The Woman of Three Hundred Rallies: Telling Gülsen Tuncer to Young Comrades

Dear Young Comrades,

Look closely at this figure: three hundred.

More than three hundred rallies, marches and mass demonstrations. The same woman set the stage, wrote the running order, held the microphone. Assistant director on thirty-seven films. Roles in nearly eighty films and series. And a single part covering all of it: Aunt Arsen of Aşk-ı Memnu.

Gülsen Tuncer died on Thursday 17 September 2026, in İstinye, at eighty-one. Almost every paper that ran the news put "Aunt Arsen" in the headline. Not wrong; but incomplete. As if a life had begun in 2008 and been spent on a series set. Yet when she arrived on those sets she was sixty-three, and behind her stood another forty-year record: Dolmabahçe, Bloody Sunday, the Progressive Women's Association, the squares, the file that came to the door on the morning of 12 September.

This piece was written to tell that record. Dear young comrades, you may not know Gülsen Tuncer; if you do, you most likely know her as the aunt of a mansion. Let us introduce her to you in another way as well: as the woman who built the stage of the class movement in Turkey.

The piece has three questions:

Who was this woman, and what did she choose?
How does the person we call an "intellectual" stand on the class's side; does being an artist make this easier, or harder?
What of her life remains for today — and what should not remain?

Chronology: A Life from Adana to Şişli Mosque

First let us set the dates side by side. Dates tell best where a person stood.

Year	What happened
20 October 1945	Born in Adana.
1960s	İstanbul Girls' High School, then İstanbul Tarhan College; she took lessons from Yıldız Kenter and Melih Cevdet Anday. She studied in the Theatre Department of the İstanbul Municipal Conservatoire; among her teachers were Ayla and Beklan Algan.
1960s	She joined the student movement in TMTF (the National Student Federation of Turkey).
1968	She stepped onto the professional stage: Zilli Zarife at the Gülriz Sururi–Engin Cezzar Theatre. The same year, according to Ferit İlsever's account, she was in the Dolmabahçe action against the Sixth Fleet.
1969	16 February, Bloody Sunday: she was among those marching in Taksim "against imperialism" when the march was attacked.
Conservatoire years	With Ertuğ Koruyan, Deniz Türkali and Mustafa Alabora she founded Grup 6 Theatre.
1970s	Member of the Progressive Women's Association (İKD). She began stage-directing and presenting rallies and mass demonstrations; by the end of her life this number would pass three hundred. She is counted a pioneer of scripted running orders and slide use on the rally stage in Turkey.
1973–1977	Cultural adviser to İstanbul Mayor Ahmet İsvan.
12 September 1980	After the coup a case was opened against her; she faced the threat of detention. Under that threat she married the director Engin Ayça, with whom she had long been together: if she went to prison, the only person who could visit would be the "legal spouse."
1980s–90s	Cinema's most productive years: At (1982, Ali Özgentürk), Dağınık Yatak (1984), Asılacak Kadın (1986), Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? (1986), Gramofon Avrat (1987), Afife Jale (1987), Karartma Geceleri (1990, Yusuf Kurçenli), Berdel (1990, Atıf Yılmaz), Soğuktu ve Yağmur Çiseliyordu (1990, Engin Ayça), Cadı Ağacı (1994), Solgun Bir Sarı Gül (1996).
1989 / 1991	Best Supporting Actress awards at the Ankara Film Festival and Antalya Golden Orange.
1980s–2000s	Two terms each on the boards of SODER, TODER and SİNE-SEN; two terms on the board of the FİLM-SAN Foundation, and vice-chair. Acting and stage-aesthetics classes at the ITU Conservatoire, TÜRSAK and the Sadri Alışık Cultural Centre.
2008–2010	Aunt Arsen in Aşk-ı Memnu. Best Supporting Actress at the 2008 Sadri Alışık Awards.
2010	She took part in a documentary on the Tekel workers' resistance in Ankara.
2010s	Independent candidacies for parliament and for mayor of Beyoğlu; İstanbul Film Festival Honour Award; Uçan Süpürge Bilge Olgaç Achievement Award.
17 September 2026	She left us while under treatment for a brain tumour. On 20 September she was taken from Şişli Mosque and buried at Merkez Efendi Kozlu Cemetery. The family asked for donations to education and aid organisations instead of wreaths.

Look at the table once more. The stage begins in 1968; the rally stage begins in 1968 as well. These two lines never parted. That is the heart of the matter.

Who Is an Intellectual: Three Conditions of Standing on the Class's Side

We spend the word "intellectual" cheaply. We call an intellectual everyone with a diploma, everyone who speaks on television, everyone who writes a book. The Marxist tradition uses this word more narrowly and more heavily.

Recall Gramsci's distinction: every class produces its own intellectuals. The bourgeoisie has its intellectual: the one who makes the class's order appear reasonable, who legitimises it, who says "there is no other way." The working class has its intellectual too: the one who puts the class's own experience into language, who gives that experience form, who organises it. The person Gramsci called an "organic intellectual" does not speak from a university chair but from inside the class's own movement. The place of speaking may be a square, a stage, a union hall.

Looked at by this measure, three conditions of being an intellectual come into view:

First, knowledge. The intellectual will first know their craft. Gülsen Tuncer's craft was the stage. She had passed through the school of Kenter, Algan, Sururi–Cezzar; she had been assistant director on thirty-seven films; she had taught acting, stage aesthetics and communication for forty years. Carrying a script and slides onto the rally stage was not an "idea"; it was the carrying of a craft into the square. Someone who knows the stage knows that the square is a stage as well, and that if that stage is badly built the crowd will scatter.

Second, the side. Knowledge alone does not make an intellectual; what makes one is for whom you use the knowledge. Standing at Dolmabahçe against the Sixth Fleet in 1968, marching on Bloody Sunday in 1969, joining the İKD in the 1970s, building the stage of three hundred rallies: these are not the artist's "sensibility"; they are a side. A side is chosen and its price is paid. We told above how that price came to the door on 12 September.

Third, continuity. In Turkey we know many people who stood on the left before 1980 and "matured" after 1980. The greatest success of 12 September is not torture; it is the silent transformation that followed torture: yesterday's revolutionary becoming today's advertising person, yesterday's unionist becoming today's consultant. Gülsen Tuncer was in Karartma Geceleri in 1990, in the Tekel resistance documentary in 2010, and in the squares again in later years. Continuity itself is a stance.

An intellectual is a person who puts their knowledge at the service of the class and does this not for a season but for a lifetime. The rest are people with a profession.

The Artist and Class: Does It Make It Easier, or Harder?

Now to the second question. Does being an artist make it easier to stand on the class's side?

The common view says "it makes it easier": the artist is sensitive, their voice is heard, they move the crowd. This view is wrong. Being an artist makes it harder to stand on the class's side; because the artist's product is sold on the market, and the market punishes the artist who has a side.

The history of Turkish cinema in the 1970s is the proof of this. Yeşilçam was a factory; a factory that shot three hundred films a year, that turned on the producer's money, that marketed the actor as a "star." Those who built class cinema inside that factory, Yılmaz Güney first among them, always paid a price. We told this in From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class and in From Tatar Ramazan to Class Cinema — Kadir İnanır's Class and Dialectical Legacy. Gülsen Tuncer paid this price in the same factory, in the same years, from a position that was not the lead. Not being the lead matters: the star has power, can bargain. The supporting actor has none; they pass from set to set, from producer to producer; being known as "political" means unemployment directly.

What Gülsen Tuncer did in order to hold on in Yeşilçam is instructive: she was not only an actor. She became an assistant director, wrote dialogue, wrote lyrics, worked in décor and production. Nearly eighty roles; but behind them, thirty-seven films' worth of set labour. She was a cinema worker and she looked at herself that way. In interviews it is reported that she did not accept that famous curtain separating the artist from the worker: she described herself as an employee with social insurance. Her board memberships at SİNE-SEN, SODER, TODER, FİLM-SAN are the institutional counterpart of this: not organising as an artist, organising as an art worker.

A class reading

From here a lesson for young comrades. Class stance in the field of art appears in two forms:

First, in the content of the product: a film that tells class, a play that tells the worker, a song that tells the square. This is necessary but not enough. A film whose content is of class, if its set runs on class exploitation, is an example not of class cinema but of class subject-matter.

Second, in the relation of production: who is the worker of the set, how many hours do they work, have they insurance, have they a union? Gülsen Tuncer's life is the life of a struggle in this second field. In a country where sixteen-hour days on series sets are still counted "normal," where the death of a set worker is still passed off as an "accident," measure in this way the worth of a woman who sat on a cinema union board in the 1980s.

Common narrative	Class reading
"She was a sensitive artist; she was not indifferent to social events."	Not an artist, an art worker; she took a side and paid the price.
"We have lost Aunt Arsen of Aşk-ı Memnu."	Aunt Arsen was a role that came at sixty-three; forty years of the life were spent in the squares.
"She had an interest in politics as well."	She was the stage director and presenter of three hundred rallies; politics was not an "interest"; it was one of her main jobs.
"She had hard days after 12 September."	The coup came to the door; she had to plan even her marriage around prison visiting rights.
"She was attached to Republican values."	True; but she defended those values in 1968 against the Sixth Fleet, in 1969 against the attackers of Bloody Sunday, in 1977 in the squares against capital. What is decisive is not the name of the value but against whom it is defended.

The Stage of the Square: The Meaning of Three Hundred Rallies

Let us stay a little longer on the phrase three hundred rallies. Because this figure is not an anecdote; it is a form of labour.

A rally does not happen of itself. A platform is built, the sound system arrives, the speakers' order is written, when the crowd will march and when it will stop is set, when the slogan will be called and when it will be cut is calculated. This is stage work, and if it is done badly the crowd tires, scatters, does not come to the next rally. In the Turkey of the 1970s this work was mostly done "as best one could." What Gülsen Tuncer did was to carry stage craft into the square: a scripted running order, timing, visual material, slides. She is one of the pioneers in Turkey of the LED screen you see at every rally today, of the visual sequence prepared in advance, of the minute-by-minute programme in the presenter's hand.

Why are we telling this? Because in "Event Organizing and Comradeship" Guide Is Out we said exactly this: amateurism is not carelessness; there is no amateur of taking care and no professional of taking care. Gülsen Tuncer is the 1970s embodiment of this principle. A woman who knew the stage carried what she knew onto the class's square and built that square with care. Dear young comrades, building the stage of a mass demonstration is not "back-room work"; it is the form in which the class shows itself to the public. Whoever belittles this work belittles the class's visibility.

The square is a stage; whoever builds it is the one who makes the crowd speak. If those who know how to build the stage are not on the class's side, others will build the stage.

12 September and a Decision to Marry

A detail Şükran Soner recounts in her piece in Cumhuriyet tells how 12 September worked into everyday life better than any statistic.

Gülsen Tuncer and Engin Ayça had been together for years. Both were on the left, but from different veins: Tuncer was an İKD member, on the line close to the Soviets of the period; Ayça stood close to the Chinese revolution and to Maoist thought. According to what Soner wrote, Tuncer turned down Ayça's proposal of marriage for a long time; the reason was not a lack of love but the worry of how her comrades in the İKD would take her marrying a "Maoist." In the left of the 1970s this worry was real; it shows that the split entered as far as people's homes.

Then 12 September came. A case was opened against Tuncer; detention came onto the agenda. Ayça noticed something: without being the legal spouse he would not be able to visit in prison. He said this. And two people, who for years had put off the marriage with "which line are you on," made it when the coup came to the door.

A class reading

There are two lessons in this story.

The first concerns the mechanics of 12 September. The coup did not only detain people; it made them build their lives around the possibility of detention. The time of marriage, the time of a child, the place of the house, the choice of a profession: all of it was rearranged according to the question "what if I am taken inside." In 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup we named this "the unsettled account"; here is the form of that unsettled account inside a home.

The second concerns the split on the left. That a woman put off a marriage decision for years with "what will the comrades say" shows how far the left of the 1970s stood from one another. When the coup came, what closed this distance was not a theory but a prison visiting list. Dear young comrades, weigh your splits of today against this story. Is the line that divides you thick enough to divide you on the coup's prison list as well?

Yeşilçam's Woman Worker: What Do the Roles Tell?

Let us look at her filmography with a class eye; because which films an actor is in, which directors call her, is a sign of a choice.

At (1982, Ali Özgentürk): immediately after 12 September, the story of a father and son who migrate to İstanbul; street selling, homelessness, the city's poor. Dağınık Yatak (1984) and Asılacak Kadın (1986): productions that tell how a woman's body and labour are bought and sold in the male-dominated order, belittled in the period as "women's films" but in fact questioning the intersection of class and gender. Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne? (1986): a peasant woman raped, and her helplessness before the law. Gramofon Avrat (1987): from a story by Sabahattin Ali, a woman's price in Anatolia. Karartma Geceleri (1990, Yusuf Kurçenli): from Rıfat Ilgaz's novel, a poet's life on the run under martial law in İstanbul in the years of the Second World War; that is, censorship, repression, the intellectual. Berdel (1990, Atıf Yılmaz): a custom in which the woman is exchanged. Soğuktu ve Yağmur Çiseliyordu (1990, Engin Ayça).

There is no coincidence in this list. The social line of Turkish cinema in the 1980s and 1990s — the line of Özgentürk, Kurçenli, Yılmaz, Duru, Akad — called Gülsen Tuncer again and again. For a supporting actor this does not mean "she found work"; it means "who she was was known." Social cinema took onto its set an actor who stood on its own side. Because she was the same person on the stage and off the set.

You can look at Aunt Arsen in Aşk-ı Memnu with this eye as well. In Halit Ziya's mansion, in a family drama turning around property and inheritance, a woman holding the scene with a grave, measured, never-raised voice. That weight filling the screen is the forty-year craft of a sixty-three-year-old stage worker. The person millions loved as "aunt" was in fact the voice of a presenter who had held the microphone in the squares for forty years. No one knew this; and that, already, is exactly the point.

The Last Years: It Is Necessary to Speak Openly

The easiest thing in a memorial piece is to justify everything the dead person did. This blog does not do that; in From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class we set the principle: an artist is neither a saint nor a villain. The contribution is a contribution, the error is an error; the two are told together.

In Gülsen Tuncer's last fifteen years her political position approached the nationalist line. In the Aydınlık piece published after her death it is reported that she contributed to the Patriotic Party's election manifesto before the 2015 elections; Doğu Perinçek and Ferit İlsever remember her as a name from their own circles. That in the 2010s she took part in actions against the closing of military schools and in solidarity demonstrations with detained officers is also in the record.

There is no point in hiding this; on the contrary, there is something that needs to be understood. That a woman who stood in the İKD ranks close to the TKP in the 1970s approached the Patriotic Party in the 2010s is not an individual "deviation"; it is a typical example of the path a section of the Turkish left followed: opposition to imperialism is right; but when you take the class out of being the subject of that opposition and put in its place "the nation" and a wing of the state apparatus, anti-imperialism detaches from class struggle and is spliced onto the politics of a faction of the army. That the woman who marched against the Sixth Fleet on Bloody Sunday came, forty years later, to a position of defending the cadres of the state, not of the class, as "national," is this detachment's projection onto a person.

We do not share this line and we write that plainly. But we also write this: this choice does not erase her 1968, her 1969, her İKD, her three hundred rallies, her labour in the cinema union. To judge a life by a single period of it is to repeat, in reverse, what 12 September did to people. We acknowledge the contribution; we do not hide the criticism. Dear young comrades, love "your elders" this way: with your eyes open.

What Is Being Covered Over?

Let us look at the death notices once more. What was written, what was not?

What was written: Aunt Arsen, her age, a brain tumour, the funeral programme, condolences from the cast of Aşk-ı Memnu.

What was not written: the İKD. Bloody Sunday. The 12 September case. SİNE-SEN. Three hundred rallies. The Tekel resistance documentary.

This is not a coincidence; it is an operation. In Turkey an artist's death is an opportunity for the artist's class record to be erased. The dead person becomes "everyone's"; and to be "everyone's," they are first told as if they had never stood on anyone's side. When Yılmaz Güney died he was remembered under the headline "Ugly King"; the class content of Yol and Sürü was set aside. When Gülsen Tuncer died she was remembered under the headline "Aunt Arsen"; 1968, 1980, 2010 were set aside. The same operation, forty years apart.

The operation has another face. The nationalist press wrote her onto its own side as well: "Republican values," "national culture," "independence." These are not the wrong words; but when you take the İKD, the union, the class out of these words, what remains is an artist waving the state's flag. That too is the record being erased in another form. On one side the magazines take "the aunt," on the other nationalism takes "the patriot"; in the middle the woman who built the class's stage is not left.

We take that woman. This piece exists for that.

Concrete Tasks

Young comrades, a memorial piece does not end only in grief. The work that falls to you from Gülsen Tuncer's life is this:

Read an artist's death notice with a class eye. Which period is told in the news, which period is silenced? You write the silenced period; on social media, on your blog, in the union bulletin. Let the record not be erased.
Learn to build the stage. Building the stage of a rally, a press statement, a panel is political work. Sound, running order, timing, visuals. Do not leave this as "someone is handling it"; as comrades who know this work grow fewer, others will build the stage.
If you are an artist, organise as an art worker. Actor, set worker, musician, designer: whatever the union's name, do not put the identity of "artist" in front of the identity of worker. Remember Gülsen Tuncer's years in SİNE-SEN.
Bring the working conditions on series sets onto the agenda. Sixteen hours a day, uninsured extras, "accidents" that end in death. The millions who loved Aunt Arsen do not know how many hours that set's worker worked. Make it so that they know.
Record how 12 September worked into everyday life. Ask your elders: what did the coup change in your house? Marriage, work, home, children. Add a testimony to the oral-history call of 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup.
Watch social cinema, but look at its set as well. At, Karartma Geceleri, Asılacak Kadın, Berdel. Watch the film; then find out who shot it, under what conditions.
Love your elders with your eyes open. To acknowledge an artist's contribution is not to approve their later choices. Hiding the criticism is not respect; it is belittlement.
Take the left's splits seriously, but do not exaggerate them. The line-difference that put off a marriage decision for years melted, when the coup came, on a visiting list. Look at your own splits by this measure.
Learn the history of women's organising. The Progressive Women's Association, founded in 1975, organised tens of thousands of women in four years and was shut by martial law in 1979, before 12 September had even come. Make the link between today's women's organising and this history.
Be the presenter of your own square. Learn to hold the microphone, to address the crowd, to cut the slogan on time. If this craft is lost the class falls silent.

Dear Young Comrades,

In the last years of her life Gülsen Tuncer had lost the ability to speak and to write; the illness took her voice first. Think what this means for a woman who held a microphone for forty years.

But a voice does not stand only in one person's throat. On the stages she built, others speak today; in the classes she taught, others act today; in the unions she belonged to, others organise today. An intellectual's worth is measured not by how many roles they leave when they die, but by how many people they enabled to join the class's voice.