“Aren’t These Worth as Much as a T-shirt?”

It gets so quiet around here on Sundays. Especially when the weather’s rainy and overcast… At times like this, you just want to lose yourself in the city streets and walk for ages. Sometimes you seek peace by becoming one with nature, accompanied by the sound of birdsong; at other times, you let yourself be carried away by the rhythm of a little surprise that might appear on every street corner.

My daughter and I had set off for a walk just like that, without knowing where we were going…

The path led us to the front of a magnificent building in Hamburg. It was my first time here, but for some reason the building didn’t feel unfamiliar to me. The inscription ‘1933’ on its wall caught my eye. Then the Latin words at the top:

“Jus est ars boni et aequi.” Looking up the translation:

“Law is the art of the good and the just.”

I was standing in front of a courthouse. In Hamburg, hundreds of kilometres away from my homeland…

Just then, the film *Yellow Envelopes*, which I’d watched recently, came to mind:

The opening line: “Berlin as Ankara, Hamburg as Istanbul.”

And the scene set in the courthouse…

Yes, this was that very building. The building where the scene depicting the trial of the DTCF lecturers was filmed… A story set in Turkey, re-enacted in another country.

I was silent for a while. My daughter asked what I was thinking.

I told her about the struggle of private school teachers that I’d been seeing frequently in the news in recent days. Teachers who had come to Ankara from different cities across Turkey, trying to make their voices heard in order to claim their rights… Having worked as a private school teacher for years, for better or worse, I too had taken my fair share of knocks within the system, however indirectly. I tried to explain to my daughter that, years ago, under a law passed in 1965, teachers had the right to the same basic salary as their colleagues in state schools, but that this right had subsequently been taken away from them.

She listened to me in silence.

Then she said something I hadn’t expected at all:

— But Mum, even on a T-shirt you buy from a shop in Turkey, it says ‘No returns’. These people have earned a right. Why has their right been taken away? Are they worth any less than a T-shirt?

For a moment, I couldn’t respond to such a comparison because sometimes children can cut straight to the heart of issues that adults have spent years debating and complicating with just a single sentence. That’s exactly what happened now.

‘Aren’t they worth as much as a T-shirt?’

I was standing in Hamburg, in front of a courthouse with the words ‘the art of what is good and just’ inscribed on its wall. My thoughts, however, were in Turkey, with the teachers trying to make their voices heard, and with my daughter’s simple, straightforward question:

‘Are they worth no more than a T-shirt?’

Perhaps some words know no boundaries.

Like justice…

Sometimes it appears before us in a film scene, sometimes in an old inscription on a building’s façade, and sometimes in a single question asked by a child—and that is when one realises:

Some truths cannot be contained within the walls of a building, the scenes of a film, or a few lines of a news report.

So, how could I have put into words the way my heart was racing with that struggle from kilometres away? With these lines, I suppose, because writing, too, is the memory of the invisible bonds forged between distant lands and the questions that pierce our hearts.