Businessman (b. 1927, Istanbul - d. 11 September 2016, Istanbul). Father
and business partner of Leyla Alaton and Vedat Alaton.
He received education at Şişli Terakki and Saint Michel until the grade 8.
Because of poverty and problems, he could not continue studying after
graduating from high school. After the World War II ended in 1945, he graduated
from French College with great difficulty. At the age of seventeen, he started
working for a foreign representation company with a wage of 80 Turkish liras a
month. To secure his families sustentation, he worked at Mehmet Kavala Company
as a courier.
Three years later (1948), he
graduated
The Swedish Consul General that
he met was very helpful to him. In March 1951, he worked for Swedish Motala
Verkstad factory as a welder, and then he worked at Stockholm Ventilator
factory as a technical artist. With limited technical knowledge, his real
earning was the friendships he made in Sweden. Thanks to the lifelong
relationships with the Social Democratic Party Youth Brach members, he tried to
understand the fine-tuned relationships between liberal and productive
economics and social democracy. He watched with excitement and enviably that a
country which starved at the beginning of the previous century and of which a
quarter of population migrated to
After he returned from
When we look back,
Ishak Alaton reminds us a brilliant scene featuring only the happy times with
blurred hard times. They are very different than each other. Thanks to this
difference, the strengths of one of them balanced the weaknesses of the other. They created the
thousands and millions over the time together.
They always tried to think
differently. After producing multiple solutions to one problem by taking a
different approach, they united on the most logical way. They prioritized the
mutual understanding and respect. They never experienced even a loud argument.
Finally, they succeeded to establish a big family where over 7,000 employees
work under a single roof.
Although their characters were
very different, their beliefs and life philosophy were based on completely the
same principles. They set the possession of financial facilities as a necessary
target, but an insufficient one. Instead of being ranked among the largest and
richest companies in Turkey, they preferred to be among the top three most
prestigious and serious ones.
As Alarko grew, they did not
ignore the social responsibilities though.
They endeavored to be useful to the society within the bounds of
possibility with the aim of being interested in the country problems and producing
solutions in respect thereof.
As long as he saw the
opportunities missed by his country poorly managed by the wrong people
throughout the last half-century, he sometimes abandoned himself to
despair. However, he never stopped
struggling. He expressed his thoughts and point of views in the media and
conferences whenever he found the chance to do so. He concluded hat overcoming
the biases of people was the most difficult thing in the world, even harder
than waking up the dead.
His biggest grief was to lose his
close friend Uzeyir Garih during the successful years. Unfortunately, he lost
his dear partner and companion Uzeyir Garih to a terrible murder on August 25,
2001.