Rana Yiğitbaşı
Mr. Christensen
L3C – IB Film
27 October 2010

The Legend Hababam Sınıfı Name a movie that is watched and known and adored by the all of the citizens in its country. Name a movie that has music so good that makes your heart beat faster. Name a movie whose audience reactions are the same even after being watched for thirty years. There can only be one answer: “Hababam Sınıfı”. It was firstly an idea, then a collection of short stories, then a book, then a script, then a play and then a series of movie. It never lost its freshness nor its humor after all these years. But why Hababam Sınıfı, and not other books or movies? Why did it become a well-known movie which has never been forgotten? Was it the actors whom the audiences loved to watch or the idea of it? Or was it just the events that took place in the story? For this project I searched about the book of poetry Sınıf, the author Rıfat Ilgaz’s life, how the book Hababam Sınıfı was created, why it was made into plays and movies, and why it has continued to be popular among Turkish audiences. Are you ready to learn a great deal about this legendary book and the movie? Because you are going to find out that you didn’t know even the half of it. As a teacher, Rıfat Ilgaz gives voice to his love for children, and his belief in humanity in his two books about school; Sınıf and Hababam Sınıfı. However, before telling how the book Hababam Sınıfı was created, I would like to explain why and how Rıfat Ilgaz had a hard time publishing his book of poetry Sınıf. To start with, Sınıf is a collection of poems written about his students when he was a teacher and got into jail for it. When the book Sınıf was published in January 1944, sadly it sold for only twenty-five days because the government found it interesting to write the truth about the real Turkey: the hunger and the poverty