The land is the homeland if anyone dies for it!

Geography, What Is Called Soil:

The geography on which a nation lives is actually nothing at first glance. It is nothing more than a meaningless land. Whether this geography has mysterious mountains, lonely cliffs, heavenly plains, and a vast vastness as soon as birds fly, caravans do not pass, it is actually nothing but the dead world that people, cars, trains and beasts of burden chew on.

However, there comes a day when what is trampled on is crowned. The lifeless and impartial geography suddenly becomes a homeland in the hands of those who do not agree with the trampling of the enemy's boots. Who did this, how did they do it?

How is the Idea or Notion of Homeland Formed?

How cloudy is the first birth of their homeland, which really means something for nations! Like a child who is not free to choose his parents, to determine where he will be born, can communities have the right to choose where they make their homeland? The generations that make up a society create the conditions for living and being happy in that geography piece by piece, so that piece of land becomes a separate character over time, an identity that is attributed importance to that society.

The fact that people unite while creating the conditions for living on such a nameless geography and that they become a community that acts together constitutes the first great and necessary prerequisite of being a nation. This condition is the common history that that community has. This unity, the common past, paves the way for that community to leave its mark on the geography.

Now that society begins to live in those lands and to protect those lands from others. Every child born on that land; Unlike before, it no longer begins to be dark, uncertain and stateless, but to exist with the identity it has acquired from birth as a part of the society living in those lands, and to see this homeland as the home of a certain society as soon as it opens its eyes to the world. It has now become a home for children, young people, the elderly, in short, everyone. The homeland was born.

The reasons that guide a society in establishing a homeland can be of a very different nature. The reason that made the United States of America was that those who were tired of the harsh conditions in Europe were displaced in search of adventure and wanted to live in better conditions, for some they were removed from their native land by forced exile, for others they wanted to seek bread and to migrate to new lands in the hope of finding gold. For the Turks, in the past, the desire to migrate to other lands for better living conditions, to seize more fertile lands, to dominate richer communities, etc., served as a guide to make new lands their homeland.

Such needs are of great importance for mobilizing societies. Every society and even individual who takes action has set sail for uncertainty. He no longer knows where to stop. The basic impulse that leads society to new lands is common needs. A community that melts into the crucible of works, sometimes disasters, wars and happiness that make up a common history and pours into the geography and turns it into a homeland means that it has moved from a active life to a settled life. Now the consciousness of being a Nation for that community begins. And now generations become known in the course of history as being from this country and this nation. For individuals, the uncertainty in their lives ends at this point, a certain flow of life begins. In this respect, the essence of the idea of nationality begins with the homeland, with the birth of the homeland.

This is how Anatolia became a homeland for Turks:

We Anatolian Turks are of Turkish descent and were born in Anatolia. After the first settlement adventure of our ancestors was over, after the homeland was established, after our lineage and homeland received its name and stamp, our birth, our life, our name and our conjecture became shaped in Anatolian lands within the framework of a certain destiny that is now known.

It is no longer possible for us to change this line or trajectory drawn by history for our nation, and we do not need to change it anyway. Because our understanding of happiness and disaster, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and curvature has always acquired an identity, a meaning, according to this trajectory. Our own homeland means that we are united by the unity of 'unity of fate', 'unity of history' and other similar things. When we destroy them, we become alienated even from ourselves, we become detached from the society we are in. Eventually, we get lost. That nation, that homeland will no longer mean anything to us.

The Turks, who created a motif like Gurbet, know much better than other nations what this disappearance means. For us Turks, no other kind of catastrophe can be imagined that can be compared to the disasters caused by statelessness. The greatest punishment that an autocratic regime, an oppressive ruler, the greatest ruler imposes on a person worse than death is, in a word, exile. This includes voluntary exile. In order to know the terrible deficiencies that statelessness creates in the human self, I believe that it is more than enough to listen to the experiences of those who go to a foreign country and to try to understand what they suffer.

Where Does the Source of Dying for the Homeland Come From?

Where does the source of that unidentifiable feeling that commands people to die for the sake of protecting their homeland, so that they can give up their own lives, come from? As I understand it, the source of this indescribable feeling is collective memories. They are lived memories that draw the value, taste, meaning and purpose of living for a person. Without these memories, it is impossible for a person to make any land his homeland. It is also impossible for him to die his way of his own accord.

The common memories that are so decisive are formed over time when a person lives in that land. It is only possible for these common memories to pass from generation to generation, to live without fading, not to be lost, and to pass to new generations as a fresh force that motivates the next generations living in those lands. What is called history is a mass of memories that reflect the experiences of society. Living generations dissolve this ball, operate in the germ of their consciousness, and thus spontaneously embrace the notion called homeland.

The Place of Writing in the Concept of Homeland:

Although we can take the establishment of homelands to fairy tales and legends, it is based on the presence of writing. Writing has kept alive the relationship between the land and man. It was only thanks to writing that the destruction of the towns in which he lived in was not immediately blown away from the human brain and heart, and that he could remain alive  . Thus, those towns, the places where they lived, did not die or disappear for the rest of that community, and they continued to live in the memory of each individual in the society. Thus, the common history of that society emerged. Common history has been their past, their origin.

The geography in which these memories pass has gained meaning for that society along with the memories. These memories, which were transferred to each newborn, served to comprehend the meaning of that geography for the newborn and then to protect it. It is the population that lives on a geography that constitutes the life and blood of it. It is the people who fill this geography. Grief, joy, hatred, compassion, difficulties, exhaustion, loves, loves, deceptions, likes, satires, etc. are the blood shed separately in the geography, the ages they spend in the geography, the efforts they spend, the intelligence they exhibit; It creates the phenomenon, concept and meaning called homeland for the people living in that geography.

The houses, caravanserais, inns, roads, bridges, fountains, etc. that people built together are the signs that the geography has become a homeland as monuments of common memories one by one. The works of art and crafts reflecting the human ingenuity that emerges as we live later, especially his literary works, are very important. Literature; What a beautiful thing that keeps the memories that hold people's hearts with all their freshness one by one, as if we have lived them, as if we had done them, and that protects them from being erased and keeps them alive. Music, the deepest part of the fine arts in the heart, is cut off as another guardian of human memory. In the same way, the art of painting, which beautifies memories with the magic of color and transfers them to generations, is like this.

And then there are the graves. Those sacred places where the living bury their dead one by one. It is always the graves that remind those who live today how what lives today becomes the past tomorrow, and that remind the man who overthrows the mountains with his might of his impotence when the day comes. Each grave becomes a part of the common memory shared by that society, and is engraved in the minds as a symbol of that land being a homeland.

Owning the Homeland:

The common reflection of all these leads a community to own those lands, to see their own rights and to know their homeland. In the course of history, labor, intelligence, art, pleasure, and torments give sufficient reasons why the community that makes up a homeland should not be expelled from there. Just as any disaster that befalls a family that owns a house does not give younger, more vigorous foreigners the right to usurp that house, so the fault of those who govern nations, the disasters they suffer, any indulgence they show as a nation at some point in their lives does not entitle them to have their homeland seized by others.

A homeland surrenders to foreigners on one condition:

As a result of the fact that the children of the homeland do not protect their homelands and cannot die in their way, it means that a homeland has entered the path of extinction. When there is no one left to remember, just as there was nothing to remember, there is no longer a thing called homeland, it is gone! The remembrance of the whole world has not been enough to keep a land and a geography alive as a certain homeland, nor is it enough!

For example, all of humanity now knows and remembers the Hittite civilization, art and history. However, a Hittite homeland no longer exists. It is gone. So was the Assyrian Empire. Despite the emergence of a science such as Assyriology and the fact that the entire world of humanity witnessed the civilization left by the Assyrians, an Assyrian homeland no longer exists, nor will it ever be!

It is in this respect that in order for a nation to be sure that it will remain in its homeland, above everything, above all things; It is imperative that a society that knows and loves that homeland continues to live on a nation in today's sense. And I think Mithat Cemal is right from the ground to the sky:

"The land is the homeland if anyone dies for it!"

Reference:

Arik R.O. (1956). From Geography to Homeland, Yeni Matbaa. Ankara