Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?
Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?

Author(s): Eyüp Özveren
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Geography, Regional studies, Human Geography, Regional Geography, Studies of Literature, Turkish Literature
Published by: Сдружение „Транспонтика“
Keywords: time/space; cosmopolitanism; Diogenes; microcosm; Nazlı Eray; place of memory; presqu’île
Summary/Abstract: Sinop is the northernmost city of Turkey along the Black Sea coast. It is a small city, with difficult access, easier by sea than by land, until recently. This has limited its development, but also helped protect its aura over the very long term. Because the Black Sea is poor in islands, Sinop by its geographical layout serves as a second-best for an island, in fact a presqu’île that is almost an island but not, hence its persistent sense of being cut off from the world in either direction of land or sea. This is all the more important because thanks to its generous physical geography, Sinope was known as the most beautiful city on the Black Sea during the ancient period. It served as native town to Diogenes, a maverick philosopher famous for his cynical and cosmopolitan philosophy. Sinop had its most glamorous period then receded backwards as Constantinople/Istanbul, Trebizond/Trabzon, and much later Odessa played major roles in the reorganisation of the Black Sea ‘connectivities’ via the networks of port cities. Of that era, the fortress and the city walls, though run down, have survived to this day and still dominate the seaport’s silhouette. Other than that, ancient Sinope lies hidden and little excavated below the contemporary city. The fortress hosted the dungeon since time immemorial and then served as a prison until recently. As a matter of fact, the prison came to dominate the fortress during the 19th century, thus becoming the metaphor for a relatively self-enclosed seaport. There exists a whole literature on the feel or spirit of places that casts its spell on writers and artists. Sinop with its aura would be a good candidate in this respect. Yet a recently drawn literary map of Turkey left Sinop blank. The paper first confirms this impression by identifying the few marginal and passing references to Sinop in modern Turkish literature. Then it explores Sinop through its literary representation in Nazlı Eray’s novel, Sis kelebekleri (‘Butterflies in the fog’, in Turkish, 2003). Whereas she prefers to characterize her work magic realist, her literary critics also qualify it as fantastic or surrealist, and be that as it may, its connection with Sinop is very strong, all the more so for its metaphorical function as a claustrophobic and repressive prison that became the inevitable ‘guesthouse’ for many a writer and political prisoner, and therefore begs for a closer investigation. Because this paper looks for evidence in literature for the representation of a place and its feel, it engages in a constant dialogue with the pioneering work of Gaston Bachelard that investigated from a phenomenological viewpoint the poetics of space. While Bachelard serves us as a companion in this work, his work supplies us with successive commentaries. In this paper we substitute a ‘literary archaeology’ for the severely handicapped real archaeology of the ancient city via Eray’s fiction. This task is made even more difficult because her book covers only the modern period. We thus have to make her ‘silences’ speak out as evidence for the missing by starting from the function of the fortress-turned prison as a contemporary ‘memory place’ but also as a repository of innocence and youth as manifest in old photographs. The theoretical framework of this study entails two components deliberately brought into contact to address the underlying research question. The first is a transdisciplinary (across the social sciences and history) theorising of the Black Sea world as a ‘unit of analysis’. Second consists of a ‘literary space’ approach somewhat overlapping with the ‘literary geography’ conception. As far as the literary space goes, all space, real or imaginary, in the fiction concerned is covered. As far as literary geography is concerned, the focus is limited in this case to the content and the meaning of the book, without going as far as the post-textual process of general reception and continuous reinterpretation by the reading public. Hence Nazlı Eray’s authorial intention and my reading of her text are foregrounded to serve the underlying research objective. It is argued that she deploys two ‘dream devices’ in construing her representation of Sinop. First is to do with her playful engagement with writing espace/temps. Thanks to the limited connectivity of Sinop, it becomes a potential candidate for being a ‘microcosm’ or a ‘fractal’. Moreover, it is as if time does not exist in Sinop, except for its specific expressions in space, put differently, when time is thus eliminated, space becomes everything. Sinop thus becomes primarily a matter of physical – and not human – geography, that is, consists first and foremost of a series of combinations of land, sea, and sky as refracted through a crystal. This brings us to her second dream device, her highly imaginative re-peopling of this now all-the-more unpopulated space by a mix of interactive ‘historical’, ‘local’, ‘international’, and ‘fairy’ characters with the main character Nazlı strolling, hopping, and flying among them as a proxy for the writer Eray. This paper focuses on Sinop with the purpose of ultimately bringing it under scrutiny as a ‘microcosm’ of the Black Sea world. This presupposes a knowledge of the Black Sea world, to be deployed as a lens in approaching the specifics of Sinop. The local, seemingly isolated from the macrocosm, functions in all its complexity here also as a figurative expression for the whole. Literature and history thereby come together to fill a void and cast a new light on Sinop’s relationship to the Black Sea. Microcosmic as it is, Sinop also approximates to a complex multi-layered fractal in this respect. What we observe in Sinop has its counterparts in the rest of the Black Sea world. Hence the projection from the specific to the general waits to be realised in forthcoming works by contemporary and future scholars.

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