Kurd's Tavern

Back Cover Text (From the Promotional Bulletin)

A small restaurant in Ankara. It is a place famous not for its food or gourmet, but for its regulars and their stories. It is famous for being known as Kurd's Meyhanesi, not its real name, because its manager is Kurdish.

The youth years of many writers we are familiar with and admire today: A social landscape of Turkey and its heart, Ankara, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Nurullah Ataç, Orhan Veli, Suat Derviş, Cahit Sıtkı, Fikret Otyam, Ceyhun Atuf Kansu, İlhan Tarus, Çetin Altan, Salim Şengil, Cüneyt Arcayürek, Cahit Burak, Orhan Peker, İlhan Berk, Azra Erhat… poets, novelists, critics, painters Memories, stories and daily life situations of musicians, theater actors, journalists, scientists as well as lawyers, pashazades, waiters, factory workers, engineers and of course plainclothes police officers who were allocated tavern allowances... This colorfulness allows us to feel the social texture, as well as the social life of that period. It allows us to visualize it in our minds.

You will find the past as well as the present in these joyful, story-like memories written by Fahir Aksoy, the pioneer of naive painting and one of the regulars of the same tavern: Artists who are constantly short of money, the friendships and fights between them; the pains of love, the ever-present shadow of the state; cultural change, hopes…

A world that you will witness with fun and joy…