[4] After living with the family, he was taken to Dârüleytâm, an orphanage that was built in Adana for the Armenian orphans.

In 1936 he graduated from the Teacher's School of Music and in 1942 from the Opera Department of State Conservatory in Ankara.

In 1952 he was arrested, accused of being a member of the banned Turkish Communist Party, and imprisonment for five years, which ended his career in the opera.

Ruhi Su combined his efforts of creating a national awareness of the rich Anatolian culture with his compositions based on texts of Sufi poets Yunus Emre and Pir Sultan Abdal and other Anatolian poets like Köroğlu (see Epic of Köroğlu), Karacaoğlan, and Dadaloğlu.

Ruhi Su died of prostate cancer on 20 September 1985 and was buried at the Zincirlikuyu Cemetery in Istanbul.