Gülcan Mengüllüoğlu: A woman in love with her profession who runs a hairdresser and bridal shop…

Gülcan is a hairdresser who has been in the hairdresser and wedding dress industry for 35 years and does her profession with the excitement of the first day. You can apply to Gülcan Coiffeur and Wedding Dress in Antakya Sümerler for both hair and clothing.

A woman who opened and formalized her business in 1990 and tried to improve herself continuously. However, Gülcan is not satisfied with just having a profession and has trained many women in her workplace to teach them a profession. “It is an indescribable feeling to teach especially young girls and to enable them to acquire a profession!” she says. With this awareness, she says that she has trained many young women both in her own business and in vocational training courses: “I cannot count the number of girls whose lives I have touched and the happiness I feel from this cannot be measured by anything!”

Before the earthquake, Gülcan had six businesses in both hairdressing and wedding dresses. She was handing over these businesses to the young women she trained and trained. However, three hairdressing salons, an evening dress shop, a wedding dress shop and a fashion house were destroyed along with her house. Her tailor shop was not destroyed, but it was buried under the collapsed apartment building. All the belongings in her other businesses were buried under the rubble. Gülcan says that she could have saved her materials in the tailor shop, but when she saw that there were casualties in the apartment building that collapsed on top of her shop, she could not think about her materials:

“After the earthquake, I was like a fish out of water. Both my home and workplaces were all destroyed. It was as if nothing was left of my profession, where I had prepared girls for their weddings, where I had made their mothers’ bridal heads.” Gülcan continued to struggle despite all this because, in her own words, “The process after the earthquake was very difficult for me, but I thought that I should re-establish my business. I have a love for my profession, the only thing that connects me to life is my work.”

After the earthquake, she stayed with a friend for a few months in a tent city. She says that many women came to her for haircuts because they could not wash their hair due to the earthquake conditions, but she did not even have a pair of scissors and this made her very sad. Gülcan did not give up even though she left her house barefoot, all her workplaces were destroyed and she did not even have scissors or a comb.

“My house and workplaces were destroyed and I didn’t even have a spoon. But I couldn’t give up, I have children, grandchildren. I have students I have raised, I had to fight.”

Her students would call Gülcan and tell her to please start again, we should come too. In the face of the devastation and losses of the earthquake, she thought she could only console herself by working. She first started to rebuild her business by continuing her wedding dress business with the wedding dresses given to her by the companies she had worked for before. Then she applied to MaviKalem’s project. When the MaviKalem team delivered the materials she needed, she expressed her feelings as “MaviKalem was a light that illuminated us in the darkness, it was instrumental for me to start working again”.

Gülcan, who now continues her work in a part of her house, wants to develop her business further. She says that before the earthquake, she was giving turban training in the Middle East and she wants to get back to this point. Gülcan has plans for the future: She always wants to improve her business and train young girls and give them a profession.