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My Story in Photographs
Our family photograph, taken in 1945, when I was one year old. From left to right: my mother Sabiha, my elder sister Sumru, me, my sister Olcay, my father Ahmet, and my brother Acar.
My sister Sumru was like a second mother to me. This photograph was taken on 9 December 1950, the day she married my much-loved brother-in-law Özbek (Cömert). (It was the only day in my life that I ever wore a tailcoat and bow tie.)
A photograph of us siblings with our mother at the wedding of my niece Yasemin, Sumru’s daughter, in Ayvalık in 1970. From left to right: my sister Sumru, me, my mother, my sister Olcay, and my brother Acar.
Fatma was born in Istanbul on 14 February 1944, and I on 18 April of the same year. We met in Ayvalık’s first three-storey apartment building, built by Fatma’s father, Mustafa Lütfi Kaptan. The Kaptan family, who owned the building, lived on the top floor, while the Alpays were their tenants on the middle floor. You could say that Fatma’s and my story began there.
After completing my primary education at Nilüfer Hatun Primary School in Nişantaşı, Istanbul, I attended the English High School for Boys in the same neighbourhood. This photograph, taken in December 1958, shows me with several lifelong friends. From top to bottom: Selim Razon, Duncan Jamieson, Nedim Demirelli, Marsel Erdal, Yavuz Sökmen, Mehmet Önkal, Şefik Yüksel, and me.
I attended high school at Robert Academy in Bebek. In my second year, I went to the United States on an American Field Service scholarship and graduated from the Webb School of California, where I spent my final year of high school, 1961–62. Throughout that year, I stayed with the family of the school’s dean of students, Gordon A. Wilson. This photograph was taken at the family’s winter home in Claremont, where the school was located. From left to right: Jackie, Gordon C., Mollie, Gordon A. Wilson, me, little Barbara, Betty, and Tom.
My friendship with my classmate Tor Krieger began at Webb and has endured to this day through letters and visits in both directions. This photograph of us was taken on the school grounds in December 1961.
My deep affection for Fatma, the girl next door, began during the 1952–53 school year, when we were classmates at Cumhuriyet Primary School in Ayvalık. Over the years, that affection blossomed into love, and we married in 1965. This photograph of Fatma, which I particularly cherish, was taken in 1960–61, during her final year at Işık High School in Istanbul. She is pictured with İnci, who would remain her close friend throughout her life.
In my final year at Robert Academy, I was elected vice-president of the Student Council. Its president was Hüsnü Özyeğin, who would go on to become one of Turkey’s most successful businessmen. This photograph was taken at one of the Council’s meetings. In the front row, from left to right, are Marsel Meşulam, who would study in the United States and become one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons; the renowned rheumatologist Hasan Yazıcı (covering his face with his hand); Özyeğin; me; Ali Nun; and Reşat Kayalı, who would become a well-known economist.
My photograph for the school yearbook, Reflections ’63, taken when I graduated from Robert Academy in June 1963.
I studied at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Sciences (SBF) from 1963 to 1967, entering what would prove to be turbulent years. Here I am in Ayvalık in the summer of 1964 with my lifelong friend from Robert Academy, Nuri Çolakoğlu, who persuaded me to study at SBF rather than attend Columbia University in New York, where I had been awarded a full four-year scholarship.
During my first two years at SBF, I travelled frequently between Ankara and Istanbul to see Fatma. Even so, I found time for one final foray into acting, which I had taken up at the English High School for Boys. I appeared in a play directed by Nuri, Harrison Fish’in Son Saati (The Last Hour of Harrison Fish), whose foreign author neither of us can now remember. My fellow cast members, from left to right, all now retired or no longer with us: Uçman Sungur (writer and director), Erçin Odman (finance inspector), Hayrettin Erdemli, Sezi Ergun (programme producer at TRT), me, Nuri (journalist, publisher, and executive), Necati Utkan (ambassador), Ayşe Esen Öğüt (consul general), Cenk Duatepe (ambassador), Deniz Gökçe (associate professor), and Turgut Erdemli (finance inspector).
29 November 1965 — the happiest day of my life! Fatma and I were married in Ankara.
In my final year at SBF (1966–67), I was elected president of the Student Association by a margin of just one vote. I stood as the candidate of the left-leaning Fikir Kulübü (Ideas Club), whose president was the late Mahir Çayan. It marked the beginning of a difficult period in my life. This rather sullen photograph of me was taken during my time as president.
In May 1970, we took a two-day trip to Antalya with Nuri and Sezi, his first wife. There, Nuri took one of my happiest photographs with Fatma. But when we learned that our comrade Mustafa Kuseyri had been killed in Ankara, our little getaway turned bitter.
Following the military intervention of 12 March 1971, I became a wanted man, labelled a “hardened leftist”. I fled the country and spent eight months undergoing training in the camps of an organisation called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Syria and Lebanon. I returned home to Turkey hating weapons. After various adventures, I decided to abandon revolutionary politics. Thanks to my brother Acar Alpay, who took great risks to save me, I managed to escape abroad in August 1972 and sought asylum in Sweden. One of the various jobs I held during my early years in Stockholm was teaching Turkish to the children of immigrants from Turkey.
After a long and painful wait, I was finally reunited with Fatma and Elvan in January 1974. This photograph, taken by my Swedish friend Klas during one of our first days together, shows the happiness written all over my face.
With a Swedish government scholarship, I pursued a doctorate in political science at Stockholm University between 1976 and 1980. My doctoral supervisor, who also employed me as a research assistant, was Associate Professor Tomas Hammar, who would later become Sweden’s first professor of migration studies. Following my imprisonment in Silivri from 2016 to 2018, I was finally able to obtain a passport in December 2022. As soon as I could, I travelled to Stockholm to visit Tomas, my teacher and friend, who had always been a great source of support. This photograph of me with Hammar, who passed away in 2024, was taken in 2006 during a visit at his home.
The political amnesty proclaimed in 1974 made it possible for me to return to Turkey and complete my military service. In the summer of 1975, at the 116th Recruit Training Regiment in Çanakkale, I served alongside friends and acquaintances, most of them from SBF and Robert Academy. We served exactly seventy (70) days before being discharged as reserve officers. My close friends Ömer Madra and Cengiz Çandar, with whom I had shared many adventures, and I made sure to have a commemorative photograph taken during military service.
My friendship with Professor Zafer Toprak, our distinguished social historian, whom we lost in 2024, began in 1965 at the SBF Theatre Club and lasted a lifetime. Here I am with Zafer, who was my squad commander during military service in Çanakkale.
My brother Acar Alpay, who had not hesitated to risk his own freedom to secure mine, died in May 1977 in a traffic accident that was little short of murder. His death plunged our entire family into profound grief. This photograph, taken ten years before his death while he was serving in the military in Ezine, was the work of our late friend, the master photographer Teoman Madra. It beautifully captures Acar’s warm personality. We named our son, born to Fatma in March 1978, after him.
Fatma and the children returned to Turkey from Sweden for good at the end of 1978, and I followed at the beginning of 1981. We were overjoyed to be home again. That happiness is evident in this photograph, taken in the summer of 1983 on the balcony of the summer house belonging to Fatma’s late father in Çamlık, Ayvalık.
When my leftist past prevented me from finding a university position, I persuaded Hasan Cemal, my friend from SBF and our revolutionary days, to give me a job at Cumhuriyet, where he had recently been appointed editor-in-chief (although he would later come to regret the decision deeply). For most of the period from 1982 to 1991, I worked in a narrow cubicle in the newspaper’s archive, specially built to keep me out of sight of the senior columnists, who thoroughly disliked me because of my liberal views.
After leaving Cumhuriyet, I briefly served as secretary-general of the TÜSES research foundation (1991–92), before becoming an adviser to the CHP parliamentary group in Ankara under the leadership of Deniz Baykal (1992–93). My next job was producing the Entellektüel Bakış (Intellectual View) page for the newspaper Sabah, together with my friend Nilüfer Kuyaş, who had recently returned from the BBC in London.
When my close friend from Cumhuriyet, the late Ufuk Güldemir, was appointed editor-in-chief, Nilüfer and I moved the page to Milliyet (1994–2001). In this photograph, taken with Derya Sazak, who succeeded Güldemir as editor-in-chief, are our colleagues: standing, Osman Ulagay, Ahmet Tan, Duygu Asena, Edip Öymen, and Yavuz Baydar; seated, Meral Tamer, me, Sazak, and Tayfun Ertan.
After my return from Sweden, my closest friend was the distinguished economist Professor Seyfettin Gürsel, who had returned from France, where he had completed his doctorate. Like me, he had begun as a revolutionary before becoming a social democrat. Together, we wrote a booklet entitled DSP-SHP: Nerede Birleşiyor, Nerede ayrılıyorlar (DSP–SHP: Where They Meet, Where They Part; AFA, 1986), and we worked together for many years at Bahçeşehir University.
I took one of my favourite photographs of Fatma at the top of the famous Empire State Building during our first visit to New York together in June 1995.
When my employment at Milliyet came to an end in 2001, the doctorate I had earned at Stockholm University proved invaluable. Professor Eser Karakaş, who would become one of my close friends, invited me to teach at Bahçeşehir University. This photograph was taken in Eser’s office.
Bahçeşehir University was the institution where I spent the longest period of my professional life. For 14 years, from 2001 to 2015, I taught political science to undergraduate and graduate students. In this photograph, taken during a visit by my esteemed senior colleague Professor Haluk Şahin, whom I had invited to give a lecture, I am pictured with my final-year students.
I first met President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 1994, the year he was elected Mayor of Istanbul, when I interviewed him for Sabah. This photograph was taken in the early 2000s at a reception at the home of my esteemed colleague Nazlı Ilıcak. I am pictured with Erdoğan, then still only the leader of the AKP, and my late friend Professor Kemal Karpat, our distinguished social historian.
While teaching full-time at Bahçeşehir University, I wrote a column three times a week for Zaman from November 2002 until the newspaper was shut down in 2016. Following the attempted coup of 15 July 2016, I was arrested on the allegation that I was “a member of a terrorist organisation” and remained a “guest” of Silivri Prison until March 2018. Although the prosecution sought three aggravated life sentences, at the conclusion of my trial in 2022 I was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on the grounds that, while not a member of a terrorist organisation, I had supported one. My lawyer, Aynur Tuncel Yazgan, appealed the verdict. The appeal is still pending before the Court of Cassation. In this photograph, I am pictured with my esteemed lawyer.
In the courthouse corridors with my esteemed senior colleague and friend Hasan Cemal, who never wavered in his support throughout my trial on the allegation that I was a “member of a terrorist organisation”. He stood by me both through his writing and by attending the hearings.
One stroke of good fortune for the Robert Academy class of 1963 was that our Student Council president, Hüsnü Özyeğin, went on to become one of the country’s most successful businessmen. Here we are at one of Hüsnü’s annual class reunions, held in the garden of the Swissôtel, which he has owned since 2005.
At Robert Academy, I formed friendships that would last a lifetime. In this photograph, taken at a class reunion in the 2020s, I am with my dear classmates. From left to right: Mehmet Araslı, Kemal Dülger, Hasan Yazıcı (the renowned professor of medicine, to whom I owe so much), and Haluk Beker (partly visible, professor of physics at Boğaziçi University). Sadly, all of them except Hasan and me have passed away in recent years. May they rest in peace.
This photograph of Fatma and me was taken in May 2018, in the garden of our house in Çamlık, Ayvalık, by our niece Yeşim, without our knowing. We were holding hands and talking about never being apart again. Sadly, my beloved Fatma passed away on 6 October 2018...
I have no doubt that the greatest source of happiness in my life has been having a wife like Fatma, children like Elvan and Acar, and grandchildren like Defne and Leyla. The photographs show Elvan with Defne in Plovdiv recently, and Acar with Leyla in Çamlık, Ayvalık, a few years ago.