Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü

Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü was published in book form in 1961. The novel takes the form of Hayri İrdal's memoirs, but Hayri begins his story after much of what he describes has already ended. The Institute is being liquidated, and its founder, Halit Ayarcı, has died in a car accident only a few weeks earlier. Hayri is writing about a world that has already become part of his past.

This gives the novel an unusual relationship with time from the beginning. We watch the Institute grow while knowing that it will disappear. We also depend on Hayri to reconstruct events that happened years earlier. A book about setting clocks is told by a man trying to put his own past in order.

Hayri İrdal and Memory

Hayri presents himself as a sincere narrator, although his idea of sincerity is complicated. 

Early in the novel, he explains that writing about a life requires selection. Some things have to be left out and others given more space. He is quite open about shaping what the reader receives.

This makes his memoir more interesting than a straightforward account of events. Hayri tells us what happened, then often explains what those events mean to him now. The two do not always fit together. He may describe something absurd in a perfectly reasonable tone or reveal a contradiction without realizing that he has done so.

Tanpınar rarely steps in to correct him. Much of the humor comes from the space between Hayri's explanation and what the reader can see.

Nuri Efendi and the Clocks

Clocks enter Hayri's life long before the Institute exists. As a child, he becomes fascinated by them and eventually spends time with Nuri Efendi, a clockmaker who becomes one of the most important people in his early life.

Nuri Efendi does not treat clockmaking as a purely mechanical job. He talks about clocks almost as if they have personalities and sees a close connection between a clock and the person who owns it. He tells Hayri:

“Beni adam eden saatlerdir!”

“Clocks are what made me a man.”

His view of clocks becomes clearer in another passage:

“Saatin kendisi mekân, yürüyüşü zaman, ayarı insandır... Bu da gösterir ki, zaman ve mekân, insanla mevcuttur!”

For Nuri Efendi, a clock has to be understood before it can be repaired. He watches it and listens to it. A broken clock deserves patience. He tells Hayri:

“Bozuk bir saate, bir hastaya, bir muhtaca bakar gibi bakmağa alış!”

This is very different from the way the Institute will later deal with clocks. Nuri Efendi works with one clock at a time. The Institute wants every clock to agree with the same standard.

Time Before the Institute

Hayri's childhood world already depends on accurate timekeeping. Prayer times, Ramadan, iftar, and sahur all require people to know the time. Muvakkithanes exist partly so that people can check and adjust their watches.

Tanpınar is therefore dealing with a change in how time is understood and used. Accurate time itself is not new.

Nuri Efendi cares about accuracy. One of his sayings is:

“Ayar, saniyenin peşinde koşmaktır!”

“Adjustment means chasing the second.”

Later, Halit Ayarcı takes this idea and uses it very differently. He calculates how much time people lose because their clocks are wrong, then turns those lost seconds into hours of wasted work. A clockmaker's concern with accuracy becomes an argument for a public institution.

The old idea has not disappeared. It has been given a new use.

Mübarek and Menhus

One of the strangest clocks in Hayri's childhood is the large clock in his family home. It has been passed down through the family and refuses to behave properly. It stops for long periods and suddenly begins striking again. Hayri describes it almost as if it keeps its own time.

His mother calls it Mübarek, the Blessed One. His father calls it Menhus, the Accursed One.

They are looking at the same clock.

This small detail appears again in different forms throughout the novel. People and objects acquire different meanings depending on who is describing them. Hayri himself will experience this repeatedly.

A Man Shaped by Other People

Nuri Efendi remains important to Hayri long after his childhood. Later, Doctor Ramiz becomes convinced that Hayri is an ideal subject for psychoanalysis and begins explaining his problems through it. Halit Ayarcı is interested in something else. He listens to Hayri's stories about clocks and Nuri Efendi and finds value in knowledge that Hayri himself has never thought much about. Once the Institute is established, this unlikely collection of memories and half-forgotten lessons helps turn Hayri into someone with a position and a public role.

Hayri recognizes how much these relationships have shaped him. Speaking of Nuri Efendi and Halit Ayarcı, he says:

“Ben onların bir muhassalasıyım.”

Muhassala means a result or product.

Hayri's identity is difficult to separate from the people around him. Their words and habits become part of the way he thinks. This gives us a more useful way of reading him than simply calling him passive or describing him as a man caught between East and West. He changes according to the people and systems around him, and he often adopts their language as his own.

Halit Ayarcı

Halit Ayarcı enters Hayri's life and quickly recognizes possibilities in the things Hayri tells him about clocks and Nuri Efendi.

He is especially good at turning ideas into projects. Nuri Efendi's sayings can become arguments about efficiency. A problem with inaccurate watches can become a public problem. Once the problem has been defined, an institution can be created to deal with it.

The Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü grows from this logic. It soon has employees, departments, inspectors, publications, and rules.

The comedy does not come simply from people being bad at their jobs. The Institute can be remarkably organized. Its procedures work. Tanpınar keeps returning to a simpler question: what exactly requires all this organization?

Fining People for the Wrong Time

The Institute eventually begins fining people whose watches disagree with public clocks. 

The system becomes increasingly detailed. How far a clock is ahead or behind matters, and repeat offenses develop rules of their own. There are even discounts for people fined repeatedly.

Hayri is proud of these arrangements.

That is what makes them funny. He describes the system as a clever administrative achievement. The reader sees an institution that defines a new offense, creates a way to measure it, collects money for it, and then develops an increasingly complex set of rules around the process.

Tanpınar lets Hayri explain the system himself. His confidence is enough.

Family, Jobs, and the Institute

The Institute also creates a large number of jobs. Hayri is surprisingly open about the fact that many employees are relatives of his and Halit Ayarcı's. He treats this as a practical way of filling positions.

When the Institute is criticized for having too many employees, Hayri points out that it has given work to people who needed jobs. In his account, this becomes one more reason to defend it.

The episode brings family connections into the bureaucratic joke. Personal relationships become official positions, while the size of the staff is used to justify the existence of the institution employing them.

Hayri does not present this as corruption. That makes the passage more effective than an outside accusation would have been.

Şeyh Ahmet Zamanî

The Institute eventually needs a past as well as a present.

Hayri and Halit Ayarcı build part of that past around Şeyh Ahmet Zamanî, supposedly a figure connected with Ottoman clockmaking during the reign of Mehmed IV. Hayri writes a book about him.

Şeyh Ahmet Zamanî never existed.

The invented figure is nevertheless discussed seriously, and Hayri's book attracts attention. Later, Cemal Bey publicly challenges the story and argues that material attributed to Zamanî actually belonged to a real historical figure, Fennî Efendi.

The situation becomes even more absurd when a foreign scholar wants to visit Zamanî's grave. Hayri and the others have to find a grave for someone who never lived.

Halit Ayarcı gives perhaps the clearest statement of his attitude when he says:

“Adı olan her şey mevcuttur Hayri Bey!”

“Everything that has a name exists, Hayri Bey!”

The Zamanî episode shows how quickly an invented story can begin to look established. Give a person a name and a biography, discuss him seriously, connect him to an institution, and eventually later evidence can be made to fit the story.

Tanpınar does not need to explain this at length. The search for the nonexistent man's grave says enough.

Doctor Ramiz

Doctor Ramiz offers Hayri another system for making sense of life. He has studied psychoanalysis and applies its language eagerly to Hayri and the people around him.

His confidence is often the source of the comedy. New information rarely threatens the theory because it can usually be explained within the same theory.

Doctor Ramiz and Halit Ayarcı work in very different areas, but they share a habit. Both have a system that can bring messy experience into order. Hayri is especially open to this kind of explanation. Once somebody gives him a convincing way of describing his life, he often begins using it himself.

Language Changes Too

The language of the novel changes with Hayri's surroundings. His childhood contains the vocabulary of clockmaking, religious life, older institutions, and Ottoman social relations. 

Later, psychoanalysis and modern administration bring another set of words.

Hayri notices the change in himself. Under Halit Ayarcı's influence, words such as değişme, koordinasyon, çalışmanın tanzimi, zihniyet değişikliği, and ilmî zihniyet enter his speech.

This matters because Hayri is learning more than vocabulary. New words give him new ways to describe his old experiences.

For someone reading the novel in Turkish, these shifts in register are part of the book itself. The language changes as Hayri moves between different social worlds.

What Does “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü” Mean?

The title sounds official even before we know what the Institute does.

Saatleri comes from saat, meaning “clock,” “watch,” or “hour.” The plural suffix -ler is followed by the accusative ending -i.

Ayarlama comes from ayarlamak, “to adjust,” “set,” or “regulate.” The -ma form turns the action into a noun.

Enstitüsü completes the noun phrase.

The title therefore names an institute for adjusting clocks.

The word ayar becomes more interesting as the novel continues. Nuri Efendi uses it for the careful adjustment of an individual clock. Halit Ayarcı turns it into administration. By the time Hayri writes his memoir, people, stories, and even versions of the past have also been adjusted in one way or another.

More Than an East-West Story

The novel is often discussed as a story about Türkiye's modernization and the tension between old and new ways of life. That is part of it, but the division is never as simple as East versus West. Tanpınar finds plenty to question in both worlds.

Nuri Efendi and Halit Ayarcı may seem to belong to two different worlds, but Halit builds his modern Institute partly from Nuri Efendi’s ideas. Doctor Ramiz does something similar with psychoanalysis, turning a new European theory into an answer for almost everything. 

Tanpınar shows how old and new ideas mix, change, and continue together.

The Past Stays in the Room

Hayri may move into a different period of Turkish history, but the earlier world remains present in his life. Nuri Efendi survives in the way he thinks about clocks. People from his childhood return through memories and habits. Old objects continue living in new surroundings.

At one point Hayri finds an old iron railing that once belonged to a ruined religious building. He buys it from an antique shop and places it in his modern home.

The railing has changed location and use. Its earlier history has come with it.

Clocks work in much the same way throughout the novel. They pass from one owner to another and outlive the worlds in which they were made. Tanpınar often lets objects do this work instead of stopping the story to explain historical change.

The Four Parts of the Novel

The novel has four sections: Büyük Ümitler, Küçük Hakikatler, Sabaha Doğru, and Her  Mevsimin Bir Sonu Vardır.

Büyük Ümitler concentrates largely on Hayri's childhood and youth, including Nuri Efendi, Seyit Lûtfullah, Abdüsselâm Bey, and the family world in which Hayri grows up. 

Küçük Hakikatler moves further into his adult life, financial problems, family responsibilities, Doctor Ramiz, and the society changing around him.

In Sabaha Doğru, Halit Ayarcı and the Institute take a much larger place in Hayri's life. 

The final section, Her Mevsimin Bir Sonu Vardır, carries the Institute toward the end of its period of success.

These sections are useful guides to Hayri's life, although the memoir does not stay inside perfectly sealed periods. Hayri is writing years later and often interprets earlier events with knowledge he gained afterward.

Halit Ayarcı's Death and the End of the Institute

Halit Ayarcı's death is easy to place incorrectly if the novel is summarized chronologically. 

Hayri tells us near the beginning that Halit died in a car accident three weeks before he began writing.

The Institute is already being liquidated too.

We therefore read the story of its rise knowing what eventually happens to it. The offices, staff, rules, and public importance all belong to something that has already started disappearing by the time Hayri records them.

This is especially fitting for an institution devoted to time. It succeeds in regulating clocks for a period, but it cannot make its own period last.

Why Hayri's Voice Matters

Hayri keeps the novel from turning into a simple lesson about bureaucracy or modernization.

He is capable of noticing a great deal, yet he is often poor at judging his own role in what he describes. He criticizes people while adopting their ideas. He can recognize that a situation is ridiculous and still be proud of his part in creating it.

This makes his voice difficult to reduce to either innocence or dishonesty. He often believes what he is saying.

The reader simply has more information than Hayri's interpretation can comfortably contain.

Reading the Novel in Turkish

Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü is challenging for learners even when they understand most of the vocabulary. Tanpınar uses older words, long sentences, different registers, and references to institutions that may be unfamiliar to a modern reader.

Irony creates another difficulty.

Hayri may describe an absurd situation in completely serious Turkish. Understanding the dictionary meaning of the sentence does not always tell you why it is funny.

For an advanced learner, this makes the novel useful in a different way from a grammar text. It requires attention to who is speaking, what that person believes, and what the surrounding scene shows.

C1 is a reasonable starting point for reading the original independently, although some sections will still require slow reading.

At the End

By the time Hayri writes all this down, Nuri Efendi and Halit Ayarcı are both gone, and the Institute is being liquidated. What remains are the clocks, the strange institution they inspired, and Hayri’s memories of the people who shaped his life. Perhaps that is why Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü stays with you. After a whole novel about setting time correctly, time has moved on anyway.