RÜYA HÜSEYİNOĞLU

İzmir- Recently, in the back streets of Alsancak’s Cyprus Martyrs Street, known as the heart of İzmir province, quite original shops have been opened. The number of these places is increasing day by day. And many of the owners of these places are women. You can also see newly opened bookstores on these streets. One of these bookshops is Tante Rosa Bookstore. We talked to Ayla Uçar, owner of the bookstore, about how she decided to open “take crazy steps “the bookstore.

She realized her dream by moving to Izmir

Ayla was born in 1987 and she has worked in the bookselling business for a long time. Before, she worked as a waiter in Ankara and İstanbul for a while. But she always wanted to open a bookstore. She moved to İzmir three years ago to realize her dream. And she managed to open her bookstore despite difficult conditions caused by the pandemic.

“I always wanted to open a bookstore. But my life conditions didn’t allow me to follow my dream. While I was living in Ankara, I saw Dost Bookstore and I became interested in working in a bookstore. It looked so beautiful and all of us wanted to work there. Since the employees had been there for years, there was not much space for us. And I worked as a waiter and clown for a while. Then I moved to İstanbul and lived there. First, I worked as a manager in a bookstore. I also worked in the publishing business there. It was a really difficult job; bosses, requests, numbers, sales, demands... I worked in that business for a long time. When I was 30 years old, I said goodbye to all of them and moved to İzmir. I have lived in İzmir for three years.

In İzmir, she decided to follow her dream and spent all of her money to open Tante Rosa Bookstore.

“I noticed the lack of bookstore in İzmir. I started working on opening a more "normal" new generation bookstore. I tried to form a bookstore where people can find different books. When I rent the store, I had 100 Turkish Lira left in my pocket. I just trusted myself. We signed the rental contract at the beginning of September. Our renovation process still continues. Many negative factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the earthquake that hit İzmir affected us. We try to keep our business despite the lockdown measures. Actually, it is not easy, we don’t have any support. For this reason, we struggle alone. The system is starting to eliminate you. Yes, we are shopkeepers, but how can we manage to survive?”

“People need to dream”

Ayla is very hopeful about the future of the bookstore despite everything. She thinks people need to dream in their homes more than ever.

“More books have always been sold more during wars. People need to dream in their homes. They need to change, to remember something. Unfortunately, we are not going through a very normal process. It is only necessary to resist what the government and the sector impose on us. If people read books during the lockdown, we can talk about another period of this country. We also can encourage other people.”