A Matter of Honour

In this edition, A Matter of Honour is published for the first time in book form and in Turkish with Latin alphabet, 94 years after it appeared as series. Mahmut Yesari, one of the forgotten figures of our literature, who, in his own words, fits “more than sixty novels, large and small, more than a thousand stories” in his 50-year life, which lasted from April 1895 to August 1945, is one of the most colorful, influential and powerful writers of Turkish.

He attempts a genre that he would master quite well in the future in the Kelebek magazine, which he published with Reşat Nuri Güntekin between 1923-24, with works such as Çulluk (Woodcock), Tipi Dindi (Blizzard Stopped), and Su Sinekleri (Water Flies). His first novel, A Question of Honor also appears as series in the same magazine.

A Matter of Honour tells of a world lost from today’s gaze. The two protagonists of this delightful revenge story, which starts in Kayseri and ends in Istanbul, are the cunning and wicked followers of a conflict they inherited from the families of Hacıoğlu Ağapiyadi and Kara Eftimoğlu Petraki. Throughout the novel, with the authentic Turkish in the Central Anatolian dialect, which is their native tongue, they try to deceive each other. Yesari tells the life of these two merchants from Kayseri, the Kayseri neighborhoods, and Istanbul of the period, and the social life that does not exist today or whose subject has changed, with reality and simplicity.