16- Family Reunion

 

In the spacious area stretching from the courtyard gate to the house, two long tables had been set up. Great-uncle Ayhan and great-aunt Ayla were seated at the head of the table. Other family members had also taken their seats. Uncles Turgay and Ertan were by the barbecue grilling the meat, while members of the third generation were distributing it onto plates.

Coloured decorations hanging from the branches of plum and mulberry trees swayed gently in the breeze, along with solar-powered lights that had been charging all day. String lights had been strung across the centre of the tables to be switched on once darkness fell. On this warm July evening, the sun was still scorching the earth as it made its way west.

Outside the large iron gate of the courtyard, family members’ cars were parked in a line. When Çiğdem noticed a pair of headlights approaching, she glanced at the table to see if there were still guests who hadn’t arrived. Everyone was there, including her cousin Nesil, who had just made it after her daughter’s conservatory exam in Ankara. However, considering the sheer size of her mother’s extended family from Filyos to Mengen, it wasn’t impossible for uninvited guests to show up.

As the car drew nearer, Çiğdem saw that it was a sky-blue, convertible Jaguar E-Type from the 1960s — exactly the sort of striking beauty her husband Jacques would admire. Seeing such a rare car in these parts surprised her. Driven by a mix of curiosity and a protective instinct, she walked towards the gate — Jacques joined her, likely just as intrigued by the car as she was. The others at the table turned their eyes in that direction too. The car came to a stop about five or six metres ahead, beside the second row of vehicles.

Çiğdem had been planning this large family gathering for over a year — and finally, the day had come. They were in the garden of the large wooden house where her mother Leman had been born seventy-five years earlier, in the ancient coastal town of Filyos by the Black Sea. Her mother was the third of eight siblings — all of whom were present that day.

Çiğdem had taken inspiration from the family reunions on Jacques’s maternal side, which were held annually in Brussels. Her mother-in-law Jacqueline’s mother was called Marie. Since 15 August, the Assumption of Mary, is a public holiday in Catholic countries and schools are closed for summer, the idea of turning that date into a family party had first come from the eldest sister forty years ago, and the tradition had continued without fail ever since. As Jacques’s wife, Çiğdem was always invited to these gatherings.

Jacques’s family also had seven siblings, and like her mother, his mother was the third child. Each sibling had three to five children. With daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, grandchildren and now their partners too, they had become a family of nearly one hundred and twenty people. Of course, divorces and changing relationships meant the attendees changed a bit each year,  some faces disappeared, new ones joined, but the annual party never dropped below seventy or eighty attendees.

One of Jacques’s great-aunt’s daughters was married to an MP — a true politician who loved being the centre of attention. He would take the microphone and never let go, speaking passionately, getting the family to sing songs together, encouraging dancing, introducing newcomers, cracking jokes. At her first attendance, he had handed the microphone to Çiğdem and asked her to sing. Embarrassed, she had only managed a brief greeting. Over time, though, she had got to know the aunts and cousins, and grown very fond of them.

Her dream of organising a similar event for her own family grew stronger with each passing year. Çiğdem greatly admired large families. As her own siblings lived in different countries, she only saw them at Christmas and in the summer. She longed for shared holidays like Jacques had with his family. But her busy professional life had not allowed time to realise that dream.

In 2023, everything changed. When her husband received a job offer in Canada, Çiğdem decided to take a break from work and follow him. That’s how they ended up in Quebec for a year and a half. That summer, with more time on her hands, she developed the idea of a family gathering in her mind and thought, “Well then, I can organise this myself.” And so she got started.

Her mother Leman had one more sibling than her mother-in-law, but the number of children and grandchildren was far fewer. After listing them all, including their spouses, Çiğdem realised they didn’t even reach fifty. She thought, “At least thirty of us could come together.” Things were easier with Jacques’s family — most of them lived within a hundred-kilometre radius of Brussels. But her own relatives were scattered not only across Turkey but all over Europe. Different countries in Europe, different cities in Turkey.

The family loved and visited one another. A few had even gone on a Balkan tour together the previous year. But gathering all eight siblings at once would be a first. Perhaps it couldn’t become a yearly tradition like Jacques’s family had, but Çiğdem was determined to make it happen — at least once — in July 2024.

Eleven months in advance, she created two WhatsApp groups — one for the whole family, and another for four people she thought might help with planning. As soon as the groups were set up, she found herself engaged with the family and was thrilled to see how warmly her idea was received. Her enthusiasm only grew. Her great-aunt Ayla in particular said, “I really admire you, Çiğdem. You’re making something happen for the first time. Thank you so much.” It moved Çiğdem deeply.

She had invited her middle uncle Turgay — who lived near Filyos — to her small planning group, which she called “Organised Affairs.” She also included great-aunt Ayla’s daughters Selin and Pelin, and her great-uncle Ayhan who lived in Zonguldak. Turgay took charge of food and drink. Selin and Pelin helped with decorations and activities. Uncle Ayhan hired a gardener to prepare the garden for visitors.

Of course, there were dissenting voices in the family. One cousin who ran a café in Urla said July was their busiest month. Another, Nesil, said it clashed with her daughter’s conservatory exams. The cousin in Venice, Ulaş, couldn’t even be reached. Perhaps he didn’t want to come due to a strained relationship with his father, Ayhan.

Tensions and even arguments flared up over trivial matters during those days. When Çiğdem told Jacques, “Your lot deserve a medal. Mine have started fighting before we’ve even gathered,” Jacques calmly reassured her with his soft voice: “It happens in every family, love. Don’t worry.” He then told her how his youngest uncle would act up when drunk, how Aunt Miette would take his side, and how that had led to countless rows. That uncle no longer came to the gatherings. Çiğdem had never even met him.

In October — around the time she began trying her hand at writing — and with nine months still to go until the reunion, Çiğdem had another brilliant idea. She would write a family chronicle and distribute it at the event. In Jacques’s family, there was always a huge photo album about a metre tall, smaller albums, and memory books brought to the gatherings. Çiğdem had pored over these with great interest and found joy in seeing the youthful pictures of people now in their seventies and eighties.

In November, she left her husband behind in Canada and travelled to Turkey for six weeks. With her mother Leman, she packed suitcases in Izmir and set off on a family tour. Starting in Izmir, they visited each aunt and uncle one by one in Bursa, Denizli, and Istanbul. Çiğdem scanned and copied the photos everyone had, and gathered stories and information about grandparents and their lives.

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough photographs to create a large, beautiful album like the one Jacques’s family had. The oldest picture she could find dated back to 1935. It was a passport-style photo of her great-grandfather Mehmet Bey, born in 1877, at the age of 58. From the period between 1935 and 1965, there were barely thirty photos. Some of them were so worn and faded that it was impossible to recognise the people in them.

When they reached their final stop in Zonguldak, and from there travelled with her great uncle Ayhan to the abandoned family house in Filyos, she was bitterly disappointed. The house, which she hadn’t seen in years, had turned into a ruin. The large garden was overrun with brambles, ivy and tall grass. This grand wooden house, which the elders in the family once referred to as the “New Mansion,” was far from new—in fact, it was completely dilapidated. The only reason for its name was that her grandfather’s grandfather Osman Bey had built a house in the 1880s, which they called the Old Mansion. When Mehmet Bey, Osman’s son, had a house built a hundred metres further in 1915, it naturally came to be known as the New Mansion. After the Old Mansion was demolished in the 1950s, the name remained, even though the second house had long since lost its former glory. The mulberry tree planted beside it was now 110 years old. It still bore delicious fruit, but the house looked as though it would collapse if thirty or forty people were to enter it.

It was in this house that Mehmet Bey’s seven children had been born. The youngest of them, Rıza Bey, was Çiğdem’s grandfather. Though his older siblings were born during the Ottoman era, he was a child of the Republic.

Years later, Rıza Bey raised his own family in this house, bringing up eight children under its roof. But now, the house Çiğdem saw had long since lost its splendour. Time, along with the Black Sea’s humidity, had devoured its carpets, books and photographs. Some of the items she remembered from her childhood had been thrown away in recent years due to neglect. The huge house had slightly tilted due to soil subsidence, floorboards had broken and holes now connected the upper floor to the one below. The wood had blackened; the white lace curtains in the bay windows had yellowed.

Çiğdem looked at the house with sadness. Hosting guests inside was clearly impossible. However, a gathering in the garden could still be arranged. The garden was neglected, but could be cleaned up. Given that the Black Sea summer was notoriously unpredictable and sudden downpours could happen at any moment, they would need to procure tarpaulins.

But perhaps due to climate change, the summer of 2024 began with scorching heat. Not a drop of rain fell throughout June. When the organising committee arrived in Filyos a week before the gathering, the grass was as yellow as if they were in the Aegean, and they had to water it themselves.

And so, on that sweltering July evening, the family had gathered in the garden of the New Mansion, cheerfully chatting away. Laughter echoed all around, a curated playlist of Turkish jazz and classical songs played softly on Spotify in the background, accompanying the flow of memories.

As Çiğdem approached the gate, a stylish man in his seventies stepped out of the pale blue vintage car, wearing a white linen shirt over beige trousers and leaning on a cane. He retrieved a fedora from the back seat of the open-top car, placed it on his head and began walking towards them. A few people at the tables stood up. The lively crowd in front of the massive, darkened wooden house fell silent, and in the background, Ajda Pekkan’s voice—“But alas, the street was empty…”—was left all alone.

Back in November, when Çiğdem had come here, she had met many people and even consulted two regional authors to learn about the family’s more distant history. She searched her memory—was this man one of them? No, he wasn’t.

One of the authors was Ali Nuri Bey, a 90-year-old graduate of the Village Institutes. He had served as a school principal in the area and written books about the region’s history. The other was a retired teacher descended from her grandmother’s line, who had written a genealogical study tracing the Rumbeyoğlu family’s 550-year history. Since two grand viziers had come from that family, Çiğdem had found further information both online and in academic sources. She had brought both authors’ books back to Montreal, signed. Upon returning, she had compiled photos, memories, historical documents, and findings from academic theses and DNA research into a booklet over the course of four or five months.

In the booklet, she had also described the changes in the region: the collapse of bridges over the wild Filyos River, boatmen pulling ferries with ropes, the region’s old churches and mosques, family members who had commissioned these buildings, and how education evolved from concubines to primary schools with the advent of the Republic.

This man wasn’t one of those writers; he looked like an Istanbul gentleman. It would be quite something if he turned out to be a descendant of one of the ancestors she had found in Ottoman archives. But surely those people had no way of knowing a gathering was happening here.

During the Ottoman era, her mother’s family had been monarchists. Her grandmother’s lineage traced back to two grand viziers—one from the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror and the other from that of Abdul Hamid I. Their sons continued to work at the palace and married into the dynasty. The second vizier, Rumbeyoğlu İsmet Pasha, was known for being pleasure-seeking and even rather lazy. But he was apparently very funny. He had commissioned the largest waterfront mansion along the Bosphorus. Of course, it now belonged to the Komili family. For a moment, Çiğdem imagined this man stepping forward and handing her the keys to that mansion. Then she smiled, shaking herself out of her daydream. With the Tanzimat reforms, those who didn’t know French and couldn’t adapt to change were pushed away from the palace. Her ancestors had returned to Filyos in the 1840s, where they acted as regional beys. But some of their younger brothers had clung to the monarchy until the last possible moment, raising their sons to be diplomats. One such son had taken part in the Treaty of Sèvres and ended up on Atatürk’s list of 150 undesirable persons, sent into exile. She couldn’t help but wonder—was this man his grandson?

There had also been curious cases of adopted children in the family. She had learned that adopted children couldn’t inherit and that in some cases, they might have been born out of wedlock. Perhaps he was one of them—who knows?

Though she had gathered information about the men in the family, she had learned little about the women. Ah, she thought, if only the Surname Law had been introduced a century earlier, during the Tanzimat period, how much more information we would have had about the women. Perhaps this man descended from one of those female branches—who knows?

As the garden gradually surrendered its stifling heat to the relief of the evening breeze, Çiğdem, still wondering who this stranger was, pushed the iron bolt and opened the courtyard gate, bracing herself to stop the heavy gate from swinging shut on the guest. The mysterious gentleman who had descended so nimbly from the beautiful car had sparked everyone’s curiosity—not just hers.

To be continued in Part 2. Next week...

 

Reuniting at the Roots, Living in the Memories.

In the garden of her mother’s childhood home on the Black Sea coast, Çiğdem organises a large family gathering. Inspired by her Belgian husband’s family reunions, she works for months to bring relatives together and prepares a booklet documenting their history. The overgrown garden of the crumbling mansion is cleared, tables are set. Just as everything seems to be going perfectly, the arrival of a mysterious man in a classic convertible hints at long-buried family secrets. Family Reunion is a warm tale woven with heritage, memory, and the bonds that tie generations together.