BUĞDA
We were introduced to Buğda through her husband, a groundbreaking presenter/producer/promoter of jazz and world music in Istanbul for over 30 years. We interviewed Buğda at her office in a wealthy neighborhood of Istanbul, where she runs her private psychotherapy practice. Buğda invited us into her office, her “sacred place” as she referred to it, and we had a wonderful conversation with her in English.
Buğda embodies a gentle elegance and is a soft, thoughtful speaker. Born in Ankara, she moved to Istanbul for Graduate studies in Psychology, got married, had children and has been working for 10 years as a psychotherapist. She spoke to us about her childhood, growing up with a working mother who married early, divorced and mostly raised Buğda on her own.
She expressed that many people in Turkey have a complex cultural identity—her mother had Kurdish origins and her father was Rumeli, with her father’s mother coming from Hungary and her father’s father most likely coming from the Aegean region. Her grandfathers had both come to Ankara during the formation of the Republic under Atatürk, and Buğda was raised in a family that embraced many of the values of that era, including fine art, classical music, athletics.
As she grew older, Buğda became more interested in learning about her mother’s heritage, and her grandmother always would tell her that they were descendants of Bedirhan Paşa. As her grandmother aged, she suffered from dementia, and would tell her bits and pieces about her story. Her dementia progressed to Alzheimer’s, and she lost her ability to speak Turkish, but began speaking in a language unintelligible to the rest of the family. This provoked a curiosity in Buğda to learn more about her Kurdish ancestry.
Buğda shared with us that in the 1920s Atatürk had traveled to Konya, and was visiting the father of her grandmother when one of Atatürk’s men noticed her grandmother playing in the yard, and asked for her in marriage. Her grandmother became his official wife, and moved to Van with him. One day, around 1925, her husband told her they were going for a horse ride, but brought all his gold and all the riches he could carry. They rode to Iran, and ended up living in Tehran for about ten years. In Tehran, she gave birth to her first two daughters. With the help of a visiting Turkish official, Buğda’s grandmother returned to Istanbul alone with her two daughters and made a new beginning, working as a tailor.
When we asked Buğda what she thought about generational trauma, she preferred to focus on how things improve over generations, and note that each mother aims to do things a bit better using the resources they have found. She feels that she has inherited an adaptability and a flexibility from the women in her family.
As a psychotherapist working in Turkey, Buğda experiences challenges from the lack of standards and regulation within her field. Her father was a psychiatrist and his third wife was a clinical psychologist, and her brother is also a psychotherapist, so there is a history and a tradition within her family of working in this field.
Buğda described her spirituality as experiential and intuitive, as she grew up in a secular family and is not a religious person. For her, home is where the kids are, where her kitchen is, her study. She used to think that home could be anywhere or anything, that she carried it inside herself, but now the definition of home includes Istanbul, and Turkey as a whole—that she feels more and more connected to Turkey, and the parts of it where she has lived have incredible meaning to her.
