page_title: Nâzım Hikmet
section_title: Later life and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Nâzım Hikmet / Later life and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece of Volume 1 of the first-ever collected works of the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, published in communist Bulgaria (Nâzım Hikmet. 1967-1972. Bütün eserleri [Collected Works] (8 vols). Sofya [Sofia, Bulgaria]: Narodna Prosveta)
context_page_description: Nâzım Hikmet Ran, commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements". Described as a "romantic communist" and "romantic revolutionary", he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.
context_section_description: Ran's imprisonment in the 1940s became a cause célèbre among intellectuals worldwide; a 1949 committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre campaigned for his release.
  On 8 April 1950, Ran began a hunger strike in protest against the Turkish parliament's failure to include an amnesty law in its agenda before it closed for the upcoming general election. He was then transferred from the prison in Bursa, first to the infirmary of Sultanahmet Jail in Istanbul, and later to Paşakapısı Prison. Seriously ill, Ran suspended his strike on 23 April, the National Sovereignty and Children's Day. His doctor's request to treat him in hospital for three months was refused by officials. So, as his imprisonment status had not changed, he resumed his hunger strike on the morning of 2 May.
  Ran's hunger strike caused a stir throughout the country. Petitions were signed and a magazine named after him was published. His mother, Celile, began a hunger strike on 9 May, followed by renowned Turkish poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rıfat the next day. In light of the new political situation after the 1950 Turkish general election, held on 14 May, the strike was ended five days later, on 19 May, Turkey's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day, he was finally released through a general amnesty law enacted by the new government.
  On 22 November 1950, the World Council of Peace announced that Nazım Hikmet Ran was among the recipients of the International Peace Prize, along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Pablo Neruda.
  Later on, Ran escaped from Turkey to Romania on a ship via the Black Sea, and from there moved to the USSR. Because in the Soviet bloc the only recognized Turkish minority existed in communist Bulgaria, the poet's books were immediately brought out in this country, both in Turkish originals and Bulgarian translations. The communist authorities in Bulgaria celebrated him in Turkish and Bulgarian publications as 'a poet of liberty and peace.' The goal was to discredit Turkey presented as a 'lackey of the imperialist' United States in the eyes of Bulgaria's Turkish minority, many of whom desired to leave for or were expelled to Turkey in 1950-1953.
  When the EOKA struggle broke out in Cyprus, Ran believed that the population of Cyprus would be able to live together peacefully, and called on the Turkish minority to support the Greek Cypriots' demand for an end to British rule and Union with Greece (Enosis).
  Persecuted for decades by the Republic of Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Ran died of a heart attack in Moscow on 3 June 1963 at 6.30 am while picking up a morning newspaper at the door of his summer house in Peredelkino, far away from his beloved homeland. He is buried in Moscow's famous Novodevichy Cemetery, where his imposing tombstone is still today a place of pilgrimage for Turks and many others from around the world. His final wish, never carried out, was to be buried under a plane-tree (platanus) in any village cemetery in Anatolia.
  Despite his persecution by the Turkish state, Nâzım Hikmet has always been revered by the Turkish nation. His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, i.e. Human Landscapes from my Country), as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı Destanı, i.e. The Epic of the War of Independence), and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvâyi Milliye, i.e. Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest patriotic literary works of Turkey.
  Following his death, the Kremlin ordered the publication of the poet's first-ever Turkish-language collected works in communist Bulgaria, where at that time a large and still recognized Turkish national minority existed. The eight volumes of these collected works, Bütün eserleri, appeared at Sofia between 1967 and 1972, that is, in the very last years of the existence of the Turkish minority educational and publishing system in Bulgaria.
  Ran had Polish and Turkish citizenship. The latter was revoked
caption: Frontispiece of Volume 1 of the first-ever collected works of the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet
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