The Story

Hayri İrdal tells his own story, looking back on an Istanbul childhood marked by poverty, disorder, and an obsession with clocks that will unexpectedly determine his future.

Because clocks fascinate Hayri İrdal, master clockmaker Nuri Efendi mentors him and teaches that every mechanism has its own temperament, almost like a living creature needing patient care.

Under Nuri Efendi's influence, Hayri İrdal learns to understand time as personal craft rather than abstract measurement. That humane vision permanently shapes his imagination, though not his fortunes.

Elsewhere in the family circle, Seyit Lütfullah pursues hidden treasure through alchemy, mystical claims, and magnificent schemes. No treasure validates him, yet his conviction gives fantasy persuasive force.

Watching Seyit Lütfullah teaches Hayri İrdal a dangerous lesson: invention can resemble truth when someone performs it confidently enough. That lesson will later return on a national scale.

Hayri İrdal also spends part of his youth inside Abdüsselam Bey's wealthy, sprawling household, where servants, dependents, and domestic confusion make prosperity feel crowded and unstable.

When Abdüsselam Bey dies, inheritance disputes tear that household apart. Its protection vanishes, so Hayri İrdal is pushed back toward insecurity and the poverty that defines his early adulthood.

Seeking a life amid that instability, Hayri İrdal marries Emine. Affection cannot remove material hardship, so the couple and their children endure long years of shared deprivation.

Meanwhile, Nuri Efendi dies, ending Hayri İrdal's only true apprenticeship before the Institute appears. His patient craft survives only in memory as Hayri enters a harsher modern world.

Then Emine dies, leaving Hayri İrdal responsible for their children without money or emotional stability. Grief deepens his crisis and makes him vulnerable to another supposed expert on life.

That expert is Dr. Ramiz, a psychoanalyst who takes the troubled Hayri İrdal under his care. Simply put, the doctor believes hidden childhood desires explain nearly everything.

Dr. Ramiz forces Hayri İrdal's complicated life into borrowed Freudian theories. Every memory becomes a symptom, so analysis creates another grand system that sounds scientific while ignoring lived reality.

Yet treatment turns into friendship, and Dr. Ramiz remains connected to Hayri İrdal. This relationship later carries the doctor into the social and professional world surrounding the Institute.

Through this world, Hayri İrdal meets Halit Ayarcı, a confident modern promoter who instantly recognizes opportunities. Halit speaks so persuasively that possibility begins sounding like established fact.

During a conversation over rakı, Halit Ayarcı hears Hayri İrdal discuss clocks and spontaneously imagines a Time Regulation Institute. A casual idea suddenly acquires the tone of national necessity.

Halit Ayarcı proposes a simple mission: one national office will make clocks agree and teach punctuality. The plan echoes Turkey's wider reforms adopting Western systems for organizing public life.

To enforce this new order, Halit Ayarcı proposes fines for wrong clocks. The farther a clock differs from official time, the larger its owner's punishment will be.

Because Hayri İrdal has loved clocks since childhood, Halit Ayarcı declares him perfectly qualified to help found the Institute. Private eccentricity is thus repackaged as professional expertise.

Halit Ayarcı does not excel at practical organization. His gift is selling an idea, surrounding it with impressive language, and making every new claim justify the previous one.

When people mock the Institute, Halit Ayarcı treats their attention as proof of its importance. Criticism becomes publicity, and resistance supplies fresh reasons for expanding the project.

Consequently, the nearly baseless Institute acquires offices, employees, titles, and salaries. Halit Ayarcı directs its growth while Hayri İrdal rises from obscure poverty into senior administration.

The expansion reaches Hayri İrdal's private circle. Relatives and acquaintances receive Institute jobs, so what began as official nonsense becomes a dependable source of wages for familiar households.

Hayri İrdal now faces a plain trap: he privately believes the Institute is absurd, yet its salaries feed his family. Telling the truth could destroy their new security.

Because an important institution needs an impressive past, Halit Ayarcı pressures Hayri İrdal to produce one. Hayri must give their recent invention the appearance of deep historical roots.

Hayri İrdal responds by inventing Ahmet Zamani Efendi, a supposedly important Ottoman clockmaker. He builds a scholarly-looking biography around someone who never existed.

Official prestige makes Ahmet Zamani Efendi seem real, while Halit Ayarcı presents the fabricated history with confidence. Institutional authority now manufactures the evidence supporting its own authority.

During this rise, Hayri İrdal marries Pakize. Her idea of modern happiness comes largely from cinema, whose glamorous fantasies teach her what home, wealth, and status should resemble.

Institute money allows Pakize and Hayri İrdal to live closer to those screen-fed dreams. A borrowed fantasy becomes furniture, comfort, and social standing through a bureaucracy built on another fantasy.

Hayri İrdal's household therefore mirrors Halit Ayarcı's Institute. Both begin with imagined stories, yet money and collective belief give those stories solid material consequences.

Against this success stands the memory of Nuri Efendi. His humane practice of listening to individual clocks cannot defeat a national system devoted to standardizing and punishing them.

Even so, Nuri Efendi's ethic survives as the standard exposing Halit Ayarcı's mistake: lived time requires attention and care, while bureaucracy reduces it to rules, errors, and fines.

As offices and payrolls multiply, the Institute's emptiness becomes harder to disguise. Halit Ayarcı has made it enormous, yet size only makes its lack of purpose more visible.

The invented past also becomes dangerous when genuine scholars investigate Ahmet Zamani Efendi. Hayri İrdal realizes that serious research may search for evidence he cannot possibly provide.

Hayri İrdal and Halit Ayarcı now want to protect the Institute's legitimacy, yet their historical foundation is entirely fabricated. Discovery threatens both their reputations and the structure supporting them.

At the same time, the authorities who permitted the Institute's growth begin examining its actual usefulness. Halit Ayarcı must answer scrutiny that confident promotion can no longer completely deflect.

Because the Institute appears purposeless, authorities target it for closure and reorganization. Halit Ayarcı confronts the possibility that the system he expanded may be dismantled officially.

The official judgment is easy to understand: the Institute is considered unnecessary, so it moves toward abolition. Halit Ayarcı's great creation may disappear by administrative order.

Yet Halit Ayarcı characteristically turns defeat into fresh work, reportedly organizing a liquidation commission. Even abolishing the Institute becomes another bureaucratic project, though this specific detail remains uncertain.

Afterward, Halit Ayarcı is reportedly killed suddenly in an automobile accident. The account gives no secure cause or preparation, and even this reported detail remains uncertain.

Dr. Ramiz continues within the Institute's orbit, still representing a borrowed theory applied too confidently. The account records no definite final fate for him beyond that social world.

Hayri İrdal survives, neither innocent nor ruined. He recognizes the deception but remains dependent on the Institute for income, identity, and the status that rescued him from poverty.

From that compromised position, Hayri İrdal writes the memoir afterward. His voice excuses his choices, mocks their absurdity, and mourns what was lost without pretending he stood outside it.

Hayri İrdal's memoir becomes the lasting record of Halit Ayarcı and the Institute. What began as invented history now survives through another carefully shaped account of the past.

The Institute's exact final fate remains less certain than one decisive fact: Hayri İrdal lives to narrate it, preserving both its comedy and his own uneasy complicity.

What it means

Hayri İrdal and Halit Ayarcı reveal how institutions become self-fulfilling fictions: once salaries, homes, reputations, and hopes depend on an invention, practical investment can matter more than truth.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.