Mustafa Balel: The Sivas Teacher Who Argued With Turkey
In 1975 a French teacher in his late twenties began publishing a literary magazine called *Öykü* out of his own pocket, funded entirely from his salary. It lasted seven or eight issues. In the same year one of his stories, *Can Eriği*, took the story prize at the twelfth Antalya festival. Mustafa Balel has spent the fifty years since producing short fiction, novels, dozens of children's books and more than fifty translations — and arguing, against most of his country's intellectuals, that Turkish society is not patriarchal at all.
A Sivas Childhood
Balel was born on 1 September 1945 in the Mehmetpaşa district of Sivas, the only son of Hüseyin Efendi and Nafiye Hanım, with three sisters. His mother died when he was three; his father remarried. He passed through an unusual number of primary schools — Cumhuriyet, Recep Handan, Fevzi Çakmak, Dumlupınar — before finishing in 1957, then attended Sivas Boys' Middle School and Sivas High School. Two teachers marked him: the literature master Halim Yağcıoğlu and the art instructor Mustafa Uzel. The early loss of his mother and the household of sisters that surrounded him are not incidental biography; they run directly into the argument about women that would organise his fiction.
French as an Escape Route
He entered the French department of the Gazi Education Institute in Ankara, spent time in France on language training, and graduated in 1968. His first posting was as a French teacher at Ardahan High School, in the far north-east — about as distant a corner of Turkey as the ministry could find. He later took a master's degree in comparative world literature at the University of Poitiers. Teaching carried him back through Sivas and on to Istanbul: the Sultanahmet Trade School, Vefa High School, the Atatürk Education Institute, and Bahçelievler High School, where he stayed until retiring in 1997. He also served as assistant general secretary of the DISK-affiliated food workers' union, and sat on the editorial committees of the Larousse encyclopaedia and other reference projects.
The Magazine He Paid For Himself
Balel's literary life began early and modestly — poems and articles in a primary school wall newspaper — and his first proper story appeared in *Soyut* magazine in 1973. *Kurtboğan* followed in 1974, gathering impressions from his Ardahan years. Then came *Öykü*, the self-financed magazine he ran across Sivas and Istanbul in 1975 and 1976. Publishing a literary review out of a teacher's wages, in the political temperature of mid-1970s Turkey, tells you what kind of writer he intended to be: unaffiliated, and unwilling to wait for permission.
Family, Violence, and the Matriarchy Argument
The adult fiction circles a consistent set of subjects: family, violence, female dominance, loneliness and migration. *Kiraz Küpeler* (1977) collects eight stories about Istanbul after the March 12 coup. *Turuncu Eleni* (1992) turns on the problems of the city's elite and petit bourgeoisie. *Karanfilli Ahmet Güzellemesi* (2004) examines family relationships, and *Etiyopya Kralının Gözleri* (2011) renders them through a child's eyes across six stories. The novels are more openly sociological: *Peygamber Çiçeği* (1981) takes on women's issues and the Alevi–Sunni conflict, a genuinely dangerous subject in Turkey; *Asmalı Pencere* (1984) places the individual under social examination. Running through all of it is his contrarian claim that Turkish society is better described as matriarchal than patriarchal — a position that produced the formidable women who dominate his pages.
Writing for Children Without Talking Down
Balel's children's output is enormous and, unusually, not a lesser sideline. It runs from *Bizim Sinemamız Var* (1979), *Cumartesiye Çok Var mı?* (1981) and *Çember Tiyar* (1983) through *Nöbetçi Ayakkabı Dükkanı* (2005), the *Fındık Kitaplar* series, *Havlamayı Unutan Köpek* (2012), *Ressamın Kedisi* (2014) and a ten-book series in 2018. Five titles appeared bilingually in Turkish and English in 2007. His stated principle is uncompromising: he rejected didactic method outright, on the grounds that the educational impulse means treating readers as foolish. Instead he used concrete events rather than abstractions, plain warm language, and the same psychological attention he brought to adult work.
The Two-Way Translator
Balel translated in both directions, which is rarer and harder than it sounds. He brought French and other European writers into Turkish — Michel Tournier, Yann Queffélec, Turgenev, Maupassant among more than fifty translation projects between 1975 and 2016 — and he rendered Turkish poetry into French. He also wrote directly in French: *Le Transanatolien* (1988), composed during a residence in Paris. In 1984 his play *Gün Vurgunu* took a success award in the Turkish Opera and Ballet Foundation's competition.
Why Mustafa Is Called a Genius
The defensible claim concerns range and independence of mind rather than any single towering achievement. Balel operates in four registers — literary short fiction, the sociological novel, children's books, and literary translation into and out of French — and the sources credit him with combining traditional narration with contemporary storytelling technique alongside successful psychological analysis. Very few writers in any language sustain that spread without one register becoming a chore. The genuinely original element is intellectual rather than stylistic: his refusal of the standard reading of Turkish society as patriarchal, and his insistence on matriarchal structures instead, is a contrarian sociological position that he then had to make good inside fiction, through characters rather than argument. His stated refusal to instruct child readers belongs to the same temperament — an unwillingness to accept the received frame.
The counter-case is strong and should not be softened. No source consulted here calls Balel a genius. His formal recognition is modest by the standards of Turkish letters: a festival story prize in 1975 and a competition success award in 1984, which is a thin shelf for a fifty-year career. Prolificacy is not the same as significance, and a bibliography of several dozen children's titles can indicate an efficient professional as easily as an exceptional one. He remains substantially untranslated into English, so the international assessment that would test the claim has never taken place, and the warm critical language attached to him comes largely from national literary reference works, whose register is admiring by convention. The honest description is a serious, versatile and independent-minded man of letters — not a demonstrated genius.
Legacy
Balel's real contribution may be structural rather than literary: he kept a small magazine alive on a teacher's salary, translated in both directions between Turkish and French for four decades, and treated writing for children as work deserving the same care as writing for adults. As of late 2018 he was still at it, finishing a novel called *Sarı Salkım Sokağı*.
