When the Kurdish poet first declared his love, the woman who was the focus of his feelings didn\u2019t take him seriously. \u201cHow could I?\u201d asked his beloved, Ipek Ozel. \u201cI was the only woman he had seen in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time he conveyed his affections, in 2019, the poet, Ilhan Sami \u00c7omak, was serving a life sentence in a Turkish maximum security prison. Ms. Ozel was a volunteer, who, amid a life of glamour and parties, visited inmates to offer assistance and fellowship.<\/p>\n
Their love story, which has surprised even their closest friends, is also a tale of a bitter and brutal decades-long conflict.<\/p>\n
Mr. \u00c7omak was born in 1973 in a tiny village near Bing\u00f6l, in eastern Turkey, to humble farmers who practiced Alevism, a heterodox Muslim sect.<\/p>\n
\u201cPerfect,\u201d he said of his rural childhood. \u201cAdoring a tree or a flower or a river. That was god to me as an Alevi child.\u201d<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t realize his family\u2019s beliefs or their Kurdish ethnicity made him a minority. He didn\u2019t even realize he lived in a Turkish-speaking country until elementary school. \u201cTurkish\u201d \u2014 the language that would later give him solace in prison \u2014 \u201cwas drilled into me by schoolteachers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
His parents encouraged his studies, and in 1992, he moved to Istanbul for college. The mid-1990s was the height of an insurgency being waged by the separatist Kurdish Workers Party, or P.K.K., and Kurdish students were being arrested en masse.<\/p>\n
The Istanbul police arrested Mr. \u00c7omak in 1994, accusing him of starting forest fires and of belonging to the outlawed P.K.K., which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. He said he was tortured for 19 days, signed a forced confession and was sentenced to death.<\/p>\n
Mr. \u00c7omak, 53, denies all the charges. \u201cThree fires in different far away locations in one day,\u201d he said, \u201cI must be Superman.\u201d<\/p>\n
He does look Clark Kentish. Tall, bespectacled and fit, he sits upright as he answers politely what he is asked and Ms. Ozel, 55, translates.<\/p>\n
In prison, he had to figure out a way to pass the time, and he soon realized many of his fellow inmates did so by reading.<\/p>\n
He picked up the habit, and he didn\u2019t just read, he devoured, everything from Marx to Mayakovsky, Baudelaire to Borges.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it became clear that I would not be leaving prison anytime soon, I began to look for something that could make my life inside meaningful, and I turned to poetry,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t easy to find his voice. \u201cA lot of poetry is based on memory,\u201d he said, \u201cand I had mostly childhood memories. I was too young. Not many experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
His breakthrough came when he realized that, even within his constricted circumstances, he was still surrounded by boundless subjects. \u201cAnything became a reason for a poem,\u201d he said. \u201cMusic, a movie, a beautiful novel, a photograph of Catherine Deneuve.\u201d<\/p>\n
He could, he discovered, \u201cinvite life and my passions with my pen,\u201d and it was like a faucet opening, with poems pouring out, mostly in Turkish.<\/p>\n
When Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004, Mr. \u00c7omak\u2019s sentence was commuted to life in prison. His lawyers took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, which declared in 2007 he had not been given a fair trial \u2014 and called for a new one.<\/p>\n
Margaret Owen, a British human rights lawyer who has become a friend of the couple, remembers being struck by the subject matter and tone of the poems by a man with every reason to be resentful. \u201cNot one poem is political or angry,\u201d she marveled.<\/p>\n
When Mr. \u00c7omak published \u201cHymns Composed by Cats\u201d in 2013, he sent Ms. Ozel a copy, even though they\u2019d never met.<\/p>\n