Hikmet Afif Mapolar: About The Octopus Hunt

Abstract

Hikmet Afif Mapolar (1919–1989) was a Turkish Cypriot writer and journal­ist who contributed immensely to the development of Turkish-language prose, journalism, and the press in Cyprus. Tied to his native country all his life, and especially to his place of birth (the port city of Kyrenia on the Mediterranean Sea), he set most of his stories in coastal towns in the vicinity of Kyrenia, and his characters are inhabitants of this region: villagers and fishermen. This arti­cle discusses a short story by Mapolar, Ahtapot Avı [The Octopus Hunt], pub­lished in 1943, i.e., during the colonial period. The realism of the descriptions, which is typical of this writer, combined with the fast-paced and engrossing storytelling bring to mind scenes from a movie drama where the sea plays the lead role. Many plot elements in The Octopus Hunt evoke associations with Hemingway’s short story, The Old Man and the Sea, which leads me to formu­late a universal truth that sea people have similar desires and a similar fate no matter where they live, and that “their” sea is not a peripheral place, but a cen­tral one. For the inhabitants of the coastal region, the sea is the center of their world, the center of life, the meaning of life, and the determinant of fate.