Zehra Say

Biography

The certificate of their marriage is written in Ottoman Turkish. It could hardly have been otherwise: the alphabet reform came only in 1928, and Zehra and Fuat Say were married on 18 February 1926.

The day before, on 17 February, Turkey had adopted its secular Civil Code.

She was born Fatma Zehra Bilgin. Her birthplace is given differently, Ankara or Istanbul; the year is 1906 everywhere. In 1925 she graduated from the teacher training school in İzmir and began work as a teacher. Her bridegroom, Fuat Say, is called a mathematician in some places and simply a teacher in others. The wedding was given political weight: the announcement of it, it is said, was written personally by the Minister of Justice, Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, the author of the code’s article on civil marriage. Later Zehra Say came to be called one of the symbols of the Atatürk era because of her views on women’s equality. In 2016 Tarık Akan made a documentary, “Atatürk’ün Alev Çiçekleri”, about the first generation of women of the Republic; Say’s story appears in it alongside those of Sabiha Gökçen and Afet İnan.

The couple had two children, Emel and Arkan.

After her marriage Say went on studying. She entered the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy, worked in Namık İsmail’s studio in the painting department, and graduated in 1929. At the same time she taught drawing at a girls’ high school in Cağaloğlu, Istanbul, and afterwards, according to some accounts, also studied in the decorative arts department. Her teaching career lasted 36 years. In the 1960s and 1970s Say spent some time living and working in the United States; her activity there is described sometimes as teaching and sometimes as painting.

She began to exhibit late. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1982 at A Galeri in Istanbul, and by the end of her life there had been ten, not counting many group shows. Some of the titles survive: “Love and Nature” at the Tanak Art Gallery (December 1989), and the group exhibitions “Breeze of Creative Turkish Women” (1987) and “Turkish Women Painters of the First Half of the 20th Century” (1992, after her death). Avni Akyol, the Minister of Youth and Sports, presented her with a plaque for fifty years of service to Turkish art.

She painted mainly still lifes and landscapes. Her work is described as a realistic interpretation of nature, and Istanbul in her paintings is seen through nature: gardens, flowers, fruit. I think there is little more that can be said about her manner: I found no detailed descriptions of individual works.

One picture is better documented. It is “Island of Maui”. Because of illness Say could not finish it and asked her daughter, Emel Say, who was not yet a painter, to complete it. The picture was shown at an exhibition, the sculptor Gürdal Duyar approved of Emel’s work, and this may have pushed her towards painting. The pianist Fazıl Say is called her grandson in some accounts and her great-nephew in others.

Zehra Say died on 16 December 1990 in Istanbul. In 2002 the municipality placed a bronze sculpture of two doves with interlocked wedding rings at the entrance to the marriage office at the İzmir International Fair, in honour of Zehra and Fuat Say; it is the work of the İzmir-born sculptor Bihrat Mavitan.