One arrow lit the fire.

For the 98th anniversary of the Republic of Türkiye, OKYU’s founding team — then working as BİŞEYLER — staged Republic Fire for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality: the founding story told in three chapters — a childhood, a struggle, a beginning — performed live on an arena floor turned into a single projection canvas.

The story opens with a boy. Before the uniform, before the name the world would learn, there is a child — and the first chapter follows him from that childhood into the years of a young officer finding his direction. The arena floor carried the imagery under the performers’ feet: maps, landscapes and memory, projected at full scale. The boy grows into Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

History has already measured the man. In 1978, UNESCO’s General Conference resolved to mark the centenary of his birth in 1981, recognising him as the leader of one of the earliest struggles against colonialism and imperialism. The show doesn’t argue his stature; it starts before it, with a child.

The second chapter tells the War of Independence — but not as a battle re-enactment. An actor sits with a book, children gather around him, and the struggle is read aloud the way a grandfather would tell it. The hardest years arrive as a story told to children, while the floor beneath them comes alive with what the words describe.

The turn comes with a single gesture: national archer Ezgi Başaran draws, releases, and one arrow lights the symbolic republic fire on a sculpture designed for the night. The third chapter begins in 1923, with what the new republic actually inherited: a worn-out country, and people who decided to build anyway. Farmers, nurses, teachers, workers — the dancers carry the rebuilding, body by body, until the floor turns red under a flag.

One night, one floor — actors, dancers and children sharing it, an original symphonic score by Rahman Altın, full-scale projection under every step, and a fire sculpture built to be lit by a single arrow.