will be able to read examples of past oral humor. What we now call “social media humor” is something different because the tools we use have changed. As society changes, humor continues, but its tone changes a little—and that is perfectly natural. Because humor has to adapt to the spirit of its time. I find these changes natural. Rather than presenting idioms or proverbs only as dictionary-style definitions, you are a writer who explains them by connecting them to life through stories. This makes your books both educational and entertaining. Could you share a short excerpt or a story idea from your books as a good example of this approach? If I hadn’t approached idioms and proverbs differently, I would have explained them in the way textbooks do. Textbooks already do that, so I wondered how I could tell them in a different way—and I discovered this method because it also helpedme learn. For example, I became familiar with idioms and proverbs even before starting school, thanks to my grandmother. We were a farming family. My mother and father would go to work in the fields, and they would leave us with my grandmother. Whenever we did something she didn’t like or annoyed her, she would immediately throw out a saying. We wouldn’tunderstandwhatshemeant,butitsoundedverydifferentandinterestingtous—it always caught our attention. Let me share two examples of idioms I heard from my grandmother, used in our region. Back then, you couldn’t find every fruit and vegetable in every season. In winter, there were winter vegetables; in summer, summer vegetables. Winter vegetables, as you know, include cabbage, leeks, and so on. In winter we had to eat these kinds of vegetables a lot, and we didn’t like it at all. One evening, when leeks we had eaten at noon were brought to the table again, my sibling and I started complaining. Complaining here means disliking something, grumbling, turning up your nose. When we did that, my grandmother immediately turned to us and said: “This is your ayran; half of it is water—whether you eat it or not, this is what it is.” We liked the phrase—it sounded nice—but we didn’t understand what it meant. We would ask, but my grandmother wouldn’t explain; she would just repeat the same line. At that age, of course, I didn’t know these were idioms or proverbs. Later, when I started school and learned idioms and proverbs, I realized that these were exactly the kinds of sayings we had heard frommy grandmother—sayings we liked but could never fullymake sense of. Also, because we grew up in the Konya region, many NasreddinHodja jokes were told. As we grewolder and learnedmore idioms and proverbs, we realized that many origin stories behind idioms were also based on Nasreddin Hodja anecdotes. I understood that these idioms and proverbs don’t appear out of nowhere. Something happens centuries ago, and then a sentence used in that event gets repeated over time andbecomesanidiomoraproverb.IfIknewtheoriginstoryofanidiomorproverb,Icould grasp its meaning more easily and it stayed inmy mind. Then I thought: if I created a book that shared the origin stories of idioms and proverbs, would it help students?When I sat down to write, I realized I only knew about 30–40 such origin stories. I wondered what to do. I went to libraries and began researching. I scanned folklore journals and folk literature magazines. Using those sources as well, I shared in these books the origin stories of 101 idioms and the origin stories of 101 proverbs with you.