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The Runaway Bride: The Real Stakes Behind Ayten’s Choice in 1958 Turkey
Denise Derya Brandt
Even before I was born, my mother was making and buying things for my hope chest, or çeyiz, as it’s called in Turkish. A crochet tablecloth, embroidered pillowcases, lace-trimmed curtains, all of it beautiful, none of it my style. As I got older and lived on my own, I bought my own things, in my own taste. And by the time I actually got married, I didn’t have a çeyiz at all. Somewhere between my mother’s generation and mine, the entire tradition fell away.
While I was writing my debut novel, Istanbul Dreaming, I thought about that half-built hope chest a lot, and about my protagonist Ayten’s marriage and wedding night. I never gave Ayten a çeyiz! An oversight on my part. What I gave her instead was a marriage forced on her as punishment for her small act of rebellion, and a wedding night that becomes the reason she flees.
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| Pub. by She Writes Press (Sept. 2026) |
But before I could write that terrible night honestly, I needed to understand what a young woman in 1958 Turkey actually risked by fleeing a marriage like that one. So I went looking for the answer, and it surprised me. Turkish women of Ayten’s generation had rights their grandmothers never had.
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In 1926, years before women in much of Europe could vote, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's new republic replaced Ottoman religious law with a civil code modeled on Switzerland’s. Polygamy was abolished, inheritance shares between sons and daughters were equalized, and divorce, which under Ottoman religious law had overwhelmingly favored the husband, became something a wife could seek through the courts on the same terms as her husband. And crucially for Ayten’s story, the law required both the groom and bride, not her father (wali), to directly and freely consent to marriage or it would not be valid. On paper. In practice, a daughter’s consent was incidental. A father’s decision still carried more weight than anything, because refusing him meant running into social and cultural walls, and in 1958, especially outside the largest cities, the social and cultural walls were the ones that mattered most.
Ayten’s marriage to Salih is exactly that kind of wall. When her father learns she snuck off to Istanbul for a night of dancing, he treats it as a betrayal and disgrace to namus, family honor, something that is linked to a woman’s body and behavior. And before she can do something “stupid to embarrass the family,” her father informs her he has arranged her marriage to Salih, a relative who bullied her as a child, and someone, it turns out, her father had promised her to years before.
What sends Ayten into this marriage is one unchaperoned night out. What her father is actually afraid of isn’t what Ayten did. It’s what people might say she did and what that says about the family. In a city like Bursa, such gossip could do real damage to a family’s reputation, and as Ayten’s father always says, his “reputation is worth more than gold.”
Ayten is devastated but eventually resigns herself to her fate. She marries Salih in a religious ceremony performed at their home by the local imam rather than by a state marriage officer, which means it has no legal standing under the civil code, no matter how many relatives witness it. Ayten becomes Salih’s wife in the eyes of her family and God, but she does not become his wife in the eyes of the Turkish state. Then Salih assaults Ayten on their wedding night. She waits until he’s asleep, slips out before the first call to prayer, takes a taxi to the bus station, and buys a one-way ticket to Istanbul to stay with her best friend. When her father finds her and drags her home days later to confront Salih, Ayten leaves a second time, this time for good, leaving her family behind and returning to Istanbul with nothing. Imagine the courage that takes! But I don’t want readers to mistake Ayten’s courage for melodrama. The truth of her situation is dramatic enough without embellishing it.
Respectable work for an unmarried woman with no money and no connections was hard to come by in 1958, and without a man willing to vouch for her, a woman often had shockingly little standing of her own. But Ayten was lucky because she had work and friends. She was not alone.
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I love historical fiction that sheds light on women’s stories, stories that are too often lost to history. The 1926 code can tell you consent for marriage was required, but it can’t tell you what it felt like to lie awake next to a man you’d been forced to marry, planning your escape before dawn. But fiction can, and good fiction can make you feel as if you’re living the story yourself. Ayten’s situation and wedding night is fiction, but what she’s facing is real for many women of her generation. And for some women today, it still is.
Ayten never gets a hope chest moment in the novel. There’s no crochet tablecloth waiting for her because her wedding is a punishment, not a beginning. Maybe that is the truer inheritance I gave her. Not a chest full of things collected in hope, but the courage to leave everything behind and start again with nothing. Freeing herself is bittersweet.
Sources & Further Reading
For readers who want to go deeper into the legal and social history of marriage in modern Turkey, check out Turkish sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti’s research on gender and the Turkish state, and Pınar İlkkaracan’s work on marriage practices and women’s rights in Turkey. Another resource is Women in Islam: From Medieval to Modern Times by Wiebke Walther. I also reviewed the 1926 Turkish Civil Code itself, along with scholarship on the gap between that law and how marriage actually worked in practice, including how common imam nikah marriages with no civil standing continue to be.
About the Author:
Denise Derya Brandt is a debut author whose writing is inspired by her life and the lives of the people she met while working for more than twenty years in international development, leading life-saving women's health projects in Afghanistan, Liberia, and Myanmar (with shorter stints in other interesting places).
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| author Denise Derya Brandt (credit: Tonya Bolton) |
She's a graduate of The Book Incubator writing program, was a 2024 finalist for the Women's Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award, and was a 2025 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out publicity incubator fellow. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Arizona State University and a master's degree in development management from The London School of Economics.
After graduate school, Denise lived in Istanbul, where she worked as an Associate Publisher for Turkish Business World, an English-language business magazine. As a Turkish-American with moderate Turkish language skills, she claims she can fool tourists but not taxi drivers! Originally from Arizona, Denise now lives in Northern Kentucky with her husband.
Her debut novel, Istanbul Dreaming, is forthcoming from She Writes Press on September 29, 2026 and is currently available for preorder.
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