111. Today in 1920s Turkey: 12 September 1928 (110-Year-Old Turkish Woman with Her Pipe)

Snippet with photograph, Köroğlu, 12 September 1928, no. 40, page 3.

Türkçe
Çubuğuyla Gam Dağıtan bir Yüz Onluk
Şu resimde gördüğünüz ihtiyar kadın tamam yüz on yaşındadır. Sekerkent’li Ayşe Abla şimdiye kadar birçok evlat yetiştirmiş. Yalnız üç şehit vermiş dayanıklı, kuvvetli, cesur bir Türk anasıdır. Başından tam yüz on yılın fırtınası ve baharı geçen bu ihtiyar kadının hafızası kuvvetli ise ne devirler, ne hengameler hatırlar. Allah, yaşını arttırsın. Zaro Ağa’yla evlenseler belki altın topu gibi çocukları olur mu dersiniz?

English
A One Hundred and Ten-er Dishing Out Sorrows with Her Pipe
The elderly woman you see in this picture is one hundred and ten years old. Elder sister Ayşe from the town of Sekerkent/Senirkent has raised many children until now. She is a brave, strong, and sturdy Turkish mother who gave three martyrs. If the memory of this old woman, who has experienced exactly 110 years of springs and storms, is strong enough what ages, what uproars would she remember. May God increase her age. Maybe if she married with Zaro Ağa they would have a great ball-of-joy child, what do you think?

Comments:
In September of 1928 the journal Köroğlu ran a short news story introducing their readership to “Ayşe Abla,” a 110-year-old woman. Köroğlu, a self-declared “political and satirical people’s newspaper” (siyasi ve mizahi halk gazetesi) and other papers like it often ran local news stories in an attempt to connect their readers with the country’s other people and places. Collectives such as schools, military installations, hospitals, sports clubs would be published as well as stories of individual citizens. Besides the obvious targets of public figures, the journal also made room for miscellaneous stories about interesting people-and surviving the brutality of life for 110 years definitely qualifies as interesting.

This perennial concern with “interesting people” was common practice across many periodicals, especially those bearing copious illustrations. In fact, Today in 1920s Turkey has covered several examples of local “characters” that have appeared in publications of this period. For instance, the same Zaro Ağa mentioned in the accompanying text is the subject of several posts. As members of their own extra elderly community, the writer suggests that since Zaro Ağa and Ayşe Abla are both very old, they should get married… assuming they both outlived any previous spouses, that is.

Entire page, Köroğlu, 12 September 1928, no. 40, page 3. Atatürk Library, Istanbul.

Originally published at https://steemit.com on September 12, 2018.