Poetry: Ashraf AboArafe
In the beginning, a dream walked on the edge of swords,
and a boy named Osman planted the seed of a rising state in Anatolia,
a state that would grow to touch the edges of continents.
Then history opened its gates to glory,
Constantinople fell,
and the crescent rose over an endless sea.
In its greatest expansion,
sultans wrote laws upon the wind,
and the land stretched as if it knew no borders.
But every glory carries within it the question of decline,
and slowly exhaustion entered the body of the empire.
Then came the final silence,
and the Sultanate faded like a book gently closed.
From beneath the ashes emerged a new idea,
Mustafa Kemal walking toward another birth.
The empire fell,
and the Republic was born.
Decades passed like a long test,
until a new era arrived with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
And so the story continues—
not ending… but transforming.
