IF YOU COULD MEET A HISTORICAL FIGURE, WHO WOULD IT BE?

I’d love to have met you when you came to Istanbul Büyükada while you were alive. But unfortunately, at that time, I was not even a vitamin in an orange. Even if I could never meet you, I am still in love with you platonically, my dear Trotsky…

They don’t know you very well around here. If I were to ask, “What is Trotsky?” they might ask if it’s a new smartphone app or a local dish. I didn’t know you before either. I read your life like I was watching a movie and I constantly talked to you in my head. You wrote so beautifully. This is what it means to be a great man and a great writer.

If you had not said to Lenin, “I am a Jew, you come to the fore, now these people will call me a Jew, things will get messy!” and paved the way for Lenin, if you had argued like you and me, there would have been no such thing as the Bolshevik Revolution. The intellectuals in our country who have read volumes of history books and still argue about whether they know better than you or whether they have read more or whether they are more intellectual, have no chance of uniting and making a revolution, let alone of being able to buy two kilos of tomatoes together at the market.

I want you to know that there is a woman here who reads your thoughts and talks to you without you. My respects and love, Dear Lev Davidovich Trotsky.