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Europe|A Turkish Love Story, With Prison, Poetry and an Airplane Exploit
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/world/europe/turkey-kurdish-poet-comak.html
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When the Kurdish poet first declared his love, the woman who was the focus of his feelings didn’t take him seriously. “How could I?” asked his beloved, Ipek Ozel. “I was the only woman he had seen in decades.”
At the time he conveyed his affections, in 2019, the poet, Ilhan Sami Çomak, was serving a life sentence in a Turkish maximum security prison. Ms. Ozel was a volunteer, who, amid a life of glamour and parties, visited inmates to offer assistance and fellowship.
Their love story, which has surprised even their closest friends, is also a tale of a bitter and brutal decades-long conflict.
Mr. Çomak was born in 1973 in a tiny village near Bingöl, in eastern Turkey, to humble farmers who practiced Alevism, a heterodox Muslim sect.
“Perfect,” he said of his rural childhood. “Adoring a tree or a flower or a river. That was god to me as an Alevi child.”
He didn’t realize his family’s beliefs or their Kurdish ethnicity made him a minority. He didn’t even realize he lived in a Turkish-speaking country until elementary school. “Turkish” — the language that would later give him solace in prison — “was drilled into me by schoolteachers,” he said.
