By Can Öztaş
Some countries remember politics through monuments, trials, flags and anniversaries. Turkey, more emotional and dramatic, rather like its world-famous TV series, also remembers it through songs.
A melody enters public life as entertainment and slowly migrates into politics. After that it can no longer be heard only as music. It becomes shorthand, a vessel for memory, carrying meanings people recognize instinctively. In Turkey, history is not only written in constitutions and court files. It is also sung, shouted in stadiums and hummed in everyday life. That is what songs do well. They make history compact and therefore more powerful.
WHEN HISTORY LEARNS THE REFRAIN
Cyprus offers one of the strongest examples. The songs attached to the conflict were emotional signals. “Bekledim de Gelmedin” (I Waited, but You Did Not Come), played on Greek Cypriot radio, carried the sound of longing and absence. “Bir Gece Ansızın Gelebilirim” (I May Come Suddenly One Night) came back as the Turkish answer, a line that turned anticipation into arrival, the promise, or threat, of an unannounced arrival. Then in 1974, “Memleketim” (My Country) moved the same moment into another register. Homeland became longing, belonging and the emotional geography of the nation.
The republican repertoire works differently. “10. Yıl Marşı” (10th Anniversary Anthem), “İzmir Marşı” (Izmir Anthem), “Gençlik Marşı” (Youth Anthem) and “Plevne Marşı” (Plevne Anthem) belong to a world of ceremonies, classrooms and parades. They were written to celebrate victories, commemorate sacrifice and reinforce a particular story about the Republic and its origins. Yet they have not stayed put. Songs learned in schoolyards reappear decades later in protest squares.
Such songs are rarely only about the past. When people sing the same anthem in different decades, they are not simply remembering history. They are arguing over its meaning. They are asking who has the right to claim the Republic, whose version of its legacy prevails, and who is still allowed to stand in the square and sing as if history recognizes them.
THE CHORUS AND THE SILENCE
In the 1960s and 1970s, political campaign music carried the heat of ideological conviction. “Yarının Şarkısı” (Tomorrow’s Song) belonged to the left’s belief in a different future. Ecevit’s “Karaoğlan” persona of a dark-haired folk hero gave politics a popular intimacy. “Sev Kardeşim” (Love, My Brother) carried the language of hope and repair.
Then came the 1980s, when Turkey, after the trauma of the coup, was invited to smile again. Özal’s ANAP understood the emotional usefulness of lightness. “Arım Balım Peteğim” (My Bee, My Honey, My Honeycomb) was almost too perfect. The bee, the honey, the promise of modernization. Politics had become less solemn and more televisual. It was the sound of a country being told that the future would be efficient, entrepreneurial and possibly wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
The 1990s brought other sounds, some rooted in history, others in community, grievance and progress. The right wing drew on Mehter (Ottoman military music), while the left kept returning to protest songs of the 1970s as language of resistance.
Then, as power became more personal, songs began to orbit leaders rather than parties. “Beraber Yürüdük Biz Bu Yollarda” (We Walked Together on These Roads) was sold as shared experience and loyalty, though by the end only one of the walkers was still on the road. “Dombra” finished the job. It no longer asked for a vote. It asked for awe. The message was no longer to choose this party, but to admire this destiny.
Political campaign music is a rehearsal. A crowd singing together not only expresses support. It practices belonging. It learns when to clap, when to rise, when to merge private judgement into public rhythm. The song does not replace politics. It trains the body for it.
Opposition songs have often sounded different. Their strongest moments have not been triumphant but fragile, almost childlike. “Her Şey Çok Güzel Olacak” (Everything Will Be Beautiful) worked because it promised healing and hope. It was less an anthem than a wish, a refusal to surrender the future. In a country exhausted by grand projects and single-voiced speeches, a small promise made a difference.
WILL TURKEY SING?
Today, one cannot help asking about the next song. What happens when the next chapter produces no song at all? The rallies continue. The loudspeakers crackle. Yet the real music may now be in the pauses, in the missing voices, in the roads that look open until one tries to walk them.
And perhaps the next song will be a silence. A crowded silence, gathering beneath the jingles and the familiar promise that everything is proceeding normally. That may be the darkest soundtrack of all, the silence of a democracy that insists it is still singing.
