You wouldn’t know Ramazan Şaşkın. Likely, no one does beyond his family, friends, and the people in his town. In his 38 years, Ramazan Şaşkın only became news in death.
The story goes like this: “While battling a fire in Bursa, a firefighter suffered a heart attack and died.”
A single-sentence report. All we know is that Ramazan Şaşkın recently had orthopedic surgery. No story, no details, no life behind the headline. Just as in the lines of poet Gülten Akın: “Ah, no one has the time to stop and notice the finer things.”
Ramazan Şaşkın worked for the fire service. His profession was fighting fires. Perhaps he had imagined the risk of burning to death in a blaze. But he likely never considered his heart stopping in the middle of it. Around the same time, ten volunteer rescue workers and laborers fighting a fire in Eskişehir lost their lives, trapped in the flames. Their stories, as they rightly deserved, found space in the media. But beyond the fact that Ramazan Şaşkın’s heart stopped while battling a fire, there was nothing. In Turkey, so many die in fires and disasters, so often, that their deaths barely register as “newsworthy” anymore.
“HAS YOUR FATHER EVER DIED?”
Among the sparse reports of Ramazan Şaşkın’s death, there was one photo: him hugging his two young daughters, both still at elementary school. Their names and ages weren’t mentioned either.
That picture calls to mind the poet Cemal Süreya’s raw, piercing lines:
“Has your father ever died?
Mine died once, I went blind.
They washed him, carried him away—
I never expected it of him, and I went blind.”
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNKNOWN MEN
The poet Nazım Hikmet once considered naming his epic book Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country), which portrays the people of Anatolia during the War of Independence, The Encyclopedia of Famous Men.
In its 7,000 verses, the book tells the stories of over a hundred people—lives of those unknown to anyone, whose very existence went unnoticed. They were people unrecognized, their existence unseen, who perished less from the enemy’s hand than from tuberculosis, jaundice, typhoid, and hunger. Their deaths were also silent, often passing without anyone even knowing. Seeing this reality, Nazım Hikmet sought to give voice to these nameless souls through his so-called Encyclopedia of Famous Men.
A HEART THAT STOPPED SAVING LIVES
Ramazan Şaşkın’s heart stopped while fighting to save people, trees, the environment, and forest creatures from the fire. June and July’s fires brought deep grief. Outrage flared at the poor response of public firefighting agencies—at inadequate equipment, at the shortage of firefighting planes. These criticisms resurface every summer. And every summer, the same images repeat.
Amid all this, firefighter Ramazan Şaşkın died quietly, just as he lived. Soon, only his children, his family, and a few friends will remember him. But let’s at least write his name here—let’s add Ramazan Şaşkın, whose heart stopped fighting the flames, to our own Encyclopedia of Unknown Men.
