Marika …You’re as much as my loneliness…

In this biography, first serialized in Cumhuriyet in 1993, journalist and writer Berat Günçıkan records the life of Marika, who has rebuilt her living despite all the devastation since the day she was born, and has persisted in existence. The steps of Marika, the orphaned daughter of a family that had to leave Imbros and go to Alexandria in the early 1920s, which first walked the thorny roads of Imbros and Istanbul and then stretched all the way to Germany, reach her homeland again. As a Greek Orthodox woman chasing her bread from being a maid to working in a kiosk, from being a nurse to working in a boarding house, Marika makes note of history by writing down her romantic life, resentments, fears and her endless fights with her own narration. Marika …You’re as much as my loneliness… is a cross-section of the “minor” lives swept away by the “major” political and social developments of 20th century Turkey.

“Perhaps it is cruel to ask a person for what she has buried deep in her mind. It’s also a bit unfair… But Marika shouldn’t have remained like any other woman… What she went through and made others experience should have a meaning ‘as much as her loneliness’…”