Turkey marked its centenary last year in muted fashion. Celebrations for the anniversary on 29 October were cut back due to ‘the alarming human tragedy in Gaza’, the state broadcaster said, though some claimed the true reason was that the country’s longtime leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is no fan of the Westernised, secular model of statehood imposed by Atatürk a hundred years ago.

Whatever the truth, it often seems that there is little to celebrate in today’s Turkey. The country is mired in economic crisis, with inflation running at 70 per cent. It is riven by social tensions, culture wars and mass migration, and languishing in a state of fear and despondency under Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. ‘Perhaps the cruellest part of the Turkey I had seen over the last few years’, writes Sami Kent in The Endless Country, a personal and idiosyncratic history of Turkey’s first century, is ‘the brute fact of unaccountable power, and how callously, how capriciously it decides the fate of others’.

Kent’s book concludes in the rather depressing present, but it nonetheless feels like a shaft of sunlight amid the gloom: an insightful, moving and beautifully crafted portrait of a nation shaped and reshaped – often violently – by the forces of modernity and the paternalistic visions of its leaders.

The book opens with Kent arriving, unannounced and apprehensive, at the Black Sea village of his ancestors in the hope of finding some relatives. His father left Turkey as a young man, meeting Kent’s English mother a week after reaching the UK, and Kent grew up viewing the country through the lens of glittering Aegean holidays and his father’s anecdotes, which lodged in his memory ‘vivid and unclear, like a kaleidoscope mid-twist’. The opening scene, in which Kent overcomes the initial suspicion of the old men in the teahouse, culminates with him meeting an elderly cousin of his grandmother: ‘She begins to cry. She hugs me. She’s looking at my face, at my nose, the slight hook of it – the same hook on my brothers, my father, my grandfather. She hugs me again. “You look just like us!” she says.’

Kent never overdramatises his personal journey of discovery, but it lies at the heart of The Endless Country, and he is wonderfully successful at marrying it with a gripping history of modern Turkey. He leads us through the past roughly a decade at a time, using specific events to explore broader trends: an ill-fated rebellion in a Black Sea town against Atatürk’s ‘hat law’, which banned the wearing of the Ottoman fez in public and required officials to wear hats instead; the brutal subjugation of the remote tribal region of Dersim in 1938, when the young Turkish state imposed its control on this last wild realm, enacting forced deportations and massacring at least thirteen thousand civilians. We learn of Koçero, the last of Anatolia’s great bandits, whose career opens a window onto the economic and social upheaval caused by the mechanisation of agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s.

These stories are judiciously chosen. Kent brings to life the chaotic late 1970s and the brutal 1980 military coup through the history of one town that voted in a communist mayor. Later, he conveys the ascent of free-market capitalism in Anatolia through the story of an entrepreneur who took a traditional orchid-flavoured ice cream and turned it into one of the country’s most successful restaurant chains.

The interviews brim with humour, detail and pathos. Often Kent is treated with affection like a wayward son: Baban Türk sen Türksün (‘Your father’s Turkish, so you are Turkish’), he is continually told. The ice cream entrepreneur, a domineering silverback who ‘seems a man pleased to be interviewed’, fires ‘folksy, motivational quotes’ at him, then forces him to repeat them back in order to check he’s understood them. An old man whose grandfather was executed for taking part in the ‘hat rebellion’ in the town of Güneysu holds Kent’s hand as he leads him to his grandfather’s grave, but also adjudges his forebear ‘ignorant’ for not having just put the hat on. 

‘I liked who I was in Turkish, and in Turkey,’ Kent says towards the end, ‘warmer, more tactile, at ease.’ After witnessing the enormous loss of life caused by the 2023 earthquakes in the country’s south, he calls his mother and breaks down crying. And while contemplating the injustices of the present, he feels not just anger but shame as well.

The final chapter of the book focuses on Silivri, the vast prison complex near Istanbul that stands as a symbol of the oppression of the Erdoğan years. Kent focuses on the family of Hakan, an academic locked up in 2022 on trumped-up charges. He was imprisoned when his young son Ege was two years old, and now they meet during brief prison visits, sometimes in a private room, sometimes separated by a glass screen. The boy seems to accept the limits on his relationship with his father, but still ‘he says sometimes at the end of visits, looking behind him, Baba gel, “Daddy come”’.

This is a book of fathers and sons. The father looming largest is the Turkish state, which is marking its hundredth birthday and whose leaders, from Atatürk to its coup-plotting generals to Erdoğan now, have treated their citizens as children in need of reform and guidance, often to their detriment. But these ‘children’ and the bonds of love, resilience and hope forged between them, leave the strongest impression. In Silivri, Hakan and his friends keep their spirits up with games of two-a-side football and throw recipes in bottles from one courtyard to another detailing how to cook toasties between radiator slats. In a letter to his son, Hakan insists that they are lucky to have been born and raised in Turkey. It is a spirit, Kent hopes, ‘that will surely have its time’.