Writer of Sabah writes on Sadık Ahmet
Writer Ferhat Ünlü's article titled '8.4 film, 9.9 life' published in SABAH newspaper on Sunday, 11 February is as follows:
A girl born in 1982 opened her eyes in a hospital room in Komotini, the Turkish town of Komotini in Western Thrace, on the 24th day of July 1995, an extra hot and dry month that year. It was as if she was being born for the second time...
He remembered that he had an accident, and that it was July... He couldn't remember anything else; despite his fresh, child mind...
When he opened his eyes, the first sentences he heard were in Greek. He didn't know before, but he had recorded the dialogue between a doctor and a nurse in the room with a dialect used since ancient times, since Heraclitus, in the deep recesses of his memory:
"Ti synevi me autous tous anthrwpous?" (What about these people?)
"Ayto to koritsi prokeitai episis na pethanei." (This girl won't live either.)
"Alla thymata?" (Are there any more dead?)
"..."
The girl's Greek was already good, she understood what they were saying; but - with a childish intuition - she also felt that the doctor and the nurse were people who did not like them, the 'Turks'. That's why she didn't want to listen to the end of the dialogue; the only person she was thinking about right now was her father.
Where was her father?
She remembered that the last time they were at the Susurköy junction on the Xanthi - Komotini road before coming here. Then I think she started to have a nightmare.
In that nightmare, she remembered that a tractor suddenly pulled out in front of them. The nightmare was over in that sequence.
They had actually had an accident. More precisely, they had experienced an accident/fate nightmare that they were not even sure was an accident. It was not like the Susurluk accident that would occur a year later, but rather like the accident that would occur 9 years later in the Gelibolu district of Çanakkale, on 14 July 2004, when the vehicle carrying TÜBİTAK officials hit a tractor. Again, a July accident... So, July 'loves' traffic accidents.
Again and again the girl heard the question "Are there any more dead?" repeated:
"Alla thymata?"
When he heard the name "Sadık" pronounced as the answer, he wanted to fall into a deep sleep again. A sleep like death... As a matter of fact, he was going to sleep for 12 days after the operation. At the Sismanoglio State Hospital in Komotini, where his father had done his first specialisation as a doctor... At the end of 12 days in which he was torn between life and death due to internal bleeding, his punctured lung had recovered to some extent. He also had 120 stitches in his face. As soon as his condition began to improve, an ambulance plane flew him to Istanbul Kosuyolu Training and Research Hospital. Thus, the first step was taken for the members of Sadık Ahmet's family to establish a new life for themselves in the motherland after his death. His wife Işık Hanım, his son Levent and his daughter Funda... Funda Sadıkahmet wrote the following after her father in the book published in 2022 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of his birth:
"I can never forget the first graffiti I read when I learnt to read. It was written in huge letters on the opposite wall of our house: 'Sadık Ahmet will die!'. You had not yet died and you had come home in the evening. There was not a long time between this graffiti and 24 July! It turned out that this warning was the harbinger of the coming death..."
HE WAS A STUDENT WHEN THE COLONELS' JUNTA CAME
Today in Three Dimensional Portrait, we will focus on the 9.9 life story of Dr Sadık Ahmet on the occasion of the TRT and MCG co-production Sadık Ahmet film, which has an IMDB score of 8.4 as of today. With his life and death, Dr Ahmet is a person whose complete story deserves to be a film. Let's start with the first years of his 48 years of life:
Sadık Ahmet was born on 7 January 1947 in Küçük Sirkeli (Agra) village of Komotini. His grandfather was a miller and was known by this nickname. Sadık Ahmet was named after his grandfather and father. His grandfather's name was Sadık and his father's name was Ahmet.
Sadık Ahmet was one of the 'Baby Boomers' born in Greece during the civil war (1946-1949), which broke out not long after the Second World War, but a year later, and in which 185 thousand people lost their lives in total.
During the aforementioned period, Turkish villages in Western Thrace were occasionally attacked by gangs; the villages of Büyük Sirkeli and Küçük Sirkeli were also affected by these attacks. Sadık Ahmet's father, who somehow managed to survive the attacks of the gangs for three years and kept his family alive, earned his living by farming and making wheels for the horse carts in the village.
Following his primary school education in Küçük Sirkeli village between 1954-1960, Sadık Ahmet started his education at Celal Bayar Secondary School and High School, the only secondary education institution of Western Thrace Turks, in 1960. While he was attending school, the Greeks changed the name of Celal Bayar School to 'Komotini Muslim Secondary School and High School'. In line with the strategy of not calling Western Thrace Turks 'Turks'...
The number of Turks who graduated from this school and returned to the region as doctors, dentists, pharmacists and lawyers was not small. Only one of them, however, would go into politics to impose his Turkish identity on the Greeks.
After studying at Ankara University Faculty of Medicine for one year in 1966-67, Sadık Ahmet enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and graduated from this school in 1974 and became a medical doctor. Sadık Ahmet's university studies in Thessaloniki coincided with the period of the 'Colonels' Junta' in Greece. This was also important because Sadık Ahmet, like all Western Thrace Turkish men, had to do military service in the Greek army.
Thessaloniki, the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of our country, left deep traces on Sadık Ahmet. As a matter of fact, Ahmet expressed his feelings about Thessaloniki as follows: "The days of Thessaloniki were the days when the most confused and mixed feelings of my life were like storms in my heart. On the one hand, I was proud to see the marvellous works of art, and on the other hand, I was saddened to think about the situation we had fallen into".
'WHEN AYŞE WENT ON HOLIDAY' HIS MILITARY SERVICE WAS EXTENDED...
Sadık Ahmet's military service in the Greek army was normally 24 months, but Dr Ahmet served a total of 34.5 months. In 1974, he joined the Greek army as a reserve officer candidate. However, although he was a doctor, he was not made a reserve officer and did his military service as an infantry private.
After completing his boot camp in Korent, he was sent to Patras. Both Korent and Patras were located in the Peloponnese Peninsula, where many Muslims were massacred during the Greek revolts, and were very far from Western Thrace.
A few months after Dr. Sadık Ahmet joined the Greek army, the waters in Cyprus heated up. Under the Junta of Colonels, a coup d'état was staged against President Makarios in order to annex the island to Greece as a fait accompli. Then, on another July day, 15 July 1974, Nikos Sampson came to power.
In response to this 'de facto' situation, which meant the annexation of the island to Greece, the Republic of Turkey, fulfilling its guarantor rights, 'took Ayşe on holiday' (the famous motto of the Cyprus Peace Operation) on 20 July 1974, in other words, landed on the island.
The Cyprus Operation brought the end of the Colonels' Junta in Greece, but it also led to the extension of Sadık Ahmet's military service from 24 to 30 months for arbitrary reasons - although it was not the story of DISKO (Disciplinary Ward). Adding to this the Kafkaesque sentences without any offence, he was only able to complete his military service in 34.5 months.
After completing his military service, Sadık Ahmet did his compulsory medical service in Kastanya village of Kardiça in Central Greece.
On 7 October 1978, he married Işık Müminoğlu, born on 25 August 1959 in Xanthi. He had two children from this marriage, Levent (29 September 1979) and Funda (24 April 1982).
In 1986 he was arrested on the grounds that he was trying to make politics with his Turkish identity and one year later he was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Sadık Ahmet, who became popular in Western Thrace in a short time with the advantages of his profession as a doctor (being the first circumciser of the region was not without its influence), was elected as an MP twice on 18 June 1989 and 8 April 1990 on the independent trust list. In the elections of 5 November 1989, between these two elections, he was banned due to an incomplete sentence in his nomination petition. In the 10 October 1993 elections, in order for independent candidates to be elected as deputies, the condition of receiving 3 per cent of the votes in Greece was introduced. With this decision, the way for Sadık Ahmet to enter the Greek Parliament was closed.
The Friendship, Equality and Peace Party-DEB, the first and only political party of the minority in Western Thrace, was founded in 1991 in Komotini. The official name of the party in Greek is Komma Isotitas, Irinis ke Filias (KIE). Its emblem is a white dove in a circle surrounded by olive branches. As is well known, both are symbols of peace.
HIS LAST SENTENCE IN LIFE: 'HE HAS A FIELD THERE'
On 11 April 1992, at its first congress, Dr Sadık Ahmet was elected as the first president of FEP. Sadık Ahmet fought for the rights of Western Thrace Turks in the three years between the presidency of the party he founded and his death in a suspicious traffic accident. He was a fearless man of struggle.
As a matter of fact, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in the article he wrote for the book published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Sadık Ahmet, refers to the deceased as "He is a man of struggle who does not hesitate to pay a price for the values he believes in, and who is loyal to his cause, which is recognisable by his name. He is a courageous person who shouted 'I am a Turk and I will remain a Turk' in a difficult period when it was forbidden even to say 'Turk', let alone to live 'Turkish identity'."
Dr. Sadık Ahmet lost his life in a suspicious traffic accident in Susurköy (Sostis) in Komotini on 24 July 1995, on the 72nd anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne. His wife and two children were with him when the accident occurred. When his wife saw the tractor on the left side of the road, she said, "Sadık, look, there is a tractor on the left, just round the corner; watch out for it". Sadık Ahmet, who knew that his family was worried because he was constantly receiving death threats, replied, "Işık, you are paranoid about everything. It's a tractor, it's irrigating, obviously the man has a field there".
This was the last sentence he uttered in his 48 years of life, not even half a century old yet. Then the tractor suddenly moved and hit the car from the driver's side. It has been 29 years since this accident with one death and one serious injury. 29 is the number of years my brother Atilla Ünlü, whom we lost in a traffic accident in 2010, also on a July day, spent in this world...
Dr Sadık Ahmet also gave his name to the boulevard extending towards the cemetery where Atilla lies in Adana. Let this be the last of the meaningful coincidences of the article you are about to finish. Sadık Ahmet's grave is in his birthplace, Komotini Kahveci Cemetery. With mercy...
