Butterfly of the Night

Haydar Karataş, the author, of Gece Kelebeği - Perperık-a Söe (Butterfly of the Night) now lives in exile in Zurich. The book's child-narrator, his mother, was swept up in a series of tragic historical event in the mountainous region of Dersim in Northeastern Anatolia. Dersim (renamed Tunceli in 1935). The area was 90 km east-west and 70 km north-south and, in the 1930s, it had a population of nearly 80,000 people, most of them involved agriculture.

Dersim was at odds with the politico-cultural landscape of 1930s Turkey, whose leaders wanted "a country with one language, one mentality, and unity of feeling." On 4 May 1937, Turkey's Council of Ministers secretly decided on a forceful attack against western-central Dersim; to kill everyone who was using or had used arms, and remove the population settled between Nazimiye and Sin. In the resulting campaign, many thousands of civilians died. According to several sources, the army used poison gas, imported from Germany, to kill people who hid in caves. Others were burned alive. Even people who surrendered were exterminated.

The loss of so many men from rural communities and the chaos caused by military incursions triggered a famine that led to further deaths. Hiding in the mountains and eating wild plants, Haydar's grandmother struggled to keep her little girl, Haydar's mother, alive. This is their story.