A 58-Year Relationship, Told Through One Car

Imagine a car insured with CAN Sigorta in 1980.

A Mini Morris.
Registration R 688.
Owned by Mr Nidai Mehmet.

He had already been a valued customer since 1967. Long before insurance was a routine habit. Long before policies were documents people compared. Back then, insurance was about trust and continuity. Names were known. Cars were known. Stories were known.

That Mini Morris was not just insured.
It was remembered.

Mr Nidai Mehmet passed away in 1993.
But the relationship did not end there.

His son, Mehmet Koralp, has lived in Istanbul since 1988, yet Cyprus never left his life. A house remained. A car remained. And the insurance relationship with CAN Sigorta continued quietly, without interruption, without ceremony. The kind of continuity that does not announce itself.

Years passed. Decades, really.

Then, on 24 December, something rare happened.

Mr Nidai Koralp, the grandson of Mr Nidai Mehmet, restored his grandfather’s car.
The same Mini Morris.
The same registration. R 688.

This was not nostalgia dressed as metal.
This was memory made mechanical.

A car restored across generations only makes sense if something else survives alongside it. Trust. Records. Continuity. Someone who remembers that this was not just a vehicle, but part of a family’s timeline.

Some companies insure objects.
Some insure moments.

In this case, the policy did not just cover a car.
It quietly accompanied three generations.

That is how memory works when it is institutional, not accidental.
That is how continuity looks when it does not need to explain itself.

Some stories live in archives.
Some live on the road.

On 24 December, R 688 returned to both.