Travelling teaches you many things, but sometimes the most powerful lessons don’t come from landscapes or landmarks — they come from people.
I am currently staying with a lady named Rojda, and through her family’s story I am beginning to understand another perspective of Turkey, one that is rarely spoken about by visitors and easy to overlook when you are only passing through.
Rojda’s parents were innocent civilians, children at the time, living in the mountains of southern Turkey during a period of heavy military presence around forty years ago. Like many Kurdish families, they were caught in the middle of a conflict they did not create and could not escape.
Her parents have memories of being woken in the early hours of the morning, ordered out of their homes so Turkish soldiers could sleep in their beds. Homes were no longer places of safety. Fear became routine.
It was not uncommon for both women and men in the family to be attacked or abused by soldiers, simply because of who they were and where they lived.
When Rojda’s mother was later issued a Turkish passport — something that should have represented freedom of movement or identity — it instead brought violence. Her grandfather and uncle were beaten, a reminder that even paperwork could carry danger.
Eventually, Rojda’s parents and many family members fled to Germany, seeking safety and a future without fear. It is there that Rojda was born. Yet exile did not erase roots. In the years that followed, both Rojda and her family returned to the mountains to visit those who had stayed behind — ties to land and kin proving stronger than borders.
As a traveller in southern Turkey, I am surrounded by warmth, generosity, shared meals, kindness, and hospitality. And yet, sitting with these stories, I am learning that Turkey holds many truths at once. Beauty and pain. Welcome and memory. Silence and survival.
This journey is teaching me that to truly see a place, you must listen — especially to the stories that are uncomfortable, whispered, or carried quietly across generations.
And sometimes, the mountains remember what history books do not.
