Yiğitcan Erdoğan
Yiğitcan Erdoğan started working professionally as a writer at the age of 16 for a video game magazine. After working in hobby journalism for more than a decade, he debuted his first fictional work; the audio drama Zamanaltı, in 2019. Outside of literature, he’s also known for his panel shows both online and on stage.
Recently, I was talking with my dear friend Kubi Öztürk about HAFTW’s album “Unknown Territories,” whose story we will encounter again on these Dolmusch pages. To describe what he felt at that moment about making this album, Kubi used this metaphor: being the archaeologist of oneself.
At this point, I stopped, excitedly hit my friend’s arm, and shouted my enthusiasm for this statement at a decibel I sadly admit Berlin’s streets generally regard with concern — because I was feeling something very similar about what I was working on at the time. I’m talking here about Büyük Tufan (The Great Flood).
Büyük Tufan began its life as an idea in late 2020. My first radio play, Zamanaltı, which I wrote and produced, was nearing its end, and I was at the time staying at the home of my dear friend İlkin Taşdelen in Çayyolu, Ankara. Their apartment on the fifth floor had a beautiful city view overlooking the lined-up apartment buildings of this Ankaran suburb. Suddenly, it started raining. I remember holding a drink in my hand, though I can’t say for sure whether I’ve added that detail to this memory later. The one thing I am certain of is this: as the rain started and I gazed out at the view, I found myself thinking: What if this rain never stops?
Büyük Tufan grew from this simple thought and first collided with the spirit of the times. In the heart of the pandemic, I had been thinking for a while that post-apocalyptic literature needed an update. The genre, seen in different media through works like Mad Max, The Walking Dead, The Road, and The Last of Us, often carries a distinctive pattern hidden in its very name: post-apocalypse.
In these types of stories, the main narrative begins after the apocalypse itself has occurred. Often, the story opens with a brief glimpse of life before the disaster, then jumps forward in time to show the audience a society radically transformed by the catastrophe — a stark contrast is drawn. Yet very few stories actually depict the time that is skipped over — the apocalypse itself.
The pandemic, however, showed us that apocalypses are not singular, clearly defined events that separate “before” and “after” like milestones. Apocalypses are long, drawn-out processes — and as the pandemic taught us, those processes themselves are often fascinating and worth telling.
The idea of never-ending rain, combined with the inspiration I felt while looking out from a window in Central Anatolia, naturally led me to humanity’s most enduring apocalyptic motif. Every civilization that ever lived in and around Anatolia has had some version of a Great Flood story — many historians today believe these stories refer to the breaching of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. And of course, given the global climate crisis the world is currently facing, the possibility of living through another Great Flood on a massive scale no longer seems far-fetched.
The theme settled on this foundation. If another Great Flood were to happen, there would be two options: either humanity would stay on this world or leave it behind to start anew on another planet. The story began to take shape through two main characters who make these opposing choices, building a thematic dialectic around the ideas of departure and staying. This, in turn, allowed me to connect to the story on a deeply personal level — because I, too, had to confront my own decision to leave Turkey and my tendency to leave places only when it suited me. Büyük Tufan gave me the space to explore these inner conflicts, and as the story found its own rhythm, it also encountered new allegories.
The first script for Büyük Tufan was written in January 2021, the first episode was recorded in December 2021, and it met its audience at the start of 2022. In the summer of 2024, its final episode, The Day After Tomorrow, aired, bringing its 61-episode run to an end. And now, it is being rewritten and reread as a serialized novel, published week by week.
This process makes me feel, in Kubi’s words, like the archaeologist of myself.
I don’t feel any particular excitement about Büyük Tufan at this point. I long ago found the answers to the questions I asked myself between its lines, and I’ve already tried most of the things I wanted to experiment with artistically. Setting aside my childish belief that one must write a novel to truly call themselves a writer, I don’t even feel an emotional reason to keep digging into this story. Excavating the temple I built a thousand years ago and which was subsequently buried under the earth doesn’t excite me — because I still remember that buried temple all too clearly.
But I do it because the work demands it.
I could list other reasons: I’m creating a slow but steady income stream through this serialized novel; I feel a sense of duty to the readers who buy and follow it weekly; I hope that one day it will be published in print… But at the end of the day, they all lead to the same conclusion. When Büyük Tufan ended as a radio play, I knew I would turn it into a novel — because the work clearly demanded it even then. And at this point in the process, the diminishing excitement no longer matters. Because every artist around the world knows that starting art is not the hard part.
The real difficulty lies in finishing it.
Yiğitcan Erdoğan
@beggarandchooser
Published Works (in Turkish)
Büyük Tufan Visual Design: İlkin Taşdelen
