“One day in 1984, my late friend Yusuf Özgülen, who worked as an electrician at Dolmabahçe Palace, came to visit me at my childhood home in Üsküdar; in his hand was a half-torn, dirty watercolor seascape by Aivazovsky, a portrait of Sultan Reşat, and a round seal one centimeter in diameter—the kind that would remain an ordinary item among old coins and cheap, low-value antiques sold on a small table next to the secondhand booksellers' bazaar in Beyazıt Square back then; neither gold nor silver, likely made of the metal they call ‘brass’… It was worthless, but a memento from my late friend nonetheless; something I wouldn't have been able to find even if I had set out to look for it… I last had it in my hands in 1995, I suppose, it had already slipped my mind; I don’t know what happened to it afterward… On the last day of 2014, when I wanted to see an agate ring that had been gifted to me while I was in prison and sent home, that seal also emerged from the box it was brought out in; on the condition that everything belonging to me was being kept… ‘Throw it away!’… Then I remembered the late Yusuf… Then, on the worn-out seal, there was an inscription; naturally, there would be, but that’s not what’s important… The inscription looked something like ‘Dervish’, it seemed… In the end, it was read by those well-versed in Ottoman Turkish, naturally we read it too, and on the last night of 2014, a magnificent miracle: ‘Dervish Muhammed-332’…”