The city of those who gave their lives for a handful of coal On the 35th anniversary of the Great Miners’ Strike and March – Part 1
“Zonguldak is a two-story house full of sorrow. Those on the lower floor snatch coal from the hands of Azrael (the Angel of Death) and offer it to those upstairs.Walk a little toward Çaydamar - you will see them on the roads, faces blackened like children just back from play, helmets on their heads, lamps in their hands. The most honest, the most kissable bread is baked in Zonguldak. When evening falls - except on Ahmet Hamdi’s evenings - the roads become like deflated tires, slack and weary. Tired people fall silent like steeped tea, and think of how they worked that day.” İrfan Yalçın, “Zonguldak,” Sanat Olayı (1982), Issue 14, p. 46–17
Imagine a city that comes from death and returns to death, upon whose darkness the light of an entire country is stubbornly built… A city with a black underside, green surface, and fierce sea above. A city where, if a local radio broadcast suddenly cuts off mid-song, it is enveloped in a long silence - hearts rising to throats. At that moment, the entire city knows; either a collapse has occurred underground, or a methane explosion has happened.
We, too, at home would know that our mother - a nurse at the EKİ Hospital’s chest diseases ward - would not be coming home that night. Can Kartoğlu says: “As a child of Zonguldak, I knew this: coal burns lives. Later, I learned that coal does not only burn the lives of miners forced to work without rules, inspections, or security; it also burns those who warm themselves with it, and those who don’t use it but merely breathe its air. Coal takes lifetimes. It takes the lives of humans, of other living beings, of the city itself… Coal destroys the climate… Even the phrase ‘those who give a lifetime for a handful of coal’ burns my soul.”
In 1979, at the small “Karikatür Evi” (Cartoon House) in Tepebaşı, Istanbul, we - together with Ohannes Şaşkal - brought to light the breathtaking cartoons of Burhan Solukçu, a Zonguldak miner and cartoonist. Suffering from dust-related lung disease contracted in the mines, Solukçu spent years in sanatoriums. Before his death in March 1978, he wrote a heartfelt letter from his sickbed to his mentor, Rıfat Ilgaz, expressing his emotions in verse: “Will you die? Then die in a square / or atop a mountain, fighting for your cause / but don’t die miserably in this bed.”
In February 1980, Ohannes and I opened the joint cartoon exhibition K-ÖMÜR - first at Ankara’s Çağdaş Sahne, then at Istanbul’s Sinematek - in memory of Burhan Solukçu, accompanied by his cartoons. Our dear friend, critic and writer Mehmet Ergün, contributed a profoundly insightful and comprehensive review titled “On an exhibition - Not a mark of shame, but coal black” to the February 1980 issue of Türkiye Yazıları, edited by Ahmet Say. That essay was originally intended to serve as the preface to our unpublished book. Time passed. İsmail Yıldırım and Nihat (Behram) Abi from Güney Film, left the country. Then, the darkness of September 12 descended upon the nation, and in its deepest, most suffocating form…
In his essay, Mehmet highlights two regions that stand out in the development of Turkish society: Çukurova and Zonguldak. He writes: “We observe that both regions, due to their natural resources and production-friendly climate and soil, are among the first areas where capitalist production relations began to take root. Çukurova possesses climate and soil suitable for cotton production, the raw material needed by the textile industry. Zonguldak, on the other hand, contains rich coal deposits, one of the most important materials required by industry. Therefore, from the early nineteenth century onward, imperialism - which reduced the Ottoman Empire to a semi-colonial state - invested in, intervened in, or stimulated production in these regions. As a result, albeit in distorted form, capitalist production relations that would later mark society as a whole first sprouted here. In other words, these two regions became typical zones in the evolutionary process of Turkish society. Examining their one-hundred-and-fifty-year economic and social history allows us to grasp, in broad outline, the effects of imperialism on economic, social, and political life, labor-employer relations, and the role of the state in both Ottoman society and Republican Türkiye.”
THE HISTORY OF PAIN AND ZONGULDAK
Zonguldak is a city that, throughout its history under both the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Türkiye, has witnessed unforgettable tragedies linked to mining. The Dilaver Pasha Regulation of 1865, which placed forced labor in mines on a legal footing, represents one of the most striking contradictions of Ottoman modernization. Issued under the guise of reform and regulation, this regulation legitimized the near-corvée-like forced labor of the rural population in the Zonguldak coal basin. Fundamental issues such as wages, health, and occupational safety were entirely ignored; mining labor was bound to a state-organized compulsory labor regime.
A similar system reappeared during the Republican era under the name Mükellefiyet (obligatory labor). Between 1940 and 1947, under the pretext of the extraordinary conditions of World War II, thousands of men in the Zonguldak coal basin were forced to work in mines under quasi-military discipline. Those who fled were captured by gendarmes and brought back. Harsh working conditions, malnutrition, and workplace accidents became widespread. Although legally justified by national interest and war economy, in practice this regime suspended the principle of free labor.
The saying “Whoever becomes unable to work is put on a donkey and sent back to his village” is still remembered as a phrase ingrained in popular memory, reflecting the harsh reality of the compulsory labor period. The most powerful literary account of this period is The Mouth of Death (Ölümün Ağzı) by İrfan Yalçın, one of the city’s great writers. In the preface, Yalçın writes:
“If the history of ‘pain’ were ever written, the compulsory labor imposed in the Zonguldak coal mines — briefly, mükellefiyet — would surely be mentioned.”
Likewise, the folk song “They declared compulsory service and called us, They told us to enter the pit of hell” collected by Nida Ateş from Sadık Akcan, is one of the most powerful ballads capturing the tragedy of the mükellefiyet period.
The 1965 and 1990 Zonguldak miners’ strikes were not merely labor actions - they marked pivotal moments in the awakening and resistance of an entire city. In 1965, miners Mehmet Çavdar and Satılmış Tepe, killed by gendarmerie gunfire, remain etched into Zonguldak’s collective memory. The strike that began on November 30, 1990, evolved into a turning point in Turkish history by January 4, 1991 - as families, children, shopkeepers, and the entire city marched toward Ankara in solidarity. Over the course of this four-part article series, I spoke with three key witnesses of the strike and march: Birol Üzmez, the photographer who captured unforgettable images of those days; Ahmet Öztürk, a miner and Secretary of the Strike Regional Committee, now a writer for Zonguldak Özgür Halkın Sesi newspaper; and Fahri Bozbaş, a miner and founder of the music group Kömür Karası.
TOMORROW: A sky three thousand light-years away
