“I met Lorenzo at our base when I joined Têkoşîna Anarşîst. He wasn’t there. I spent a couple of weeks with other friends. It was winter, it was cold when heval Tekoşer came with other comrades. I met him at this time. He came from the front line. He was tired, dirty and he was a bit cold. I think he was very tired. It was not his first rotation to Deir-ez-Zor. And this time, in January 2019, he came back from the front.
We met each other, we talked a little bit, but he was not very talkative in general, although he had a very warm blood. In the following weeks, I got to know him a bit better. The first thing that I noticed about him is his appearance, his way, his presence in our common space. He was stocky, not very tall. He was a strong person and he had a strong attitude.
Heval Tekoşer was a sommelier by profession and he was very good at his trade. He knew how to cook well. From nothing, whatever logistics brought us, he could do anything that we had in our hands. He could cook something really nice from it. For special occasions, he would make gnocchi, he would found very special ingredients for this food. He really put effort to make something nice for friends. I also was trying to talk to him, but as I said, again he was not very talkative. Most of the time, how I remember him, he was sitting in our yard, he was writing his diary, he was writing his memories from the front line, his memories of what he saw in the Rojava Revolution, what he lived, people that he met.
Truly, heval Tekoşer was a person that you get to know the best in a common work and in a common life. So, in a couple of weeks, I also managed to get to know him a bit better. I remember that I had the first meeting with him. We were discussing some contradictory question and I remember that our views were not coming together. I remember that I left this meeting with a feeling, I was telling myself, okay, it will be difficult for this guy, it will not be easy with this comrade.
Truly, it was like this, in the weeks that followed, it was not easy to get to know him, but I remember there was another event that took place in our base where I saw his heart, where I saw how deep his heart is. A comrade of ours had a shortcoming and we had tekmil. heval Tekoşer started to give a critique to this friend and when I listened to how he was speaking and what he was saying, I truly met a new person, I realized that I didn’t get to know properly heval Têkoşer.
His words and his approach of criticism and the perspective that he was bringing to the friend was actually one of love, and in the way how he spoke, you could see that he comes from a place of comradeship and a place of empathy, he is speaking from empathy. It was a deep and honest perspective that he gave to the friend.
When I listened, I really changed my view of this friend. I realized that I was also superficial in my judgment about the friend and this really gave an important lesson to me. Sometimes we might have a contradiction, sometimes we might not be the best friends, but when some of us fall Şehid, in this moment the meaning of being comrades, it shows its truth.
I realized the value and the preciousness of our friendship, of our comradeship, of being in the same group, being in the same organization, it’s something that builds over time and maybe a person doesn’t see the true value of it immediately and heval Têkoşer was like this and was needed some time to be able to understand his personality.
He was not a one-dimensional soldier or something like this. He was a very smart person. He put a lot of effort in learning Kurdish and in writing, studying, learning something, he was reading a lot of books. He was building good relationships with comrades around us. Of course sometimes there were conflicts and the warm blood of heval Têkoşer was showing itself at this point. If he would be provoked or he would get upset, he could say a lot of things that could raise your hair a little bit, but he would forget about the incident five minutes later. He didn’t hold any grudge. He valued the importance of good relations with comrades. I think in this there is a good lesson to learn.
Yes, comrades remember heval Têkoşer as a fearless fighter who had experience from Afrîn, who had experience from Deir-ez-Zor, who did not fear to stand up for the cause for which he came, to support the Rojava Revolution. He truly believed in the values of women’s liberation and of democracy. He gave his contribution.
And maybe I can say one story of him. Heval Têkoşer, he had some specialties. One of these specialties was nobet (nightshift). As you might know, if you have experience from nobet, from taking a guardship, sometimes comrades might trick you if you wake them up. They don’t wake up but they tell you that they wake up.
But heval Têkoşer was not like this. To wake heval Têkoşer up, you had to learn a specific procedure. You have to come and you need to wake him up until you hear a sound, like a grunt that means that he woke up. After this, you don’t do anything else. You let him smoke his cigarette in bed. And then from the moment you woke up 10 minutes later without fail, he would be in his position with an ammunition belt, with his weapon, ready to take the guard.
But if you were unlucky and you’d try to bring him any further and try to get him out from bed, you would very soon face yourself with an angry and profane Italian. So it was very important for heval Têkoşer to wake up, to get used to the thought that not only he has to wake up, but also he has to take a nobet at night. And in the cold, if you gave him these 10 minutes to accustom himself to this thought, he would be there without fail.
Here we have the commemoration stone of heval Têkoşer, we put there to commemorate his contribution to the struggle and in his memory. It is only a memorial stone, there is no grave here. We managed to send his body back to his homeland, but here sometimes we come to sit and think about our comrade who passed away. The contribution that he has made, the meaning that his life had, to say a little hello.”