Photos of airplanes, whole albums
My childhood was spent in the years
of World War II. My father was a civil
servant, and in those days the life of
a bureaucrat’s family in small-town Anatolia was incredibly monotonous; there was no radio at home, and newspapers came three days late. To listen to the news my father would go to the ‘Halkevi’,
a kind of town hall where people could
gather, and when late at night he got
back home he would tell my mother and
me what he had learned about the war
that day. So on a daily basis we knew
where the German bombs had fallen, and
what kind of planes had dropped them:
Messerschmidts and Henkels. I would clip
photographs of airplanes out of the newspaper
and carefully paste them in a notebook.
Even our toy planes were fighters and
bombers.