Metin Münir, 1944-2023

We were all so busy with the daily politics of the time that we never then discussed how he, the son of a forester, had ended up in Ankara with perfect English, stunning erudition in English literature and a passion for music which must have played a part when he married Hikmet, then studying to be an opera singer. It was only after his death that I learnt that his father, Mehmet, was from Lithrankome (Botaşlı), a Karpaz village, spoke English, Armenian, Greek, and Turkish, and read Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Communication from Augusta Rieber Münir, who remembers the father’s village as being Çayırova (Aghios Theodoros, Ammohostou)). And that his mother was called Pembe and was the daughter of a successful restaurant-owner in the Nicosia çarşi, working in a bookshop when they fell in love.

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Metin’s early years were spent in Vroisha (also Frodisia or Yağmuralan) in the Tillyria area on the north-west coast. Years later, Constantinos Lordos, a committed advocate of close relations between the island’s Greek and Turkish Cypriots, shared with Metin how the village, uninhabited for over 30 years, had beautiful Damascene rosebushes, walnut trees, almond trees and other fruit trees gone wild. The two decided to visit it together. As Lordos recalled:

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"When we got there, Metin literally metamorphosed into a goat! He kept running from place to place, jumping over rocks and fallen trees, uphill, downhill, everywhere. He reconstructed in front of my eyes the whole fallen village, step by step, stone by stone: here was the house of the old man and his daughter who would give me goat milk to drink every morning, here was the stream running serenely down the small, narrow valley, here was the school with the twin fireplaces where I put my foot down to be allowed to go though I was not yet of age!…here was this and that…! Metin could see his minute village as a megacity, from when he was 3-4 years old until he was 7-8 when this lone village fell victim to the local thugs and was evacuated." (https://www.facebook.com/andreas.lordos/, 10 October 2023)

 

He was a committed pupil. With no kindergarten in the village, at the age of four he started attending classes with his elder sister, Ülkü, and was devastated when he - probably at school against the regulations - was the only one not rewarded with a school report.

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Concerned about the education of their children - by then Ülkü and Metin had two younger brothers, Tekin, later an oculist, and Ziya, who became a poet - his parents bought a house in the city. His father continued to spend much of the year in Vroisha, being joined by his family during school holidays, but Metin was making his mark at the British High School for Boys.  It was in those years that he developed his love for music. There was no gramophone in the house, but the family had a radio and were avid listeners to the British bases’ radio station, particularly, Ülkü remembers, Top of the Pops. It was probably at the concerts which were a feature of 1960s Ankara that this interest developed into the passion he would later have for Mozart. “His taste for music was eclectic. Paul Robeson, The Beggar’s Opera, good folk and pop, jazz, classical music of any kind, Paul Simon, Simon & Garfunkle, Beatles of course,” Augusta Rieber, his second wife, recalls. “Early in our relationship he said that had he not had Mozart he would have lost his mind.”

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His love for English literature developed in Nicosia. His friend, the historian Philip Mansel, says he knew this literature “better than me, and the Greek and Latin classics. He claimed to have been chased round the bookshelves by a British Council librarian with dishonourable intentions.” John Murray Brown of the Financial Times remembers him as a genuine bibliophile: “I mentioned I was re-reading Lucky Jim - I was preparing him for a heavy-drinking Irish friend's arrival - and Metin, quick as a flash, quoted chunks of the hangover scene, particularly that bit about Jim's mouth tasting like the bottom of a bird cage.”

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After finishing secondary school he had considered becoming a diplomat. He went to Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi in Ankara, a traditional training route for Turkish diplomats. How he would have fared in such a career is uncertain. To many of us, he was the least diplomatic friend we had. But his university days in Ankara led him to join a group of Turkish students who went to defend the Erenköy (Kokkina) enclave in northwest Cyprus. This was a lonely beach surrounded by mountains and was a landing point for military supplies for the Turkish Cypriots. General George Grivas, freshly arrived, had stiffened the back of the Greeks who launched an attack on Erenköy on 5 August. About 2,000 members of the Greek Cypriot National Guard and Greek army were resisted by around one-third that number of Turkish Cypriots.

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Metin was one of 455 scarcely trained volunteers from Turkey.  During the three-day battle - ended after a ceasefire resolution by the UN Security Council - "A close friend was shot beside him, and seeing his Greek neighbours in the crosshairs of his rifle he needed little more convincing of the folly that had led to the conflict. Later, as a journalist, it was his scoop that revealed the existence of the Atilla Line, the de facto boundary imposed by Turkish troops in 1974 that divided Cyprus into north and south." (Andrew Finkel, Cornucopia, 27 September 2023)

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He always deflected questions on his military experiences, but his elder sister, Ülkü, remembers him as being away for two years. “We only learnt where he was when we received a letter sent via a Swedish UN peacekeeper whom he had befriended.”

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Metin returned to Ankara and, after graduation started to work at the Turkish Daily News, owned by the ever-hospitable İlhan Çevik and edited by Nick Ludington, who was also the AP correspondent.

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He had great hopes of what Bülent Ecevit could do to broaden the meaning of democracy in Turkey, retaining these after many of us were deeply disappointed at Ecevit’s failures in this. By contrast, I remember one article which he sent to the Financial Times which started: “Süleyman Demirel, the worst Prime Minister Turkey has ever had,...” We worked together in 1977 on a supplement for the International Herald Tribune and a year later I stood in for him as stringer of the Financial Times when he took a sabbatical.

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Come the 1980 coup and censorship of the Turkish press and the BBC Turkish Service became one of the most reliable sources on the human rights’ abuses under the generals. At one point Metin testified in favour of Ecevit in a martial law court (as did Sedat Ergin, a life-long friend).

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Metin always retained his links with Cyprus and by the early-1980s had met Asıl Nadir, whose Polly Peck was then well on its remarkable rise to become one of Britain’s leading companies. He was on the editorial staff of Kıbrıs (long the leading daily in Northern Cyprus) after its launch in July 1989 and then transferred to become editor of Güneş in İstanbul. Nadir had bought Güneş earlier in 1989 and, in the year or so that Metin headed the paper, he transformed it into a European-style quality broadsheet.

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"This was a time when Turkish media was engaged in a brutal circulation war, attracting readers with contests for cars and through coupons redeemable for encyclopedias. Güneş’s manifesto promised to compete on the excellence of its news. For the first time in the Turkish press there was a women’s page, an environment page, a youth section, an editor responsible for covering human rights. Metin’s approach was to hire young people who understood finance, literature or law and let them learn journalism rather than employing the same old hacks who would never learn new tricks. He nurtured a new breed of young editors, gave them their opportunity, paid them a proper salary but wished them good luck at the door if they failed. He gave impetus to so many careers – including my own." (Andrew Finkel, Cornucopia, 27 September 2023)

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Metin respected figures who had made a success of their lives. In 1982, he shocked the Financial Times by suggesting that the paper did a survey featuring Turkish construction companies. Right he was. The companies were already well on their way to putting their mark on their region. He was intrigued by the success of Dinç Bilgin, in 1993 writing Sabah Olayı - Sabah ve Dinç Bilgin'in Öyküsü (The Sabah Event - Sabah and Dinç Bilgin’s Story).

 

By this time, he had started the phase of his career for which he is best remembered, as a trenchant columnist, writing with breadth, depth and integrity. He had long worked with the Sunday Times and the Independent, and was part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He covered the Istanbul earthquake of 1999 for the Financial Times, “with vivid writing and real anger at the corruption in the building industry and planning authorities,” according to Hugh Carnegy, then foreign news editor at the paper.

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In this period, he worked with Yeni Yüzyıl, Sabah, Vatan and Milliyet, freely in the early years and then with increasing discomfort as the governments of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan turned their attention to the press. He also wrote a second book, "Ölümden Sonraki Hayatım" (My Life After Death), a description of the massive cardiac arrest he suffered in 2002, when the doctors declared him dead. As he subsequently wrote:

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"Dying - the transition from being alive to being dead - was an extraordinary thing. I was not there in body, but I was there as a self. I was flying. But not by the effort of wings, bones and muscles, but by my own, like tree seeds crossing the ocean on the current of winds to land and germinate in the land of another continent." with a flight without wings or propelling power. There was a screen or window. Inside, a honeycomb-coloured, swarming luminous mass, ranging from white to yellow and dark brown, was moving from left to right and from east to west at a frightening speed. This speed also had a sound. Inside me "There was no fear or excitement. It was like I was on a familiar beach or forest trail." (From Ölümden Sonraki Hayatım, cited by Hakan Aksay, T24, 27 September 2023)

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He and Hikmet had two daughters together, Berna, involved with her husband in textiles, and Ayşe, a hotelier. The parents divorced and in the early 1990s Metin married Augusta, a pianist from Stuttgart. They had met at Salzburg, taken to the music festival by common friends. “He was inseparable from Mozart’s piano concerti which he carried around in a double-cassette box. Three months later he came to London on business with Asıl Nadir, and attended a solo recital I was giving at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. He took me to Fortnum’s. We fell in love that day,” Augusta recalls. He had bought a large wooden house high up in Kuzguncuk on the Asian shores of the Bosphorus, where they lived with their children, Selim, now a drummer, and Sara, completing a doctorate in psychology at the University of Bath.

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Increasing despair with being a journalist in AKP Turkey and the ending of his second marriage saw him spending more time in the farmhouse in northern Cyprus that he had bought in the 1980s. This was in Özanköy, midway between the Monastery of Bellapais and the sea. “When I land in Cyprus, the smell of the air makes me feel younger,” he told Şerif Kaynar. As conditions for journalism worsened, this progressively became his base, with him filling the garden with plants and the house with books. (At one point he had a collection of classical sculpture and artefacts, now in a local museum.) He had an incessant thirst for information to feed his understanding of the world.  He kept a post box in southern Cyprus to which he would have books delivered, the last ones being on medical advances in cancer. He continued to write on current issues and nature, including for the internet newspaper T24 for five years, and for the Cypriot paper Diyalog.

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He did not cut his links with the country where he had lived for half a century, his last trips being to Karaburun, İzmir, where his friend Nuray had a summerhouse and to Kars. He and Nuray were planning a trip to Berlin to see his son on stage and a reunion with his four children in 2024 when he died from a rupture of the aorta.

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He was a grumpy, gruff figure, “tyrannical in serving tea not coffee to his guests”, according to Kaynar, impatient with many but unreservedly appreciated by his family and many friends, saddened by the degradation of public life he saw happening on his island, and usually taking a bag to collect waste on his many walks.

 

He had been exposed to Kemalist values at the Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi, but he was always more Cypriot than Turkish, seeing Cyprus with many of the aspirations which the British had proclaimed for its people. His links with British culture ranged from appreciating its shirt-makers, teas, design and style - Harrods not Marks & Spencer - to following its music and, always, its literature. He kept a book account in London, at Hatchards. “When the Queen died, it was also his Queen,” Ayşe said in 2024. Philip Mansel remembers encouraging him to sing God Save the Queen in Turkish, as he had been taught at school.

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His funeral took place close to his farmhouse, attended by a number of former ministers and the General Secretary of the Halkın Partisi, which shared his concerns over corruption. He is buried under a tree overlooking the sea.

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It is a striking trajectory, with some hint of his multi-dimensionality evident in the haunting lines he wrote as his farewell contribution to Milliyet in November 2012. As my English translation of his poem falls short, here is the Turkish original too.

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“I wrote the following to be published on Saturday. I would like to present this to you as a farewell letter. Hoping to meet someday somewhere else or in another way...​