Tired Warrior

This study examines the television mini-series Tired Warrior (Yorgun Savaşçı, Halit Refiğ, 1979), adapted from Kemal Tahir’s novel, as an extreme case of state authority over audiovisual memory in Turkey. Commissioned and produced by the state broadcaster TRT, the series was banned following the 1980 military coup, and its negatives and positives were ordered to be physically destroyed by burning. However, years later, a single surviving videotape copy—originally preserved as “legal evidence”—was paradoxically screened by the same state channel. Employing a case study methodology, this research examines the production, censorship, destruction and rebroadcast of the series through archival documents, press coverage, and memoirs. Tired Warrior thus illustrates the state’s symbolic violence on cultural memory and historical erasure, demonstrating how cultural works may be alternately destroyed and re-legitimized as political regimes and ideological priorities shift

Ideology · Negative · Politics · Television series · Turkish · Cyprus History, Politics, Society · Media Discourse and Social Analysis · Turkey's Politics and Society