Renowned Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet was commemorated

Born in 1902 in Salonika, where his father was in the foreign service, Hikmet grew up in Istanbul. His mother was an artist, and his pasha grandfather wrote poetry. Through their circle of friends Hikmet was introduced to poetry early; publishing his first poems at seventeen. He attended the Turkish Naval Academy, but during the Allied occupation of Istanbul following World War I, he left to teach in eastern Turkey. In 1922, after a brief first marriage ended in annulment, he crossed the border and made his way to Moscow, attracted by the Russian revolution and its promise of social justice.

At Moscow University he got to know students and artists from all over the world. Hikmet returned to Turkey in 1924, after the Turkish War of Independence, but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. In 1926 he managed to escape to Russia, where he continued writing poetry and plays, met Mayakovsky, and worked with Meyerhold. A general amnesty allowed him to return to Turkey in 1928. Since the Communist Party had been outlawed by then, he found himself under constant surveillance by the secret police and spent five of the next ten years in prison on a variety of trumped-up charges.

Then, in January 1938, he was arrested for inciting the Turkish Armed Forces to revolt and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on the grounds that military cadets were reading his poems, particularly "The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin." Published in 1936, this long poem based on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule was his last book to appear in Turkey during his lifetime.

After his death in Moscow, Hikmet’s books began to reappear in Turkey; in 1965 and 1966, for example, more than twenty of his books were published here, some of them reprints of earlier volumes and others works appearing for the first time.