7TH RUMELİ [LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES] SYMPOSIUM
The Features Refi Cevat Ulunay highlights about the Turkish checker game and players in his articles
Yayıncı:
RumeliYA Yayıncılık
Turkish checkers has been played in Anatolia for hundreds of years, especially during the Ottoman period when Sultan Abdülaziz and Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals showed high interest in the game. However, it has lost its wide audience with the passage of time. But, today, Turkish checkers players, who continue to play the game with great devotion in different cities of Turkey, protect the game showing a great effort to maintain the culture and pass it on to new generations. Despite all this historical depth, it is very difficult, to find written sources describing the social structure and history of the Turkish Damascus. This creates a wide gap in this transmission from the past to the present. Nevertheless, based on studies on coffeehouses, an approximate view of the cultural universe of a checkerspace can be obtained. In such a deprived environment, journalist/author Refi' Cevat Ulunay provides important information on the history of the game with his articles on checkers. Thus, it is possible to observe in his writings how similar the behavior of Turkish checkers players are from old times to the present day and the traces of an ongoing tradition. The author, especially in his column “Takvimden Bir Yaprak” in Milliyet newspaper, as well as in his book “Eski İstanbul Kabadayıları - Sayılı Fırtınalar” and in an article published in Tan Newspaper, wrote about old checkers players with valuable details. In this paper, the prominent aspects of Turkish checkers and checkers players and the striking events that Ulunay witnessed in relation to the game are discussed. Thus, through Ulunay's writings, a little light can be shed on the past of Turkish checkers, for which there is no written source on its past. For those who are unfamiliar with this culture, these vivid scenes quoted from life give data to the reader; for those who are familiar with dama culture, they offer important information in terms of establishing a relationship with the past.