Karakterler

Ali

Son of Grocer Şerif. He is Yusuf's cleanest and most naive friend who manages to stay away from the dirty, dark nature of Edremit. With his quiet and calm demeanor, he harbors a secret but deep, pure love for Muazzez. To ease the greatest burden in Yusuf's life, he provides the money to pay off the District Governor's gambling debt without suspecting anything or seeking any benefit. Yusuf, out of a sense of gratitude and the instinct to protect the girl, is convinced to give Muazzez to him instead of Şakir. Ali's story is proof that good intentions will not go unpunished in this corrupted town. When he attends the wedding festivities, he is insidiously targeted, shot in the chest, and murdered by Şakir.

Hulusi Bey

He is an experienced and elderly lawyer who belongs to the Edremit provincial elite. He is Salâhattin Bey's agent and a close acquaintance. He is privy to every stage of the rot in the town. Although he intends to partially protect and warn Yusuf and the District Governor's family, he never engages in a fight that would compromise his own safety. He considers remaining in mediator or passively obedient roles, rather than clashing head-on with the powerful elite for the sake of ensuring justice, a 'necessity of living.' Despite his friendly intentions, he has adapted to inaction within the system.

Muazzez

She is the daughter of Edremit District Governor Salâhattin Bey and Şahinde Hanım. She grew up like a sister with Yusuf, who returned to the house as a 9-year-old orphan, and upon reaching adolescence, she became attached to him with a passionate, reckless love. Her whole life turns into a circle of pressure once Şakir, one of the town's wealthy men, sets his sights on her. She is weak in will and cannot compensate for her father's death or Yusuf's long absences due to his profession. Guided by her mother Şahinde, she slides into the alcohol-filled entertainment of a fake and toxic society. Although she realizes her own corruption, she cannot find the strength to save herself in Yusuf's absence. In Yusuf's final raid, she becomes an innocent victim of a great tragedy, severely wounded by Şakir's stray bullet, and passes away silently while fleeing toward the mountains on horseback.

Sabahattin Ali

Sabahattin Ali was born on 25 February 1907 in Eğridere, a small town near Gümülcine on what was then Ottoman soil and is today Ardino in Bulgaria. His father, Selahattin, was an army officer; his mother was called Hüsniye. As the Balkans slipped away, the family moved to Anatolia, and his childhood passed in the shadow of wars, constant relocation and want. He began teacher training in Balıkesir and completed it in Istanbul, graduating in 1926. After a year of teaching in Yozgat he was sent to Germany on a state scholarship and lived in Potsdam from 1928 to 1930. Back home he taught German in Aydın and Konya. His first poems and stories were already appearing in magazines when, in 1932, a poem led to his arrest; he served time in the prisons of Konya and Sinop and was released under the amnesty of 1933. He settled in Ankara, worked at the Ministry of Education and the State Conservatory, and married in 1935. The stories of The Mill were followed by the novels Yusuf of Kuyucak (1937), The Devil Within Us (1940) and Madonna in a Fur Coat (1943). In 1946 the satirical paper Markopaşa, which he founded with Aziz Nesin and Rıfat Ilgaz, found a wide readership; closures, trials and another term in prison followed. He wrote of Anatolian towns, of the defenceless and of the everyday face of power in a plain, hard language, while in Madonna in a Fur Coat he tried out an inward, fragile voice. Denied a passport, he attempted to leave the country in secret and in 1948 was killed near the Bulgarian border by Ali Ertekin, the man guiding him across. His body was found months later; he was forty-one. Years afterwards, Madonna in a Fur Coat became one of the most widely read novels in Turkey.

Şahinde Hanım

Wife of District Governor Salâhattin Bey and mother of Muazzez. She is a woman living for provincial gossip, a show-off who is fond of luxury and comfort. Exploiting her husband's spineless nature, she has become the absolute ruler of the house, making both him and the home unlivable. From the beginning, she has been disgusted by Yusuf, who entered the house as a dependent, and deemed him unworthy of her daughter. She plans Muazzez's future according to her own convenience; she feels no shame in giving her daughter to Şakir for his money. With her husband's death, she completely loses all restraint and wanders freely in the town's wealthy circles as a fresh widow. She does not feel the slightest remorse as events turn into a catastrophe.

Şakir

He is the unruly, flighty, and lawless son of Hilmi Bey, one of the influential and wealthy factory owners of Edremit. With the power provided by money and privilege, he sees the town as his own personal playground. He is accustomed to getting what he wants and never being opposed. He harbors a sick, predatory obsession toward Muazzez. When his ambition to make her submit is shattered by Yusuf's dignified stance, his spoiled anger evolves into deadly violence. He kills Ali, the weak obstacle in his path, without mercy or remorse. He even escapes consequences through his father's money, the neutralization of the district governor's office, and the fake testimonies of his men. At the peak of his hubris of possessing everything, he is shot during Yusuf's fatal raid.

Salâhattin Bey

Serving as the District Governor of Edremit, he is an Ottoman bureaucrat with genuinely good intentions. While he had a much brighter will in his youth when he saved Yusuf's life, his unhappy marriage to the nagging and self-interested Şahinde has eroded all the resistance in his character. He has abandoned himself to raki and melancholy thoughts. Although he sensed the potential danger between Yusuf and Muazzez, he could not provide sufficient protection. He realizes that his own position and honor are mortgaged due to his gambling debts, which are a diabolical trap set by the industrialist Hilmi Bey. While struggling within this weakness, his body gives way, and he departs this life with a severe heart attack, leaving his children vulnerable.

Yusuf

In 1903, he was only 9 years old when his home in Kuyucak was raided by bandits and his parents were murdered before his eyes. District Governor Salâhattin Bey, who came to investigate the incident, adopted this orphaned child. When they moved to Edremit, Yusuf could never adapt to the hypocritical, self-interested people and corrupt structure of this town. He frequently breaks away from his surroundings and escapes into nature, building walls in his inner world. His deep and reticent love for his foster sister Muazzez is the only thing that ties him to life. He displays a solitary, silent, but fierce resistance against the games of Şakir and his circle to obtain Muazzez and the internal decay within the house. When events spiral out of his control and Muazzez is drawn into the polluted world, he commits murder. Finally, he tries to save his wife and flee to the mountains, but with her death on the road, he rides toward eternal loneliness.