In Turkey, he taught Ottoman language and literature at a university. Spoken by peoples of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkish was heavily influenced by travel and multiculturalism. After all, the Ottoman Empire sat at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. During the peak of Ottoman rule, words of foreign origin outnumbered native Turkish words: Arabic and Persian loanwords comprise up to 88% of the vocabulary in Ottoman literature.

Alpsoy has a deep affinity for the language. He recites Ottoman poetry with palpable feeling, the ancient cadences contrasting with the blare of Greek TV. He taught this poem in classrooms before Turkey’s dictator imprisoned upwards of 40,000 people as political enemies, including Alpsoy. “Being just an ordinary person was enough to go through what I’ve lived. The fact that your only crime against the State is having speeding tickets doesn’t change this situation,” says Alpsoy.

Alpsoy’s story coincides with Turkey’s descent from a free and democratic country to an authoritarian regime. The story begins on July 15, 2016, the day a would-be coup was enacted against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey. According to official Turkish pronouncements, while Erdoğan and his family were vacationing in the southern seaside resort town of Marmaris, political opponents tried to capture and kill him. However, the attempt was quelled. “I was happy about it because I would prefer even the worst democratic governance to a coup,” says Alpsoy.

Afterwards, the coup was used as an excuse to vilify whole classes of people. Those who did not favor Erdoğan as a politician were accused of being terrorists. People with even a passing association with the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government claimed was responsible for the coup, were rounded up as criminals. A moderate Islamic practice that follows principals of volunteerism, social service, and secular political rule, the Gülen movement was begun by Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, who currently lives in Pennsylvania in the United States. The Turkish government has not produced any evidence that Gülen was responsible for the coup, and the US government has refused to extradite him back to Turkey.

Regardless of the lack of evidence, emergency decrees called Kanun hükmünde kararname (KHK) were issued in Turkey, and laws that normally required parliamentary approval came into force by prime ministerial decree. People were fired from their jobs — and arrested, tortured, and even murdered. Some were journalists and editors from an ensuing media purge. In March 2016, for example, the government seized control of Zaman, a newspaper that had been critical of Erdoğan and his party. The fact that Zaman — and other media outlets like it — had gained extensive readership and international popularity did not help save it.

Many more of those who lost their jobs were academics. 6,070 academics were dismissed from state institutions due to KHK decrees, and 2,808 more lost their jobs with the closure of 15 private universities. Following the coup, a total of 8,878 academics were dismissed — nearly 15% of the academics then working in Turkey.

At the time, Alpsoy was working as a lecturer at a university in the small northern port city of Zonguldak while writing his doctoral dissertation. 13 days after the coup, his phone rang — a summons from the Dean’s Office. “Of course, I was very scared,” says Alpsoy. The Dean, says Alpsoy, “was a really kind man. He was at a loss for words and couldn’t tell me the truth.” With no other excuses to fall back on, the Dean brought up the fact that Alpsoy was doing a doctorate at Fatih University — ostensibly, his acceptance to this other university was the reason he was going to be fired on the spot. Alpsoy’s office was locked, and all his belongings and books were confiscated.

At first, it wasn’t too terrible. Alpsoy received his salary for three months and took a mini-vacation. On October 29, however, he saw his name on the expulsion list in the newspaper. Here, says Alpsoy, his “first banishment began” — he was excluded from society, barred from traveling abroad. “From that day on, no one could employ me. I became a criminal person, to whom people turn their backs.”

At the time, Alpsoy thought that surely, sooner or later, the government would understand that he was innocent and correct their mistake. After all, the night of the coup, he’d been playing guitar and drinking beer, utterly oblivious to the events unfolding elsewhere. So, eventually, he would resume his work and continue his PhD studies. “Until then, I just needed to wait and do something useful.” This illusion was shattered in April 2017 when he was arrested on terrorism charges. Detention and interrogation, he says, were awful. “It was the worst experience to have and it is still hard for me to even talk about.”

Finally, he appeared in court, which is where he first learned what he was accused of. The charges stated he had associated with Gülen-influenced institutions: he’d worked at a certain state-recognized institute as a teacher back in 2006; he’d worked for Zaman newspaper for six months a few years prior, where he’d penned unfavorable articles about Erdoğan; he’d undergone vaguely “suspicious” travel; he’d used a chat program called ByLock, then available on Apple Store and Google Play.

“I didn’t know how to reply to these assertions,” says Alpsoy. “Besides, there wasn’t anyone listening to me. I faltered a bit and was able to say, ‘Sir, I can’t see anything criminal about this; they were all legal institutions when I was working for them.’”

The judge stood up and said, “All right, arrest this guy.” That was his last statement before Alpsoy was placed in the prison system. “I knew prisons solely from American movies,” said Alpsoy. He thought there would be a big yard to play sports in and a cafeteria, but the reality was quite different. For five months and 12 days, he was detained in a small ward designed for seven or eight prisoners along with 27 other men. The wards were all overflowing with political prisoners, and it was up to them to manage their lives in confinement. “I stayed in a very orderly ward, much like a small state. We solved all our problems democratically,” says Alpsoy. They prepared their own food and arranged how they slept. The wards were still outfitted for seven or so prisoners, with one dull butter knife for cutting food to be shared among everyone. They also had a single brush without a handle they all shared. When a former judge was transferred to their ward as a prisoner, he started writing petitions to get a brush handle and a second butter knife — 25 petitions in total. He was eventually successful. A prison guard came in and threw a brush handle at him.

Alpsoy read approximately 60 books during his confinement and spent a lot of time thinking. “My body was imprisoned but my imagination and soul were free.” He started to lose his sense of reality, though, he says. Once, when he was overwhelmed, he called over the guardian and asked, “I wonder, Officer, do you have the keys of this place? We could be anywhere in the world.” After every bad incident, he told himself, “This is the worst thing that has happened to you. I mean, it can’t get worse.” At first, he says, “it was really hard, but later, I got used to it. Most of all, you miss soil and nature when you’re in prison.”

Alpsoy briefly went back to court. “My case file was complicated. I did not even receive my indictment,” he says. Before the hearing, he stayed in a cell on the basement floor. You could hear the cries and screams of women, he says; children wailing because of hunger. “While I was walking through the corridor with lots of soldiers and police officers, I saw many children and women in cells,” he says. The women and their children were members of Gülen. “There are still thousands of them in prison. Children who were punished along with their mothers by the government,” says Alpsoy. “People from different backgrounds: teachers, housewives, doctors, journalists, and many other professionals.”

When he got out of prison, he was still a convict, and he worked for his cousin’s construction company. “At all costs, he looked out for me,” says Alpsoy. “To work in construction was heavy and backbreaking. Additionally, I was scared of people.”

He was afraid due to the political climate. “There is a group of people in Turkey who could be easily manipulated. The politicians know how to do it, especially by using religious arguments. It doesn’t matter which religion it is. A politician making policy while holding the Quran in his hand has a target group, for sure. No matter how educated they are, some people got manipulated because of religious issues.” Because of this, he was afraid to identify himself or to meet new people at work. “When you search my name, you would see the news about my arrest. My situation could not be called living anymore. Nevertheless, I survived and continued to live,” he says.

Alpsoy continued to appear in court hearings, and, every time, he was afraid he’d be re-arrested. He made a decision: he was going to flee Turkey, and no longer be part of his country’s hunt for political opponents. “Either I was going to be a victim of this witch-hunt, or turn over a new page in my life,” he says. “I don’t feel any regret, but I saw many regretful people on the way here. That’s why it is a difficult decision to make. Going back is almost impossible.”