İrem is one of my friends from Kabataş Erkek High School. We lived together for five
years in school’s dormitory which is a effective sample of Turkey in terms of cultural, ethnic,
and religious diversity due to the fact that students, having great expectations about their
future career plans, are coming from different parts of all the country to this well-established
educational institution. I chose to interview with her for my project because I believe that her
life history is giving me a great opportunity to analyze, in a humble way, the matter of
internal migration from rural to Istanbul mainly based on educational purposes which is a
widespread trend in Turkey, and how difficult it is to deal with the conflicts arising from
socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic variation among people in the city and the chaotic
structure itself. We made the interview in South Campus while we were drinking tea, looking
at the Bosphorus, and chatting. In fact, İrem is still one of my roommates in Boğaziçi
University now.
Looking at the very beginning of the story, İrem was born in Bayburt, in 1997, as the
third child of her family. When I specifically asked for it, I learned that almost every family
has more than two children due to the need for them as agricultural workers. Their home was
in a village, four kilometers to the county town, and forty kilometers to the town center. Only
two thousand people were living there, as a result, neighborhood relations were quite strong
and almost every one in the village knew each other very well. Although there were not much
to do outside, even at night, security was not a problem, so she spent her childhood years in
this confident atmosphere. At the age of seven, due to the lack of access to sufficient
educational resources in the village, she made her first semi-migration from her village to the
county, which can be considered as from rural to rural, and started going to school in the
county town every day. In a relatively small and underdeveloped city, opportunities such as
learning a foreign language or out-of-class activities were not satisfactory at the school.
However, İrem’s big sister, studying at Istanbul University, was playing a key role for her to
SOC281
Fall 2018 / Project I
Gülşah Suileten
2016300183
