Biz Insanlar

Set in Istanbul during the Armistice years following the First World War, Biz İnsanlar follows Orhan, a schoolteacher whose disciplining of a student's quarrel brings him into the household of the boy's sister, Vedia. What begins as an incidental encounter becomes an unlooked-for love, one that Orhan pursues even as it costs him his position and pulls him deeper into a city living under foreign occupation.

Around this love story, Peyami Safa builds a portrait of a society caught between East and West, tradition and cosmopolitanism, idealism and moral compromise, at a moment when Istanbul itself was administered by occupying powers. Orhan's private struggle to reconcile desire with honor mirrors the larger struggle of a nation trying to decide what it will become.

First serialized in 1937 and published in book form in 1959, Biz İnsanlar is one of Peyami Safa's meditations on identity and integrity, using a spare love story to stage a much larger argument about nationalism, materialism, and the search for moral footing in a fractured era.