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For 24 years, Yakup Ozturk has run a unique 30-square-meter tea house in the Kucukminare neighborhood of Sivas, a city in central Türkiye. Inside, he showcases an extraordinary collection of photographs featuring fellow villagers, relatives, friends, and regular customers that he has gathered over the past 48 years.
The wall-to-wall photo display hung by the 75-year-old father of five catches the attention of everyone who steps inside. Ozturk's passion for collecting these memories began long before he opened his business. He started gathering pictures of his friends back in 1978 while working at the General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration (MTA).
After retiring from the MTA's 1st Regional Directorate in 1999, Ozturk opened his tea house and began saving photos of his daily customers. Over the years, his project grew to include portraits of fellow villagers, extended family from nearby communities, his father's lifelong friends, and everyday patrons, turning his shop into a living archive of the local community.
Ozturk said he collects the photographs purely out of love and affection. He said he would like to hand over the photographs to an association if anything were to happen to him.
He added that the photographs create a different atmosphere for customers who see them, recalling that customers once asked his brother-in-law, Yunis Kaya, whether his own photo was on display.
Kaya, he said, replied: "Those who put their photo up here die soon after, so I won't give you one." Ozturk noted that most of the people in the photographs have since died, though some are still alive.
Ozturk noted that some customers whose photographs he has, or their relatives, do not even have those photographs in their own homes.
There are currently more than 1,000 photographs in the shop, he said, adding that he is still collecting them and has another 250 to 300 waiting to be printed. "I will keep doing this until I die," he said, noting that he collected the most photographs between 1978 and 1979, while working at MTA, and has continued ever since.
Kaya called the photographs "a fine keepsake." He said the tea house displays photographs of his older brother and father, both of whom have since died. That, he said, is why he has never put up his own photograph, despite Ozturk repeatedly asking him for one.
Mustafa Yilmaz, 80, also said the photographs serve as a keepsake. He said that when customers visit the tea house, they look through the photographs and ask each other whether they recognize the people in them, with Ozturk filling in the details.
"It's a very nice memory," he said, adding that some of the people pictured have died while others are still alive. He joked that Ozturk had played a trick on him by placing his photo in a dark corner.
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