Ayn Rand Is Alive in Ankara

There is one Ayn Rand-themed establishment in Turkey. It isn’t in Istanbul, the financial heart of the country, but Ankara, its political capital, home to Turkish bureaucrats and defense companies. The logo of Catalyst Coffee & Hub is a black-and-white picture of Rand holding a steaming cup of coffee. It is perched on top of Çankaya Hill, surrounded by embassies and official buildings. Its garden has a wonderful view of Atakule, the iconic tower overlooking the city.

When the cafe launched, a tax inspector came for a start-of-business check. When he saw copies of Rand’s work on the bookshelves, he was delighted and engaged his hosts in an enthusiastic discussion of Objectivism. When he departed, he did so without looking at Catalyst‘s accounts.

Turkey’s major political traditions of the past two generations—Kemalist secular statism, political Islam, and ethnic nationalism—all subordinate the individual to a collective project in different ways. Rand is countercultural against all three, and yet she articulates something that life in Turkey has quietly become: more individualist, more disenchanted, more on the hustle. That is why her readers pop up in unexpected places, and why they have been multiplying for over half a century.

Today, the political scene is more conducive to young readers of Rand than ever before. The big political traditions on the left and right have decayed so much that very small groups like the libertarians and Objectivists no longer seem squeezed in the middle. As President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hold on power has tightened, the intrinsic appeal of Islamism has weakened—he now rules through coercion rather than conviction. Liberals and leftists of various stripes are finding it hard to organize politically, tap into capital, or even maintain their presence in media and cultural life. Where Randians looked like a small group squeezed on two sides, they are now one group among a constellation of free-floating political groupings, each of different shapes and sizes. 

Rand was first translated into Turkish as a romantic novel. Biz İnsanlar (literally “We humans,” ergo, We the Living) was released by a small publisher in 1974, with a cover depicting a blonde woman being embraced by a handsome man. There were other small translations in the following years, but their quality and circulation volume remained low.

It was in the 1990s that Rand hit Turkey’s political scene, at a time when liberalism was ascendant in the country. Turkey had been ruled since the 1920s by a secular establishment that saw itself as the heirs of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the leader of Turkey’s war of independence and founder of its secular Republic. The Kemalist-dominated military frequently carried out coups against elected governments that they saw as a threat to Atatürk’s values. By the 1990s, the Kemalists were engaged in a culture war against Turkey’s Islamists, whose base was growing, largely as a result of massive urbanization. In their fight against the establishment, the Islamists’ allies were Turkey’s classical liberals. Intellectuals like Atilla Yayla, Etyen Mahçupyan, and Ali Bayramoğlu were secular in outlook, but believed that the Kemalist republic was inherently repressive.

Tensions increased when the Welfare Party, the prime Islamist outfit at the time, won a plurality in the 1995 election, and in 1996, formed a coalition government, making its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, prime minister. On February 28, 1997, the military launched what is still known as a “postmodern coup,” threatening military intervention without carrying it out. The generals’ threats succeeded at forcing Erbakan out of power, and purging Islamists and their sympathizers from public institutions, especially politically sensitive ones like higher education and the judiciary. To liberals, the military was now the central collectivist force of Turkish public life, and therefore the obstacle that prevented the flourishing of individual liberties.

In 1997, the Journal of Liberal Thought (Liberal Düşünce Dergisi, LDD), the flagship publication of Turkish liberals, published a translation of Rand’s 1964 interview with Playboy. Burak Bilgehan Özpek, who is arguably Turkey’s preeminent liberal intellectual today, remembers this as a significant moment in his personal development. He says that Yayla, a well-known liberal intellectual of the time, “said that one should really embrace one philosopher, and I chose Rand.” But copies weren’t easy to find at the time. As a university student, Özpek took a trip to Fırat University, located in relatively poor southeastern Turkey. “They had a library donated by an American university, and there was a copy of The Fountainhead,” he says, “and I stole it.” He thought of it as finding a diamond in the rough, and in his defense, he was hardly selfish with Rand’s texts. He remembers translating sections of her writing by hand, having them printed on pamphlets, and distributing them on the streets. 

As Turkey rolled into the new millennium, a political earthquake broke open new ground. 

In the wake of the postmodern coup, a group of young Islamists wanted to reform the  Welfare Party. When their leadership bid failed, they splintered and formed their own outfit. On August 14, 2001, the Justice and Development (A.K.) Party was born, and its tall, handsome leader declared in his inaugural speech that “after this day, nothing will ever be the same again.” This party was more moderate in its own Islamism, and more liberal in both social and economic policy. Reaching out to the E.U. and the U.S., it was able to mollify the military and govern the country. Liberals stood firmly with the A.K. Party, and its outspoken leader—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Rand’s presence in Turkey would enjoy a major upgrade during the early 2000s. Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı is known today as a celebrity political commentator, TV soccer analyst, and all-around enfant terrible of the Turkish media. As a teenager from a Kemalist household in the 1990s, Kütahyalı was caught up in the wave of anti-Kemalist liberalism. He also read Rand’s Playboy interview and quickly sought out the works of this mysterious thinker who was originally from Russia. 

In 2002, the 22-year-old Kütahyalı was introduced to Sinan Çetin. Çetin was a director with critically acclaimed films in the 1990s. In 1999, he released Propaganda, perhaps the only libertarian movie ever to be made in Turkish: a surreal comedy about a customs officer on the Turkish-Syrian border, following state directives to split his hometown in two. The film’s star cast and international reception elevated Çetin’s name as a serious director with a political mission.

Kütahyalı recalls that during their first meeting, Çetin asked him what he thought of his work. Instead of the lavish praise Çetin was used to hearing, Kütahyalı told him that Çetin lacked a “başyapıt” (magnum opus) “even though you have great potential.” This got Çetin’s attention. The two kept talking, and bonded over, among other things, their love for Rand. Çetin purchased the rights for Rand’s work in Turkish, and with Kütahyalı’s help, promoted the books through Plato Film Publishing.

In his introduction to The Fountainhead, Çetin wrote a classic Randian rendering of human history, in which a few creatives have pursued their creative potential but have been shunned by society. While some countries had managed to overcome this pattern, Turkey remained an egregiously regressive country. As Çetin wrote:

If The Fountainhead had been read in Turkey; no ideology would have superseded reason, and instead of being a haven for zealous militants, Turkey would have become a country of professionals. Doing a job well, respecting one’s work, and achieving success in that work would not be so disparaged; people would not be ashamed of what they do, of producing, and of earning money.

This book in your hand is a SHIELD OF THE MIND to prevent the world from being destroyed by the peddlers of sacrifice. It is a defense of the ‘I’ and a reward given to creators who stand against the masses.

Çetin clearly wanted to use his growing clout to fashion himself into the champion of the creative classes in Turkey. In disseminating Rand, he would give creatives permission to be as they were, and to push back against the psychological impact of regressive forces on the left and the right. Academics and leftists firmly opposed Çetin in this. 

In 2003, the backlash showed up in print. The academic Ayşe Kadıoğlu saw the emergence of Rand readership in Turkey as a sign of a greater malaise and published a critique in Radikal II, a highly influential feuilleton at the time. She looked back on a civic-minded liberalism at the Republic’s founding—most significantly in Ahmet Ağaoğlu—in which altruism was the road that led to individualism. Kadıoğlu argued that when President Turgut Özal unleashed market deregulation in the 1980s, the public’s spirit of altruism began to atrophy. What emerged, she claimed, was the mentality of “I will save my ship, everyone else can do as they please” and that when “a delayed individualism fuses with an Orientalist mindset, this is the result.” 

Leftist alarm notwithstanding, Rand’s books weren’t quite selling themselves. They needed a bigger cultural vehicle to attach to, and none of Çetin’s other ventures were bigger than the TV sitcom Avrupa Yakası (The European Side) which ran from 2004–2009 and became a megahit. In it, Gülse Birsel (who also wrote the show) played Aslı, a tall, fashionable journalist living in Istanbul’s fancy Nişantaşı district. Her counter was the magazine’s administrative manager Burhan Altıntop, masterfully played by Engin Günaydın. Burhan was a new arrival to the city, with a thick Anatolian accent, forever striving to get ahead by following the latest fad, but failing spectacularly every time. The cultural clash between the cities and the countryside, “white Turks” and “black Turks,” was on full display here.

The show had a huge impact, especially appealing to a white-collar, university-educated demographic that was excited about Turkey’s E.U. aspirations. Careful viewers could see Rand’s books as set decoration, or in one scene, the office tea boy’s reading material. Kütahyalı also wrote for the show, and says that Birsel “didn’t have a clue, we put those references in.” Asked if this was an evangelizing effort of sorts, he says it was, but that “there was also a commercial concern. We wanted to sell books.”

Perhaps it was too subtle, because Rand didn’t stick. In a 2007 interview in Hürriyet, Çetin lamented that his publishing house was having a difficult time with her:

It’s not selling. Being collectivist sells better. Because collectivism is a place where people feel better about themselves. “Let’s all be happy together, together, together…” But we have a saying, “wherever there is a crowd, there is shit!” [nerede çokluk orada bokluk]

The broader trend of liberalism too, came under a different kind of pressure at this time. In 2010, the A.K. Party proposed a constitutional change that was designed to break the stranglehold of Kemalist elites on the judiciary. Many liberal intellectuals supported the measure with the slogan “Yetmez Ama Evet” (“Yes but not enough,”) while most of the left and Kemalist nationalists opposed it. The referendum passed, forever implicating the liberal name with the A.K. Party’s efforts to reshape the state. 

In 2013, a small youth gathering to protect Gezi Park in Istanbul from a construction project erupted into a nationwide protest movement, and was harshly suppressed by the Erdoğan government. Some liberal intellectuals were uncomfortable with the protests. Atilla Yayla, who by this time was working with Çetin’s publishing house, argued the protests were antidemocratic. Randians, however, Özpek argues, were consistently against Erdoğan, and therefore supported Gezi. “In times of crisis, morality [ahlak] is important,” he argues, “for them [Rand readers] it was about dictatorship.”

The space for individualism now began to shrink, not least due to a civil war in the Islamist camp. The A.K. Party’s rise was supported by a religious order, led by the preacher Fethullah Gülen, who commanded a network of foundations, schools, and media outlets, as well as a huge covert presence in the country’s bureaucracy, which effectively attacked the old Kemalist elite. It is difficult to think of a group that is as far away from Randian Objectivism as the Gülenist movement, which demanded intense personal loyalty to a charismatic leader. But the A.K. Party fell out with the Gülenists, and after a 2016 coup attempt that Erdoğan blamed on the group, the Turkish state began a new wave of mass institutional purges.

Rand’s sales reportedly fell during these years. “You could only find expensive copies on the secondhand market, and then only of Atlas Shrugged,” says Orçun Koçak, a co-founder of the Turkish Objectivist Network. And yet, it was in this environment that a new generation of Rand readers took to the texts.

Koçak was from a Marxist family. His father had been arrested after a 1980 military coup and tried for capital offenses. Koçak was in high school in the early 2000s, the A.K. Party’s early years, and began to be interested in liberal ideas. One of his friends recommended Atlas Shrugged, and he got hooked. He overcame the idea that “intellectual life is inherently leftist,” and began to talk about Randian morality to his family. They thought it was a phase. “They have only recently accepted that it wasn’t,” he says.

As a student in Ankara’s TOBB University of Economy and Technology, Koçak was spending time with a group of gamers who liked playing DotA (Defense of the Ancients), a modification of the real-time strategy game Warcraft III. “These types of games have a culture of chatting for hours via Discord” he says, and it was during those hours that they would discuss liberal ideas (Turkey would ban Discord in 2024). These gamers thought that the left had failed to stop the rise of the A.K. Party, and that consequently, the country was now heading toward authoritarian rule. 

In contrast to the first-wave of 1990s readers, this second wave of Rand readers seem to be disproportionally gamers. Merve Karataş, a highly active libertarian (and very long-shot candidate for mayor of Istanbul in 2024) who also reads Rand, says that gaming is conducive to the ideology. “It’s an individual activity, and it develops your imagination,” she says. She also thinks that it helped her grasp of economic principles. Playing the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, “you buy up the entire supply of a certain product on the market, then sell it for a higher price,” she says, “so you learn about the market economy.”

One gamer Koçak met at this time was Özgür Özer, who was a student at Middle East Technical University (METU). Özer was more strictly Randian in his tastes. “Classic liberalism’s problem is that it doesn’t have an aesthetic understanding,” he says. He believed that the Turkish public was a lot more individualist than it led on. His father ran for local office in Ankara in 2009, and it was while working on that election, and talking to shopkeepers at the time, he concluded that “people don’t want interference in their economic lives. They want to find their own way.” By the time he was in college, he was already involved with liberal groups. 

In 2019, Özer and Koçak joined forces and applied for funding to establish the Turkey branch of the Objectivist Network. The project allowed them to launch years of organizing workshops and training sessions. Perhaps the most important thing it did, however, was to put pressure on the publishing house.

Plato Film Publishing had gone dormant, and Pegasus Publishing now owned the rights to Rand’s works in Turkish. The problem was that it wasn’t printing any. Özer and Koçak reached out to Pegasus and asked if they could buy the rights. Under Turkish contract law, Pegasus’ failure to print Rand’s titles made them vulnerable to acquisition ventures. Koçak thinks that their offer put pressure on Pegasus, and instead of selling the rights, they rushed to print Rand again. “[The Turkish Objectivist Network] became their best customer,” says Koçak, who bought many copies to be distributed at their events.

Turkey is also more individualist than it has ever been. It is an industrial powerhouse and a rising star on the geopolitical stage, yet is suffering more malnutrition, organized crime, drugs, and school shootings. Nearly a decade of sky-high inflation has wiped out some people’s earnings, and made others into expert speculators, hedging into dollars, gold, cryptocurrencies, and side businesses. Kütahyalı today has a reputation for praising Erdoğan’s genius (“he is Howard Roark!”) and kicking the opposition when it is down, but even he is candid about what he sees as contempt of the poor. “Turkey is ‘business-friendly,'” he says, using the English expression, “but that is not liberalism.” Perhaps he is in a position to know. Kütahyalı was arrested on May 14 on charges of forming a criminal organization, illegal betting, aggravated cyber-enabled fraud, bribery, and laundering proceeds of crime—all of which he rigorously denies.

In the meantime, Rand’s Turkish readership has been growing, as evident in their robust online presence. The Turkish-language Wikipedia page on Rand is substantial, easily longer than those of Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, Émile Durkheim, or F.A. Hayek. On Ekşi Sözlük, a uniquely Turkish forum that works like a crossover between Wikipedia and Reddit, Rand’s characters have their own pages with long commentaries and debates. 

It is difficult to get sales figures, but kitapyurdu.com, the biggest online bookstore in Turkey, is well stocked with Rand’s books (including a 13-book box set), and its online forum hosts a lively discussion of the works. YouTube searches for Ayn Rand in Turkey (one of the most popular modes of dissemination now) were flat until 2018, when they began to increase—peaking in 2023, but now maintaining a steady hum. Turkish philosophy YouTubers like Diamond Tema have made introductory videos about Rand’s work and host discussions about the ideas. 

Rand is still not considered respectable reading by the mainstream. In February 2026, the office of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the imprisoned mayor of Istanbul and the opposition’s nominee for the presidency, mentioned in a post on X that Rand’s We the Living was on the mayor’s prison reading list. This received a strong reaction among leftists online. “The left hates her. Really hates her,” says Özpek, who has himself become more critical of Rand’s work, and now describes himself more as a “Hume-Hayek” liberal. Çetin is also no longer a champion. In 2016, he retreated from public life after his son, a serial traffic violator, crashed his sportscar into a police vehicle, killing an officer and wounding another. The case became a scandal about elite impunity, especially as Çetin was said to have offered money to the family of the deceased officer to keep them quiet.

For a generation now, the spirit of Turkish politics has been reactionary. Its most visible manifestation is the Islamist revolt against the secular, Western-looking republic of the Kemalists. Rand’s appeal in Turkey too, rests not simply on ideas of managing the economy or daily life, but on the alternative values she proposes, ones that are implicit in daily life. An Ekşi Sözlük entry by the username nekadarolabilirki puts it best:

I have just read The Fountainhead. even though I do not agree with the writer on every topic, egoist morality seems so natural to me that it is as if these views have always been with me.

I was someone who lived by this mindset for years before reading this book, and now I understand better what I am.

production and self-centeredness equals happiness. 

p.s. not for everyone