Aesopian Language: The Turkish Case

In my last post, I talked about what Aesopian language is and how writers kept reinventing it all over the world. From Tsarist Russia to Nazi Germany, from Qing China to McCarthy's America. If you haven't read that one yet, you can find it here. This time, I'm zooming in. Just Turkey.

From the founding of the Republic to today, over a hundred years. How did writers, directors, cartoonists, and lately just regular people on social media say what they couldn't say out loud?

But honestly, this story doesn't start with the Republic. Censorship in Turkish press goes back to 1876. It got lifted for a hot minute in 1908 with the Second Constitutional Era, then came back, then kept changing shape.

The Republic didn't invent censorship from scratch. It just took what was already there and reshaped it with its own tools. Every name you're about to see is just standing at a different point on that same long line.

1923–1950: The Single-Party Years

Let's start with the single-party era. The wildest example isn't a book or a movie. It's a magazine.

In 1946, Aziz Nesin, Sabahattin Ali, and Rıfat Ilgaz started a satirical magazine called Marko Paşa. It went straight after the government. Of course, it got shut down.

But they didn't quit. Same team, same edge. They just kept changing the name. Merhum Paşa (The Late Pasha), then Malum Paşa (The Notorious Pasha), then Yedi-Sekiz Hasan Paşa, then Hür Marko Paşa, then Bizim Paşa, and finally Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Every time they got shut down, a new name popped up. Same spirit. This is the "screen" tactic in its purest form. The censors chase the title, while the content just keeps going behind it.

Sabahattin Ali paid a heavy price too. His book Sırça Köşk was banned under İsmet İnönü. Rıfat Ilgaz had his poetry collection Sınıf confiscated in 1944, and he ended up serving six months in prison.

Now, Sabahattin Ali's own career holds one of the most twisted examples of Aesopian language in Turkey.

When he was young, he published poems in a hardcore nationalist, Turanist magazine called Atsız Mecmua, run by Nihal Atsız. And get this: some of those poems were written while he was in prison, under censorship and editorial pressure.

A recent academic paper reads those poems through Loseff's framework. Here's the gist. On the surface, it looks like excited nationalist praise. That's the screen. But underneath, hidden in the rhythm and mystical structure, there's a Sufi layer. That's the marker. His real voice, kept alive as a secret code in a magazine he never truly belonged to.

That partnership didn't last. In 1944, Atsız wrote an open letter to the prime minister, calling Sabahattin Ali a communist and a "traitor." Ali sued Atsız for defamation. The case blew up into the big "Turkism-Turanism Trial" of the era. Atsız got four months in prison, but it was suspended.

First, he hid his voice behind a screen in a nationalist magazine. Then, the editor of that same magazine denounced him openly, with no screen at all. Strange fate, right?

Sabahattin Ali's traces also pop up unexpectedly in another writer's life. In 1938, Kemal Tahir was arrested for "inciting military rebellion." The reason? He gave a book by Sabahattin Ali to his brother, who was in the military.

Tried alongside Nâzım Hikmet, Kemal Tahir got 15 years and actually served 12 (1938–1950). While in prison, he wasn't allowed to use his own name. So he wrote humorous stories and detective novels under fake names: Körduman, Bedri Eser, Samim Aşkın. He even translated an American detective series under those names.

Think about that. A literal identity screen. The writer existed, but his name didn't. He couldn't use the signature "Kemal Tahir" on anything until 1954.

Meanwhile, there's Nâzım Hikmet. Complete contrast. He didn't bother with screens. He just wrote what he wanted.

In 1938, he got 28 years and 4 months. He served around 12 and a half. Released in 1950, then stripped of his citizenship, exiled to the Soviet Union, and died in Moscow in 1963. Never came back.

Nâzım's story shows us, in reverse, why Aesopian language exists. The ones who don't hide pay a much heavier price than the ones who do.

1950–1961: A Brief Window

In 1950, Turkey switched to a multi-party system, and the pressure on the press eased a bit. A general amnesty came through, and Kemal Tahir walked out after twelve years. But he didn't stop using fake names overnight. He only started using his real name again in 1954, with his long story Göl İnsanları (Lake People).

Around this time, Kemal Tahir found his true path: the historical novel. He wrote about the early days of the Ottoman Empire, but scholars still argue today that he was really talking about contemporary politics. They call it "national allegory." A historical costume for a modern ideological battle.

But that window of freedom wasn't as wide as it looked. In 1955, right after the September 6–7 riots, Kemal Tahir was picked up again. This time, they accused communists of orchestrating the attacks on minorities. He served another six months, along with about sixty other writers and intellectuals, including Aziz Nesin.

As soon as the 1961 Constitution came into effect, guess who was the first journalist arrested? Aziz Nesin. March 1, 1961, he was taken in for an article in the newspaper Vatan. The ink wasn't even dry on the new constitution, and the system went right back to its old tricks.

Around the same time, a silent rebellion was brewing in poetry, but through a totally different method. Starting in 1954, a group of poets (Cemal Süreya, Edip Cansever, Turgut Uyar, İlhan Berk, Ece Ayhan) formed what would later be called the "Second New" movement.

They had no political agenda. In fact, they deliberately stayed out of politics. But they pushed poetry into such a dense, image-heavy language that how something was said became more important than what was said.

Ece Ayhan actually gave this stance a name: "civic poetry." He refused to let poetry become part of the ruling power's language game. Here, the screen wasn't about dodging censors. It was about building a language the censors couldn't even enter.

1961–1980: The Years of Military Memoranda

These two decades were Kemal Tahir's most productive. His novel Devlet Ana (Mother State) told the story of the Ottoman Beylik's founding, but it was really a response to the left-wing debate of the time: "Turkish-style socialism or universal Marxism?" That's why academics still argue about it today under the label "national allegory."

Aziz Nesin also kept writing. In 1961, he wrote Zübük, which would be turned into a movie nineteen years later and reach a much bigger audience.

In cinema, a new name appeared: Yılmaz Güney. His early film Umut (Hope, 1970) showed the poverty of a carriage driver. The censorship board banned it for exactly that reason.

The reasons sound almost laughable today: his patched clothes were "propaganda of poverty"; a police station scene supposedly suggested rich people don't get investigated; the morning prayer was said at sunrise.

The film was banned in Turkey but smuggled to Cannes. Güney got sued. It was the start of a struggle he'd use much more skillfully in the following years. But censorship in Turkish cinema goes back way further. Even the country's first domestic film, Mürebbiye (The Governess, 1919), was banned back then.

During those same years, traveling folk singers with their saz instruments found their own version. There's an old tradition in Turkish folk music called taşlama, a kind of satirical verse. You target someone or something without ever naming them directly.

Âşık Mahzuni Şerif took this tradition straight into contemporary politics. After the 1971 military memorandum, he sang to the new government, "Erim Erim Eriyesin" (May You Melt Away). He was jailed multiple times for songs like "Katil Amerika" (Murderer America). Selda Bağcan got a broadcast ban from TRT in 1972 that lasted twenty years. She even did time for singing a poem called "Koçero."

The screen was really thin here, because these songs often weren't hidden at all. But sometimes they slipped through disguised as workers' songs or love songs. The price was steep. After September 12, Cem Karaca, Melike Demirağ, and Şanar Yurdatapan were stripped of their citizenship and spent years in exile in Germany.

1980–1990: Under the Shadow of September 12

On the morning of September 12, 1980, state pressure on the arts and media in Turkey hit a whole new level. After the coup, thousands of lawsuits, thousands of journalists in court, hundreds of publications confiscated.

In that kind of climate, newspapers found a strange solution. They started printing completely "safe" news. Nothing controversial. The response to censorship was, quite literally, building a screen. Even news was now being written behind a veil.

Now, Yılmaz Güney. He's the most complicated figure in this whole story. His importance in cinema is undeniable, but I can't just pretend the dark stuff didn't happen.

In 1974, he shot and killed a prosecutor named Sefa Mutlu during a nightclub dispute. He got 19 years. Before that, there were incidents of violence against his wife, actress Nebahat Çehre. According to producer Abdurrahman Keskiner, during a film shoot in 1966, Güney had a glass placed on her head, took aim with a real gun, and fired. In another incident, he ran her over with a car, breaking her collarbone.

You can't tell his story without mentioning that. Otherwise, it's just a heroic fairy tale, and that's not the full truth.

But looking purely at his cinematic technique, he never stopped making films, even in prison. He wrote the script for Sürü (The Herd) behind bars, with Zeki Ökten directing. For the censors, he had a separate "clean" script written. The actual film shot was something else entirely.

He put a screen in front of the censorship board and filmed the real movie behind it. Forty years earlier, Kemal Tahir had hidden his real name behind fake ones. Güney hid his real directing identity behind the name of a credited director.

In 1981, he wrote Yol (The Road) in prison, with Şerif Gören directing. In October of that year, he escaped from an Isparta prison during a leave permit, fled through Kaş to Greece, then Switzerland, then France. Never came back.

The raw footage of Yol was secretly smuggled to France for Güney to edit himself. In 1982, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the first Turkish film to do so. But that doesn't erase the past I just described. Güney died of stomach cancer in Paris in 1984, at fifty-one.

In 1980, Aziz Nesin's Zübük finally hit the big screen with Kemal Sunal in the lead. The film showed a fictional opportunist politician, but audiences and critics immediately recognized the real ones, especially Süleyman Demirel and Necmettin Erbakan.

No one had to say, "This is Demirel." They didn't need to. The screen was comedy. The marker was the familiar gestures, words, and mannerisms that everyone already knew.

1990–2000: Identity and Memory

In the 1990s, cinema moved into territory that had rarely been touched before: the Kurdish issue. Mem û Zîn, adapted from a 17th-century Kurdish love epic, explored separation, prohibition, and division without directly mentioning contemporary politics.

It was another version of the "historical costume" trick we saw in the Ottoman and Nazi sections. A love story from centuries ago, used as a safe way to talk about a people's modern-day fate.

Around the same time, films like Babam Askerde (My Father Is in the Army) and 80. Adım (The 80th Step) tackled the September 12 period through children's eyes or indirect storytelling. Instead of directly criticizing the coup, they showed how it crept into ordinary family life.

But not everything was hidden. There's a fascinating counter-example from this period. In the TV series Bay Kamber (1994–95), starring Kemal Sunal, there's a scene where a character says, "I heard Istanbul's water problem will be solved soon. Water will flow from the taps like arms."

Bay Kamber asks, "Who said that?" The assistant replies, "Tayyip Erdoğan." The name of Erdoğan, the mayor at the time, was mentioned directly, with no screen at all, followed by a mildly sarcastic reaction.

Even in the 90s, not every critique needed to be coded. Sometimes direct sarcasm still worked.

2000–2010: Cartoon Trials

In the 2000s, books faced similar pressures. Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, enacted in 2005, made "insulting Turkishness" a crime. But it was so vaguely written that almost any criticism could be dragged into court.

Orhan Pamuk got sued for an interview. Elif Şafak got sued for something a fictional character said in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul. The prosecution treated a made-up character's dialogue as if it were the author's own opinion.

Şafak was eventually acquitted, but everyone saw how easily the line between fiction and reality could disappear in a courtroom.

The Aesopian tradition Marko Paşa started sixty years earlier carried on, but now in satirical magazines. In 2004, Cumhuriyet cartoonist Musa Kart drew Erdoğan as a cat tangled in a ball of yarn, tripping over his own feet. The message was loud and clear: the guy was tied up in his own mess. Erdoğan sued, and Kart had to pay compensation.

Two years later, Leman magazine's Mehmet Çağçağ drew the same politician as a tick carrying a deadly virus, on a cover titled "Reco Congo Tick." Another lawsuit.

Penguen magazine decided to protest Kart's conviction. They went all in: eight different cartoonists, eight different animals, from a donkey to a camel. The cover was called "Tayyip's World." Naturally, it also ended up in court.

But these cases eventually created an important legal precedent. The Supreme Court of Appeals basically ruled that politicians have to tolerate harsh criticism, citing the principle of "tolerance for satire."

The animal caricature became so familiar, so overused, that even the highest court had to accept it as a legitimate form of criticism. The same weapon Marko Paşa used sixty years ago, but now lines were speaking instead of words.

2010–2016: Gezi and the Digital Shift

The Gezi Park protests in 2013 gave us some of the most creative, fastest-spreading examples of Aesopian language in Turkish history, and this time it was all digital.

When Erdoğan called the protesters "çapulcu" (looters/marauders), they flipped it and wore it as a badge of pride. The word even became a verb in English: "chapulling." Classic move: taking an insult and turning it into your own banner.

But the most iconic moment came from a TV channel's self-censorship. While the protests were raging, CNN Türk decided to air a documentary about penguins instead of live coverage. Meanwhile, their international partner was broadcasting the protests live.

The contradiction was so absurd that the penguin instantly became a symbol of media censorship. Protesters wore penguin costumes. The penguin image turned into a sarcastic emblem of resistance online. Even today, it's shorthand for criticizing censorship in Turkey.

That same week, Bloomberg HT aired a word puzzle competition. Every answer was one of the words being censored on other channels at that moment, like "tear gas." The show had literally turned its own format into a screen.

Maybe the simplest, most wordless protest of that era came from İzmir-based performance artist Erdem Gündüz on June 17, 2013. He stood in Taksim Square facing the Atatürk Cultural Center, completely motionless, completely silent, for eight hours. No banner, no megaphone.

At first, even the police didn't know what to make of it. As hours passed, others started standing the same way. It spread across the country, "The Standing Man." Some people even stood holding plush penguins, connecting the two symbols.

Here, there was no screen. Just silence. But even that silence carried a message, because "standing" wasn't technically a crime, despite the dozens who were detained anyway.

Its impact lasted. Twelve years later, on May 28, 2025, nineteen people who stood in the same square on the anniversary of Gezi were charged again.

2016–2026: Authoritarianism, Resistance, and Meme Culture

After the 2016 coup attempt, state pressure intensified again, so fast that Turkey quickly became the country with the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world.

The numbers fluctuated, but the trend was always downward. Turkey's ranking on the World Press Freedom Index kept slipping. In the mid-2000s, it was somewhere in the middle. Within a decade, it had hit rock bottom.

In 2021, when a rector was appointed to Boğaziçi University instead of being elected, the resistance produced a clever modern example of screen and marker. Students stuck a sign on the rector's door that simply read "kayyumluk" (trusteeship). One word, perfectly questioning the appointment's legitimacy.

During that same resistance, at an exhibition, a visual combining Şahmeran (the snake-woman from Anatolian mythology) with LGBTQ+ flags was displayed. Seven students got sued and faced between one and three years in prison.

Books also kept getting targeted. Yavuz Ekinci's novel Rüyası Bölünenler was published in 2014 and sold fine for nine years. Then, in 2023, it got confiscated under the Anti-Terror Law.

Ekinci's reaction hit the nail on the head. He said the court was judging fictional characters as if they were real people, which says more about the court's view of literature than about literature itself.

Around the same time, RTÜK kept slapping fines on Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Mubi, and BluTV for "violating Turkish family structure."

By the second half of the 2020s, Aesopian language had largely moved to social media. Academics now describe Turkish internet memes as tools of "digital resistance" and "culture jamming." Taking an existing image or phrase, stripping it of its original context, and giving it a sharp critical meaning.

In 2022, new internet laws hit platforms with heavy fines. In 2025, after the Mayor of Istanbul was detained, an X account with 9.7 million followers was blocked by court order.

Today, the screen is no longer an animal fable or a historical novel. It's mostly a meme, a hashtag, or an emoji.

Beyond the Written Word

While I was writing this, I kept coming back to Kemal Tahir's fake names. A guy who couldn't use his real name for sixteen years. Then I saw that photo of the Boğaziçi sign, "kayyumluk," and just smiled.

Two different generations, sixty years apart, landing on the same clever solution.

I don't think that's a coincidence. Marko Paşa's name changes, Zübük's fictional politician, Musa Kart's cat, the penguin costumes. All coming from the same need: say the unsayable, one way or another. The disguise changes. A magazine, a film, a cartoon, an emoji.

I also realized something else while writing. Sometimes the screen was a choice, like Ece Ayhan's hermetic poetry, a wall he built himself. Sometimes it was a necessity, like Kemal Tahir in prison, who had no other way to write. Both roads lead to the same place.

That's it for now. Next post will probably be the third part of my Anatomy of Mythology series.

Oh, and I used shorter paragraphs this time. If it made for a smoother read, I'll keep doing that.

Take care, and see you soon. :)