Who Are These Warriors? Turkish Engineering and Contracting in the First Century of the Republic

Turkey's public works and development activities date back a long way, to the Ottoman era. Especially following the Second Industrial Revolution, the Ottoman Empire accelerated its development efforts to keep pace with this trend.

The dispatch of Yirmisekiz Mehmet Çelebi to France as an extraordinary ambassador during the reign of Ahmed III (1703-1730) to examine European development activities on-site is an indication that the matter was taken seriously. 

Development activities continued unabated during the late Ottoman period. With the establishment of the Ministry of Public Works (Nafia Nezareti) in 1848, construction activities began to be planned at the ministerial level.

The first railway was built between İzmir and Aydın in 1856. Later, with water lines, railways, and telegraph line investments starting in the 1880s, the Ottoman Empire made visible construction investments in the Balkans and around the Marmara region. 

The construction of irrigation canals for agriculture, high school buildings, hospitals, higher education buildings such as the Darülfünun, and most importantly, railways during that period demonstrates that construction activities were quite intense at the time.

Construction activities continued to increase in the early period of the Modern Republic of Turkey, founded by Atatürk. In particular, infrastructure services were brought to Anatolian cities that had been somewhat neglected previously.

After the proclamation of the Republic (December 1924), the foundation of the Ankara-Yahşihan Railway Line was laid, and by August 1930, the steam train had reached Sivas. 

The Eastern Anatolia Express, which is very popular today and for which almost all tickets are sold out well in advance, is one of the significant investments of the early republican period. The railways, which pioneered the development of the region by transporting the people of the Aegean as well as their figs and grapes to the Port of İzmir, connected one end of Anatolia to the other, extending all the way to Kars and Van.

While all these activities could only be carried out by foreign firms until 1935, Turkish contractors began to take matters into their own hands after this year.

Steam trains and train stations, which are among the most important milestones of public works investments, have also featured prominently in Turkish cinema. The film Gurbet Kuşları (Birds of Exile), directed by master Yeşilçam director Halit Refiğ and starring Filiz Akın, Tanju Gürsu, and Cüneyt Arkın, begins and ends at Haydarpaşa Train Station with the line, "With God's permission, we will become kings of Istanbul."

Another Yeşilçam film, Sürü (The Herd), starring Tarık Akan and Tuncel Kurtiz, also demonstrates how significant the role of railways and steam trains was in the lives of the people of Anatolia.  

It would be impossible not to remember the Turkish engineers and contractors who undertook these construction investments, which transformed the social, cultural, commercial, and academic life of Anatolia and enabled its integration into the modern world.

Who are these warriors? What are their sources of motivation? Why did they shoulder the burden of modern Turkey?

To recognize, know, remember, and pass them on to future generations, we recorded 250 years of development efforts in a 10-part documentary titled "Nafia: The Construction History of Turkey" and a book of the same name.

The documentary titled Nafia has served to immortalize our engineers and contractors who developed and revitalized our region, and even left their families and loved ones behind to set out for foreign lands to contribute to the development of other nations, spending their lives in the unhealthy, dusty, and muddy environments of construction sites.  

I conducted interviews with names such as Şarık Tara, İdris Yamantürk, Sani Şener, Ersin Arıoğlu, Nihat Gökyiğit, Nurettin Çarmıklı, İshak Alaton, Feyyaz Berker, and Necati Akçağlılar. During these interviews, the fears and traumas I experienced as a child came to mind. 

As I got to know Turkish engineers and contractors more closely, I began to think that my fears were unfounded. The Republic has raised such generations that I realized they possess the capability to protect the Turkish nation from any kind of extinction and to ensure its development. 

Today, we cannot even begin to count the projects that Turkish engineers and contractors have completed and are currently undertaking in various countries.

I will mention a few of them nonetheless. Turkish engineers have completed and continue to complete projects such as power plants, airports, bridges, roads, railways, and offshore oil refinery facilities in countries in the Gulf region like the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait; across Russia and the Turkic Republics; in Europe, including Poland, Sweden, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina; in Siberia; in Africa; and indeed in 135 countries in total.

Furthermore, these individuals have realized projects such as the Eurasia Tunnel, Marmaray, the Osmangazi Bridge, the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, Istanbul Airport, the Ankara-Eskişehir-Istanbul High-Speed Train Line, the Anamur-Cyprus Water Pipeline Project, the Deriner Dam built on the Çoruh River, the Istanbul-Izmir Motorway, and the Northern Marmara Motorway within the last 10 years.

My childhood passed during the 1970s and 80s, a period when the effects of the Cold War were felt quite strongly. Our child minds were not enough to grasp the virtues of the Republic, but we were extremely loyal to the Republic that Atatürk founded and entrusted to us.

With my child's mind, I used to think, "What would have happened if Atatürk had not existed? Could we have lived freely and independently?" I felt gratitude toward Atatürk, wondering, "How would we have protected our property, our lives, and our honor?" I still feel that gratitude today.

Seeing the current state of the world, I agree with him even more. Seeing that there is a Republic of Turkey that still looks to the future with hope, thanks to the doctrine he created a century ago, increases my respect, love, and gratitude for Atatürk tenfold. May God grant him a place in heaven and illuminate him with His intercession. He enabled a nation whose race was in danger of extinction to stand up again and, at the very least, become part of the G20.  

In the first century of the Republic, one must appreciate the struggle that Turkish engineers and contractors have waged for the civilization and modernization of our country through projects such as dams, roads, bridges, and tunnels.

On the other hand, we should be grateful for the business volume they have undertaken abroad, which is approaching 500 billion dollars. 

And of course, it is our collective duty to pay our respects to the professors in our engineering and architecture faculties who trained these engineer-contractors. May God bless them all.