“My way of life is very simple. Summer and winter, I live in my hut and cave at Topkale. Surrounded by fruit trees and flowers, my home is like paradise. In summer I eat fresh fruit; in winter, dried fruit. I wash in ice-cold water three times a day. To protect my body, I rub myself with a herbal oil I make myself. I can read both the old and new scripts. I adore Turkish music. I am passionate about cinema. Those are how I forget my troubles and sorrows. Newspapers and magazines are never out of my hands; I buy and read them all.”
Ahmet Bedevi’s name in the civil register was Ahmeddin Carlak. Born in Baghdad in 1888, Bedevi was a veteran who spent many years serving in the Turkish Army and fought in the War of Independence. Awarded the Independence Medal with a red ribbon for his military achievements, he settled in Manisa after those long years of service, following the proclamation of the Republic. He helped clear the rubble of a Manisa left largely in ruins by wartime fires, and it seems his passion for bringing greenery back to the city began then. Whenever he could, he would bring saplings from the forest and plant them around town. Every sapling he planted was said to take root. People even used to say that Tarzan could plant a dry stick and it would grow. When he first arrived in Manisa, he would fire the cannon at Topkale at 12:00 each day. People would gather to watch him running down the mountain to fire it.
Tarzan chose to live apart from people in a hut on the mountain. Perhaps it was the pain of a lost love, or perhaps what he had witnessed during his years in the army, that led him to seek a cleaner life away from people and closer to nature. At first, Bedevi wore a T-shirt and shorts. Later he abandoned the T-shirt too and remained as you see him in the photographs until the end of his life. I think Ahmet Bedevi reached a state of mind that rejected ownership altogether and stood apart from civilisation. In his hut, he slept on a wooden bed covered with newspaper. He spent much of his life making Manisa greener and fighting to protect the greenery already there. He saw every sapling as his own child, addressed them as “my child,” and cared for each one attentively. Bedevi was also an accomplished athlete and climbed Mount Ararat, Demirkazık and Cilo with young mountaineers.
Ahmet Bedevi was nicknamed the Tarzan of Manisa after the Tarzan film shown in the city’s cinema at the time. While the film’s Tarzan lived close to nature in untouched forests, far from civilisation, Manisa’s Tarzan spent his life trying to protect his children from an urbanising Manisa, from bureaucracy—in other words, from civilisation. And in those years he succeeded. The city became known as Green Manisa. Throughout his life, Ahmet Bedevi won his struggle to bring nature back to the city. Arriving in black shorts and rubber shoes, he wrote his name into history through what he did there, becoming a hero of nature. Manisa has not forgotten Tarzan, whose life and struggle many environmental activists still read about today. Statues and monuments to him stand in many parts of the city. But I don’t know how many of his children have survived to our day. Perhaps none. Near the end of his life, they tore his children away from him one by one to make room for a road. The grief devastated him.
Whenever you remember Bedevi, remember the years in which he lived. We are talking about the 1930s. The people had only recently emerged from war, religious sheikhs and self-appointed holy men were everywhere, and here was a man walking around bare-legged, rising above such a conservative environment to become a folk hero, a lover of greenery and an environmental activist. People accepted and loved him as he was and built monuments to him. Ahmet Bedevi was far, far ahead of his time. In people’s eyes, he was an eccentric artilleryman, a pious old character. Perhaps they could not see much beyond the curious gaze people turn on someone who looks different. Environmental activism, which began on these lands with his struggle, is now growing in many different forms. Ecovillages; intellectuals and philosophers turning away from civilisation towards older village ways of life; people so disgusted with cities that they are willing to escape the crowds and work the land—their numbers increase every day. There are hundreds of young environmental volunteers and activists in this country working to raise awareness among villagers. Today, educated people with good jobs or careers who return to nature and join communes are often looked at as though they must be agents. Apparently it was the same back then. For a time, the Tarzan of Manisa was also watched because he might be a spy. The Tarzan of Manisa, whose story also appears in Sunay Akın’s book “Onlar Hep Oradaydı,” died on 31 May 1963. To me, he represents a turning point in Turkey’s history and an example of idealism. I remember him with respect.
The video below is from the 1994 film Manisa Tarzanı, made about Ahmet Bedevi. My thanks to everyone who put their work into it. They have made an enormous contribution to keeping his name and story alive today. I think the time for a new film, so that younger generations can get to know a man who loved cinema himself, is already long overdue.
Sources consulted:www.agaclar.net