Ergun Çağatay, bridge to the vast Turkic world

On 15 July 1983, the Izmir-born photojournalist, Ergun Çağatay, was at the Turkish Airlines ticket counter at Paris Orly Airport waiting to fly home to celebrate his wife’s birthday. As he queued, a bomb hidden in a nearby suitcase exploded, killing eight people and wounding dozens more. 

Çağatay’s own injuries, including severe burns to his hands, meant it would be five years until he was able to take up photographic work again. But, as a patient at a burns unit in Paris, his Nikon camera was kept by his bedside. As he recovered, an ambitious plan began to form: to photograph the Turkic-speaking world. A vast project, exploring what unites scattered Turkic communities, from the frozen lands of eastern Siberia, to the oasis cities of Central Asia, even to Lithuania. 

He had identified a gap in the market. While much has been written about the first nomadic tribes migrating from Mongolia and Central Asia towards the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, few have turned their attention to the Turkic world. It took not only this unforeseen disaster, and his subsequent recovery time, but also the fall of the Soviet Union for Çağatay’s project to get underway. Explaining the concept was sometimes a struggle. Few people, he said, really understood what ‘Turkic’ meant.

Çağatay was used to tricky assignments. In 1979 he helped the Magnum photographer Gilles Peress to get his film out of Iran during the hostage crisis in Tehran. Then, in the 1980s, he documented Turkish families building new lives in Berlin after the Wall came down.

A decade on from the near-fatal bomb attack, Çağatay began his Turkic project, capturing people at work, play and prayer, and unravelling the threads of shared culture that bind societies together across wildly different landscapes – from men sipping tea in Azerbaijan to eagle-hunters in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

One of his photographs shows a reindeer herd gathering in Yakutia, a territory in eastern Siberia so large that it spans three time zones. Turkic-speaking Yakuts are primarily hunters, fishermen and reindeer herders, and most still follow some form of nomadism, moving their animals between summer and winter camps.

Keeping the Yakutian tundra in mind, similarities can be found in a variety of different Turkic languages. In Yakut, the word for snow sounds like haar; in Turkish it is kar, in Turkmen gar, in Uyghur qar and in Uzbek it is qor. A speaker of Yakut will also share many of the herding and dairy traditions observed on the giant steppelands of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan hundreds of miles away. In the summer, all will prepare vats of fermented mare’s milk, prized for its health-giving properties.

Çağatay’s photographs remind us, too, that Turkic speakers are not exclusively Sunni Muslim. One image, of a traditional shamanistic healer beating a drum, highlights the practices of the Turkic-speaking Tuvan people of the Altai in southern Siberia. The drumbeats are believed to be reverberations from the eternal Sky God. In Moldova, meanwhile, he extensively captured the Turkic-speaking Gagauz, who follow Orthodox Christianity. 

There are photographs, too, of the Karaim community in Lithuania, who practice an archaic form of Judaism. Forming one of the smallest groups of Turkic-speaking people – with official figures showing that there are only a couple of hundred of them living in the country today – their culture remains a big part of Trakai, the former Lithuanian capital, where they were once the city’s champions. This minority was in charge of guarding castles, when the Grand Duke Vytautas brought Turkish tribes to his homeland in the 14th century. This has not been forgotten. Restaurants still serve the staple dishes of the Karaim, including the classic delicacy of kybyn, an empanada-like pastry filled with either beef or lamb, cabbage or spinach. It isn’t so far off the fried, half-moon-shaped mince and onion turnover, chebureki, that the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars, in Ukraine, are famous for. When it comes to tracing the shared heritage of the scattered Turkic people, the view from the kitchen is illuminating.

Ergun Çağatay died in 2018, just as he was embarking on another project to fill in the gaps in his first magnum opus. He wanted to photograph the lives of Crimean Tatars in detail, as well as the landscape and peoples of the Balkans and the persecuted Uyghurs of northwest China. There was more to report on, more to capture, more to share. 

Shortly after he died, I began working on a book to celebrate his life called The Land of the Anka Bird (published by Cornucopia Books in 2020). My editor was keen for us to visit the studio where Çağatay had worked, close to Taksim in Istanbul. We travelled there one December afternoon and met Ergun’s widow, Kari Wulff Çağatay, a bright and gentle Norwegian. As we drank Turkish coffee, my eyes wandered around what was more of a gallery than a living space, despite its location in a low-slung apartment block. I took some photographs, aware that my visit could be a one-off. 

On the wall was one of his most recognisable images, blown up as a poster. It showed an abandoned trawler in the Karakalpak town of Moynaq in northwest Uzbekistan, a former fishing port that once employed more than 30,000 people. Stranded in the desert scrubland, the boat is instantly recognisable as a symbol of the Aral Sea disaster, but Çağatay goes further, not only showing the ship banked on the sand where the sea once was – before Soviet-era cotton-field irrigation drained it dry – but superimposing the tragedy by shooting the boat with a gang of children leaning over the bow. Children who are living with the ecological and economic fallout from that disaster. With this photo, he captures how the catastrophe has been passed on to the next generation. Yet you cannot help but see hope in the faces of the smiling children.

Despite his obvious talent, gritty determination and original thinking, Ergun Çağatay is not well remembered outside Turkey, which is a shame. Even when he had whittled down the photographs taken on his journeys for Turkic-Speaking Peoples, from 35,000 to 300, the book still ended up weighing nearly three kilograms. Along with the photographs are corresponding essays on everything from epic poetry to medieval Turkic cuisine. It remains a landmark study and Ergun Çağatay is name that ought to be better known.