Love on the Wing of Passion

Love...

Here, we call it ‘sevda.’ It is not always the sublime and powerful emotion that one person feels for another, as everyone imagines. It is perhaps a form that has taken shape. Sometimes love is ‘homeland.’ So much so that even after 50 years have passed, it is the moment when one goes to Kırcaali and touches their grandfather's land.

It is not always like Yusuf and Züleyha, Kerem and Aslı, or Ferhat and Şirin. It is not like Leyla and Mecnun either.

As the poet says, it becomes a nightingale that flies away, from Edirne to Ardahan, from Ardahan to Edirne. It is everywhere, we see it everywhere, from children to the elderly...

Sometimes you see love filling your heart in Kani Karaca's beautiful ghazal.

Or in Neyzen's ney, coming from deep within with every breath... With every breath...

Here, everything, absolutely everything, is weighed on the scales of love. It is weighed with love, gram for gram. Neither too little nor too much. Love here is like a patch on a tree or a piece of paper buried in the ground on Hıdırellez. It is everywhere. Yunus said it so beautifully, ‘Give your understanding to those who seek it, but I need only you.’

We came to know love here through Mevlana, who said, ‘Let the beauty you love be the very thing you do.’ We came to know it through Hacı Bektaş, who said, ‘Love and affection boil in our burning hearth, nightingales come with enthusiasm, roses bloom in our garden.’

We are also familiar with Troy and Helen. So familiar that, for the sake of love, they were willing to surrender their parents, their people, their city and their civilisation to the clutches of an angry ex-husband. Love was everything here. From the Iliad to the present day...

Did the views that assume that a person's most important love is their first love come from here?

Perhaps we love once. And we love deeply. If we can manage it, that is... The ones that come after, the ones we have mentioned here, whether they are the verses of poets or the wishes of ordinary people, are all images of that first love.

Where does your love truly come from? Who is it for? Who is your true love for? What is it? Who is it that you experience again and again every time you fall in love? What is it?

-Taken from Prof. Dr. Zümra ATALAY's TV programme entitled ‘İnsan Hali’.