Not a great photo, but the only one I have... Once used to be number 99, then turned 71, now a wreck in Eşref Efendi...

GOODBYE TO AN OLD FRIEND...

I'm a person who tends to fall in love with small things around her. I make them a part of my life, my routine. A marker drawing on a wall, a small sign of an old store, and a house that stands still against all the changing world around it.

I didn't know anything about Kurtuluş until my aunt and cousin moved there. I walked through Eşref Efendi for the first time thanks to Dilara Hadroviç, when she invited me to do some photographing of the workshops happening under the architecture faculty and I am eternally grateful to her for doing that.

Eşref Efendi is a really beautiful street that has a lot of history and a sense of community. That is why I fell in love with it in the first place. After that, it took me almost a year to move and spend my next 4 years there. It was my home away from home, my neighborhood.

There was this building, somehow stuck between all those 5-floor buildings. That was the building I showed to any guest coming over. My cousin once said it's like the house in "Up". Still standing. There were always these stories about the owner, a really old man living in there alone, some people said he was a bit mental but he was keeping it safe. They wanted to buy that building to turn it into a more profitable shiny (ugly) new thing and make more out of it. But he wouldn't let them. I don't know if it's true or not. Neighbors had their own myths.

Yesterday I saw a horrendous video of that building getting wrecked illegally. People of my neighborhood, city hall everybody was against it. It was a building that was supposed to be protected legally. You shouldn't even be able to change the door without a permit. And they just wrecked it.

I feel sad and heartbroken. I always feel that way about my country deep down but you get used to it after the 100th time. But realizing that what you love and cherish can be destroyed without even caring, again and again, just punches me in the gut once more to remind me that the things I love about my life are gone. I just long for memories.