The Turk's ordeal with fire escapes

Halide Edip Adıvar's famous work, The Turk's Ordeal with Fire, is a masterpiece that recounts our War of Independence. Inspired by this title, other articles have been written about the other ordeals (tests) of the Turks. Perhaps the most frequently written about is our ordeal with democracy.

Like many others, I tried to follow the events of the Kartalkaya Grand Kartal Hotel tragedy closely and learn exactly what happened. Let me state immediately: I observed with great patience and sadness the political outputs, whether offensive or defensive, that were being harvested from the tragedy. What struck me most was the response given by the Minister of Culture and Tourism on the morning of the fire, in front of that ominous building with smoke still rising from it, to a journalist friend who asked, "Were there fire escapes in the hotel?" He replied, "Yes, there were fire escapes inside the hotel." This answer about fire escapes being inside the building was not foreign to me at all.

When I was elected head of the Department of Internal Medicine at Cerrahpaşa Faculty of Medicine in 2003, my first initiative was to take some steps regarding the structure of the department building, which was almost the size of a hospital on its own with around two hundred patient beds. The first thing I observed was that our building lacked fire escapes. Let me remind you immediately: Fire escapes are also quite useful escape routes during earthquakes. Furthermore, earthquakes are often accompanied by fires. The building I was responsible for had survived the 1999 earthquake with relatively little damage. But who knew when the next earthquake would come? All of this multiplied my anxiety about fire escapes to some extent.

Let me convey the rest of my story directly from my Cerrahpaşa memoirs*.

"I explained the situation to the Dean's office and asked for help. The answer I received surprised me. Our building did not have fire escapes in the classical sense, but there were other stairs that would serve a similar function. What they meant was this: Apart from the stairs used every day on each floor, there was a second staircase system. However, the side of this system facing the exterior of the building was covered with a honeycomb-like wall that looked pleasant to the eye from the outside, unlike traditional fire escapes. Moreover, the doors opening to these stairs were not heavy, flame- and heat-resistant doors as in traditional fire escapes, but were no different from the doors we used every day inside the building.

I explained the situation to our family friend and my patient, the famous contractor Selahattin Beyazıt, and asked for his help with the fire escapes. Thank God, two days later he sent an architect/engineer friend. The friend who came had also brought a fire chief with him. They toured the building and examined the situation. I can never forget what they said when they saw the structure built for the purpose of a fire escape: 'Professor, let alone being an escape route in a fire, this structure acts almost like a pipe placed over a barbecue, serving to spread a fire that starts on the lower floors of the building to the upper floors.' I understood. Our building definitely needed proper fire escapes.

Thank goodness, a week later they put the fire escape project on my desk. The next stage was to find money. It seemed impossible to utilize university resources. If the university and Cerrahpaşa administration had believed in the need for a fire escape for a hospital building, our building would have already had one long ago. If I remember correctly, I made an agreement with the Cerrahpaşa Foundation. We made an agreement with the Kocamustafapaşa Nejat Uygur Theater. They were going to donate the proceeds of one evening's performance of their play to Cerrahpaşa. Also, tickets for that evening were to be sold at a slightly higher price. We sold quite a few tickets through friends, acquaintances, and of course our patients, and raised good money. I remember that even Semra Özal came to watch the play that evening. By the end of the play, we had enough money to build the fire escapes. Of course, the contractor who undertook the construction of the stairs showing us a very symbolic cost estimate also made a significant contribution to this.

And what do you know! The money had been raised, but opposition had begun to simmer among the internal medicine professors. 'Were fire escapes really that necessary? We had been managing just fine for years without fire escapes, etc.' Of course, I swallowed it all, including the flare-ups of my duodenal ulcer that had been acting up from time to time since my internship, ignored it, and in the end, the necessary fire escapes were built for the building.

However, my fire escape adventure did not end there. Professors of every academic rank, assistants, and other building staff had started using the fire escapes as a shortcut or a place to smoke. I was blue in the face from talking. I hung notes on them saying, 'The doors opening to the fire escapes must remain closed to prevent their use for purposes other than intended.' Not many people listened. Some patients even used the stairs as a pantry for food and drinks brought to them from outside. One part of the stairs even became a storage place for special fluids used by dialysis patients. Then a small group of faculty members came to give advice. The best thing was to put locks on the floor entrance doors of the fire escapes. My face must have looked very interesting at this suggestion, because one of the professors said, 'It seems Professor Hasan is not happy with the lock either,' and they left my side without letting me open my mouth to say what I thought of them.

In the months and years that followed, the problem of how to use the fire escapes was never solved."

I leave it to you to decide whether or not to see similarities that we as a society can easily digest between the fire escapes we deemed appropriate for Cerrahpaşa once upon a time and the story of the new ones, and the Grand Kartal Hotel fire escapes. Oh, and ask yourself without hesitation: Is our fire escape test just one of the questions of a much larger test?

* He Said 'What's It To You!' - Short memoirs of a Cerrahpaşa professor. Hasan Yazıcı, Nobel Tıp Kitabevleri 2022, pp. 116-118.