Serin Bir Yol Hikâyesi

Serin Bir Yol Hikâyesi

MediaCat — 11 December 2025
Interview by Eylül Seren Altay

The December 2025 MediaCat interview is one of the richest late-period documents in Nejat İşler’s archive.

It begins with Miras.

But very quickly, the book opens into larger questions:

What do we inherit?

How does memory change?

What does it mean to be alone?

Why do some people need others not to survive, but to participate in life?

What remains after a person dies?

By this stage, İşler is no longer mainly explaining his career.

He is explaining the private philosophy that has grown around it.

A Road Story

İşler describes Miras simply as:

“serin bir yol hikâyesi.”

A cool road story.

It follows a roughly twelve- or thirteen-day spring journey through the Aegean.

He says he wanted the book to carry something of the early 2000s for readers of his generation and that he enjoyed writing it.

The description sounds light.

But the road is doing more than moving characters between places.

It becomes a structure for memory.

The Road Is Life

Later in the interview, İşler makes the metaphor explicit.

The road is not only a physical road.

It is life.

People travel together temporarily.

They create a shared reality.

Years later, they may remember the same events differently.

That creates a difficult question:

If two people remember a shared life differently, who owns the truth?

Shared Memory Is Fragile

İşler says that remembering something differently can feel almost like betrayal.

The statement is intentionally strong.

Two people once built a common world.

Then memory edits that world differently for each of them.

One remembers happiness.

The other remembers pain.

The event may be shared.

The meaning no longer is.

This is one of the deepest developments of the memory theme first visible in the 2014 OT interview.

Three Versions of Every Story

İşler likes the idea that every story has three sides:

yours,

mine,

and reality.

That is almost a theory of his writing.

Miras does not promise objective history.

It offers remembered life.

And remembered life is always constructed.

He Admits That He Decorates Stories

İşler is unusually open about this.

He says that when telling stories, he likes to decorate them a little.

His father sometimes corrected him:

that was not exactly how it happened.

İşler’s answer was essentially:

I am making it more interesting.

This is important because it clarifies the relationship between memory and fiction.

He is not claiming documentary purity.

He is transforming remembered reality into narrative.

“Remember It Well”

He recalls advice given after a motorcycle accident:

how you remember something may determine how it stays in your mind.

That idea seems to have remained with him.

Memory is therefore not simply storage.

It is interpretation.

And interpretation can alter the emotional life of an event.

What Is an Inheritance?

The title Miras naturally brings the conversation to inheritance.

İşler says he has seen many families fight over:

houses,

gardens,

land,

businesses,

property.

He strongly dislikes the idea that someone can receive ownership merely because another person has died and then fight over it.

His preferred inheritance is completely different.

He says he would like to leave behind only:

beautiful memories.

That statement connects directly with his older criticism of property.

From Property to Memory

Compare this with 2017.

Then İşler questioned the burden of possession.

Property could create obligations and conflicts.

By 2025, the idea has become almost philosophical.

The best inheritance is not property at all.

It is memory.

This is an extraordinary transformation of the word miras.

The Anti-Monument

Many famous people think about legacy through permanence.

Films.

Books.

Awards.

Buildings.

Names.

İşler gives a smaller answer.

Good memories.

This is consistent with his lifelong suspicion of grand public identities.

He does not seem interested in becoming a monument.

Death Was Never Distant

The interview then returns to Eyüp.

İşler explains that he grew up surrounded by cemeteries.

As a child, he played football and hide-and-seek among graves.

His grandfather could read Arabic script on older stones, and they walked through cemeteries together.

He is careful with the conclusion.

He does not claim:

I am not afraid of death.

He says something more precise:

death is not foreign to me.

Familiarity Is Not Fearlessness

This distinction is important.

A mythology of Nejat İşler could easily turn his illness, risk-taking and cemetery childhood into:

the man who does not fear death.

He rejects that simplicity.

Death may still be frightening.

It is simply familiar.

That is much more human.

2014 Was Not His First Encounter with Mortality

This also strengthens an important archival interpretation.

The 2014 illness did not introduce mortality into İşler’s worldview.

Death had been culturally and physically present since childhood.

What the illness did was make mortality personal in a new way.

The difference is:

seeing death around you

versus

seeing your own possible death.

Eyüp as Social Formation

İşler again describes Eyüp as an old working-class district shaped by factory workers and migration.

He remembers knowing Eyüp, Balat, Fener and the surrounding city intimately.

This matters because Eyüp has repeatedly appeared as the source material for his acting.

By 2025, it is also source material for his writing.

The Grandfather

One of the most personal sections concerns his grandfather.

İşler says his father worked in a factory and was mainly available on Sundays, so his grandfather played a major role in raising him.

He even says that much of what people see in him comes from his grandfather.

This is significant.

In a book called Miras, biological and cultural inheritance meet.

The important inheritance is not land.

It is character.

The Copy

İşler describes himself partly as his grandfather’s copy.

His grandfather was:

a calligrapher,

visually talented,

careful about clothing,

interested in beauty,

authoritative,

distinctive.

İşler remembers nearly getting a tattoo of his grandfather’s face over his heart.

Here inheritance becomes embodiment.

Not property inherited after death.

Traits absorbed while someone was alive.

This Is the Real Miras

The interview almost creates two opposite models.

Material inheritance:

something transferred after death.

Human inheritance:

something absorbed through living together.

İşler clearly values the second.

Barış as Composite Memory

The fictional character Barış also illustrates how this process enters literature.

İşler says the character began with a real older friend he lost to cancer but eventually became a mixture of several people he lost around the same period.

This is a perfect example of his fiction method.

Real person.

Real grief.

Multiple memories.

One constructed character.

Losing the Compass

İşler describes those deaths as deeply destabilizing.

Losing several important older figures made him feel as if he had lost his compass.

That metaphor is particularly powerful in a road novel.

If life is a road, friendship can function as orientation.

When people disappear, the problem is not only grief.

You may no longer know which direction you are moving.

Solitude: The Public Myth

Then the interview reaches perhaps its most important late-period theme.

İşler is known publicly as someone comfortable with solitude.

That image is not entirely false.

He says he can stay alone for a long time:

at home,

in a tent,

in a forest.

He can live without constantly needing another person and even recommends learning to stay with oneself.

But then he makes a surprising distinction.

Solitude Is Easy

Being alone is not the problem.

He can do that.

The problem begins when he has to enter ordinary life.

He says his connection with life can disappear very quickly when he is alone.

This changes the entire interpretation of his solitude.

Participation Is Difficult

İşler gives very ordinary examples.

He does not like going to a match alone.

He does not like sitting somewhere alone.

Even if very hungry, he may not want to sit down and eat by himself.

For these activities, he wants another person beside him.

The difference is subtle but profound:

he does not need people in order to be alone.

he needs people in order to participate in life.

“Tek Başıma Hiçbir Şeyi Beceremiyorum”

The sentence from Miras therefore does not mean literal helplessness.

İşler explains that he can handle many practical things independently.

What he struggles with is something closer to:

being connected to ordinary life while alone.

This may be the best correction ever given to the “solitary Nejat İşler” mythology.

Childhood Already Contained This Pattern

He traces it back to childhood.

In the morning, he could disappear into his own imagination.

His sister would take his hand, get him onto the bus, and through that contact he would enter life again.

This is a remarkably intimate detail.

Other people function as bridges between:

inner world

and

shared world.

The Outsider Needs a Companion

This reframes the entire archive.

İşler has often appeared as:

outsider,

loner,

independent man.

But many of his most meaningful activities are social.

Football matches.

Gümüşlükspor.

Film sets.

Friendships.

Road journeys.

Meyhanes.

Writing about shared memories.

The independence is real.

So is the need for participation.

Independence Is Not Isolation

This is probably the cleanest formulation:

İşler values independence but not isolation.

He wants the ability to withdraw.

But meaningful life seems to require the ability to return.

And returning often requires another person.

Acting Is Empathy

The interview also gives one of his simplest definitions of acting.

Asked about empathy, İşler says he cannot abandon it because it is his profession.

Acting itself means establishing empathy.

This gives a more direct theoretical form to ideas already visible in Episode.

“Kötüyü Kötü Oynamıyorum” Revisited

Episode gave us:

do not play the bad person simply as bad.

MediaCat gives us the mechanism:

empathy.

To play someone, the actor must temporarily construct the person’s internal logic.

That does not mean agreement.

It means imaginative access.

Empathy Does Not Make Him Optimistic

Interestingly, İşler combines this professional commitment to empathy with a rather pessimistic social observation.

He thinks people have become increasingly isolated and self-centered, especially since the 1980s, and connects this partly to economic pressure.

So empathy is both:

his professional necessity

and

something he believes society is losing.

The Economy of Loneliness

This is a notable extension of his earlier criticism of markets.

Earlier:

the economic system consumes time.

Now:

economic pressure may also consume relationships.

People focus on individual survival.

Shared life becomes harder.

This is a much wider criticism than his old television complaints.

From Buying Time to Finding People

That produces another interesting late-career development.

In 2017, the problem was:

How do I recover my time?

In 2025, a second problem becomes visible:

Who do I share that recovered time with?

Freedom solves only half the problem.

Human connection solves another part.

Miras Is About Shared Time

This may be the deepest meaning of the book.

A journey is time shared by several people.

Years later, what remains is:

memory.

Not the car.

Not the road.

Not the hotel.

Not the property.

The shared time.

That becomes the inheritance.

A Useful Comparison with 2016

In 2016, after the health crisis, İşler asked what he would leave behind.

He concluded that living only for himself was insufficient.

In 2025, the answer has become simpler.

What does he want to leave?

Good memories.

The moral philosophy has become personal.

A Useful Comparison with 2017

2017:

property can become a burden.

2025:

property can become a source of conflict even after death.

Again, the alternative is not more ownership.

It is experience.

A Useful Comparison with 2019

In Socrates, İşler said that places lose meaning when the people connected with them disappear.

MediaCat develops the same principle further.

Life itself seems to become difficult to enter without other people.

The relationship is not decorative.

It is structural.

A Useful Comparison with Mirgün Cabas

The Mirgün Cabas interview emphasized:

farewell,

youth,

loss,

remembering earlier versions of oneself.

MediaCat gives those themes greater philosophical precision.

The real inheritance is memory.

The road is shared life.

The solitary man needs companionship to participate.

The two interviews should therefore remain separate.

Cabas gives us retrospective biography.

MediaCat gives us the conceptual framework underneath it.

Why This Interview Matters

The 11 December 2025 MediaCat interview is one of the most important late-period records in Nejat İşler’s archive.

It resolves several themes that had been developing for more than a decade.

Property becomes memory.

Mortality becomes familiarity rather than bravado.

Writing becomes the transformation of remembered reality.

Acting becomes empathy.

And solitude receives its most precise definition.

Nejat İşler can be alone.

What he finds harder is entering life alone.

That distinction changes the familiar image of him as a solitary outsider.

A better formulation might be:

He does not need other people to escape the world.

He needs them to return to it.

And Miras ultimately suggests that what survives a life is not necessarily what a person owns.

It is the reality that people once built together and still remember after the road has ended.