New Spring, New Day, Newroz and Easter

Newroz Eggs/Easter Eggs

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, so this is going to be short--just to get my feet wet again. Yesterday, Delal and colored eggs for Easter, or Paskalya as they say in Turkish. It's one of my favourite times of year here--all the bakeries in Kadıköy carry challah bread, a braided Armenian sweetbread with brightly painted eggs in the middle. And of course, the apple blossoms and cherry blossoms are in full swing, the world famous tulips are starting to pop out of the ground, and the sycamores all have incandescent green buds on them.

And as usual, Delal's granddad pops out with a piece of surprise information.

"When I was a boy," Dede says, "We used to dye eggs for Newroz in the village."

Newroz is the Iranian New Year, celebrated by Kurds in Turkey on March 21st, the equinox. In fact, just last week we had gone to what must have been Istanbul's biggest Newroz festival yet in Kazlıçeşme--easily over 200,000 people in my modest opinion. Newroz has become a sort of national holiday for Kurds--and in recent years is the day for important political announcements. This year, the PKK leader Ocalan wrote a letter to be read out at Newroz celebrations, calling for an end to the armed struggle--a historic step in the ongoing peace process between Kurds and the Turkish government.

The traditions don't include bunnies or baskets. Though there are a few superficial similarities. In my family, we used to buy new clothes for Easter Sunday, usually all bright coloured pastels I never ever wore again. On Newroz, Kurdish women dress up in brightly colored bangled dresses called fistan--red, green, and yellow are the colours of choice, but you'll see orange and purple and turquoise.  Men, on the other hand, will wear black of khaki şal u şapik --a traditional outfit recently banned by Turkey's so-called "security package."

Other things: people build huge bonfires and jump them for luck, and everyone dances the govend (Turkish: Halay) until their legs snap off.

So how were Dede and friends colouring eggs for Newroz back in the early 1930s? We can only guess that it came from centuries of living in close proximity with Armenians. I found a book published by Ragip Zarakolu's publishing house, Belge. It's called Kedername (Document of Grief) and is a compilation of testimony on the Genocide compiled by Armenia's State Archives. In it was a rather telling description of the Kiğı region with harrowing and heartrending descriptions of the emptying out and murder of Armenians in all the villages near Conag--including Xiwek, Akrag, Hasköy and the town of Xolxol (Yayledere). Of Conag, there isn't much. One witness, a church official from Kiğı and the godfather (kirve) to the head of "the Kurdish village" says that on the road that leads to Conag from Xolxol, you can see a grave stone belonging to Prince Beşar.

"And in fact his descendants still dwell in the area. The ruins of an Armenian church sit in a pile of stones in the fields of Suleyman Beşaroğlu. I observed an interesting ceremony at his house. He had told me about the local saint that protected them and I asked if I could watch the ceremony they held for him, for he was reportedly a very powerful saint. I watched as he drew one by one books wrapped in white cloth from a large trunk. As he unwrapped them, I saw pages from the Bible, richly decorated and written in Armenian and Greek. The village headman couldn't read what was written there but just knew that the words held power."

Anyone who has kept up with my blog knows that there is still a pile of stones from an Armenian church that the villagers treat as holy and possessed of healing powers. Could this be the same stones? Dede doesn't remember anyone named Beşaroğlu (this would have been the late 1800s) and none of the books we have on the area mention anyone bearing that last name or anything resembling it. But it's intriguing--especially since the road from Xolxol to Conag could pass by the village of Hasköy which still has an Armenian cemetery and might explain the grave.

As we discover more and more anecdotal connections with the disappeared Armenians, Turkey brings to bear all its powers to deny the Genocide on the 100th anniversary. The government has scheduled an international commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli on April 24th, the day also commemorated as the start of the Genocide. Not surprisingly, most foreign dignitaries have declined the invitation. Turkey's pro-government newspapers claim that foreign officials have received threats from ASALA, an Armenian radical group--the only possible explanation in their minds for the refusal to show up.

And as for Newroz, the ruling party seems determined to roll back all progress made on that day as well, refusing to grant permission for a mediator for the Kurdish Peace process among other things. (Other things including a new ban on all social media and a draconian security bill that makes it legal to shoot protesters wearing a scarf over their faces, which you might if you expect to be attacked by thousands of canisters of tear gas.)

In any case, it felt right to colour eggs--somehow a celebration of both my childhood traditions and the traditions of Delal's granddad. There in lay some sort of symbol of who we were--it's hard to explain. Both American and Kurdish, respectful of tradition but forward looking. Together. United. Happy Easter, D. Newroz Piroz Be!

Newroz Piroz be--And Happy St. Patrick's

It’s been a long time since I posted anything—I haven’t felt much like writing lately. Maybe it’s the winter. If that’s the case, then yesterday’s Newroz celebrations in Istanbul should have broken the wicked season’s spell—I’ve jumped the proverbial Newrozian fire.

For those overseas: Newroz is the traditional Kurdish holiday to welcome spring and has become quite the political flashpoint in recent years. Then again, in Turkey, what doesn’t? The big hullabaloo this year is an argument over the spelling—Yes, spelling. According to crazed nationalists—patriorts--spell it Nevruz and it shows you don’t hate Turkey’s martyrs, spell it Newroz (with the evil Kurdish W!) and it showsy you are a crazed terrorist.

The devil evilly typing the evil W into every noble Nevruz

Last year, Newroz celebrations were forbidden by the government and police blocked access to transportation as far away as the ferries in Kadıköy. The usual chaos ensued—with one man losing his life to police tear gas cannister. The official Newroz celebrations are set for March 21st in Diyarbakır—and it’s going to be a big day this year because that is the day the Kurdish BDP party announces their vision for a peace plan after long negotiations between them, the government, and Abdullah Öcalan. Okay, it’s a long story—but the most ridiculously hopeful think that it could all mark the beginning of the end—the end of random arrests and of all official oppression as well as the end of the guerilla war that has gone on for 30 years. I don’t enough about politics to speak (comfortably) much about it, but let’s just say, this year, Newroz carries a great deal of weight.

Diyarbakır—unofficial capital of unofficial Kurdistan--is being given the exclusive for the official celebration, so other cities like Istanbul chose to celebrate on the weekend—for us, that meant March 17th.

We caught the ferry from Kadıköy, across the Marmara and Golden Horn to Eminönü. Then from there, hopped the commuter rail from Sirkeci station—a train I’ve only ridden one other time in my five years in Istanbul. It runs along the ruins of old Byzantine walls through neighborhoods of rickety but grand Ottoman and Greek houses that are heart breakingly picturesque, but have seen better days. We got out at Yedikule—the stop for the fortress of torture where the Sultan’s enemies used to rot before being killed and tossed into the sea. From the moment we exited the train, there were huge crowds, a river of people flowing past the fortress, through all the side streets to the Kazlıçesme fair grounds. Tens of thousands of people.

I’ve gotten kind of accustomed to this—but the walk to the fairgrounds is historically stunning. Through the old Greek and Armenian neighborhoods, past the ruins of the Imperial Byzantine gate, along the thousand year old city walls and then down to the fairgrounds. It was nearly a half-mile walk and was packed with people the whole way. Then the fair ground itself was bursting with bodies. The fences set were swelling outward with people and every inch of space was crammed with human beings—they even stretched vertically with lots of people climbing the ruins of an old mosque. Every free space was full. During election year, the AK party filled this space and claimed it held over 200,000 people. I suspect their calculations (made according to how many human bodies could fit into a square meter of land), but I wouldn’t be surprised of that’s how many were there yesterday. Or more—they spilled out into all the side streets after all.

Picture borrowed from Yuksekovahaber.com--gives you an idea of the crowds. Go to the website for more.

All the woman were gussied up in bright colored dresses with silver bangles and head dresses of the Kurdish colors green, red, and gold. There were purple fistans and orange ones and men in the olive green of the mountains. Every member of the Turkish left (an alphabet soup of political parties. Really, it’s best just to nod and smile and sing something pretty in your head when they start naming them all). You had your usual stupid young men climbing the towers that held the speakers and hanging from the rafters with Kurdish flags. Tons of people were dancing the halay, music was blasting between the political speeches and towers of cotton candy were floating over everyone’s heads as vendors wove in and out of the horde. People sold hot köfte sandwiches from carts and the smell of roasting meat filled the air. Some one lit a fire and, feeding it with plastic bags, led a group of boys in the Newroz tradition of fire jumping.

But what everyone was really waiting for were the political speeches—this is the year things are changing. And it was in one of these speeches that something interesting happened, something that made me want to pick up my pen. I was standing in the mud, shivering in the cold, when the speaker who was trying to introduce the Kurdish Party’s chairman, Selahattin Demirtaş, said the word ‘Martin Luther King’ into the microphone. He then quoted the famous ‘I have a dream’ segment of King’s eponymous speech.  He ended with King’s geographic call to the four corners of the American continent:

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

Then he began the speech again, substituting this time the cities and towns of Turkey for those of America. Let freedom ring from the plains of Anatolia, let freedom ring from great river valley of Mesopotamia. Let freedom ring from the lake of Van. And I got chills, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. This could very well be history in the making, and the connection to another history that greatly affected my life and my home was electrifying.

I thought of my trip home, this winter, to Washington DC. I stood at the top of the steps to the Lincoln Memorial. It was an extraordinary day, strangely warm and sunny. At the spot where King stood during his famous speech at the March on Washington is a marble block carved with his name and the date, August 28, 1963, ‘the hallowed spot to remind us of the fierce urgency of now.’ I had just stood on that marble block and imagined myself addressing a crowd of tens of thousands on that historical day (I remember the crowds from the video—millions it seemed stretching from horizon to horizon with their banners and their children on their shoulders—just like now in Istanbul) and as I rested on the top step I saw a young black man coming out of the shadow of Lincoln’s statue. He was dapper in a fedora and long coat and carried g a Bible—obviously the preacher of a Baptist bus from Louisiana I’d seen parked down the road. He was very careful in placing his feet on either side of the block, as if measuring the exact place King’s own feet would have touched and then he square his shoulders and looked out over the Washington Mall. I heard him say to himself, ‘So this is where it happened! This is what it feels like!’ He couldn’t stop grinning. And I knew why. I had imagined the same thing myself not five minutes before. And now on this cold Newroz in Istanbul, fifty years later, another group of people who marched to this place compare themselves to the people who marched on Washington that day. From other cities, we heard of attacks by nationalist groups, people disappeared even, and yet here they were, these two hundred thousand with their flags and their optimism and their music facing decades of systematic repression, here, at the ‘thresshold of freedom’ at long last.

We are all skeptical of course. The people on the other side of the negotiating table are still making random arrests, my father in law is still in prison along with all his friends. But we are hopeful.

After the rally, we went to the apartment of a Conag villager in Kadıköy, where the neighborhood of Yeldeğirmeni (Windmill) is a defacto Little Conag. A bunch of ladies were at the house and as the only male in sight every morsel of food available somehow found its way to my plate—a feast of Turkey and lavash and celery root and afterwards, rice pudding. And they talked—in Turkish—about the loss of their mother tongue. One woman told me how, when she was a girl, she had understood nothing of school. She failed the 2^nd grade and only later learned enough Turkish to pass.

‘They’d beat our hands with sticks for speaking Kurdish,’ she told me. ‘And it wasn’t just at school either. We were supposed to spy on our friends. And on our families, too. If anyone spoke Kurdish we were to report to the teacher.’

Dede, our trusty granddad, added his two cents, or kuruş. ‘I remember the teacher would line us up and look at our tongues. He said he could see the Kurdish words on our tongues. We believed him because they say ‘mother tongue’ you know and so of course you could see it on our tongues!’

‘We have no strength as a people,’ the first woman said sadly. And then our host reminded her of where she’d just come from, the rally of hundreds of thousands of people, and said ‘We’ve found our strength.’

Happy Newroz--Here's your jail sentence, Mamoste update

This is the Newroz celebration in Diyarbakır (NTV called this field 'empty except for a few stragglers')

A quick update—our aunt is visiting from Şırnak, and will tomorrow go see her brother in Kandıra in the first ‘açık görüş’ (open meeting)since she arrived. She will get to hug him, in other words. She came a few weeks ago because she had been having so many dreams about him and couldn’t bear being so far away—and what is the news that awaits her today? What hope do these democratic leaders of Turkey bring? The two most famous and thus most talked about people arrested with my father in law, Professor Buşra Ersanlı and Nobel PEACE prize candidate Ragip Zarakolu were formally charged today. The Professor—who is not Kurdish—was charged with leading the KCK, a Kurdish organizaitong that I am no longer sure is even real.  They want 22.5 years for her.  As for Zarakolu, he is charged with aiding and abetting the KCK and they want to slap him with a sentence of 15 years. (It’s funny, but my crime Turkish is really improving—for example from reading all the prison related crap I am now drowning in, I know that they say ‘slap with a sentence’ in Turkish, too—cezaya çarptırmak) No word yet on all the little non-media stars like mamoste they have caged in there with them, but we are expecting nothing different. The full indictment is apparently 2400 pages long, which makes me think we should call in Greenpeace in on the protest for all the forests they are leveling to print this nonsense. In other news, Newroz celebrations are being suppressed around the country. There is a video, right now, on the news that shows civil police in Cizre dragging a young girl out of a building by her hair (possibly the back of her collar—it’s hard to tell from this distance). Another officer is firing a gun into the building—which itself is hung with streamers and signs saying ‘Happy Newroz’.  Tanks, water cannons, and tear gas clouds fill out the picture. In the rioting on Sunday, a BDP representative Haci Zengin was killed by police, and Ahmet Turk was beaten up by police just today.  In our aunt's hometown of Şırnak (on the TV right now) police tanks are attacking a crowd of young boys with water cannons.The boys are throwing rocks--no doubt they will be sentenced to at least 15 years. Yeah, Happy Newroz—I wonder when folks here will start seeking refuge in Syria?