Executioner’s Graveyard

An old graveyard, left forgotten in one of the oldest cemeteries in Istanbul… It belonged to the executioners who lived during the Ottoman era…

Four men whose fates come together through crime and innocence…

Isa, Hamit, Lutfu and Fuat…

A psychological thriller from Asli E. Perker…

“The graveyard stones were blank like last night when he saw them. He shuddered unexpectedly, again, as he did previous night. A blank graveyard stone was like a child without a face. He didn’t know why, but he choked. It was the feeling of being abandoned. He felt sorry for not himself but for these people who lay there, abandoned.”

Isa is a graveyard digger with one leg shorter than the other. The only trouble he has with this is not being able to kill his cigarette butt with the tip of his shoe. His only friend in Istanbul, where he’d immigrated, is Hamit, who brings the bodies of people he kills.

Hamit is one of the best hitmen in the underground world. He has a reputation of being slick, traceless. At his older age though, he is not happy with his farsightedness, the ever changing world and technological developments. He complains that he cannot take care of business the old fashioned way. He has only one close relative in his lonely life, his nephew, Lutfu.

Lutfu is a young guy who wants to move quickly within the underground world. He is charming, that’s for sure, everybody he meets loves him. He definitely has more friends than Fuat, who studies math at the college where Lutfu deals drugs.

Fuat is a loner. However he saves Lutfu from being busted by the campus security with the help of his analytical mind one day. It is not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but when Fuat finds himself in a predicament one day and calls Lutfu, the fate of these four men intermingle.

Perker goes deep into human psychology in The Executioner’s Graveyard and questions the grounds for crime in everybody’s life. In a world where all believe in their own innocence, she lays the concepts of crime and innocence on the table and work on them with the rigor of a surgeon and a literary sensibility.

“When he woke up he didn’t know who was the kid in his dream, but he understood very well that it was time to leave here. His time was up, that was for sure. Like a glass of water brimming over or a balloon being blown up too much only to pop up, his time was up. However there was something stopping him. Even though he didn’t know exactly what it was, he sensed that he had one last mission before he left. He was going to wait. He was going to wait till that mission found him, despite all the nightmares and spirits calling out for him. Then he was going to dig a hole in his mind and bury Civili.”

“That’s why he understood Hamit’s visits more or less. He was trying to hold on to the last pieces of a love lost, but the visits were going to get less and less and one day they would end. If nothing else, Isa had learned one thing in this cemetery: How easy it was to forget.”

“When Hamit was able to stand up from the ground a couple of hours later, every piece of emotion he had fell on the ground with the soil that had stuck on the knees of his pants. He wasn’t going to give up on those spots easily at the end of the night, he was going to hug them as he laid on the bed and smell them one last time before he got rid of the pants. He wished the grief dawned on him like the darkness of the night: cool; unfortunately it had dawned on him like the warmest summer day: humid, heavy and as bright as to make him blind.”

“He knew from the days he’d spent in his village: The wheel of gossip turned day and night, among men and women, everybody had something to say about everybody else…”