What better image than the sea to convey the idea of infinity and an actual voyage? And if you then put a ship in that dark blue sea, gliding along with all the grace of a swan amidst the foam-spewing waves... As children of a people that took to the sea rather late despite inhabiting a geography surrounded by water on three sides, we should not be surprised that images of the sea and portraits of ships are rather new to Turkish painting. The depiction of ships found in Byzantine mosaics, Greek terra cottas and Egyptian papyri only developed in the true sense of the word with the extraordinary advances in the art of oil painting that took place in Europe from the 16th century onwards. In the absence of photography, oil paintings, which aimed to be almost exact copies of reality, had an important documentary value as faithful representations of their subjects. Indeed portraits of ships became a discipline unto itself in painting of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Since we Turks had no tradition of painting in the Ottoman period apart from the very limited and stylized art of the miniature, depictions of the period’s splendid galleys and imperial caïques have not come down to us in detail. We know these vessels only from Melling’s engravings and the paintings of Ayvazovsky and Preziosi. While we have long lamented the absence in the history of Turkish painting of any painters of the sea or ships other than Diyarbakýrlý Tahsin, a fleet looming suddenly on the horizon now looks like putting an end, to some extent anyway, to these regrets of ours. Haslet Soyöz, whom we have always known as a cartoonist, is coming at us full steam ahead with his ‘Ships of Paradise’.
FROM CARTOONS TO OILS
Like many others, I became acquainted with Haslet Soyöz through his comic strips in the daily papers. The ‘big’ questions asked by that memorable ’Little Guy’ of his still ring somewhere in my childish head. For some reason however I was not at all surprised when the creator of Küçümen, who has never lost those wild childish eyes of his, came out thirty years later with a whopping series of ship paintings, perhaps because I could detect in those giant canvases the signs of a sensitive soul that still views the world through a child’s eyes.
What, I wonder, lay behind the extraordinary labor and patience lavished on those ship paintings by Haslet, who shut himself up in his studio in Tarlabaþý for over two years? Could it be an attempt to turn the old cliché ‘the history of these lands’ on its head and write a visual history of our ships and the sea that surrounds us on three sides? It’s not easy to explain why an artist who spent thirty years pouring his grievances into the minimalism of cartoon art in black India ink on A4 sheets has now returned to the canvas and the rainbow oil palette.
Haslet says the inspiration came with a painting of the Savarona. Starting with a painting of this beautiful yacht on which Atatürk spent his last days was an auspicious introduction to the enterprise of painting pictures of each of the ships that left an important mark on the history of the late Ottoman and the Republican periods... a long voyage through history on the crest of the waves and in the wake of the ships.
THE YAVUZ, THE GULCEMAL AND OTHERS
They are all there in Haslet’s paintings. The battleship Yavuz, which sailed through the Istanbul straits in 1914 to pound the Russian ports of Sevastopol, Odessa, Kiev and Novorossisk with cannon fire thereby triggering the First World War, is proceeding full steam ahead, puffing smoke from its double smokestack. Right next to it is another legend, the Gülcemal, an English-built vessel launched on 15 July 1874 with a German name, which was bought by the Ottoman government in 1911 and renamed for the mother of the reigning Sultan Reþad. This ship, which glides along on Haslet’s canvas like a coy bride with a profile befitting its name, Rose-faced, is sacred in the eyes of the Anatolian people, who were convinced of its powers to heal the sick who surrounded it in boats in the ports where it anchored.
And what about the frigate Ertuðrul, forging ahead in unfamiliar waters even though the sea is high and the sky, roiling with blue-grey clouds, is ready to burst? It only narrowly escaped several disasters before it reached Japan bearing gifts and greetings from Sultan Abdülhamid to the Japanese Emperor. Now it is on its return voyage. When stormy Japanese waters off the coast of Kobe swallowed up the Ertuðrul on 18 September 1890, only 69 of its 681 crew members were saved. Now on Haslet’s canvas it pursues its return course, like a yearning song in the darkness.
THE SHIPS OF PARADISE COME TO LIFE
In another corner stands the Sahilbent, whose story is little known. The world’s first car ferry, produced in England in 1871 according to plans drawn up jointly by Hüseyin Haki Efendi, director of the Þirket-i Hayriye, the period’s leading shipping company, General Inspector Ýskender Bey, and the head architect of the Hasköy dockyard Mehmet Usta, the Sahilbent, with its twin the Suhulet, operated for close to a hundred years between the two shores of the Bosphorus. These are just a few of the many ships depicted on Haslet’s canvases. The Bandýrma, for example, carried along by winds of hope, stoutly resists the Black Sea’s fierce waves to carry Atatürk to Samsun, where he launched Turkey’s War of Independence in 1919. All these and many more are immortalised on Haslet’s canvases. Haslet Soyöz has breathed new life into these ships, which put their stamp on the last century of Turkish history before sinking quietly to the bottom of the sea when their time came or breathing their last as they were dismantled at a shipyard. His ‘ships of paradise’ turn over a new page for us in Turkey’s maritime history.