LIVING SAFAI
News Source: Gocek Gazete
What do you think is the worst habit in the world? Marijuana, cocaine, cigarettes? Which one? For me, cigarettes come first. So who smokes the best cigarettes, even if they are harmful? Everyone can give a few different names. Or you can take the attitude that it is better to smoke. I always warn and criticize smokers. I react, “Put that cigarette away, put it down.”
But there was one man, Safai, who made every moment of the first puff of a cigarette, the way he opened the cigarette case, rolled the carefully chopped tobacco, wetted it with his tongue and sealed the paper, and smoked that cigarette with pleasure, into an artistic movement. I didn’t feel like criticizing or warning Safai with his poetic gestures. I’ve never seen anyone smoke such a beautiful sarma tobacco. To love with love. This is what love and devotion looks like. I always saw in my heart as a physician that this love, this devotion would end badly. And finally, he was stricken with lung cancer, and with the addition of corona, he said goodbye on March 09, 2022, in Safai’s words, “to rest”. Being born, growing up and dying. Can the laws of nature be challenged? But some deaths are premature!
Safai was a very different, very different personality. He was a nature lover, a good environmentalist, a true friend to animals. His mother was a teacher, so he had a good education. Shepherd, agriculturalist, painter, author of books, poetry, and a versatile artist with his photographs. He was an architect with many dreams and never-ending hopes, an architect whose love for humanity was kneaded with love.
He was a patriot whose face bears the traces of the last 70 years of Anatolia.
He spent part of his life living with his sheep in a village in Gölhisar, Burdur. He struggled to explain the importance of agriculture and animal husbandry in Turkey’s development. He tried to contribute to the crossbreeding studies of gum ram and Tahirova sheep to obtain Sönmez type sheep. He worked hard with his friends to improve the hybrid offspring obtained and to mate them with Tahirova rams in the second stage. He believed that Sönmez sheep, created on 25% Chios + 75% Tahirova genotypes, would make a great contribution to Turkey’s Small Ruminant Livestock. When I said I was going to be a sheep farmer, Sönmez talked for hours about the characteristics of his sheep; he talked at length about their abundant milk, how many offspring they produced and how soft and precious their feathers were. His eyes would light up when sheep and goats were mentioned.
They came to Muğla with Özlem Uzman and worked day and night to pave the way for and educate young people in a time when the importance of education is increasing. They established the EGET Foundation. The future of our country and the youth was one of his biggest concerns. As a foundation, oak saplings were planted in Armutlu in Ula district to grow truffle mushrooms. They created a lavender garden. One of their biggest dreams was to sell their truffles and lavender and to raise modern, Kemalist youth who adhere to the principles of the Republic. They commissioned geothermal field surveys in Muğla Menteşe. They had projects prepared. They worked for health tourism.
Ms. Özlem’s insistent phone call informed me that they were organizing a commemoration night for “Living Safai” on 03.06.2022 and that they were waiting for the night. I had to go, no matter what.
The invitation reads: “Safai, a multifaceted person, architect, painter, writer, poet, thinker, who passed away on 9-March-2022, left indelible traces in the hearts of many people.
We would be honored to have you with us at the commemoration of Safai, whom we call “Safai the Living”.”
In the conference hall of the Türkan Saylan Contemporary Life Center, one of the beautiful works of the Muğla Metropolitan Municipality, I was welcomed with an exhibition of Çoban Safai’s Son Quixote paintings and photographs. To the left of the entrance, his books of novels, poems and essays filled the stand. All around the hall, Safai friends from various parts of Turkey were talking only about Safai. After the cocktail, it was time to meet Safai. Until midnight, his friends and companions talked about Safai the Living. The meeting was so successful and engaging that no one could leave the meeting. There’s so much we don’t know about Safai. The more we listened, the more we saw, the more we admired. From the students he brought back to life, who he made great efforts to help become modern human beings, to the heartfelt love he gave to his neighbors in Esenliktepe village. From Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Son Quixote in the Anatolian steppes, his life did not fit into one night.
He was not only an environmentalist, nature lover, writer and painter but also a good Anatolian wren.
At one point in the Safai narrative;
“We are only changing form on the one hand: We are neither really being born, nor really dying. For we are the kind of men for whom even death is an illusion. That death which in reality is pregnant with new births, that death which is rest!” Now he is just resting, he will continue to live his 70 years of life in Anatolian lands with his friends and the values he left behind. Safai should not only live on through the EGET Foundation, but also through a street or avenue named after him.
Gocek
06.06.2022
Author Dr. Nurettin Demir.