İTÜ Sözlük

» see instela.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

It opened on 1 March 2004 and it closed on 1 March 2024. Twenty years to the day, which almost never happens, because sites do not usually get to choose. Somebody had been counting.

Çağatay Gürtürk built it for Istanbul Technical University, and for the first month you could only reach it from inside the campuses. That constraint is the whole personality of the thing. It began as a dictionary written by engineering students for engineering students, in the collaborative format Turkey had already taken to, where a title is a word or a phrase and the page under it is a stack of numbered entries by different people, some of them definitions and most of them arguments. From April 2004 the rest of the internet was let in, and it became one of the two or three sözlük sites everyone in the Turkish web knew by name.

It grew the way a forum grows rather than the way a startup does. October 2007 brought a second version with an agenda and a notebook bolted on. In 2008 it became the first site of its kind in Turkey to let images and video sit inside entries. A third version in July 2010 finally got rid of the iframes. In 2013 there was a project called Atlas that let writers tag entries with a location, so the dictionary could be read as a map. Membership passed 185,000.

My own Turkish web in those years was forums, not sözlük. I was the kind of user who kept a signature block on frmtr with my hardware listed in it, which tells you the register I was writing in: part numbers and arguments about what would bottleneck what. The sözlük format was doing something else, a shared voice with a house style and a running joke stretched across a hundred thousand titles, and I read that world from the outside without ever having an account in it. This grave is written from that distance, in the honest sense of the phrase.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got bolted on ~

The list of side applications is the best evidence of what this site was. Kovan, the hive, organized the meetups. Müze, the museum, exhibited entries that had been deleted for breaking format but were too good to lose. Konsepte Aykırı published members' poetry and prose. There was a chat interface and a question-and-answer board, plus a bug tracker with a name that translates roughly as the progress-tracking interface. There was also Resepsiyon, which handed out concert invitations to writers.

And there was İTÜ Sözlük FM, a radio station where members made their own programs, on the air from 2007. Very few communities of this size built their own broadcast schedule. This one did it for seventeen years.

~ the january ~

January 2015 has two events in it and no source connects them, so this grave will not either. On the 15th, Gürtürk was detained at Atatürk Airport on his way back from Spain and released after appearing before a judge. He said himself that the case concerned things members had written about the Prophet Muhammad. Lawsuits were not new here: the earliest ones had come from Adnan Oktar and from the broadcaster Ali Kırca, back in 2006 and 2007.

That same month the site dropped the name İTÜ Sözlük and became instela, on the reasoning that non-Turkish speakers could pronounce it. The dictionary structure was rebuilt as a social community, the database was kept intact and the existing users were carried over unchanged. On paper it was the careful version of a rebrand. In practice a site named after a university in a format specific to one country had spent eleven years accumulating exactly the audience that the new name was designed not to be about.

~ the twentieth birthday ~

It kept going for another nine years, which is longer than most rebrands survive, and it was still in the Turkish top ten thousand in 2022. But the traffic was a slow decline and the format war had been decided long before: readers who wanted a Turkish sözlük went to the one that had never renamed itself, and readers who wanted a social feed had several billion dollars' worth of alternatives.

The closure was scheduled rather than sprung. The twentieth anniversary was the last day, and the discussion of it happened mostly on a rival sözlük, in a thread named after the date, which is a very on-brand ending for a site of this kind: the eulogies were written in the same format by the same sort of people, on the site that had outlived it.

~ still on the air ~

The instela.com address does not resolve at all now. The old one, itusozluk.com, still resolves and serves an empty page, 114 bytes of nothing.

The radio survived both of them. Today fm.instela.com still answers, calling itself the İTÜ Sözlük Radio and instela FM Museum, 2007 to 2024, with the song archive and the program schedule still browsable. A twenty-year community left behind neither its dictionary nor its social feed but its playlists, which is the least likely piece to be the durable one and is the piece somebody chose to keep paying for.

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