Lezzetli Bir Veda

Lezzetli Bir Veda

Mirgün Cabas — 5 November 2025
Interview by Mirgün Cabas

By late 2025, Nejat İşler had begun looking backward in a more deliberate way.

Not nostalgically.

Not to produce a heroic autobiography.

But to understand what survives from youth after the people, places and versions of oneself connected with that youth begin disappearing.

His new novel, Miras, gives the interview its center.

The book is narrated through the voice of the twenty-eight-year-old Nejat and returns to friendships, losses, youth and farewell. Mirgün Cabas’s official description presents the conversation in exactly these terms: Miras, acting, farewells, life, art, loss, friendship and internal reckoning.

This makes the interview an important late point in the archive.

The older Nejat İşler is now actively revisiting the younger one.

Writing Toward the Past

The most interesting thing about Miras is its perspective.

İşler does not simply write:

This is what happened when I was young.

Instead, he returns to the voice of the younger person.

The distinction matters.

Memory normally belongs to the present.

The fifty-something person looks backward and organizes the past with knowledge acquired later.

Using the younger voice creates another problem:

Can you remember what you knew before you knew what happened next?

That is a much harder form of memory.

The Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Nejat

The podcast description explicitly notes that the story is told through the twenty-eight-year-old Nejat’s voice and revolves around friends, youth and saying goodbye.

This creates an unusual double perspective.

There is:

the young man experiencing events.

And:

the older writer who knows which people will disappear and which experiences will become important.

The novel therefore contains memory even when it attempts to speak from youth.

Memory Has Been Building Since 2014

This theme did not begin with Miras.

The chronology is remarkably coherent.

2014 — OT:
İşler returns from serious illness and talks about memory, childhood and how experiences are later told.

2019 — Socrates:
He explains that fiction grows from lived experience and that writing, interrupted by acting, has returned.

2025 — Miras:
He deliberately returns to his younger self and turns youth, friendship and farewell into the central material.

Memory has evolved from interview subject into literary method.

Farewell Is Different from Loss

The title used by Mirgün Cabas is important:

Lezzetli Bir Veda.

A delicious farewell.

Farewell and loss are not identical.

Loss can happen without consent.

Farewell implies some degree of awareness.

Someone or something is ending.

You recognize the ending.

Then you let it go.

This distinction fits late-period Nejat İşler remarkably well.

Learning to End Things

By 2022, İşler had already begun talking almost philosophically about ending things.

Gümüşlük.

Gümüşlükspor.

Sequels.

Projects.

He did not want successful experiences to continue forever simply because they had once worked.

The mature principle seemed to be:

know when something has ended.

Miras brings that principle into personal memory.

Now the things ending are not only projects or places.

They are:

friendships,

youth,

people,

versions of oneself.

Gümüşlük Again, but Without Mythology

The conversation revisits Gümüşlük and his eventual return toward Istanbul.

Mirgün Cabas’s official chapter list specifically includes both Gümüşlük and the return to Istanbul and the financial cost of Gümüşlükspor.

This is valuable because it continues the demythologizing process already visible in 2022.

Gümüşlük was not paradise.

Gümüşlükspor was not a romantic celebrity hobby without cost.

Both were real experiences with:

money,

work,

consequences,

endings.

The Cost of Gümüşlükspor

The financial dimension is particularly important.

Earlier archive entries emphasized:

community,

children,

amateurism,

responsibility.

By 2025, there is enough distance to discuss cost more openly.

That adds another layer to the “do something for others” philosophy from 2016.

Contribution is not abstract.

It costs:

time,

money,

energy.

Sometimes substantially.

This makes the altruistic narrative less sentimental and more credible.

Television: The Old Problem Returns

The interview again returns to television and working conditions; the official video chapters place this at roughly the twenty-minute point.

This is notable because the topic has followed İşler for at least fifteen years.

The central complaint remains recognizable.

Not television itself.

The conditions.

Duration.

Schedule.

The industrial logic of production.

The persistence of this criticism confirms that the 2010 dispute was not a temporary excuse.

Fifteen Years of the Same Problem

The continuity is unusually strong:

2010: television schedules consume life.

2015: series are finished; cinema continues.

Episode period: digital platforms make television-like work possible again because production conditions improve.

2025: the industry problem is still worth discussing.

This is one of the archive’s most stable positions.

Is Acting Sacred?

The official chapter list also contains a direct section:

“Oyunculuk kutsal mı?”

That question is particularly interesting given earlier interviews.

İşler has sometimes spoken about acting with almost sacred seriousness.

But he has also repeatedly removed glamour from the profession.

Acting is:

work,

observation,

craft,

discipline.

This tension matters.

Taking the profession seriously does not require turning actors into sacred beings.

Profession Versus Priesthood

The broader archive suggests a useful distinction.

Acting can be deeply important.

But the actor does not need to become morally elevated because of it.

This fits İşler’s resistance to:

role-model status,

celebrity worship,

heroic recovery narratives.

Again, he prefers the work over the mythology surrounding the worker.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Privacy Inside the Set

One of the most widely reported parts of the interview concerns Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

İşler criticizes Ceylan for releasing behind-the-scenes material containing sensitive director-actor interactions.

His objection is fundamentally about privacy.

He treats the set as a protected working space and argues that exposing vulnerable rehearsal or direction moments crosses a boundary.

This is much more interesting when read across the full archive.

The Same Boundary Since 2010

In 2010, İşler argued:

professional work can be public.

Private life does not automatically become public property.

In 2025, the boundary has moved inside the profession itself.

A film may be public.

But the process used to create the performance may still contain private space.

This is a very consistent philosophy:

visibility does not eliminate boundaries.

The Set as a Protected Space

For actors, rehearsal may require:

failure,

embarrassment,

confusion,

emotional exposure,

being corrected.

If those moments are later turned into public content, the working relationship changes.

The actor may begin protecting an image even during preparation.

That could damage precisely the vulnerability the director needs.

So İşler’s objection is not merely personal anger.

It raises a genuine question about documentary transparency versus creative privacy.

A More Mature Correction of His Own Earlier Words

The conversation also revisits his earlier public comparison of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Zeki Demirkubuz.

Reporting from the Mirgün Cabas appearance indicates that İşler expresses embarrassment about the way he previously made that comparison and jokes that he should have approached it more soberly.

That is useful archival material.

He does not simply defend every provocative statement forever.

He can revisit his own public performance.

This is another form of aging:

editing oneself without pretending the earlier version never existed.

The Magazin Conflict

The interview also gives İşler space to explain a recent confrontation with a magazine reporter.

His account emphasizes that he had explicitly asked not to be interviewed that day, believed the request had been accepted, and then encountered the reporter again.

He frames his anger around the broken boundary rather than around journalism itself.

Again, the continuity is striking.

He Has Never Rejected All Media

This matters because the mythology often says:

Nejat İşler hates journalists.

But the archive shows something more specific.

He gives interviews.

Long interviews.

Magazine interviews.

Video interviews.

Written interviews.

What he repeatedly objects to is:

access without consent.

That is a very different position.

The Old Celebrity Conflict Has Not Disappeared

More than twenty years after becoming nationally famous, the same basic conflict remains.

The public figure is visible.

Therefore people assume access.

İşler continues drawing the line:

visibility is not permission.

This may be one of the longest-running themes in the archive.

Young Nejat and Old Nejat

The most valuable part of the interview, however, remains Miras.

By constructing a story around his younger self, İşler creates a conversation between two versions of one person.

The younger Nejat does not know the future.

The older Nejat cannot forget it.

The book exists in the tension between them.

Aging as a Conversation with Earlier Selves

This offers a more interesting model of aging than simple maturity.

Aging does not mean:

the old self replaces the young self.

It means:

the older person carries multiple previous selves.

Some become embarrassing.

Some become funny.

Some become precious.

Some are mourned.

Miras turns that internal archive into narrative.

Friendship as Historical Evidence

Friendship also becomes central.

People are often the strongest evidence that a past version of ourselves existed.

A friend remembers:

how you spoke,

what mattered,

where you went,

what you feared,

what you wanted.

When friends disappear, part of the archive disappears with them.

This connects directly with İşler’s 2019 observation that places lose meaning when the people who made them meaningful are gone.

Place and Person Are Entangled

Beyoğlu.

Gümüşlük.

Istanbul.

These places matter because of relationships.

Likewise, youth matters because other people shared it.

Miras therefore appears to treat memory socially rather than purely individually.

The past is something that happened between people.

Writing Does What Acting Cannot

In 2016, İşler imagined that music could express the self more directly than acting.

Writing eventually becomes another solution.

Acting requires:

a role,

a script,

another person’s world.

Writing allows him to reorganize his own memory.

This is perhaps why literature becomes more important as he gets older.

From Observer to Archivist of Self

For decades, İşler described acting through observation.

Watch people.

Remember movements.

Understand behavior.

Late-period writing redirects that same observational habit inward.

Now he observes:

his younger self,

old friendships,

former places,

earlier decisions.

The actor who collected other people becomes an archivist of himself.

But Not a Monument

Importantly, Miras does not seem designed as a grand official autobiography.

The younger voice prevents that.

So does İşler’s tendency toward irony and self-criticism.

This is not:

the definitive story of Nejat İşler.

It is another version.

That is much more consistent with the archive.

No Final Nejat

Across more than twenty years, one lesson has become clear.

There is never a final public definition.

Leading man.

Rebel.

Kaan.

Delikanlı.

Gümüşlük resident.

Writer.

Producer.

Older man remembering youth.

Each is temporary.

Miras seems to understand this especially well.

A Useful Comparison with 2003

The distance from the first archive entry is remarkable.

2003:
Other people are beginning to construct Nejat İşler as a star.

2025:
Nejat İşler is constructing a younger Nejat as a literary voice.

At the beginning, identity is being written onto him.

Late in the archive, he is writing himself.

That is a profound reversal.

A Useful Comparison with 2014

In 2014, after illness, memory entered the interviews with unusual intensity.

In 2025, memory has become a book.

The progression is almost architectural:

remember

→ tell

→ write

→ fictionalize

→ preserve.

A Useful Comparison with 2022

The 2022 Oksijen interview was strongly about ending things.

The 2025 conversation deepens the idea.

Sometimes ending is not rejection.

It is preservation.

A farewell can recognize that something mattered without demanding that it continue.

That may be what makes it “lezzetli.”

Why This Interview Matters

The 5 November 2025 Mirgün Cabas conversation is one of the strongest late-period records in Nejat İşler’s archive.

It brings together nearly every major thread:

• writing,
• memory,
• youth,
• friendship,
• loss,
• Gümüşlük,
• football,
• television labor,
• acting,
• privacy,
• public image.

But its most important contribution is Miras.

The younger Nejat has become material for the older Nejat.

After decades of being defined through other people’s roles and public labels, İşler is now actively creating a narrative around an earlier version of himself.

The shift can be summarized simply:

early career: other people construct the Nejat İşler image.

late career: Nejat İşler begins constructing his own archive of Nejat İşler.

And the dominant late theme is no longer rebellion.

It is:

farewell without erasure.