Summer in Dersim

DERSIM

I have never seen the Dersim region covered by an official English guidebook. (Maybe that’s changed with the newest edition of Lonely Planet) God knows why. Fear of the PKK, obesiance to the general Turkish taboo on even mentioning the region or just simply not on the plate of the authors they choose? Whatever the reason, they’re missing out on perhaps one of the best regions of the country.  We spent a few days in Dersim this summer and this entry will hopefully give you enough of a taste to make you want to go there yourself and help you do it, too.

Dersim (whose official name, for the moment at least, remains Tunceli for those with maps) is culturally contrary and complex. Almost entirely enclosed by steep mountains and filled with canyons and gorges,  it was thus, for centuries, too difficult of access for the government to effectively control. It was and is populated mostly by Alevi Kurds speaking a dialect of Kurdish called Zaza by the mainstream and Dimilli by natives of the region.

An aside—Alevis, in brief, are a kind of fusion faith of Islam with local Anatolian animism and Bektaşi mysticism, all with a dash of Zoroasteriansm and Christianity. (Think Mexican Catholicism) They don’t worship in mosques, but rather places called Cem Houses, and men and women lead the worship together, mostly with music and dancing. Ali is the most important figure—and like Shiis, in their ceremonies they remember the massacre of Hasan and Husseyn at Kerbala. They have been ruthlessly, at times, persecuted by the state and the majority, most recently when a mob, most likely with government collusion, burned down the Madimak Hotel in Sivas which was hosting an Alevi convention. 35 people died in the fire.

Most people in Dersim setttled because they were fleeing something—either they were Alevis fleeing the massacres of Sultan Yavuz the Grim or, according to one researcher, Zoroastrian Armenians fleeing the recently Christianized Armenia. More recently, some came because they were seeking refuge from the Armenian Genocide or because they were bandits who made their living raiding travelers from the mountains. Whatever the reason and because they were largely Kurds and Alevi and preferred to act independently of the central government, they were not well-liked in Ankara and thus, in 1938, the Turks decided to pacify the region—relocating thousands on forced marches into exile and murdering thousands more in a feverish ethnic cleansing. The scars are still evident in the region today. The 1938 massacres is what gives the region it’s air of taboo—nationalist still stridently deny it ever happened (but if it did they deserved it, of course) though the current government has issued a mild apology for the events. In 1936, the name was changed to Tunceli (and some of the original Dersim lands parceled out to surrounding provinces) as part of a Turkification process and apparently a change back to ‘Dersim’ is now on the official docket—but we’ll see. Using the word ‘Dersim’, at least as far as I can see, marks you politically as against the nationalists so be warned.

Enough history—onto the travels.

We rented a car in Elazığ and drove up from Kovancılar, through Mazgirt. The first place we stopped was Tunceli, a city built on mountainsides surrounding the famous Munzur River. The weather was excruciatingly hot and so we ducked into one of the cafes along the river and had a glass of cold Coke on the terrace. The view was beautiful—the blue-green river wound under a bridge just below the cliffs from where we sat. There are dozens of terraced cafes around here. Many at night feature live music—some kind of free style where any musician can hop on stage and some following a schedule of professional musicians.

The Munzur River



A roadside 'scenic point' on the Munzur

An aside--Dersim produces some of the best music in all of Turkey, perhaps in all of the Middle East. It’s some witchy combination of suffering and independence and awe-filled nature and mountain-folk resiliance, perhaps. Or maybe, as the pop-culture site Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Dictionary) suggests, it’s because as Alevis and Zazas and Kurds, they are a minority of a minority of a minority. Just a brief and rather inadequate preview of music is called for at this point, for if you travel there you should have at least a passing familiarity. First, let’s start with Mikail Aslan from Tunceli who sings mostly in Zaza (Dimilli) but also in Kurmanci, Armenian and Turkish. He uses a blend of traditional instruments like the bağlama and occasionally western ones, especially the clarinet. Here’s one of my favorites by him, a tad upbeat in what generally is a genre of melancholy. It’s called Way Way Ninna.  

Ahmet Aslan is his cousin from another Dersim city, Hozat. We saw him in concert last year at the Dersim Music and Culture festival and he was mesmerizing—one of those musicians who never really address the crowd and spend all their time absorbed in their art—a stellar live performer (even if he made the halay dancing crowds angry for not pandering to them). Here’s a rather melancholy one by him that I am fond of.

Here’s another rather melancholyone by Emir Erdoğan, a musician from the village of Zımteq in Hozat. In an interview, Erdoğan explained being a Dersimli thusly, ‘Dersim is the nationality of exiles. We suffered through two very serious forced exiles and in a sense, they’ve never ended for we are still in exile.’

Finally, I have to mention Aynur Doğan who sings in Zaza, Kurmanci, and Turkish. She is from Çemişgezek and has a voice like an atom bomb. True to form, the Turkish government banned her albums for a while and she was chased off the stage by nationalists at one of the concerts we attended a couple of years ago—a sure sign of quality in these parts. Here’s a sample.

There’s tons more but those four give you a taste.

The Munzur Gorge
 

 

From Tunceli we set out through the Munzur Valley. ‘Valley’ is a dictionary translation for the Turkish ‘vadi’, but only because Turkish generally doesn’t bother making a distinction between a valley and a canyon. Munzur Vadisi is a canyon—and the road winds along the blue-green Munzur River through a deep, forbidding gorge with cliffs of red, maroon, and umber rock that are utterly gorgeous. In my opinion, it rivals the canyons of America’s Southwest. The mesmerizing drive through the gorge alone is worth the trip. There are a few little trout restaurants along the river where people eat, drink and swim. This is one thing I love about the Dersimlis—they swim! The people over the border in Bingöl are afraid of water—either it’s too cold and it will shut down your kidneys or it’s too warm and will make your heart stop or it’s fresh water and so it sucks you under or it’s a dam lake so your foot will get caught on a house. But not the Dersim folks—they are in the water everywhere we look.



And here is where Seyid Rıza took the oath with his posse

Swimming at Halvori Boils

About 15 kilometers up from Tunceli Center you crest a narrow incline and start dipping down into a cleft between two steep canyon walls. There’s a turn off along the gorge wall toward a place the signs call ‘Halburi Gözeler’—göze means ‘spring boil’ and there are thousands of boils all along the river feeding the waters.  It’s a fantastic spot for a swim and a lunch—maybe one of the best places I’ve swum, ever. Certainly in the top 10.

To get to Halburi, you follow a sign to the ‘gözeler’ and veer off right onto a dirt road that winds down to the Munzur. After about five minutes, you spot a little cafe with tables set up amongst the tree roots that spider among the shallows of the river, so you can cool your feet as you drink your tea or beer. Here, the river bottom is all soft sand and clear at the shoreline, but brilliant cold green and deep in the center—you can jump from the cliffs on the other side with no problem. Across the water, bursting out of a cave in the cliff is a waterfall of ice cold spring water (the gözeler). The springs have made a bubbling pool inside the cave. I swam over to the waterfall and was joined by two local boys. In sun-drenched silence, we watched the trout play under a rocky overhang for a few seconds, then they asked my name and launched immediately into politics. They couldn’t have been more than fifteen. The conversation started with ‘Where are you from?’ and quickly jumped into ‘We are Alevis and we hate Erdoğan. Can you believe he wants to dam this river?’

Dams are a big problem in this region—but they didn’t start with the AKP. A similar river in my wife’s province of Bingöl, the Peri, has been dammed eight times since the early 80’s with a ninth one planned. The level of corruption is absurd—everyone knows these rivers can barely sustain one dam but someone is lining their pockets with the money from these projects. Most locals theorize that the government does it to disrupt the movement of guerilla troops.There are plans now by the government to dam the Munzur despite the environmental havoc it would wreak.

Halburi is spelled many ways, Xalwori on the Zaza sign near the restaurant and Halvori in a 19th century travel book I discovered—written by a Captain L. Molyneuz-Seel during an exploration he undertook of the region for National Geographic at the end of the 1800’s. Of ‘Halvori’ he writes, ‘About 300 feet above the river bed is the last Armenian monastery in Dersim, Surp Garabet Vank, and it only survives because the Kurds believe it possesses a miraculous relic of St. John the Baptist. To this day, Kurds make pilgramages to the monastery to be cured of diseases. Curiously enough, the disease which most frequently brings them to the monastery is said by the monks to be insanity. The community consists of one monk and his three nephews, without exception the dirtiest and most degraded looking people I have seen in all of Dersim.’

We saw no traces of a monastery here—though it would have been up on the cliffs above. The owner of the cafe, when asked about the name Halvori, said it was neither Turkish, Kurmanci, nor Zaza. We asked if he thought it was Armenian and he simply said he had no truck with the past. According to a book on Dersim by local Hüseyin Aygün, there were once 12 churches in the area. The book I speak of is Dersim 1938, the Official story and the Truth, and in it I find Halvori’s other claim to fame. It was here, at the very boils where I jumped into the river, that Seyid Riza and his alleys made an oath to resist the Turkish forces that were massacring Dersim’s villages. According to a book by Hüseyin Aygün, “In Spring, because of the military operations, all the clans were in an uproar. A meeting was held at the Halvori Boils in March. It was joined by Seyid Rıza, Seyid Hüseyin, and the Ağas Cebrail, Kamer, and Fındık. They arrived at the opinion that if the government’s intentions were bad, then they had the right to defend their lives. With this, they threw stones into the Munzur. They swore on oath, passing these rocks from hand to hand and tossing them in the water. A few months later, in the summer of 1938, Turkish soldiers gathered together all the villagers in front of the mills and massacred them, then threw the bodies in the river. For days, the river was clogged with corpses.”

There you have why perhaps so much of Dersims natural grandeur is also tinged with gloom and resistance. Here is this breath-stealing gorgeous swimming-hole in a beautiful canyon, and it’s filled with the ghosts of two genocides. It’s a jeweled, haunted, gorgeous, tough-skinned, welcoming and melancholy place.  

While traveling through the canyon you’ll see all sorts of banners, posters, and grafitti hanging from trees and strung—improbably—across cliff-faces. One of the one’s you will see most is Seyid Rıza himself, who, as mentioned above, was one of the leaders of the Dersim Rebellion against Turkish troops once they started ethnic cleansing the region. Turkey executed him for treason (if resisting a genocide is treason)—in a manner that I think still reflects a still-current national zeitgeist of ignoring the law and exacting a revenge for people trying to stop you from murdering them. The trial was conducted in a language none of the suspects understood and no translators were provided. Because Ataturk was coming to visit and because the prosecutors feared he might issue an amnesty, they pushed for a verdict on a Saturday, when courts do not normally operate. Seyid Rıza reportedly did not understand what was happening at all until he saw the gallows. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but his last words were, “I have a 40 lira watch. Give it to my son.” To which the gallows men replied, “We will hang him, too.” Rıza—who had already lost one child in the fighting said, referring to his children, “I have lost the key to these mountains! At least, hang him before me.” And of course, the authorities did not comply. Another famous last line, oft quoted, was this, “Ben sizin yalan ve hilelerinizle basedemedim bu bana dert oldu ama ben de sizin önünüzde egilmedim bu da size dert olsun.” I could not cope with your lies and trickery and this became a terrible grief for me, but I never lowered my head to you, and this will become a terrible grief for you.”

The other poster face you will see is that of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, the iconic image of him being that of a kind-looking, young worker type in a granpa hat. He was the leader of the Turkish communists and formed the organization TİKKO (workers and peasants liberation army) which was the armed wing of his version of the Communist party. They were active in the Dersim region, where he was finally caught after a battle with government forces and brought to Diyarbekir prison. There, as was most everyone who was brought to Diyarbekir’s prisons, he was tortured before being executed. MIT (Turkey’s CIA, not the university) called him the ‘most dangerous revolutionary in Turkey.’ He is revered now as a kind of Turkish Che Guevara for having spoken out against Kemalism and the rather monolithic ideology of the Turkish State.

The road to Ovacık

And speaking of communists, we speed past the occasional images of these guys toward our ultimate destination, the source of the Munzur River (The Munzur Gözeleri) which lies just 15km north of Ovacık, a town which recently elected the communist party to head the municipality. I know, crazy! The road through Ovacık is breathtaking—a flat red plane of farmland that runs straight into the stark wall of red and maroon peaks of the the Mercan Mountain range. “This looks like how I always imagined Uzbekistan or one of those countries,” says our traveling companion, Carolilna. There seem to be no trees on the mountains—just cliff and crag, rock and precipice. They are utterly breathtaking. We stop in Ovacık for some fruit and snacks—I don’t know that a see any signs of a communist government anywhere, but the beer if 50 kuruş cheaper and the grapes are good.

Communist Ovacık with a little nod to Gezi

The Gözeler are 15 kilometers further up at the end of the road. We park in a kind of festival atmosphere among vendor stalls and outdoor gözleme restaurants. The water is below. Each set of boils is enclosed by a wall that captures the spring water in a bright, clear pool. People fill their water bottles here, and the water is so cold that just holding my hand in it for more than five seconds freeze-burns my skin. We hike up a trail behind the boils where you find more springs popping out the mountain side in little streams, though there was not much snow this year and lots of dry streambeds spider-web through the meadows as evidence of the drought. The trail winds into the high pastures and valleys of the Mercan peaks and offers stark views of the valley below with its bright green poplars and willows along the water’s edge.



The shrine at the entrance to the gözler

The valley above the boils

At the entrance to the Gözeler is a shrine in the side of a mountain called a ‘Ziyaret’ in Alevi culture, which means ‘visit’ in Turkish. Some Alevi traditions are animistic—if there is a cave or a spring or a mountain top, then people will set up a shrine to the power that dwells there. Generally, you light candles and pray or make wishes. Some ziyarets are thought to have the power to heal. We see these ziyarets all throughout the Dersim region. A man at the boils sells us candles for 30 kuruş each. After we light them, he hands us a piece of lokma (parxaç in my wife’s region of Xolxol) which is a sacred bread appropriate for the atmosphere of the place.

People climbing rocks above the willows at the boils

Folks dancing the govend/halay in the meadows above the boils

Among the pools of the boils are picnic tables and families enjoying a days outing. People barbecue and play volleyball or just sit and chat on the bridges.

We stay the night near Ovacık in a bungalow cabin called Elbaba Camping. It sits up from the river and has wonderful views of the Mercan mountains. The owner is named Mahmut Bey and he’s a bank of information on everything from geology to biology to local history. We learn from him just how much of the region we have missed. North of here is a waterfall called the 40 Stairs Fall (Kırk Merdiven Şelalesi) which is one of the highest in the world. Also nearby is Mercan Canyon, even more stark than the Munzur Canyon, he promises, and there’s even a third canyon accessible only by strenuous hiking. Over the peaks of the the Mercan mountains are 7 crater lakes and another gorge called the Havaçor. Mahmut Bey offers hiking tours to all of the above which, unfortunately, we did not have the time to take advantage of.

Mahmut Bey is an interesting guy. His campgrounds/hotel is full of birds—ducks, geese, chickens and pigeons, all of whom come waddle-running when he whistles. For a while, he had a sort of pet bear that he fed honey to just outside the hotel grounds. ‘It got to where I would find him sitting out on the roadside around dinner time!’ Mahmut Bey explains. ‘But I stopped doing that. A biologists told me that it would hurt his immune system because he would stop hunting and only focus on what I fed him.’ He also knows a lot about the local flora of the region—with books upon books about the different herbal treatments they are useful for.

El Baba Camping

 

Elbaba has a firepit and Mahmut Bey’s staff set up a large screen to watch movies. We watched Animal Planet as we chatted around the flames and sipped beers. In short, we loved Mahmut Bey and Elbaba and would highly recommend him to anyone staying in the region. It’s worth a few days in that mountain air.

Taking a right out of Tunceli City brings you to the Kutu Deresi, or Box River. The river is famous for ‘flowing red’ during the Dersim Massacres of 1938. Now it flows a bright pretty blue among small reddish gorges of it’s own. We stopped at a little cafe along the Kutu and had a delicious fried trout by the water. I swam of course—the water was so cold it took the breath away but the scenery was, as usual, breathtaking.

A cafe along the Kutu Deresi

A delicious fried trout

A distant waterfall from the roadside, on the way to Nazmiye

 

We continue up the river toward Duzgun Baba, a holy mountain to the Alevis, passing waterfalls and gorges and picturesque little villages of stone houses. The turn off for Duzgun Baba winds up a tiny curving road past flocks of goats and little creeks until the pavement gives out on the slopes of Duzgun itself. At the base of the mountain you can have tea or sacrifice a goat if you want, and then begin your ascent. The climb is not hard—you never have to do anything too serious or strenuous, but you should be fit and wear long pants—there are thistles and thorns everywhere. At the top is a gorgeous view of all the surrounding region—kilometers and kilometers of mountains. There’s also a ziyaret—a long pile of rocks that’s supposed to be mark the place that the saint disappeared.

From the climb up Duzgun Baba



From near the peak of Duzgun Baba

The ziyaret at the top of Duzgun

From the slopes of Duzgun you can see Mt. Silbus in the distance

The story of Duzgun is this. In Zaza, his name is Bava Duzgi and he was a shepherd during a time of severe drought. Only Duzgi’s goats seemed to be flourishing during the drought and curious as to how it was possible, Duzgi’s father, a Dervish, followed him up the mountain to watch him pasture his animals. There he saw his son wave a staff over the earth which immediately began to flower. One of the goats noticed Duzgi’s dad as he fed and sneezed. Duzgi looked up to see what the goat was bleating about. “What’s up? Did you see my father Mahmut?” he asked and then caught sight of his father out of the corner of his eyes. ‘Ashamed of having called out his father’s first name,’ the signboard at the mountain somewhat mysteriously explains, ‘Duzgi ran up the mountain and vanished. In three steps he cleared five kilometers and those three footprints are still visible on the mountain today.’ He is considered the strongest saint in Dersim and according to the aşık’s (Dersim’s traditional bards), he is the head of 366 saints. The mountain possesses certain powers, thanks to the saint. It can give a person a son, for example, and also can solve personal problems among people. If you have an issue with someone, you simply climb to the top of the mountain and pray for advice.

After Duzgun we drive  back down and take the road toward the town of Nazmiye. At the town center, we turn left to head up toward a place called Der Ova—a ‘waterfall’ recommended to us by one of the locals. We’re not sure exactly what to expect as the road gradually gets rougher and rougher and we shift into lower and lower gears. The scenery reminds me of the Painted Desert of Arizona—rocks and cliffs suddenly give way to these cone-hills of chemically colored sand, earthy maroons, reds, oranges, greens and yellows. A ‘kalekol’ or ‘police fortress’ looms up on our right. It’s a new one—freshly constructed. This is the Turkish government’s answer to the so-called Kurdish peace process, dozens of new military bases all throughout the region. The military presence has been heavy since we crossed the official Tunceli border, actually.  A couple of panzers were stopping cars just outside of Mazgırt for instance.

Anyway, we arrive at Derova and find a trout farm on a creek and a trail up to a large cliff wall that stretches maybe a hundred meters along the forest. A waterfall tumbles over the full length of the cliff and  a cafe has been constructed along the base of the falls. Some of the tables sit in the water.

The falls along the cliff wall at Dereova Cafe

A flower near the falls

 

A view from the tables in the cafe
 

We stop and have tea here, listen to a random performance by an old moustachioed aşık and then hike up into the mountains on a flower filled trail streaked with more mini-falls and streams. Like everywhere else in Dersim, the place is so tranquil and beautiful that we end up staying for a couple of hours instead of the intended few minutes, and then that doesn’t seem enough. There’s a story about Derova in Molneux-Seel’s book on his travels in Dersim. I quote:

“Der Ova is a corruption of the Armenian, Der Ohan or ‘Father John’. There was once a monastery and Armenian community here and this is the story of how it came to be abandoned. Forty years ago (1860ish) here lived a certain Armenian Melik, very rich and wealthy who had acquired such renown for his wisdom that the Kurds, whenever a dispute rose among them, used to appeal to him and accept his decision. One day, forty Kurds from Kutu Dere came to him and asked his decision in the case of a dispute that threatened to cause a bloody feud among them. During their stay at Der Ohan, the Kurds one day ventured to address some words of love to the beautiful daughter-in-law of the Melik as she was drinking from a well. The young Armenians were so incensed at this that that same night they massacred the entire Kurdish deputation. Then, fearing terrible vengeance, they collected their animals and possessions and took refuge in some villages around Erzincan. The fugitives numbered about 300, only a few old men with their wives stayed. Of these one survivor remains in the village to this day. The old man has two sons and two daughters, whom have all married Kurds and become Moslems.”

We head back to Elazığ on a different route—turning right out of Tunceli toward the town of Pertek. We don’t have time to stop in Pertek except for a bathroom break—but the restaurant we choose is so friendly what we can’t just take a leak and leave. They start to show us all the pictures of Dersim on the wall and explain each one. We finally have to beg a time crunch to escape their enthusiasm. The town if full of large adobe and stone houses that I have seen nowhere else in Turkey and sports a mosque that looks a lot like the black and white mosques in Diyarbekir. The road to Elazığ, as it turns out, is on a ferry across the Murat Dam. In the middle of the pale powder blue lake is the grand Pertek Castle which looms up picturesque as we cross the water. A scenic end to a scenic trip. On an another trip, I think Pertek would be worth a half-day stay. There’s a hot spring and the castle here and some grand mountain scenery.

Pertek Castle from the Ferry

The more people we talk to the more we find out about how much there is to see in Dersim. The town of Hozat, for example, you can find the 4000 year old Iron Age caves of Kalecik Village or the 3000 year old newly discovered ancient ruins of Rabat Castle. We will definitely be heading back.

 

Travel Info:

Transportation: You can rent a car—which in my opinion is the best thing to do—in Elazığ. We rented from Seyran Rentacar, run by Ömer Bey who was an excellent host. He even drove us around to do a few little errands before he took us to the airport to pick up our friends who were joining us on our Dersim trip. The car, in the summer rush (when nothing anywhere was available, reserve ahead!) was 120 TL a day. The phone number is 0530 263 9136. Ömer Bey speaks enough English to set you up. There are also minibusses that go to Tunceli from Elazığ airport and then minibusses from Tunceli center that go to all the places I’ve mentioned above.

For lodging—we stayed in student dorms, but also in Ovacık, at El Baba Camping, run by the excellent Mahmut-Bey. The food is good, breakfast is provided (and very local), and he provides information on rafting and leads his own treks. He speaks German but very little English—still, it’s enough to book. http://www.elbabaturizm.com.tr/konaklama

 

Scalawags, the Seven Stomachs, and Pir Sultan Abdal.

Hey poor people. I am only trying to help you quit smoking.  Think of me as a political nicotine patch.

Before I start this up…this weeks perfidy champion is Vice President Bulent Arınç. You see, the government has raised gas and electricity prices this year. I wasn’t thrilled, but could understand higher prices for resources among the deepening crisis, falan filan. But then Arınç goes on TV and explains that the price hike is for our health. To wit, the lack of money will help us stop spending money on unhealthy things like cigarettes and cell phones. ‘Some people actually have two cell phones!’ he says in horror. 

You might want to skim down to the end.  The music there is fan-f'ing-tastic

An Old Alevi Tradition Passed On to Me

It’s not like anyone named me Eamon or Aloyisius or Zaqrtyux. My name is not hard to pronounce, and yet no one makes use of it. My mother calls me Joe for obscure reasons (don’t like the name you first picked out, Mom?) Delal’s grandparents on her mother’s side call me Jack, while Dede calls me Cem. There’s at least a reason for that. For someone completely unfamiliar with English, Cem (pronounced like ‘gem’) is the closest thing to Jeff he knows. And yet we subtly try to correct him whenever we get the chance. These days, as a full fledged family member, I now have been given the responsibilty of phoning Dede from time to time. But the quandary remains, how to break the ice when he picks up the phone.

 ‘Hi Dede, it’s me….um….Cem....Jeff…Jefcem?’ Or maybe just talk till he recognizes my voice.

Today is one of the interminable weddings, and Dede comes over for tea before we head out. We are chatting about Kurdish names.

‘So are Heval and Delal and Zelal the old Kurdish names?’ I ask.

‘No, no! In the old days we used the good-old reliable names--Suleyman, Mehmet, Ali. We named each other after the prophets and the saints. I’m Mehmet, my father was Suleyman, his father was Suleyman, his father Mehmet.’

‘I see.’

‘But you, Cem, you have a good name. It means something in our language, too.’

I pause with tea in mid-air. ‘Actually.…’

‘Cem is the name of our holiest ceremony,’ he goes on. ‘You know, we’re Alevis. We go to the Cem ceremony to worship. In the Cem house everyone is equal, men and women, poor and rich. We are all human beings first! It’s a good, noble name, and you should be proud of it.’

So much for that. I am Cem forever now.

This line of talk launches Dede off on the topic of being Alevi in the old days.

‘Things are so different now. You have courts. Today they’re arresting people left and right, but when I was a boy, you went to the pir if you had a complaint. He was the leader of the village cem. Then he would gather up his congregation, you know, everybody in the community, and they would have a meeting and make a decision. We never had one murder in Conag. Never.’

‘Impressive,’ I say.

‘And then there was the musahip.’

Back in college, a few friends and I discovered each other (They also call me a variety of names I won’t mention here.) We were the misfits, the weirdoes, and because of a kind of esprit de corps, we became very attached. At one point, I remember discussing a plan for the end of our lives. When all the children were grown and neglecting us, when we had nothing better to do than sit by the phone and wait for young’uns who never call to call—then we were going to pack up our stuff like hobos, get back together at a point on the railroad tracks in Florida (home forever) and start walking. A last adventure—kind of like Eskimos sending their elderly off on iceflows.

If we had been Kurds before assimilation, we would have become this thing called musahip.

The musahip is a special kind of relationship observed by Alevis way back when. Dede explains as I fix more tea. I decide to cut it with fresh milk instead of water, Dede’s idea.  Delal has been buying farm milk from the Thursday Market, and Dede told me that it would be delicious with tea.

‘My father used to do it,’ he said. ‘All the time. Of course he preferred coffee. We’d roast and grind our own right in the village, but you can’t find coffee beans anymore.’

It is a late October afternoon, and that clear autumn sunlight falls behind him over the rooftops and skeletons of the rising skyscrapers of the neighborhood called New Sahara. Behind me, the TV has been muted but is set to the Kurdish Roj TV which is showing footage of rock throwing boys confronting tanks.

‘Everything from the old days has been taken away!’ he said. ‘Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Like having a musahip.’

In my entries on Conag, I spoke about Ali.  I mostly glossed over him because to explain his actual relationship to Delal and to me would have taken a few paragraphs. He is the grandson of Dede’s musahip, and therefore, by custom and ceremony, equal to a blood cousin.

‘When you’re young,’ Dede told me, ‘And you have a close friend, you make a pact, a promise to each other a lot like a marriage. There’s a ceremony in front of everybody in the village—there must be witnesses, and from then on you are like brothers, even closer than brothers.’

‘Really? So how did your ceremony go?’

He looks down as if thinking, and then suddenly raises a finger in an aha moment.

 ‘Yes! There’s a story. A long time ago there was a great Alevi teacher named Pir Sultan Abdal.  He was hung by Hizir Pasha who was a very oppressive dictator of the people. He was hung and as he dangled there, the crowd started to throw stones. Now he had a musahib. His name was Ali Baba, I think. And I guess Ali got caught up in the crowd fever and didn’t want to stick out, because he decided to throw something, too, just for show, but to not hurt Pir Sultan Abdal, he threw a rose instead of a rock.  As he breathed his final breath, Pir Sultan Abdal told his musahib to go home. ‘Because your flower has hurt me more than all their stones put together.’  Ali Baba went to his own house and there found his wife making bread. ‘Pir Sultan Abdal has been hung!’ he said. ‘My brother is lost! Do you know what his last words to me were?’ The wife shook her head. ‘He said go home!’ At that, his wife put the dough she was kneading down and began to rhythmically brush the flour from her hands.’

Dede demonstrates, patting his knees as if beating out a drum rhythm.

‘Why are you here then?’ said the wife. ‘You should be home.’ ‘But I am,’ the man protested. ‘You’re home is not here,’ she said. ‘Not anymore.’ And the man understood then, that he now belonged to the house of Pir Sultan Abdal! And do you know our women still do this when they make bread?’

And he kept drumming his knees in that rhythmic way.

‘They hung him in Sivas,’ he went on. ‘Centuries ago. And then just a few decades ago they came back and massacred all the Alevis there again. They called them infidels and traitors.  I tell you I can’t understand it. A human being is a human being. You do your best not to hurt others.’

Dede is wearing his cap and brown jacket, looking a bit dapper for the wedding we have to go to later. The incident he speaks of was at the Mardımak Hotel in Sivas in 1993. A mob, probably instigated by the police, tried to burn to death the participants at an Alevi conference in honor of Pir Sultan Abdal, partly because one of the guests was Aziz Nesin who had translated segments of the Satanic Verses. Thirty seven people died.

‘So what was your musahib ceremony like?’ I repeated. ‘You know, where you make your promise.’

‘You wear a white shirt and underwear.  Like a shroud.  No, not a shroud exactly, but like the white robes they wear to Mecca.  You take all of your old clothes off and put these white ones on.  Then sometimes you go down to the river and stay.  And there you die together--not really of course, but symbolically.  That’s the meaning of the white clothes—death to your old life. Not everyone does this, though. Of course in the old days, you and your musahip would wear the same shirt.  I mean, they’d put you in the same shirt and you would become one that way, but we never did anything like that. People way back then were strange.’

I nod to let him know that I think it’s a little freakish, too.

‘Now no one did this until they were at an age where, you know, they knew good from evil, right from wrong. You had to be mature enough to make this kind of decision, but after that, you could be joined together. Your children cannot get married because they’re considered family. And if someone hurts your musahip it’s the same as hurting you. Of course, this is a very serious relationship, stronger than blood, so you had to speak to your wife and family. It seals a relationship for seven stomachs, so you must get permission from all sides.’

‘Seven stomachs?’

‘You know, his children and children’s children and children’s children’s children.’

‘Seven generations.’

He points his finger and grins. ‘Right! Exactly! Seven generations.’

‘So Delal and I are only the second stomach down, eh?’

‘Yes! So your children can’t marry Ali’s for example. Anyway, after you make your decision, you announce it in front of everyone. The pir explains all the responsibilities.’ Dede wags his finger in imitation of a holy man’s voice. ‘You are entering into a very solemn thing. You must be sure. Take a year and get to know each other. If after that year, you still want to be musahip, then we’ll do the ceremony.’

One Alevi sheikh says this, ‘A musahip must know his or her musahip’s inner world.’

‘A musahip can be a woman or a man,’ Dede goes on with a shrug like que sera sera. ‘In the Cem, we are all just human beings after all. I had two musahips in my life, Ahmet and his wife Hatun.’

He starts to pull up his sleeve and runs his hand up and down his arm.

‘When I did it, we also had a branch wrapped up in green cloth. It was as big as my arm.  It came from a sacred tree, maybe one in Mecca? I’m not sure. But the Pir hit us each in the shoulders with it and said prayers over us.’

He smacks himself on one shoulder and nods.

‘Just like that.’

We sip our tea in silence for a moment, looking out at the buildings in New Sahra.

‘And oh yeah,’ he says. ‘Some even say the Prophet Mohammed had a musahip. I almost forgot. I think the story goes that one day the Prophet went home to his wife. He smelled something in the house, something really nice, a rosy fragrance and he asked his wife what it was. The sweater (hirka) of his musahip had arrived as a gift and a beautiful aroma lingered on it from the man himself, detectable only to Mohammed himself.’ Dede shrugs. ‘That’s what they say, at least. Rumor and gossip. His name was, let me see…yes! Veysel Karani.’

Some historical stuff:

Veysel Karani was a man contemporary with Mohammed, a camel herder famous for his devotion to his mother. He was not able to go and visit the Prophet because he was too busy carrying for his blind and lame mom. He sent a sweater to the Prophet instead, as a gift. He later died fighting as a partisan of the Prophet Ali, which may explain why the Alevis like him.

The other man Dede mentioned was Pir Sultan Abdal. Whenever they Alevis have a demonstration or a march, they use the symbol of a man holding up a bağlama—if you don’t look closely, it resembles a rifle. This is Pir Sultan Abdal—poet, musician, rebel, and symbol of the Alevis. He died as Dede explained after leading a rebellion against the Ottoman governor Hızır Paşa.

According to the website of the Young Alevi Movement: ‘The roots of the Musahip go back to the Prophet Ali. He once said, ‘All people are spiritual brothers—from either faith or from creation’ With these words, Ali underlined the two aspects of brother (or sister) hood—genetic and spiritual. It is possible to characterize the relationship of Ali and Mohammed as Musahip.’

Dede’s musahib passed several years ago, but the responsibility has passed onto us, the second (or would it be third?) ‘stomach’ down. We’ll have to keep any future daughters away from any of cousin Ali’s future sons…or vice versa.

Not sure this is true...but two of the all time türkü/bağlama masters is Muharrem Ertaş and his son Neşet. A couple of website claims Ertaş (born in a village called Abdallar) is the 8th generation grandson of Pir Sultan.  In any case, this song is amazing.  The caption says--although not an exact translation, I think it captures the spirit 'Heart! What are you looking for in this place of wandering? Muharrem Ertaş-Pir Sultan Abdal.'  Someone correct me if I am wildly wrong!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvm5C2-lvMo

Another Conag blog--Be back soon, Gone Villageing!

Kurdistani Entertainment

Out East, there is a past time I like to refer to as ‘going villageing’. Basically one starts by waking up slightly earlier in the morning than usual and has a breakfast of dorak, bread, and salad out on the balcony.  If you are in the elderly set (Dede), you start this process around six. If you are slightly younger than 83 (like the rest of us), then you get up when the elderly set knocks on your door and repeatedly calls your name—say 6:10.

Delal! Hun hişar bun!? You awake?

(I keep mentioning dorak by the way. That’s Kurmanci Kurdish.  I forget the Turkish word, and have never eaten it in the presence of a Turk anyway, but basically it is a dairy product, a kind of sour, cheesy sort of grainy mixture that is creamed with butter and eaten on toast, sometimes cooked with eggs.  I like it, though my mother did not find it so palatable when she was here.  I believe the word she employed was, ‘YUCK!’)

After breakfast you hop in your car--if you have rented one, like we have--and drive to a village where you hopefully know someone or know someone who knows someone. If you are from the Mala Memli  (remember? The House of Memli), this is never a problem. It should be a nice village—and there are many around Conag with reputations for having lots of trees and brooks and friendly non-fanatical folk.

We went villageing several times. On one such adventure, I set out with Dede, Uncle Celal, Delal, and Zelal early one sunny morning. Our first stop was the village of Hopık, about fifteen kilometers and two hours from Conag. No, I didn’t miswrite that. You head down a dirt road, round a small lake and then dive left into the brush, fording small streams and washes until you park at the foot of a very steep and very green hill. The village sits on the summit. The climb up takes you past a lush orchard with a tall wooden fence. A gate in the fence reveals a shadowy trail vanishing into a crowd of mulberry trees—the woods lush with vines and clusters of plants. At the first row of houses Uncle Celal shouts out to the first person he sees—a man working on his roof. The man stops working, and wipes his brow. They launch into small talk hollered across great distance. Çerre? Rindin? Hi? How are you? Where you coming from? How are things over there? Oh things here are fine, fine. Lots of visitors for the summer. Conag? How’s the water situation? By the way, is so and so about? We know a friend of his….

It’s odd to think about here in Northern Mesopotamia, but as we labor up the hill and Celal stops to chat with random strangers standing in their doorways, it strikes me that villaging was an activity my father was good at. Born in a town back in rural Georgia Conagians may have found small, he was the last of an old fashioned breed of Southern gentleman. He liked to ‘pay calls’. When I was a kid, we would hit small towns in Georgia and Florida and, starting out with an acquaintance of a relative of a friend, slowly work our way around. His method was similar—stomp up in the yard and holler a name. If there was trouble or doubt, invoke the name of the famous family head. In his case Grandma Hattie (famous from Valdosta to Tifton). The results? Tea and sweets and tongue wagging. He would have loved Conag.

The house we are seeking belongs to the parents of the husband of one of Delal’s mom’s cousins. (Figure that one out.) They welcome us warmly with plates of cookies and nuts and of course cup after cup of fresh tea. Kaçak (bootleg) tea from Sri Lanka—the preferred kind. The wife boils it on the wood burning stove in her kitchen, and we sip with her for an hour or so out on the shady front patio, sharing Istanbul gossip and news, learning about the gossip and news of Hopık. They stop to inquire after the foreign zava for a bit. (That’s me!) The usual questions, how am I holding up in such an out of the way place? Can I take village life? They’re picturing me in New York cruising down 5^th Avenue in my Benz. I’m remembering scratching chigger bites in the trailer in the swamp where my father lived my 3^rd grade year—we paid lots of calls that summer.

We didn’t just choose this village for the company. It commands a pretty spot in the hills. There are lots of walnut, plum, and mulberry trees giving shade and endless green meadows. Many of the houses have plums drying in their guardians and one family we visit give me a free taste of some of their homemade prunes—they’re dark gold and sour and incredibly fun to eat. We pop them in our mouth as we descend back down toward the car, squeezing our faces up into a grimace as we chew.

Our hostess in Hopık

The dried plums!

A view from a stable in Hopık

Our next stop (after several police checkpoints) is Zenan. Zenan is where Delal’s mother hails from. It’s a Sunni village and so they are hard core Ramadan fasters—no water, no food, no nothing till the evening ezan—the Conag Alevis are a bit wary of all this faithyness. To wit, the whole place is empty when we arrive. We have come to see the mother of another second cousin—whom we call Amoj (Auntie). Amoj, being one of the elderly set, doesn’t have to bother with fasting, and she welcomes us in with open arms and lots of kisses and begins preparing a meal of boiled lamb and rice—her specialty which we eat out on her front patio, probably to the envy of many invisible eyes. After tea, we have a look around her house, a small but spotless earthen walled home with a picture of the Last Supper mysteriously hanging in the bedroom.

I feel a bit sorry for her—at one point, Celal, Dede, and I get embroiled in a political discussion and Amoj is kind of relegated to smiling and nodding in the background as the menfolk prattle. She remains gracious by keeping our tea glasses filled, but seems bored.  

The streets of Zenan are cobblestone and narrow. Many of the lanes are barely wide enough to fit one large man walking. On the largest streets a small dike runs down the side so that the sound of trickling water fills the whole village. Chickens and donkeys wander about, more plentiful than the humans during the day.

We visit a few different houses—relatives of relatives of cousins—again catching up on news great and small between Istanbul and Bingöl. I see the house where the Armenian sister Magrik first knocked on the door to find the man who would save her (the story is here). There is a large field in the back, all empty green grass now but which, in the old days, sported the most fertile, lushest garden in all of Bingöl. A party of women is just breaking up and as they burst laughing out of the gate, they blink wide eyed in surprise and then shower us with hugs and kisses on the cheeks.

Xer hatin! Xer hatin!  Welcome! Welcome!

More friends and relatives of Delal and Dede.

Pulling out of Zenan in the late afternoon, we pass the cemetery where Amoj’s husband is buried. As soon as we are even with his head stone, a magnificent woodpecker with a black and white spotted crest lands in the middle of the road.  I honk the horn and he flies up only to land a few feet ahead of us to land again.

‘How strange,’ Delal says. ‘He appeared right next to that grave! It’s like he’s trying to tell us something.’

The bird’s name in Turkish is Dik Suleyman—Spiky Suleyman, and Spiky keeps appearing for the next thirty miles, hopping in the middle of the road and flying away only after I have stopped and blasted the horn to drive him away. It was just the beginning of our wild life encounters for the evening.

From Zenan, we drove North to the small town of Kiğı. The dirt road winds for thirty miles along the Peri River Canyon past several dam lakes. To the right are dramatic drops to the bue-green water.  To the left red towers of rock and cliff. After the woodpeckers stop pursuing us, there comes a new kind of bird—as big as a Western Bluebird with bright blue and green wings—I mean tropical bright—and a fanned tail. The bird is magnificent, and when we first sight it, it hops into a bit of brush on the side of the road and when I stop to get a better look, even Dede leans out the window for an eager peek.

We round a corner with a glorious view of a valley streaked with silver lakes. It’s sunset, and the water is starting to blush a deep wine red at the edges. The sky is purpling.  And there, in a cluster of green hills at the foot of a tall mountain is a patch of lights, like a constellation fallen to the ground. This is the town of Kiğı, where Delal was born. Our last ‘village’ on our villageing tour that day.

A view on the road to Kiğı

If Bingöl reminds me of Arizona, then Kiğı is its Flagstaff. It’s much cooler and greener here than in the valley below. There’s a waterfall to the side of the road as we pull into town. The minaret of a mosque older than either the Ottomans and Columbus sticks up out of the shadowing dusk. Somehow, though we are two hours away from Conag, Dede manages to locate a friend within five minutes of leaving the car and we are invited to dinner at the local lokanta where we have moussaka and tea and warm bread.

This area has a long history—at least five thousand years. The Hittites were here (more Biblical folks). The Persians were here. It was part of the Urarturan Empire for a bit, and a castle looms crumbling from the mountains behind to prove it.  Then came the Byzantines (as always) and more ruins. Later it was controlled by the Ak Koyunlar Turks (White Sheeped Turks?) who had their capital several hundred miles South in Diyarbakır. They were founded by Tamerlane the Great, and built a mosque in Kiğı with an odd attached square minaret that still stands today. The Armenians were prominent here as well, and during the genocide, this was one of the smaller centers of killing. Then came the Russians with a brief invasion, followed by Republican Turks.  And now, well, us. It was the usual layer-cake of people and civilizations but with ruins scattered everywhere—unexplored, unsurveyed, and fast dissolving into dust.

There are other things that remind me of Flagstaff—the whish of trees after a desert, the Old West atmosphere of the old town with its shut up wooden shops and saloons and the posters advertising concert festivals with folk singers and barbecues. Of course, the big history here is astounding if largely undocumented, but it’s really the smaller history that I’ve come for--this is also the town my wife’s first memories take place in.

She remembers the one-story red building where she first went to school. She remembers the pharmacist we visit on the way back from dinner—her father’s friend who at first think I might be big brother Heval. She remembers the teacher dorm where her family lived when she was born.

‘Is this the house you nearly plunged to your doom?’ I ask.

‘Yep.’

One day, when she not yet two, Delal was playing on the balcony while her mother, Safiye, was working. Suddenly, she fell over the edge. When her mother looked up, the spot on the balcony was empty. ‘My heart was in my throat,’ Safiye tells me. ‘I knew that if Delal had fallen…’ Holding her breath, she peeked over the railing only to find Delal sitting up as if nothing had happened.

‘I think it was because she landed on her butt,’ Safiye says. ‘That cushioned her fall.  But I couldn’t tell her father what had happened. He would be furious with me! So I just waited around to make sure she was okay. One of the neighbors said I should keep watch for signs of anything strange. If nothing happened in twenty four hours or so, she’d be fine. I watched, and well, she just sat around smiling and playing and everything seemed fine. I still think her butt saved her.’

This wait-and-see-if-something-weird-happens is a far more hands-off approach to parenting than most people I know here. In other hands, Delal might have been in ICU for a month—just as a precaution.

Safiye follows this up with another story.

‘And do you know when she was one year old, she was already singing? I was singing a turku and I heard someone humming it after me. I looked around, wondering who had snuck in the house, only to see Delal smiling up at me and humming away, just as pretty as can be.’

Other stories of a less funny nature, but still a bit comic in a way darkly…

Delal remembers at age five or six, her father was arrested. Being a somewhat apolitical kindergartener, she can’t quite remember the reason, but in those days in the mid eighties, it was just after the coup (the Turkish word is darbe-as in a blow from a beating) and you didn’t need much reason to arrest a socialist, Alevi Kurd. ‘It was like a funeral at home,’ Delal said, ‘And somehow my mother sent me with our neighbor, whose name was Fate (Kader), to pick up my Dad. When the soldier saw a five year old approach the prison gates, he must have thought he was dreaming. I told him why I was there, my dad had been arrested and was in prison and I had come to pick up.’

If you knew Delal, you’d be able to picture this scene perfectly—the saucy five year old telling the prison guard to cough up her father. But he didn’t, ‘Get out of here! They’ve taken your father to Bingöl City,’ he said.

Everyone calls my father-in-law hoca, a rather old fashioned word for teacher—more akin to ‘school master’ I would say. I do, too but I find it puts such an odd distance between us, at least in my own thinking. It’s hard thinking of him as human. He’s not a man with flaws, he’s hoca. But there’s one story from the Kiğı days that really struck me.

‘I used to write, too,’ he told me once. ‘Around the time of the coup, I kept lots of journals. It seemed like an important time in history and I wanted to record what was happening for posterity. I was hoping for a book one day. I had researched. I had collected books for years and written hundreds and hundreds of pages, and then, one day, the gendarmes came to my house. They dragged all of my books and journals outside and piled them into a huge mound and then made me burn them.’ He paused. ‘I have not had the heart to write since.’

One final Kiğı story. One of Hoca’s friends, a fellow Conagian and leftist, had dodged the draft. He was operating under a fake id and trying to leave the country.  Now, in Turkey, the army is somewhat sacred. Questioning the military service ever, anywhere is like burning a flag in front of Daughters of the Revolution meeting hall back in the states. In any case, he was found out—a slip up by his wife-- and the police were in hot pursuit. He ran to Hoca’s house and asked for help. The cops weren’t far behind. There was a door between Hoca’s house and a neighbors and Hoca quickly shoved him through. ‘A neighbor woman lives here,’ Hoca explained. ‘A friend of ours. Oh yeah, by the way, her husband just got back from jail though. He killed a man because he thought he was having an affair with his wife, so take care.’ And then he shut the door.

I was lucky to meet the fugitive a while later.

‘Hell, I didn’t know what to think. Either I threw myself on the mercy of the police or I waited for this guy to come shoot me! Thanks hoca!’

It’s night when we pull out of Kiğı and start on the road back home. There’s not another car on the road, just a spill of stars in the sky and these odd little birds perched in the middle of the right (our!) lane. I stop the car and let the headlights flood over them—miniature white owls.  They don’t move until I turn off the headlights. We see the first one when we cross the river and then they start to turn up every five minutes or so. It’s slow going.

Sometimes there’s another bird—usually in the left lane--that bears a striking resemblance to the chuck-wills-widow back home. Both are ground nesters and both look like a pile of dried leaves. I think it’s an Anatolian species of nightjar—which in Turkish is called a çobanaldatan—The Shepherd Tricker. This guess sparks some lively debate in the car. Maybe it’s a bapuk (Kurdish word)? No, no, impossible, not the season. There’s a night bird we hear in Conag that has a similar melancholy cry to the Chuck Will’s—a soft rising coo calling from tree to tree. I think the little bird in the road is probably one and the same.

And then come the foxes. We have counted twelve before we finally pull into the rocky  lane that descends into Conag only to have a pair of them pop up and dash into the brush. And it is also this night that I start to notice the little glow-in-the-dark bugs that gleam a pretty yellow-green from the weeds along the road.

If there are so many unexplored ruins here, I wonder how many of these animals and plants are unexplored? I can find nothing on the area on the internet or in the library. One of the cousins said a German botanists had come through last year researching one of the plants on Mt. Silbüs which was supposed to be a possible treatment for arthritis.

Another morning, we go villageing down below Conag to Xasköy—where a hot springs resort entertains the locals. We take Şerafettin’s van which means leaving at 6 and picking up everyone else along the way. At one stop, there is a view of a wide rolling valley. Near the lowest point is what looks like a herd of cows, and then someone whispers, ‘Boars!’ The bus erupts into a chorus of hisses and tuts and curses. ‘Pis domuz!’ Filthy pigs!’ and the whole herd dashes into the forest as if in shame. They’re huge animals and one of the men on the bus, wide-eyed, tells a story he heard about a man being gored to death by one. ‘It attacked him out of nowhere!’ he says. ‘They’re deadly!’  The rest of the drive is filled with rabbits and hares (one small and black and white, the other long legged and dun colored). We unload at the spring and immediately embark on breakfast. Cousin Husein and I mosey down to the water when the men’s turn comes, harassed the whole way by fat horse flies. (Another similarity to home!) Just like at Lake Geneva back in Florida, I spend the next half hour ducking under the water and splashing the pursuing fly above the surface. There’s a trinity of old men commanding the coveted spring mouth where warm water gushes out like a Jacuzzi. They never yield up their position and spend the entire two hours of the men’s turn complaining about how fanatically religious the surrounding country side is—Alevis looking down on their Sunni neighbors, also Kurds.

But to be fair, there’s some history to it. First of all, the Alevis here have a reputation for tolerance that Sunni Kurds do not. They hid the Armenians when they fled from the genocide for instance, while the Ottomans used Sunni Kurds to do the killing. And of course, the mountains here sheltered the Alevis themselves when they fled the pogroms of Sultan Selim the Grim who enlisted the aid of Sunni Kurds to help with the massacres. After this, there was such intense pressure to conform to the mainstream Sunni religion that Alevis in general became fiercely opposed to all forms of external worship—at least according to a book on Alevism I read, although its backed up by personal observation. My ex-ney teacher, for example, always stressed the inner self and dismissed any kind of external worship, and while mainly taken up with Sufi and Bektaşi philosophy, he also reads Buddhist, Christian Mystic, and Hindu literature.

There is a footpath that connects to the road to Hasköy with the Conag cemetery. If you follow it, you find a small spring spilling water out of the rock. This is the fountain of Xıdırilyas—Kurmanci Kurdish for the saint Khidr or Hidrellez who is also supposed to roam Mt. Silbüs. It’s an Alevi shrine where we stop to drink the water, whisper a prayer, and wash with the sacred water.  It’s cold and bright clean. Down below the stream skips past a row of shady poplars, where we sit on the grass, have a cup of tea and cookies, and talk. It’s the late afternoon. The sun is honey gold, the trees rustle in the wind. A fire on the hill across from us sends black smoke up into the blue and Mounts Silbüs and Taru tower in the distance. It’s a glorious, sleepy place for a picnic.

Our picnic spot down from the spring

On the road to Hasköy

Hasköy was rather unremarkable to me, save for the speedbump that nearly tore out the undercarriage of our car. It has a friendly father dog, who plays with his puppy rather than chase strangers. And it has a little girl named Hivda who seemed a little surprised at the foreign zava.

‘I don’t think you’re really American,’ she says.

‘Why not?’ I ask.

‘You’re not black!’

‘How’s that?’

‘I know Obama. He’s American and he’s black. So is Michael Jordan.  But what are you?’

After centuries of civil rights struggle on the part of our black people.  After my own travels in Asia where somehow the word American always equaled ‘White’. After lynching and slavery and profiling and whatever else you want to throw out there, we have come to a point where this Kurdish girl doesn’t believe I am American because I am white. I laugh out loud, and show her my driver’s license. See? She looks unconvinced, and repeats, ‘You don’t look anything like Obama!’

Her mother lays out a huge tray on the table and we gather around for dinner. It’s dusk. The call to prayer is signaling the end to the fast. There’s soup, lamb, lavash, and as always tons of questions and hospitality.

Before I close here, I want to mention a few of Conag’s own locals, who seem very important to this whole experience. For going villageing could often involve simply visiting several people in Conag itself, walking around randomly and popping into houses as you go to partake in conversation and whatever refreshment they brought out (usually tea). I couldn’t learn all the names, but let’s run through a few.

There’s Remziye Abla—Big Sister Remziye, whose legs were broken when she was young by the collapse of an power line. She uses two homemade crutches to walk, but is always smiling and when Husein and I pass her one day on a tour of the village, she grabs our arms and leads us to a hidden little plum tree loaded down with fat purple fruit. ‘These are the best in the whole village! I’ve kept them a secret until now!’ They taste like grapes—incredibly sweet. She then leads us to a huge mulberry tree in her yard. The west side of the tree, toward the bottom, bear white mulberries, the rest of the tree fat black ones. She laughs as we climb up and start to gather fruit, raining berries down on her head. ‘Take all you want!’

Then there’s Cengiz Abi (Big Brother Cengiz) with his honey—he’s a beekeeper and diplomat who keeps trying to negotiate the water crisis in the village. He has a soft, deep voice, a world-weary grin and always stops when he passes by to bid me a normal hello—without any of the marveling at the foreigner. Somehow, I just automatically feel at ease around him—right from the first handshake. I don’t know what it is.

Hediye Abla (Big Sister ‘Gift’) is a plump woman who talks in a boisterous voice and is always laughing. She also greets me normally, like I have lived next door all my life. She is one of the few who stays in the village all year round and is the manager of the calves that I let into Dede’s house the first day. We often pass her in the heat of the day shooing the little cows up or down the hill. Sometimes they wander ahead of her and you can hear her voice far away bellowing after them.

Hediye Abla's employees and my gate crashers

Mehmet Abi and his elegant Armenian wife who spend their winters in Germany—he’s a television produce there. It is there you go when you want to discuss history or music over rakı and beer.

Then there’s Celal’s wife Fatma, who invites us over one night for a dinner of zirvet—this was amazing, a hot fresh tray of soft bread drowned in ayran, garlic, and butter. She adds her own little flourish with a bit of honey.  We dined out on her porch after the ezan (she was fasting) and watched the twilight sky over the Peri Canyon turn from purple to star strung. Her grandson, Yağız was visiting, a little two year old with a big belly who somehow never ever ate—not even junk food, but who also never stopped smiling. His vocabulary consisted of bak and burda (Look! and Here it is!) which he used to mean just about everything. He used bak to ask for help tying his shoes, to say welcome, to point out a dog barking, and to say goodbye

So let me use it here to close. Interpret it as you will.

Bak!