Listening To Old People

The Ottoman Empire lasted into the 20's. I remember hearing stories told about days I never lived in from people who were born in 1909, especially about the roaring 20's. Unfortunately for me and my interests, these werent the kinds of people who listened to their elders when they were growing up, or I would have heard stories that had been told by people born in the 1840's or earlier. And I only started listening to stuff like this in the 80's. Someone with a lot of time to listen while growing up in Turkey in the 50's would have heard some really interesting tales from old men who had nothing to do but drink tea, smoke and talk to anyone who would listen. They might have been anything from footsoldiers to officers, but they things they would have seen would have apealed to young boys, who also had little to do, and as these were people who had been in the company of other men since early childhood, people who for generations had never known families, some of these stories would be of times hundreds of years earlier. And while it is unlikely anyone who did any of those things for the empire are still alive, the people who regarded them as tv, the movies and comic books for the whole time they were kids were bigger than me the whole time I was getting used to being here.