Abdullah Akan was born in Rumelia in 1896. In the years when he was called up for the Ottoman Empire's last great war, he too, like thousands of other sons of Anatolia and Rumelia, was despatched to the front. Abdullah's fate took him to one of the empire's most distant and most arduous fronts: Yemen. There, in the scorching heat of the desert, he fought against the British forces.
His unit came under attack by British soldiers; the defence lasted for hours. Fragments of a shell fired from far away struck his forehead and his chest, and Abdullah collapsed in pain. When the gunfire stopped, one of the enemy soldiers who had got in among the unit took him for dead and rolled him into the trench beside him. Abdullah lay unconscious in that pit for hours. At last he raised himself onto his knees, got to his feet using his rifle as a cane, and walked. He walked and walked; ahead of him he saw a stream.
That stream saved Abdullah's life. He washed his hands and face and came round. He saw a fish lying on its side in the water, close to death; he cleaned it with his bayonet and ate it raw, for he had not had a bite to eat for hours. Leaning on his rifle he set off again, and after walking for hours, resting as he went, he reached a village. The villagers cleaned his wounds and fed him, and in the morning sent word to the nearest Turkish unit; two soldiers came and took him to a field hospital. Abdullah was treated there for months and recovered.
“The flowing water saved my life. Let my surname come from it too.”
When the Surname Law was enacted in 1934, every citizen had to choose a surname. Abdullah did not hesitate. He had not forgotten that stream, that flowing water, which had given him life in the deserts of Yemen when he was wounded and helpless. He had his surname registered as AKAN. This name was neither a coincidental choice nor an ordinary preference — it was the debt of gratitude that a gazi (war veteran) paid to the water to which he owed his life.
Treated for months in the field hospital, Abdullah recovered. When the war wounded him he was a young soldier; when he returned to Mesudiye he had become a man who knew the value of life and who knew his debt to the water and to the soil.
Abdullah Akan died in Mesudiye on 3 July 1969, at the age of 73. His body was committed to the earth, but his story — that story of survival which began on the bank of a stream and turned into a surname — went on being told for generations. It lives on in memory as one of Mesudiye's most meaningful surname stories.
