Melis Kaya wrote a piece for the newspaper Yeni Özgür Politika to pay tribute to her father, Ahmet Kaya, on the anniversary of his death.
Melis Kaya wrote:
“You were singing your songs to the mountains in the Turkey of the 1990s, at a time when everyone else had withdrawn into silence, and when you reached out saying, ‘Extend your hands, let us meet, let us make peace,’ being Kurdish was not just an identity, it meant being born into endless darkness and war. It was like the children of the backstreets whose fates were written before they even opened their eyes; like shift workers quietly exhausting their own lives to heal the lives of others; like university students tortured for defending their democratic rights; like the children who grew up in front of prison gates; like revolutionaries living in exile; like all mothers who sent their children to death. The millions who listened to your songs felt the same ache in their hearts. They shared certain wounds. Their sorrows resembled one another. They listened to you because you created a new language, one that those bruised by life embraced instantly, one they learned at once. And this new language did not rely on words; it was rooted in dignity, the most primal right a human being possesses.
This resistance belonged to you
In a time when every righteous uprising was ruthlessly crushed, your music became a public truth, an act of witnessing. It was a moral insistence on living with dignity. A society was rediscovering its own story. You cried out your existence not like an anthem, but like a proud, unbroken lament. And this was your way of resisting: not by hiding who you were, but by transforming that very identity into the aesthetic of your music. This resistance was uniquely yours, and perhaps that is why some called what you created “original music.”
For me, those songs were always “my father’s language.” I sometimes wonder what made your musicianship so singular in my childhood. Maybe it was the staves you sketched on the backs of stray pieces of paper with a pencil, and the notes you scribbled on them by hearing the melody inside your own head. Or the verses and poems you jotted down, almost absentmindedly, in the pages of a phone book. Or the way you could master every instrument you picked up. Even your talent for fatherhood was something I never fully understood. It felt as though a father was, by definition, someone who could play the piano, the bağlama (a long-necked Anatolian string instrument), and the double bass with ease and if he couldn’t, then he was somehow incomplete.
Those who grew up with your voice
The sound that echoed through our home was a fresh memory that held all of us close, something warm that existed beyond bans, repression, war, imprisonment, and exile. In your voice, there was the unending laughter of a child. There were the fluttering wings of birds, the waves of the Bosphorus, rivers flowing wild or soft, the wind of the mountains, the scent of mothers longing for their children, the ache of lovers’ hearts, the dust of distant cities and unfamiliar streets and faraway roads. Perhaps that is why those who grew up with your voice carried their identities not as an ideology, but as a way of remembering.
Your sorrowful yet stubborn melodies
To understand you today is to understand not only an artist, but the weight of an entire era, time lost, and grief without end. In the years when you sang your songs to the mountains, calling out to them with no one to lean on but yourself and your music, it took immense courage to raise your voice that way. Every time you stepped on stage, the country’s most suppressed truth pushed its way forward and began to reveal itself. To the tens of thousands who filled those halls, you were telling a truth they had never heard before. Those of us who recognize this are now far greater in number, and after all these dark years, we are trying once again to rediscover one another and we are still listening to you. Your songs continue to fill our lives, sometimes as advice, sometimes as comfort. Those sorrowful yet stubborn melodies, and that faint note of reproach you left behind as you departed this world, still move through the conscience of the peoples like a lingering shadow.
A courageous teacher
You once said, ‘I am no one’s enemy, I am only a singer,’ but you were never only a singer. You were a courageous teacher who showed that defending the dignity of a people and defending one’s own identity were the very same act. And of course, it was never just for your own people, you carried the voices of suffering and forgotten peoples everywhere, wherever they were in the world. Thirty years ago, you told us, ‘Our mountains will turn green as we weep.’ We held on to that hope. We cried with you, and we cried after you and you kept your word: those mountains are turning green once again. Dawn is breaking again in the Serhed region. Where are you now, can you see it? You once said, ‘Your brother will return from the mountains one day, and you will embrace him, little one.’ Look, they are returning. Can you hear their footsteps? Through all these years, the traces of your saz (a long-necked Anatolian lute), your words, your tears, your labor, and your too-young life are still with us.
I’m grateful that your path crossed this world
The year 2025 marks twenty-five years since we lost you, and forty years since you began a professional artistic life that, heartbreakingly, lasted only fifteen. I remember you with endless longing and respect, carrying the courage you left to me as your greatest inheritance. My father, my friend, my companion, my teacher, I’m grateful that your path crossed this world, grateful that you lived, grateful that you sang your songs to us and to the mountains.’’
*Poem: Orhan Kotan
**“Ağladıkça” – Poem: Gülten Kaya Hayaloğlu
**“Özgür Çağrı” – Lyrics: Ahmet Kaya
Source: Yeni Özgür Politika