The Ox-Cart and the Snow: Şerife Bacı's Last Road
Somewhere on a frozen road outside Kastamonu, a young mother pressed her body against a quilt to keep her infant warm through the night. By morning, she had become a legend.
Şerife was born around 1900 in a village in the Seydiler district of Kastamonu Vilayet. She married at sixteen, and within two months of her wedding World War I began, taking her husband to the front. Six months later came word that he had died at Gallipoli. It was a fate shared by so many young Anatolian women of her generation, left widowed before they had truly begun their married lives.
The villagers arranged a second marriage for her, to a wounded war veteran known as Topal Yusuf, 'Yusuf the Lame,' who had lost his left leg and an eye to a bomb explosion at the front. In the third year of this marriage, Şerife gave birth to a daughter she named Elif. Known in her village as Şerife Gelin, 'Bride Şerife,' she was remembered as someone endlessly willing to help with any task, for anyone.
By the winter of 1921, the Turkish War of Independence against Greek forces demanded everything of the population, including its women. Ammunition brought by sea to the port of İnebolu needed to reach the army fighting far inland, and villagers were called upon to help transport it. Şerife joined a convoy hauling cannonballs on an oxen-driven cart, the kağnı, from İnebolu toward Ankara, her two-month-old daughter Elif wrapped in swaddling beside her.
The journey was brutal even in ordinary conditions; that winter, the cold was severe. As the convoy neared the Kastamonu barracks, Şerife could go no further. She was found dead atop her cart, frozen, having pressed herself over the quilt covering her infant daughter, nestled among the artillery shells, as if to shield the child with the last of her body's warmth.
Because of the clothing she wore, it was believed she came from Seydiler, and her body was taken there for burial, though exactly where and how she was laid to rest remains unknown. Decades later, in 1972, a Gallipoli veteran named Mustafa Nurettin Peker, who had served as a district official in the Kastamonu region, undertook research to establish her identity for a journalist interviewing him. He determined that the martyred mother was Şerife of Satı Village in the Seydiler district of Devrekâni county, and that the crying infant in the cart, saved that night, was named Sıdıka, who had died only a few years before his account was published — a name that differs from Elif, the one recorded elsewhere in the village's memory of the child.
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