Niyazi Altun is from Kavak, a district in Türkiye’s Black Sea province of Samsun, where the scars of World War I still linger. Men from villages in this district were conscripted to fight on the front, never to return, leaving sorrowful families wondering about their fate.

His great-grandfathers – both from his mother’s side and father’s – were among those swallowed by the transnational conflict, which raged from 1914 to 1918. As a child, Altun would visit graveyards of the fallen Ottoman soldiers with his parents and wonder what had become of his ancestors. Whether they were dead or alive, nobody knew.

“I grew up listening to the tales of these missing soldiers. Their stories were always incomplete. I couldn’t live with the idea that I would never know what had happened to them,” he tells TRT World.

Millions of soldiers were lost during the Great War. Their bodies were never found, and their whereabouts remain a subject of speculation. Some of them fought for the Ottoman Empire. 

Altun, 39, spent years piecing together his family’s history, hoping to retrace the journey of his grandfathers and find out what had become of them. While he didn’t succeed, he ended up writing a book, Martyrs of Kavak, about the soldiers who had gone off to the war from his district.

Little did he know that his pursuit would one day help bring closure to another family.

Altun teaches Turkish literature to high school students. As part of his training, he studied and learned the old Turkish script, which was used during Ottoman times and before the founding of the modern Turkish Republic.

One day in September 2024, someone informed him that a letter written by an obscure Ottoman soldier in 1918 was on display at a Turkish Red Crescent exhibit. The soldier had penned the letter while he was in Russian captivity. It was supposed to go to his family in Kavak, Altun’s district.  Altun was asked if he could review its contents.

The letter was addressed to the Hilal-i Ahmer Society, the predecessor of the Turkish Red Crescent. Founded in the late 19th century during the Russo-Turkish War, the society helped wounded and captive soldiers and carried on correspondence with their families.

Sakir’s letter never reached his family due to a technical mistake.

“Ottoman handwriting can be easily misread. The address in the records listed ‘Kurce’ village in Kavak, but no such village exists. When I re-examined it, I realised it could be ‘Gocebe’ village and began investigating,” says Altun. 

His hunch was right. The soldier, Sakir, was indeed from Gocebe village. With the help of official records, Altun traced his descendants and took it upon himself to deliver the message that waited 107 years to find its way home.

Sakir’s legacy

Sakir left behind a wife, three sons, and a daughter when he marched off to war. In the years that followed, his children had many of their own, and they all grew up listening to the tales of Sakir’s bravery and his service to the nation.

Yet, like many soldiers lost to history, his fate remained uncertain. With no known grave and no final word, his descendants had only stories to fill the gap. That changed when Altun tracked down Sakir’s only remaining grandchild, Osman Cakir, in December.

“The family was in tears,” Altun recalls. “They kept saying they wouldn’t have believed it even in a dream — but there it was, word from their grandfather, a century later.”

With the help of ANDA, a humanitarian foundation in Türkiye that is active in education, research, aid, and search-and-rescue activities, Altun presented Sakir's grandchildren with a special design of the letter on February 15.

One side of the design displays Sakir’s handwriting in the original Ottoman script, and the other, its Turkish translation.

But it wasn’t just the letter’s arrival that left the family in tears. It was the contents as well.

“We are talking about a man who lost both of his legs fighting for his country and endured years in captivity. Yet his words reflect no regret, no bitterness. He writes as if he’d do it all over again,” Altun tells TRT World.

Sakir’s only concern was that he hadn’t heard from his family, his four children, and he never forgot about them, Altun adds. 

State records show that Sakir died in 1921, three years after posting his letter. However, this could be an approximate date.

According to Altun, there are many reports of soldiers who were recorded as dead, only to resurface years later, with some making it back home and others starting new lives elsewhere.

There’s a chance Sakir had survived and lived a life somewhere else. But why Altun decided to go over old archives, conduct interviews and search for Sakir’s family has a much deeper reason. Everyone’s story must be told, he says, and it should also be recorded before it’s lost in the vagaries of time.

Carrying history forward

In 2003, during a university lecture, Altun realised he could answer the questions posed by his professor with unexpected ease. Not because he had studied hard but because he had heard the answers from his mother as a child.

The questions were drawn from Professor Ali Berat Alptekin's Taseli Masalları (The Tales of Taseli), a book that preserves the folklore of old Turkish tribes through 70 stories passed down over generations as part of the tradition of verbal storytelling — but now, only a few people remember.

“I grew up learning our folk tales, songs and laments from my parents, who were illiterate but carried our history in their memories and words,” Altun recalls. His family hails from Turkmens, ethnic Turks who migrated westward from Central Asia beginning in the 11th century.

“Culturally, they have remained intact. Yet, so much knowledge, especially oral traditions, have been lost over time because they were never documented,” he adds.

Still, the people preserved their heritage in their own way. Folk traditions, such as stories, songs, and laments, were handed down through generations by word of mouth.

One tale that has stuck with Altun is that of Igci Baba, or Spindler Father. It’s a story about three young sisters tricked and kidnapped one by one by an elderly man selling spindles. Two sisters fall victim to him, but the youngest outsmarts him, ultimately killing the spindler and claiming his treasure: 40 rooms filled with gold.

The tale carries key themes of Turkish oral tradition, such as the archetype of the elderly figure, though this time depicted as evil rather than wise and helpful, and the symbolic numerology of three and 40. In Turkish folklore, these numbers often mark the passage of time, the stages of a journey, or the number of people and objects.

“In the end, I realised that the only thing my parents didn’t know was how to read and write,” Altun says. 

But the experience made him realise the fragile nature of unwritten history. Now, as a teacher and an author, Altun sees his work as a crucial service to preserve history — whether by documenting it firsthand or uncovering forgotten records.

This commitment set him on a lifelong quest to uncover more stories. “If I hadn’t studied literature, if I hadn’t pursued this research, all of this knowledge could have been lost forever,” he says.

Suffering, kindness, resilience

Altun now holds a vast collection of documents chronicling the history of his region, from the wisdom his ancestors carried from Central Anatolia to the memories of martyrs lost to history.

He is now working to deliver another document to the family of a soldier who was killed when the Ottoman battleship Mesudiye, which was blocking enemy forces from entering the Canakkale Strait in World War I, was sunk by a British submarine.

If they had managed to pass the strait, the Allied forces would have had a straight line to overtake Istanbul, the Ottoman capital.

“Sakir’s story is just one of hundreds,” he reflects. “During my research, I have come across countless accounts of people who were captured, tortured, and killed in times of war and conflict. But I have also heard stories of profound kindness.”

One such story comes from the early 20th century, when the Rum population was leaving Turkish lands as part of a population exchange. While some formed violent groups that forced Turks to flee and hide in creek beds to survive, others quietly defied the cruelty.

“Some of the Rums, knowing the desperate conditions of those hiding in the creeks, would scatter bread into the water to make sure they survived,” Altun says.

“One thing I have learned from my research is that there have always been cruel people. But there have also been good people of strong character, and they will set the example for generations to come. We must look into our history to remember them.”