Anadolu ve Balkan Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

Mustafa Necati Sepetçioğlu has written many works in various literary genres such as stories, novels and theatre, and in most of these works, he has achieved fame with his historical novels by bringing the theme of history to the fore. The theatre, which he considered as a school, played an important role in giving cultural identity, national consciousness and historical awareness to the audience as the main manifestation of his intellectual struggle. In this context, Sepetçioğlu, who attracted attention with his play titled Her Bizansa Bir Fatih published in three acts in 1972, comparatively classified the process of Istanbul before the conquest at the level of individuals, people and states, and concretised the reasons that led the Ottoman Empire to be victorious and the Byzantine Empire to defeat. At this stage, he characterises Sultan Mehmet, the dominant figure throughout the play, as an ideal leader with extremely positive qualities, and the Ottoman people as a society that supports its state by standing by its side under all circumstances, while the Byzantine Emperor and his people, in contrast to the Sultan, he constructs the Byzantine Emperor and his people as a hobbled leader and society that gathers all negative qualities together and thinks only of itself. Therefore, this organisation, which is separated with sharp lines through the symbols of 'crescent' and 'cross', enabled Sepetçioğlu to clearly reveal the social message he wanted to give.