Menal Konak's brother, Mahmut, was 18 when he left to join the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Syria in 2014. He died six years ago but she only found out this week.
The Turkish authorities have now begun publishing lists of "martyrs" to the PKK cause, after parliament this month passed a law to reintegrate Kurdish fighters into civilian life.
"He (Mahmut) fell in 2020. We're only finding out now. We spoke to him just once, in 2017. We thought he was alive," Konak, 31 said tearfully, her face etched with grief.
"There are so many others like him. They fell so that we could live free. They sacrificed themselves for us."
Like many Kurdish families, Konak doesn't know where her brother's remains are.
In the absence of funerals, places of remembrance have been set up in several parts of Istanbul and in the southeast of the country, which is home to large Kurdish communities.
At one, in a nondescript apartment block in the Kucukcekmece area of Istanbul, Vasile Uskas, her head draped in white, mourned her daughter, who also left to join the PKK in 2014.
"We still had hope that she would come home, alive or dead," she said. "We were waiting for a sign, we didn't know where she was.
"We wanted to know what her life was like, how she was doing, but we understood nothing, knew nothing."
The places of remembrance allow families and relatives to gather and pay their respects, despite the lack of a grave.
Associations like the NGO Mebya Der have helped to set up the spaces.
At Kucukcekmece on Saturday, Mebya Der vice-president Ilhami Kurt said they were "honouring eight martyrs".
"The news arrived recently. Until now the families were waiting, they held on to hope. With this peace process, even if it's only the gravestones of their children, people want to find them," he said.
"The fact that peace is at the heart of the process (initiated by the Turkish authorities at the end of 2024), that people sit down around a table, that gives meaning to the struggle."
Between speeches, photos of the fallen fighters and videos in which they explain to the camera why they joined the PKK are shown.
Slogans in Kurdish and peace signs accompanied the images.
Latif Kol has known since 1994 that his younger brother was dead. He left at the start of the guerrilla war against the Turkish state in the early 1990s.
But he has only just received confirmation.
"It's thanks to them that we can speak Kurdish today. Before, we couldn't even listen to music cassettes," he said.
"Our mother had even hidden his photo, she buried it. We never found it."
"Peace will come, that's certain," added Menal. "May there be no more bloodshed, neither on their side (the Turkish side) nor on ours.
"May all this blood not have been shed in vain."
Four decades of fighting have left nearly 50,000 dead, according to the government in Ankara.
Yet the law that has just been adopted is only a first step, stressed Sebahat Tuncel, a former MP for the pro-Kurdish DEM party, which has been closely involved in the process between the government and the PKK and its founder Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan, the PKK's figurehead, 77, has been held in solitary confinement since 1999.
"The law says nothing about resolving the Kurdish question. It only talks about disarmament. We still have a lot to do: to use Mr Ocalan's words, we are only at the first step on a road of thousands of kilometres," she insisted.
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