Why did Yılmaz Güney ride a white horse into Taksim?

As the number of people fleeing destitute countries to seek refuge in prosperous ones increases, the backlash against them is also growing. In almost every country, xenophobia has reached an all-time high.

Germany, the leader of the European Union, has begun controlling all its borders to monitor those arriving by vehicle; they are not even accepting those with visas—they are not issuing visas in the first place, and even their neighbors are complaining.

A logistics company owner stated that an unknown number of trucks are sitting idle because Turkish drivers are not being granted visas. They are reportedly issuing visas for a maximum of one month, even to experienced drivers who have traveled to Europe many times.

It was in a newspaper yesterday: Ford Truck Factory has parked 6 thousand newly produced trucks in parking lots because they cannot sell them, they are expanding the parking lot every day, and now they have started laying off workers.

In Canada, which Turks see as a sanctuary, just the other day, racists in the country firebombed a restaurant owned by a Turk, rendering it unusable; the Turk who had opened the restaurant with great effort was weeping.

All these negative developments fuel nationalism and, consequently, racism; even nations that have lived together in the same country for hundreds of years can no longer tolerate one another.

We were already seeing the reflections of this in Turkey against Syrians; insulting, belittling, and looking down on Syrians who fled the civil war and took refuge in Turkey had become a common occurrence.

Since terrorism has decreased compared to the past, racist movements against Kurds, which had not been seen much in recent years, have also resurfaced recently.

Just the other day, an Iraqi Kurd who came to Istanbul from Northern Iraq for a vacation was brutally killed by a group in front of the hotel where he was staying because he spoke Kurdish.

The state itself broadcasts in Kurdish, but other units of the state apply double standards; in many places, weddings are raided and arrests are made because Kurdish songs were sung.

Just yesterday, we saw a passenger on a Turkish Airlines flight cause a scene by shouting, "I am a Turk," attacking those who warned him, damaging the plane, and being removed from the aircraft by police force.

It should not be forgotten how much these racist tendencies have paved the way for bloody events in Turkey's history; not even two weeks have passed since the anniversary of the September 6-7 events.

Those who get caught up in xenophobia should know that loving one's country and racist politics are different things; loving one's country is one thing, while considering one race superior and belittling another is something else entirely.

Patriotism means not evading taxes and paying them in full, working harder for the country's prosperity, striving to help one's own citizens, spending the country's resources on investments rather than wasting them, not plundering public property, and not stealing the people's money.

XXX

As the delusion of racism increases in Turkey, attacks on artists of Kurdish origin, especially Yılmaz Güney and Ahmet Kaya, are also increasing.

I want to tell you a memory of Yılmaz Güney that I recently learned from the pen of Aydın Tan in Evrensel Newspaper. Yılmaz Güney described his first arrival in Istanbul years ago in a letter as follows:

"Fatih Sultan Mehmet was twenty-one years old when he conquered Istanbul. I also came to Istanbul at twenty-one and seized a pension room in Tünel for four liras a day, and then I said, 'Hello city of Istanbul, surrender immediately, please don't make me struggle.' It didn't listen. The owner of the pension was an elderly madam. She asked me:

"Why did you come to Istanbul?"

"I came to conquer Istanbul, madam," I said.

And it turns out that Yılmaz Güney poured this Fatih analogy he attributed to himself and the metaphor of conquering Istanbul on horseback into cinema, just like that, by riding a horse into Taksim Square. In the 1967 film "At Hırsızı Banuş" (The Horse Thief Banuş), there are scenes where Yılmaz Güney gallops from Beyoğlu into Taksim Square on a white horse. According to Aydın Engin, who worked on the script, Yılmaz Güney had this scene added to the script even though it was not in the original, and he insisted on it being filmed.

xxx

Yılmaz Güney is a talent who has gone down in cinema history with his contributions to Turkish Cinema; we cannot ignore his internationally awarded cinematic mastery due to the legal incident he was involved in.

Because being an artist is one thing, and the mistakes in a person's life are another.

I would like to end the article with a quote from a piece by dear İnci Kaya:

"In the play Amadeus, which tells the life of Mozart, Mozart encounters the king while chasing girls inside the palace with his shrill voice, straightens his clothes, and then says to the king who is looking at him in astonishment:

"I am a vulgar person, but what I write is not."

If you try to love Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner as people, you will struggle; it is only possible to love them through their music. But if you try to exclude Villon (French poet François Villon) from the world of art because he shot men a few times, Genet (French writer Jean Genet) because he was a thief, Defoe (English writer Daniel Defoe) because he was a fraud, Dostoevsky (Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky) because he was a gambler, Balzac (French writer Honoré de Balzac) because he was a swindler, Michelangelo (Italian painter, sculptor) because he was selfish, or Hamsun (Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun) because he was a fascist, and curse them as 'pariahs of history,' it is not their lives that will be diminished, but yours. Their personalities may not be respectable, but humanity has become respectable thanks to their works."