Dudu Şahin (Shahin means Eagle) Arab Ali’s wife

Dudu’s birth was registered in 1910 although the exact date is unknown.

Dudu explained her life like this: When I was a child I remember always being hungry and thirsty while I was small. My father, who was from Okçular, lost his life in the Balkan War (1912-1913). Any 15 or 16 year old boy from this village who could handle a gun was sent into military service. Nobody came back. At that time many people died of epidemic disease. According to hearsay, poison from Rhodes was thrown into Black Lake from a small churn or chemical gun, the consequence being that a number of people died, they say.

We ate bread made from grain that we pounded with a mallet. We planted wheat with a mattock. We kneaded herbs into our dough. We didn’t have flour. We suffered a lot in those hard times. We couldn’t sleep at night for the sound of gunfire. In this area rebels were widespread, rebels who would demand food and goods from us. We span yarn and made underwear and from every house our muhtar (village head man) Mehmet Ceyhan collected two kilos of butter and sent it all to our soldiers.

(This was the time of the Great War 1914-1918 and the War of Independence 1918-1923)

In these times we grew sesame and maize and raised animals. Our transport was camels. We had no mosque, no school. We prayed each day in a different house. On Fridays we went to Dalyan. Our hoca (religious leader) was sometimes Mehtin and sometimes Bayram. Because our menfolk were away as soldiers we women dug the graves and conducted the funerals. We had our religious education at prayer time.

I ran away from home with 16 year old Ali Şahin, nicknamed Arab Ali, and sheltered in muhtar Abdil’s son Mehmet’s house. The muhtar proposed to my mother that I should leave my home again, this time as a bride and that we should have animals to raise. During these years we lived in Kapız Mevkii        .

Ali Şahin became muhtar after Işıl Mehmet, then after a year it was İzzet’s turn. Then he did another term. He did 4 more years. When the surname law came in (in 1934) my husband ‘Arab Ali’ became Ali Şahin.

When we built the first school, women, girls, men, everybody brought stones by donkey and we all mucked in together. When the school opened most women went to learn to read. In the era that the school was being made we used to go to a building in Marmarlı built by Ali Çakır to learn the new alphabet. (Atatürk introduced the Latin alphabet nationwide in 1928, discarding the Arabic script completely, everyone was expected to learn the new characters)

I have 2 sons, 4 daughters and 70 grand and great-grandchildren. My husband died 13 years ago at the age of 88. May he rest in paradise.

May God grant Grandma Dudu long life.

Mehmet Taniş with his wife Ayşe taken a few years ago, and as he is today

Mehmet Taniş

I came into the world in Okçular in 1913. My father died in the Balkan War (1912-1913). After that my mother married Mehmet Ali Çakır whose nickname was ‘Wise Man of Okçular’. This man owned lots of land in Okçular. I was 2 years old at that time. My mother came from Acıpayam.

My military service started with 20 months in Bodrum, then 6 months in Milas and 10 months in Çanakkale. At the start of my service I set out from Okçular on foot. I spent the first night with soldiers in Ula. The next day I left on foot over the mountains to Milas. From there to Bodrum I got a lift. I spent 20 months in Bodram and then went on to Milas. After 6 months service in Milas I was in the Transport Division. My military service continued in Çine and for my final year I went by ship from İzmir to Çanakkale. After 10 months service here I returned home and married Ayşe. We have 5 sons and a daughter. My livelihood was farming - maize, sesame, wheat etc. My 2 step-brothers Tahir and Durmuş lost their lives as soldiers and didn’t return home. I have 114 grand and great grandchildren. It is because I live so close to nature that I have lived so long and I am thankful.

Note: Of Okçular’s Mehmet Ali Çakır’s sons, Ömer Çoban, İsmail Şahin (Meryem İsmail), Ali Şahin, İsmail Uysal and Durmuş Çoban are dead; only Mehmet Taniş survives. Most of them lived a long life. It is their descendants’ duty to protect this land.

Mehmet Bay and some of his descendants

Hakkı İzmir

I was born in Okçular in 1930. My grandfather Ağa Hüseyin came from Horasan in Iran to Bingöl, from Bingöl to Karaman, from Karaman to Aydin and from there to Okçular where he settled.

At the time of the War of Independence I heard what I believe to this day to be true that Çakırcalı Mehmet Efe and his closest friend Yörük Ali Efe caused heavy losses as rebels against the enemy.

Kemaliye, Okçular, Ekşiliyurt and Eskiköy villages worked mostly in forestry under Torunoğlu Süleyman Ağa and Deden Hüseyin Ağa (An Ağa, pronounced ‘Ah-uh’ in Turkish and ‘Aga’ in English was a feudal land owner with enormous powers. The position was abolished by Atatürk). My father Hasan İzmirlioğlu at that time worked on the land with yoke and plough. In those days a cowhide was worth 2-2.5 lira - we worked at making the traditional leather sandals.

I went in to military service in 1950. We didn’t

have any vehicles in the village then so I walked to Köyceğiz where the next day I got a lift to Aydin in an open truck. After staying in Aydin for three days I was sent to Selimiye barracks in İstanbul. First I was an anti-tank gunner and later I became a medic. I did two years in the military.

When I returned from the army I worked with my father for a year as a farmer.

In 1954 I married Elif and my father gave me some land which was enough to produce a livlihood. With my wife Elif I had seven daughters and four sons and now we have fourteen grandchildren.

Nowadays, what you can find left of the school in Marmarlı, is what my grandfather had made. Also the first mill we had in the village was made by him, Ağa Hüseyin - God rest his soul.

Mehmet Türk

I was born in Okçular in the year of the founding of the Republic, 1923. In the early days of the Republic, just after the war (of Independence) our economy was in a poor state and people had very little. Those years most people worked on road making and I found myself working on this from time to time. Time went by and in 1941 at eighteen years of age I married Fatma, with whom I had six children and thirteen grandchildren. Around then our village headman was Mehmet Ceyhan, a well liked character.

About a year after I was married I was called for military service, it was the Second World War time. It seemed to me that every poor wretch went into the army. I spent four

Years with the Ankara General Command - Maps and returned to the village in 1947.

Let me return to local matters and elections. There was just one candidate for headman, Muhsin Yaşar and I gave him my vote. At that time votes were cast by putting them in a box. How it happened I don’t know but when the votes were counted I got most of them. In spite of my disagreeing with this outcome Muhsin Yaşar took my arm and we went together to see the Köyceğiz Kaymakam (District Governor) Ahmet Topaloğlu.

He looked at me and saw I was quite young and asked me if I could do the muhtar’s (village headman) work. Before I could answer Muhsin Yaşar right beside me spoke up excitedly saying that I’d make a first rate muhtar. I want to give you some appreciation of the people’s feelings in those old times, their trust and honest sentiments.

We had no school in the village so our children had to go to Dalyan, however, Şevket Akgün who was living at that time in Dalyan came by horse every day to Hüseyin Yılmaz’ ruined coffee house in the village to teach the children and he did it without taking any payment.

That’s how it was, so then Okçular and Kemaliye got together, and to build a school we all, men and women alike, went to the mountains to collect stones and we made mud bricks and eventually put on a roof - then our children didn’t need to make any long journeys to school.

In those times I, Dalyan muhtar Ekrem Şahin, Ekşiliyurt muhtar Muammer Kaçar, Kemaliye muhtar Ali Yılmaz, together with all our citizens made a road between Ortaca and Dalyan. Our village land was just a huge marsh then so we weren’t able to farm it and, in fact, we had a lot of problems with malaria. In 1961 a specialist doctor of malaria, Cemalettin Doğukan came to our village and said that we could at the same time both increase our farming lands and decrease the incidence of malaria. So he made a report and gave it to the Muğla Provincial Governor. There were many comings and goings, this expert and that. One day Turan Şahin from TARIM (Turkish State Agriculture) came with the Vali (Provincial Governor), Şerif Tüten and from this event came the decision to drain the marshes by digging a canal. At the same time the land registry officials came and gave everyone title deeds, also drew the village boundary between Kemaliye and Okçular and soon we were able to begin farming cotton which made the farmers happy. I understood that the muhtar’s office was an important place if we could get the State Agriculture minister to come to our village.

1962: from left to right - Şevket Akgün (teacher), Kürt Fatri, Muğla Vali Şerif Tüten, Ali Yazar, Niyazi Erken, MehmetTürk, Durali Aslan, Agriculture Minister Turan Şahin and other civil servants.

Here in this village we hadn’t had a road but we accomplished it, we also built a school, drained the marsh but we still didn’t have a mosque - we used to go to Dalyan or some groups prayed in homes. So, in 1961, we took it upon ourselves to get started and in 1964, during muhtar Ali Yazar’s term, we finished it.

From 1960 cotton growing expanded and Mustafa Akat from Muğla led seventy eight groups in association with TARİS (agricultural co-operative) in the Ortaca branch and for six years

I was on the committee. Our provincial chairman was Kemal Batıbey from Güzelyurt. It was important to discover what the possibilities were in our area.

I thought while we were engaged in the various projects at this time with Köyceğiz Governor Ahmet, our teachers Şevket and Nuri, agriculture chairman Turan, Muğla Governor Şerif, Doctor Cemalettin and Dalyan, Ekşiiyurt, Kemaliye muhtars and village council members, that the most important factor for we village people to do whatever we could to help implement the improvements and in doing so show our respect to these people.

To these people still living may, God grant them long and healthy lives, to those deceased, God rest their souls. This is a tribute to all the work and achievement of the people.

Okçular Muhtars:  Ali Şahin, Mehmet Ceyhan, İsmail Uysal, Muhsin Yaşar, Mehmet Türk, Ali Yazar, Salih Girgiç, Sebahattin Şaşmaz, Müfit Ceyhan, İsmail Şaşmaz, Hasan Çoban, Sakıp Tan and Ahmet Bilgiç.