Photo: Burcu Çağlayan
With a collection of four stories on the comfort and burden of families, and nostalgia for childhood and all things lost – or never gained in the past – Yeşim Erdem’s Filedelfiya Hikayeleri (Philadelphia Stories) is an exploration on small-town life.
Filedelfiya here is not the city that once was the symbol of colonial America, and now one of the largest cities in the U.S. The stories have no relation either to the 1940 movie that made Katharine Hepburn a box office name, The Philadelphia Story. Filedelfiya here is an Aegean town in Turkey that no longer bears that name from antiquity and the Middle Ages.
One of the first ancient cities in the world, Filedelfiya is now a small town, known for its dried raisins and vineyards. And the town was also once home to writer Erdem, who prefers to refer to her hometown as Filedelfiya, not Alaşehir, perhaps to emphasize the transcendent nature of her stories that could come from any place in Anatolia, and who thinks the most distinctive quality of the town was simply the grape vines.
Filedelfiya Hikayeleri features four stories that are seen through the eyes of four people, spanning a period of four decades. The story of a little girl’s foray into the reality of stigmas attached to a certain kind of small-town woman is followed by a young man’s brush with unrequited love in the most unlikely place. The third story features a “bad guy,” who refuses to accept any responsibility in a life that would make him feel good and worthy, while the final and the longest story centers around a woman who returns to her town and to her family for one final visit upon her mother’s death.
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