Most of us have been in self-imposed isolation for 30 days. On April 18 2020 Osman Kavala will have been in enforced isolation for 900 days in an Istanbul jail cell.

Nine hundred days away from every friend, family member and colleague, without seeing even a tree or the horizon. During this time, we have not stopped thinking about our friend, Osman Kavala.

Today we announce the upcoming world premiere of a small opera film made over seven days by artists in lockdown, entitled Osman Bey and the Snails.

This modern fable is the story of a beloved Turkish philanthropist and activist cruelly jailed– and of the two little animal friends who shared his cell. Osman Kavala has fought for human rights in Turkey for 30 years. He has used art and culture to build bridges with Kurds, Armenians and Greeks, to make Turkey a fairer and more humane place.

Osman has always loved animals. In his youth he stopped his family firm from building of a hotel on a beach used by loggerhead turtles to lay their eggs.

In 2017, Osman Kavala was sent to jail by a court on politically motivated fantastical charges. He became one of the country’s best-known political prisoners, kept in severe conditions of isolation. So, the animal-loving prisoner was delighted one day when he found two snails in his lunch-time salad. The pair became his companions in isolation.

In February this year, in a move that surprised and delighted everyone in equal measure, Osman was acquitted by a court which ordered him to be released forthwith. The prisoner’s first concern was not to abandon his new friends, so he gave the two snails to his lawyer for safekeeping. But that same day he was cruelly re-arrested—on different charges.
The snails are now free, Osman is not.