Poems and cities: reading Antalya in the Poems of the Tarık Akıltopu period

Abstract

The consequences of modernisation on the city are investigated in this study by reading poems written by Tarık Akıltopu, Antalya's first architect, in the last 15 years of his life, about his love for the city. Having witnessed the changes that the city has gone through in the historical process, both as an architect and as a city user, Tarık Akıltopu is one of the first architects to sign the buildings built in Antalya after the Republic throughout his professional life. Referring to the changes he saw in the city throughout his life before and after the republic in his poems, he mentioned the city-street, city-landscape, city-house relations. Therefore, the poet provides an important reference for interpreting the city of Antalya and its relationship with places. In his poems, when the descriptions of urban spaces are examined, he defines the relationship with spaces as the place of concretion, sadness and longing created by the modernization process in the city, and the times when green and blue integrate with the city as a place of happiness and conveys physical, sensory and emotional spaces in the context of the city through poems. These changes that the city has experienced in the process have led to the feeling of longing for the previous living spaces and the effort to approach the future with hope. In this context, the poems of Tarık Akıltopu, which are thought to best describe the urban changes, were analysed only by referring to emotional space, physical space and qualitatively defined space and its sub-components. As a result of the study, when examined in the context of the relationship between architecture and literature, Akıltopu reveals the relationships that the city has established on the urban spaces and users affected by the changes that the city has experienced throughout the process in his poems. The poems written with a love for the city by Tarık Akıltopu, the first architect of Antalya, have been an important source for reading and examining the change of urban spaces by describing the period lived in and after the Republic period. The study consists of four parts: the first part includes a literature review about the subject and Akıltopu’s life and poems, as well as information about the study. In order to reach the results of the study, the poems of Akıltopu and the analysis method of the poems are explained under the title of Materials and Methods in the second part. Under the title of Findings and Discussion, evaluations were made on the titles and concepts obtained from the analysis of the poems in the third part. In the fourth chapter, the results and recommendations of the study are presented.