---
title: "Mother, Where Is My Youth?"
canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/anne-benim-gencligim-nerede/"
date: "2016-08-13"
author: "Banu Uçak"
description: "As the ferry draws in to Beşiktaş, I find my first youth buried under a caged shore: a tea garden, a vanished petrol station, a warehouse turned hotel."
categories: ["essays"]
lang: "en"
---

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/9bed1-19ofrqme2uhhvqy09jrt6og.CuH2vkR6_ZTPyIm.webp)

When a person suffers a great loss, they seem to call up their whole existence in order to hold fast. From the instinct to survive, humanity endures wars, prison camps, a thousand and one ills. Small losses, by contrast, often shake a person more than anyone expects. Like a paper cut, they leave a sudden sting. Today, as the ferry drew in at Beşiktaş, a pain of that kind filled me. At first I could not see the cause. Then I understood. I remembered that the shore we have been deprived of, shut into a cage, was a tea garden of small stools where I sat in the breeze all through the years of my early youth, and that it was here I learned to drink my coffee plain. I remembered passing, in my university years while I studied architecture, the Mobil petrol station designed by Maruf Önal, its exquisite slender roof a slab of reinforced concrete, vanished now into the wind, passing it as if it would always stand, taking it for granted, without even a photograph. I remembered the abandoned, imposing bulk of the Reji tobacco warehouse, now turned into a luxury hotel without proportion or meaning. Under this greyness that no longer lives, caged, where fear rules, my first cigarette and the first giddy winds of my youth lie buried. The strange thing is that I did not notice what I had lost. It passed before I could mourn it, as if it had never been lived. Today I understood how, all at once, a person feels alone, a stranger in their own city, once childhood is lost. Today I seem to have taken on another year.

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/b16d6-1dpraiidhtfsremqoi68cva.N7DEoNfa_Z1Xgvam.webp)