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Doctor Munevver Mertsoylu Aydin, who was pulled out from beneath the rubble as a 2-year-old during the 1974 Cyprus Peace Operation, says she has spent her life trying to pay back that debt by caring for patients in Türkiye.
Now 54, Aydin works in the chest diseases department at Kayseri City Hospital and links her medical career to the Turkish soldier who saved her, her sibling, and their mother from the ruins of their home.
Aydin told Anadolu Agency that her life was torn apart in Lefkosa when attacks by Greek Cypriots escalated in the period surrounding the Cyprus Peace Operation.
The military intervention was launched by the Turkish Armed Forces on July 20, 1974, with the stated aim of ending pressure and violence against Turkish Cypriots and bringing peace to the island.
She recalled that her family home was destroyed in a bombing and that they were left trapped under the collapsed building. While she and her sibling were crying beneath the debris, Turkish soldiers moving through villages in search of bread heard their voices and came over.
Aydin said her mother initially panicked and feared the voices might belong to someone who did not speak Turkish and could harm them. She said her mother later described the man who reached them as “a very fair-faced man with beautiful eyes and a spotless face,” and remembered being told that after he pulled them out and heard there was a baby, the next thing she knew, they were all in the hospital.
Her mother kept repeating one line from the story Aydin said: “They really were Turks.”
After surviving the attack, Aydin came to Türkiye in 1990 for her education and later won a place at medical school in Istanbul. She went on to become a doctor and has continued her career in Kayseri, where she said she does not plan to leave.
She said she began working as a physician in 1996 and took up her first post in Kayseri in 2009. After completing her specialist training and with her husband, an army officer, also posted to the city, she settled there permanently.
Years later, during a visit to the Cyprus Veterans Association, Aydin unexpectedly met Osman Balci, the veteran who had rescued her family during the operation. Balci had joined the mission voluntarily and fought on the island, where he later pulled Aydin, her mother and her sibling from the wreckage of their destroyed house.
Aydin said she never forgot what she owed him and came to see him as a spiritual father. She said Balci died in a traffic accident in 2025 and that burying him herself was one of the hardest moments of her life. In her words, “I buried with my own hands the man who pulled me out of the grave with his own hands when I was a child. May God have mercy on him.”
Speaking about her work today, Aydin said she draws strength from Balci’s advice to stay honest and keep working. She said she tried to carry on in that direction by helping others through medicine and by contributing to patients’ treatment in Türkiye.
She also marked March 14 Medicine Day, a day in Türkiye dedicated to honoring medical professionals, and said Turkish doctors are among the best-trained and best-equipped in the world.
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