Conag, Part 10000. Mt. Silbüs--Lord of Light

                                                                The Holy Light—Mt. Silbüs                          

If the natural world holds any interest for you. If you’re the type to literally stop breathing when you see the full red moon clear the horizon, or when you  drive over a hill to find yourself looking over an empty canyon, or if you kind of get a high from a field of wild flowers, or from the sight of a turquoise blue river snaking far far down a mountainside through a sand colored valley—then there is no better place than Conag’s little spot on the border of Bingöl, Tunceli, and Elazığ provinces.

But what if nature is your arch enemy?

You see, I am working on developing a new stereotype. It may even advance to the level of prejudice one day. In any case, I would like to present it here so that others may share in my bigoted beliefs. Won’t that be nice?

Ready?

People in Turkey hate and fear the natural world.

Never mind the government’s decision  to dam all the rivers and turn over Turkey’s national parks to ‘entrepreneural initiatives’—that’s just good old fashioned greed. I’m talking about the fear of outside air for one. This is why so many people keep their houses shut up tightly even in the summer. Why, when its over 90 degrees outside, your service bus driver and his Turkey born passengers will not open a window.

As a corollary, they fear wind and breezes—those stalwarts of poetry the world over that most cultures describe with pleasant adjectives like ‘cool’, ‘warm’, ‘gentle’, ‘refreshing’, are here agents of Satan blamed for all sorts of illnesses from hernias to the flu.

And swimming in natural fresh water is deadly. It pulls you under and drowns you. When we went swimming at the Özlüce dam I had a very difficult time understanding what all the panic was about. ‘Please don’t swim!’ our host’s mother begged. ‘Please don’t even touch the lake! Fresh water pulls you!’ Tatlı su insani çekecek. Pulls me?  Like on a ski rope?  That sounds fun! But then I use my trusty language skills and figure out from context that she means ‘sucks you under.’ I suppose that when you compare it to the buoyancy of the salty Mediterranean or Aegean, it might feel like being pulled to someone who didn’t know any better.

Also, in the summer you can’t go outside because of the deadly African ticks. The media floods the airwaves with warnings, and Istanbul friends won’t even go in grassy parks for fear of them.  This year bears were added to the mix. There was a bear attack in the East and now everyone’s on the look out for roaming packs of killer bears.  Articles appear in the papers. Are we safe?  Can we coexist? What must be done? As if the whole nation were on the verge of invasion by armies of grizzlies.

And so when we decide to climb the majestic Mt. Silbüs, we are met with the same dismayed response by almost everyone. ‘Oh, you can’t! It’s too hard, and very dangerous.’

The drive to Mt. Silbüs was a hair raiser, I’ll give them that.  After the town of Xolxol, the road turns straight up and changes quickly from pavement to sand with bits of it washed away down the cliffs on either side. At one point, our trusty little Chevy already in first gear, starts to slide backwards down the mountain and it takes a few tries before she is able to clear the hill. The road is barely wide enough to accomodate us. If something happens, there’s no turning around, no getting out of the driver’s side even.

‘In the old days,’ says Delal. ‘You had to park down hill and walk for about twenty minutes, but the road is decent now.’

Decent?

Flowers of Silbüs

By some miracle, we arrive at the base of the mountain. From Conag, Silbüs looks like a smoothe rounded hill, but from here, it’s gigantic—three successive peaks towering ever higher into the turquoise sky. We are nearly above the tree line. Everywhere is desert brush and alpine flowers, splashes of bright pink, white, purple and yellow scattered among the rocks.  The patches of purple are so profuse it looks like lavender cloud shadows have frozen as they race cover the rock. The real cloud shadows pass quickly, darkening the tones to dark violet. Along the road, century plants stand like centinels, as tall as men. The sky is pristine. Across a small valley filled with bright green lichens is Taru, Silbüs’s mountain mate, a fortress of red rock and stone jutting up out of the earth, and behind Taru, a rolling stretch of smaller hills and canyons as far as the eye can see. Which is far—almost fifty miles even on a hazy summer day like this.

We breakfast at a picnic table overlooking Taru, and as we dig into our olives and cheese, Şerafettin’s minivan pulls in behind us. A troop from the village has come—more than should safely be jammed into a bus. A goat steps out of the back, destined to become a pot of Shepherd’s Stew by the early afternoon. Silbüs, like the shrine of Nur Dede, is a sacred place where sacrificing an animal and distributing the meat to others can win you merit. It is so sacred that it is the solemnist swear one can make.

Serê Silbûse wî! ‘By the Peak Mt. Silbüs!’

I hinted at the story before, but the full legend goes like this.

In the old days, there was a shepherd boy named Siibüs. He grazed his animals on these slopes and back then, the land was a paradise of fresh springs and green meadows. A girl from a neighboring village fell in love with him.  Her name was Star. They met together on the mountain slopes and eventually decided to marry.  But there was a very unhappy witch who saw them from her hut and decided that if she herself were miserable, then everyone around her would be miserable as well. She spread rumors about the couple, (in this culture—what people say about you is paramount) and the girl’s family locked her away and forbade her to see Silbüs. Silbüs was devastated. He wandered the slopes in his grief and finally, lost to despair, lay down weeping in some rocks near the mountain peak and died. Star finally managed to elude her family and ran up the mountain to meet her lover only to find his dead body among the stones. She fell down weeping and died herself from sorrow. The witch, unwilling to let them be together even in death, transformed herself into a thicket of briars that grows to this day between their unmarked graves. In the spring, the two lovers’ ghosts struggle to be together, and their fight against the witch’s magic results in great black storms that engulf the peak.

But then, this is just one version. The mountain harbors layers upon layers of different stories.

In the version I first heard, the two mountains of Silbüs and Taru were the two lovers and the valley between them where the witch transformed herself into a bramble.

It was also apparently a mountain sacred to the Armenians who once lived at its feet.  The name Silbüs is probably a Turkification of Surp Luys (Holy Light). Some say the boy and girl in question were Kurdish and Armenian and that Silbüs means light in Armenian (a la Lucifer) while Taru meant ‘dark’ in Kurdish. So it was a myth for day and night, and for the folly of fighting between two peoples or religion. In other stories, the two mountains are brothers. Silbüs goes off to stop an invasion but his brother Taru doesn’t join him. Silbüs curses his brother, who becomes a mountain of rough and sharp stone with no smoothe meadows.

The Alevi Kurds come here now when they want a blessing. They sacrifice an animal at the summit or else go behind the spring that gushes ice cold water to find a boulder blackened with soot. There they light a candle and pray—for themselves or a loved one, especially for women who can’t conceive, people wanting to meet a mate, or people separated from their lovers. This is the mountain of the Kurdish Romeo and Juliet after all. Some say its the mountain of St. Hizir, a kind of trickster saint beloved by the Alevis and Muslims alike—he’s the saint of misfits. He helps the poor and down-trodden and gallops to the aid of anyone truly in need on a magnificent white horse.

We get in line to light our candles, but the wind keeps snuffing them out. I finally manage to get three burning behind a small crack in the stone and say a quick prayer for my family back in the states.

There’s a lot of action going on. The villagers are setting up the barbecue grills, the goat is being led down to an outcropping below the picnic table, and we (Delal,Zelal, and I) decide to make our climb.

It takes only two hours from start to finish, and though there are points where the slope is steep and the air is thin (burning the back of the throad), it’s a relatively easy climb, but just absolutely awe-inspiring. Christ, I am running out of words to describe nature here. The last of the three peaks is up a field of red stones that people have piled into cairns. The sight of these standing stones is eerie. They are scattered with bright purple and lemon yellow flowers that Zelal picks—she says that when they are dried they give off a perfume that lasts for years. Dede still has a bunch in his house picked decades ago.  Delal is far ahead of us snapping pictures, her purple scarf flying out from her neck and snapping in the wind. It looks dramatic against the deep blue. Kites (the bird) soar in the air above us, riding the fierce air currents that whip up over the blade of the ridge.

When we reach the peak we find  boulders covered by hundreds of lady bugs—some orange and some yellow. A stone wall surrounds another black rock filled with tiny multi-colored candles. We light the ones we’ve brought and look out at the expanse of canyon and mountain, rivers and lakes—it stretches far toward the edge of sky where it desolves in a whitish mist of sunlight and distance. The wind is howling over the rocks, jumping past us and plunging into the void with a pained whistle. We can make out the Peri River and the castle of Xolxol far below. We can see the province of Dersim and the old Armenian village of Herdif amid a green wood.  Towers of thunderheads sail in from the north. Two hawks fly in circles next to a mountain peak far below ours and the sight of them, the realization of how high we are gives me vertigo.

‘I think I will always be the daughter of mountains,’ Delal says. ‘The sea just doesn’t call me like this.’

Zelal agrees.

Words don't even touch it

Some Conagians at the celebration--I just like this picture

More of them celebrating Conagians--one the famous Memli Dede

When we climb down, we find the villagers ready to eat. There’s a group of women singing a Kurdish folk song, and some are dancing the halay. Watermelons float in a pool just below the spring and I am reminded of how we used to chill our watermelons in the spring water back in Florida. What follows is hours of feasting and dancing. The goat is served in huge black skillets with flat loaves of lavash bread and salad.

Before the Armenians were driven out, they would have joined in these festivities. Armenians and Kurds, according to all the stories I’ve been told, celebrated each other’s holidays here. At the spring where the water melons chill, Armenian priests used to conduct baptisms for children born on the holiday of Vartavar--the biggest celebration of the year. It dates back to pagan times perhaps, and is thus loads of fun.  People throw water on each other, old and young alike, much like the Thai festival of Songkhran. They also sacrificed animals, ate lots of food, played music, and danced themselves silly right where we are doing the same things (minus the water throwing).

I try to imagine how the mountain would have looked then. 

Dark. The mountain is black, the sky a spray of icy stars.

The Armenians would have prepared for days, buying new clothes, cleaning everything in sight, baking loaves and loaves of lavash. Animals would be ready for sacrifice on the mountain (and all feuds ended, to sacrifice while angry at someone was a sin)

The first hint of sunlight would gleam pink-orange over the village of Xolxol and her castle down below, the mountain ridges lined with a pale light, and the Armenian women—perhaps with Kurdish neighbors—would labor up the slope in barefeet with loads of food, their men behind them.  They would reach the fountain where we now feasted—the whole sky perhaps a deep orange at this point and have breakfast.  The first to reach the water had the right to throw some on the others. I can imagine squeals and shrieks as the icy water made contact.  Then they set out for the summit—files of them trudging ever upward, a priest in front leading the way.  Once at the top, religion and race and creed were forgotten. All worshipped together, touching their heads to the rocks and kissing the stones like people are doing even now at the black rocks above the spring.

There are caves all over the mountain slopes. They supposedly sport piles of snow all year round. In fact, as we get down to the trailhead, everyone asks, ‘Did you eat the snow?’ When we say there wasn’t any, they look at us as if we are lying. Hundreds of people can fit in these caves (though we don’t see them, many people talk about caverns being up there, somewhere among all those crags). In one of these caves, an Armenian priest would feed sacred salt to an animal—only once made holy could it be cut.

They’re all gone now, these Armenians. Or maybe not. There’s a lot of mixing here, and a lot of hidden blood. Still, this whole mountain seems haunted with ghosts and memory.

After climbing it, it never quite looks the same. It is visible from every point important to a Conagian. It is a center, a compass, the great axel around which the world turns.

Conag's Wise Man-Dede

Dede—Grandfather.  Mr. Memli Seven.

Dede is a legend.

He’s the wise man of the mountains, the one all the others seem to aspire to. But seriously.

The hammock in the pine tree planted 60 years ago

There is a phrase in Turkish, ‘Elinden her şey gelir.’ Everything comes from his hands. This is certainly a fact on the ground in Conag. Dede built the house. He planted the apple and pears in the orchards. He planted the giant pine tree down in the garden where we hang our hammock and have our barbecue. He built the picnic table at the mill. He found the famous Joni (after apparently breeding his mother with a bear).

And the others revere him.

For example.

We go over one night to the neighbors for a rakı and cheese party. (A common event in Turkey—anis, different  cheeses, chilled green melon and watermelon). Our host is an exile returned—a German television producer with several documentaries under his belt—(check out his website, www.conag.org) It’s night, the winds are blowing hard up from the valley, and he’s talking about the village and how far it has fallen—‘people are selfish and small-minded nowadays. They can’t even turn off their faucets during the day when they know good and well everyone else has no water!’—but he also knows what the village needs to rise again. ‘We need more Memli Sevens.’ He turns to Delal and Zelal. ‘The trouble is there are not many like your grandfather in this village. Or in the world for that matter. For integrity, dignity, honesty, humility, open-mindedness—‘ He raises his glass. ‘He is one if a kind.’ And we drink a toast.

Another night, Delal’s second cousin has come over for tea (this is Celal, Dede’s nephew who I will call Uncle Celal from now on to avoid the complex calculus of extended family explanations.) Celal watches Dede leave the house on his way to have a bath, and then says to me, ‘There’s not one of us like that man, not in this world. When he goes, something important passes.’

‘Well hopefully those of us left behind can live up to his example,’ I say.

He flashes me a look like I have just blasphemed God.

Every village we go to, every town and every city, we introduce ourselves as Memli Seven’s grandchildren, and people just know. They become the Red Sea and make way for the Chosen Ones.

In the family, he’s famous for being unable to hurt another’s feelings or hold grudges. When Dede’s father was dying, he told Delal’s uncle (his grandson, mind you) ‘Make sure my sister doesn’t come to the funeral!’ There was a grudge between them at the time, apparently. Delal’s father quite naturally asked ‘Why are you telling me? Why don’t you tell my father, you know, your actual son?’ ‘Please!’ came the answer. ‘Your father is too soft hearted. He could never tell his own aunt not to come to her brother’s funeral!’

And despite heart problems and the occasional crisis with a blocked artery and his eighty-two years of hard life, he is rather spry. One day, we go on a walking tour of the village. We scale steep slopes, hop cow fences, dash across pastures, pick our way over streams through briar and bramble and he is there in the lead with his trusty cane. He loves his orchard. He leads us weaving through the trees, handing out pears and apples picked fresh off the branches. ‘This one is good! And this one!’ At one point, he calls out ‘Jem! Take my picture’.  Jem is me. Everyone says ‘Jeff’ is too foreign for him to take to, so he’s latched on to a Turkish name in its stead. I whip out the camera and look in the direction of his voice only to find him emerging delicately from a gathering of pear branches, one leg coyishly stepping forward, chest pushed out, a girlish grin on his face. ‘Take the picture! Take the picture!’ And I snap the shot, Pre-Raphaelite Maiden in the form of Elderly Kurdish Man.

Dede is also a wizard at the oral tradition—in other words, he tells a good story—all with his own embellishments, gestures, imitations, and little role plays. If there is a question about the history of the village, everyone refers you to Memli Seven. Behind the orchard and up the hill are the ruins of the old school—no longer in use because there’s no one to use it. The young have all fled to the cities. ‘Hey Uncle Memli,’ Hussein says. ‘Didn’t a blizzard kill a bunch of students here one winter?’ ‘I heard it was teachers,’ Zelal says. ‘Twenty teachers died…or something like that.’

‘No no!’ Dede says scowling, as if the false stories were a bad smell that had suddenly filled the air. ‘People are exaggerating and changing the story. I was there! I know what happened.’

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. We are all waiting.

‘Well then!’ we say. ‘What happened?’

‘It was like this. I remember the date, February 24th. It was back before the school was even finished, because the students hadn’t even come yet. There were two teachers staying there, young men, getting their house set up and trying to ready things for the kids. The day before was very sunny, and so warm that a lot of people started talking about Spring coming early. Then in the afternoon, the snow began to fall. It was light and fluffy at first, and it didn’t stick, but it kept falling into the night, and by early the next morning it had turned into a full fledged blizzard. Oh and such a storm! The winds were howling so loud, we had to hold our ears. The doors shook, the windows rattled, the animals cowered and whined. Of course, we couldn’t go outside at all. I remember when it hit noon, our windows were still black. You couldn’t tell it was daytime. Now, I was hungry, but we didn’t have much in the house and so we gathered around the table for dorak and bread, and then we heard screams. I don’t know how in the world we could hear them over that wild howling of the wind, but we did! Imagine how loud and desperate those men must have been! We dashed outside. The whole village had heard them and everyone was in the street. We heard people from up the hill trying to make it down to us, ‘What is it?! What’s going on!?’ We shouted for them to go back inside. ‘Go back! We’ll take care of it! It’s too dangerous!’ We all raced down through the winds and snow toward the school—that’s where the screams were coming from. We got there to find it half covered in snow. We scrambled over each other, desperately digging and digging to get to the door .’

He pauses for effect, and continues in a slightly quiter voice. ‘When we finally got in, we saw that the roof was gone. It had been swept away in the wind. We found one of the teachers in his room, covered up to his neck in snow, ice in his hair. He couldn’t talk, but he pointed to the class room and some of us plowed a path through the snow in the hallway and kicked open the door. The other teacher was frozen—his hand still held to the chalkboard where he’d been writing a lesson—blue skinned, covered in ice and snow.’

‘Oh God, they died!’ says Delal.

Dede looks surprised. ‘What? No they lived, of course. We dug them out and warmed them up with blankets and soup and they were fine.’

Sometimes he starts stories at the end. One night, when talking about a neighbor having evaded military service with a fake passport, he says simply ‘And of course, that’s why the police raided your father’s house that time.’

What are you talking about? Everyone asks. What raid? When? Why did who raid where?

Sometimes I don’t understand or miss a detail—between my imperfect Turkish, and Dede’s accent, and his liberal use of Kurmanci Kurdish, I miss alot. ‘Have him retell them,’ Delal advises. ‘Believe me, he never tires of going over his stories again.’ One day I ask him to tell me the tale of his older sister and the Dersim massacres. I’ve heard them twice before, but mess up the details. We are in his kitchen, having tea after a rather large breakfast.

‘My older sister,’ he begins without pause, ‘Married someone just over the mountains. The family was a clan from Dersim proper, Zazas. We were just a border town. We’s heard about the massacres, and so the whole family gathered and went to bring my sister back to Conag. Now the government was having a lot of problem with the local tribes there.  For centuries they had lived pretty independently. They didn’t pay any taxes. They didn’t send soldiers to the army. Then the government tried to force them to do these things, and they didn’t appreciate it. I also heard a story about a Turkish soldier raping a girl, a daughter of one of the clan heads, and the father gathering his men for a revenge raid. Maybe all the problems started like that, I don’t know, but in the end the Dersim people basically wanted their own state and…’

Right in the middle of the sentence, Uncle Celal comes over with a neighbor and the story is forgotten. The three older men venture off in search of a sheep (more on that later), and we young people (Delal, Hussein, Zelal, and I) set out on a walk to the nearby village of Mırun to pick up and pick on Murat—the driver from my previous entry who has avoided visiting us the whole time we’ve been in the village, apparently because a trip to Conag would interfere with his intense napping schedule.

We return late that night, too late for dinner, so instead we all repair to the balcony for tea and watermelon.

Dede is relaying some story or another to Hussein about Hussein’s grandfather (and Dede's uncle), whom everyone somewhat sarcastically calls Efendi, or ‘Honored Sir’. Apparently, when Dede was building his house, they were in the middle of a feud. Dede, feeling a bit guilty for fighting with an elder, went to make peace. 'Why don't you come help me build, Efendi?' he asked. 'We'll work together. You would be a huge help!' Efendi came and worked for a few weeks--the feud seemingly forgotten in the common labor. Then one day, he hand-delived a bill for services rendered.

‘I always forget your stories,’ Hussein says. ‘I need to record them or write them down or something. Tomorrow, I won’t remember a word.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I say. ‘Remember Dede? You were telling me about your sister and Dersim? I’ve already forgotten the details.’

He looks at me blankly for a second then its like someone’s flipped a switch, bringing him to life. ‘Right’ he says, ‘And of course the Turkish government couldn’t accept an independent state.’

Hours later, picking up at the exact point in the sentence where he’d left off! Everyone bursts out laughing.

‘They started rounding up the Dersimlis just like they had the Armenians, marching them away and murdering them. That’s why we decided to go fetch my sister before they could do it to her. It took a couple of days of travel over the mountains, but we got her and brought her back to Conag. A few days later, our in-laws show up. Her husband is there and starts shouting at us, ‘I’ve come for Hatun!’ We tell him, leave her with us! We brought her here to save her. It’s safer here. We’re on the border and in less danger. And do you know what their answer was? ‘If they come, they come. We will all die together!’ Hatun went back with them and luckily the massacres stopped before they got to their village.’

(Back in Istanbul it’s not okay to talk about any of this, by the way. That statement he started with about the Armenians is enough for death threats--and just a few years ago, arrest and prosecution. Telling the bit about Dersim amounts to treason, splittism, and terrorism in the eyes of some in the government. NO ONE talks about these things, but in the village, they’re simply part of a shared history, and the evidence is in the back yard.)

And a certain old fashioned magic hangs around the man.

Before we arrive in Conag, one of Dede’s neighbors has a dream (Uncle Celal’s wife, in fact). She sees Dede walking hand in hand with his grand daughter to the shrine of Nur Dede. (Nur Dede is a local ‘Saint’ sacred to the Alevis). They have a sheep, and together they sacrifice it at the shrine and give the meat to the poor. A few nights later, a woman in the village down by Özlüce dam calls Dede to tell him about her own dream, and it turns out to be the exact same one.

He decides its a sign. And its hard to argue.  As soon as we, the grand children, arrive, the search for the sheep begins. It proves fruitless.  Animals are hard to come by these days, and when you do find one, its prohibitively expensive. No one likes my idea of offering up Stew, who I think has gotten too uppity for an ruminant. After a long search, Dede turns up one afternoon with a black goat whose fur is matted with lumps of beggar weeds. 

I have long wondered how I would react to seeing an animal butchered, but the goat proves so annoying that I would have volunteered to do the cutting myself, early, if it wouldn’t have ruined all the holiness. The goat starts bleating that afternoon—loud, furious screechy bleats--and it bleats on into the night (keeping everyone awake) and is still bleating madly in the morning.  (Do goats sleep?) Only when we load it into Şerafettin’s van does it finally quiet down.

The ride to the shrine takes an hour almost, down long stretches of gravel roads winding through the mountains--and the goat is so calm that I forget it’s there and am somewhat startled to see it come calmly stumbling out at the end of the trip. It’s silence is eerie. It trots up the path to the shrine without resistance, as if it knows and has accepted what’s about to happen.

The shrine itself is a village house that the owners claim is eight hundred years old.

‘It was the first house built in Şixan, by the holy man Şıh Harun,’ explains a plump woman who welcomes us inside. ‘We call him Nur Dede—the Old Man of Light’. We’ve brought candles, and each of us grandchildren lights a few and sets them on a stone in front of a sort of altar, at the center of which is a large stone pitch black with centuries of soot. The walls are hung with portraits of the prophet Ali and his grandsons Hassan and Hussein. There is soot around the door, too. No one seems to know the explanation for anything here. ‘It’s tradition,’ is the only answer I can get. Of course, Alevis do take a few things from the Zoroastrians—including a reverence for fire, which might explain the candles. After kissing the black stone, we are hurried outside and up the hill behind the house. There we find Dede and the shrine keeper standing over the quivering body of the goat. It’s neck has been severed until the bone and blood streams out into the dirt in a stream of cartoon red that looks too bright to be real. The shrine keeper dips his finger into the goats blood and dabs it on each of our foreheads. The blotch on Delal’s looks like a cross. The one on Hussein’s looks like a Zen painting of zero. The one on mine feels cold.

‘Are these your grandchildren?’ the shrinekeeper asks.

Dede looks at us all and nods. It’s an odd moment. The blood is a mark somehow, an initiation. Wearing it brings me viscerally into the Mala Memli (The House of Memli—in the village, everyone wants to know what house you belong to, and this is the answer.) I came not particularly believing in any of this sacrifice stuff, but you can feel some kind of sacred space now—if only from the presence of Dede and the four of us, blood on our foreheads in his name.

The Sacrifice

Delal films and takes pictures, and the rest of us simply watch silently as the man turns this once living animal into a pile of meat. Out pops the heart and liver and the brain. In the end, the meat is taken back inside the shrine and distributed to the poor of the village who have materialized out of thin air in our absence.

‘Vultures!’ Delal’s uncle calls them later. ‘The people in that village live off the donations to that shrine, and they’re neither poor nor needy!’

But it’s the intention, isn’t it? And Dede seems to have made peace with the dream. We journey back to Conag with the blood dried maroon on our foreheads, and Dede tells the story of the shrine (of course, he has a story). And it all has to do with cucumbers.

‘A long time ago (1200 AD according to some of the old folks), there lived a very important vizier. He was trying to have a road built through these mountains and one of his strongest mules fell and broke its leg. Now work couldn’t continue without that mule, and so he sent two of his finest soldiers in search of Sheikh Harun—a holy man that people said had mastered the power to heal. After some wandering, the soldiers find a man called Harun. He invites them into his garden for some tea and a rest. As they drink, he places cucumber seeds in one empty row of his garden. No sooner does he start the second row, than the seeds of the first sprout and begin to grow. When he begins the third, the first begins to flower and by the time he gets to the fourth row, the first is full of fat, ripe cucumbers!’

Harun picks two and says, ‘Take these to the vizier. But don’t eat them before you arrive! If you can manage this, I will not be far behind and heal the donkey.’

They left with the vegetables, but one of them was unable to contain his curiosity. ‘Can it be a real cucumber?’ he said and then took a bite. He immediately fell over, stone dead. The other soldier raced to the vizier and told him all that had happened. The vizier was incredulous, and stared in wonder at the cucumber, wisely deciding not to eat it. Just then, an old man appeared coming up the road. His face was radiant with light. He was shown to the mule and as soon as he touched its leg, it rose to its feet and began to work. A miracle! The dead soldier’s grave is still in the forest outside Şixan!’

Our last few days in Conag, we decide to take a trip East, to Lake Van. Not wanting to leave Dede alone, we try to cajole him into joining us the night before we leave. ‘My health is not good!’ he protests. ‘I have heart problems!’

‘We’ll drive you immediately to the hospital if something happens,’ we promise.

‘Then I’ll ruin all your fun!’

‘What fun? It’ll be boring without you.’

‘Or I’ll slow you down. I can’t take the heat you know. I always have to rest.’

‘We’ll keep the air on in the car.’

‘Traveling is for young people! Just leave me alone already!’

‘Your only eighty-three.’

‘Well,’ he groans miserably. ‘We’ll see.’

This is a chink opened in his armor. Delal opens it a bit further. ‘You can see that friend of yours that lives in Van. Your cellmate.’

When he was seventy-eight years old, Dede was arrested by the Turkish gendarmes and sent to prison for three months in the province of Muş. He was charged with, yes, the old classic, aiding and abetting terrorists. The army had captured a PKK guerilla and to save his own life, the captive gave the soldiers the names of several people in the surrounding villages as his ‘helpers’. ‘Memli Seven’, being one of the most well-known names in the region, was among them. And though innocent of the charges (I know, because he has shared stories of guilt for NOT helping the guerillas) and though seventy-eight years old with a serious heart problem, he was loaded in the back of an armored car and driven through the middle of the desert heat and tossed in a prison. There he met Ali, a merchant who worked in Van.

‘He told me where to find him if I should ever get out,’ Dede says as we load him into the back seat, having persuaded him in the more optimistic light of morning.

It takes as a couple of hours to clear the mountains of Bingöl. The highway climbs a steady slope for what seems like hours and then, as we round the top, an enormous plain comes into view, stretching in all directions toward the horizon. The far edges dissolve in a white haze of heat and dust. Dede sits up and looks excitedly through the windshield. This is the legendary Plain of Muş.

‘I’ve always wondered what it looked like!’ he says. ‘When they brought us through in the armored car there was only one slit in the very top of the wall and we took turns peeking through it. But we had to stand on our toes and you could hardly see a thing!’

In the city of Muş itself, we pass a sign for the State Prison. There is a rather uninteresting road plunging through some concrete housing and brush.

‘That must be where you were, Dede,’ says Delal.

‘It’s hard to say. We couldn’t see anything going in, nor anything going out.’

He’s wearing a wide brimmed women’s hat with a white cloth hanging down the back (the girls have stuck this on him to protect him from the sun coming through the window) and looks for all the world like a cross between an elderly Lawerence of Arabia and a fussy British country club lady. He pulls out his phone, ‘I think I’m going to call Elif.’ (his daughter).

‘Hey Cemile!’ he says. ‘Guess where I am! Nope! I’m on the road to Van!’

And one by one, he phones all of his children to brag about where he’s going.

‘Kemal, how are you?  How am I? I’m on my way to Van! We’re in Muş now.’

‘Fatma, you’ll never guess where I am. No! On the road to Van!! We even went to the floating islands! We’re going everywhere!’

The floating islands are Bingöl’s claim to fame—three islands on a small lake over 180 feet deep. The islands literally glide over the surface of the water at the slightest breeze. To get to them, you have to turn off the highway and drive down a cracked and ruined road that passes through several deserted villages and a dry riverbed. The islands themselves are located in a valley just on the other side of a Kurdish village in the county of Solhan. At the entrance to the village is a guard box. Inside is a man dressed in camouflage and carrying a machine gun. We sight another gunman walking the streets of the village itself. Several serious face little girls run out to throw themselves at our car. They are trying to sell flowers or plums, but there’s something bizarre about them. A kind of gloom hangs over their faces, and when we stop to buy some purple daisies off of them, the do not smile at our jokes or answer our questions with anything more than a few monosyllables.

The floating islands--not impressive in a photo, maybe, but when they get moving, it's spooky

The girls of the Home Guard village

‘This is a Home Guard village,’ Delal says. ‘I have never seen one before!’

The Home Guards (Korucu) villages are villages who have agreed to work with the Turkish government against the PKK. At best, they are ostracized by other Kurds and targeted by the PKK. At worst, they also do a lot of the government’s dirty work for them. Another camouflaged guard waits at the park entrance, sleeping with his arms around his machine gun next to a rather depressed looking park guard. It’s the middle of Ramadan, and over a hundred degrees outside, so they can be excused their lethargy, but nevertheless Dede decides to try and talk to them.

‘I’m curious about these guys!’

By the time we return from our exploring, he’s in the middle of a rather lively conversation.

‘You don’t have home guards?’ the man is asking.

‘We sure don’t,’ Dede says.

‘But I thought all of our villages were controlled by the Home Guards!’

‘They gave us the choice, work for us or we will bomb you. We said we wouldn’t work for them, but somehow they never bombed us.’

This was the choice given most villages.

Later in the car, Dede says, ‘That was a strange place.’

Lake Van is majestic. At the Armenian church on Lake Akdamar, despite all his fussing about the heat and his health, Dede cannot hide his fascination with the carvings. We walk around together and he traces the intricate lace-work designs on the katchkar gravestones with his fingers. ‘Look at this stonework, Cem!’ he says. ‘The people who made these understood something we don’t. They’re just incredible!’ When the girls try to get him to sit in the shade, out of the heat, he gets frustrated and says, ‘But how will I be able to see everything if I sit down?’ I’ve never seen him so enthusiastic about anything. The inside of the church captivates him as well. ‘These are like the carvings in our Shrine back home!’ he says, marveling at the crosses and ivy designs in the arch above the entrance to the main sanctuary.

Inside Akdamar Church

Akdamar Church from the Mountain Behind--Lake Van

We pull into Van City late afternoon. The sun is setting, the sky a deep blue as lucid and unspoiled as the lake itself. From the top of Van Castle they look like one reflected into the other. When we first drive into the downtown area, it’s jammed with cars. At one point we sit for thirty minutes in a traffic jam made of horses, eskici carts, motorcycles, sports cars, minibuses, and cement mixers all seemingly pointed toward us. Then, miraculously, as the sun sets the traffic lifts and the streets are completely empty. We find a parking spot on the main artery through the city, and begin walking the back streets.

‘My friend works in the Old Wheat Warehouse,’ Dede tells passers-by. They point us down one side street or another, and for a long time we walk through a maze of shops whose owners are busy turning off lights, locking doors, and pulling down shutters. After living three weeks in Alevi Conag, I had forgotten about Ramazan in Sunni Muslim lands. That’s why the traffic had suddenly vanished. The İftar breaking of the fast was coming in the next ten minutes, and everyone was rushing toward a meal.

‘Dede,’ Delal says. ‘I don’t think we’ll find him. Everything is closing.’

But he won’t give up. He ducks into a bakery trying to fill all the last minute orders for Ramazan Pide. ‘Do you know Ali Çelebi? He used to work around here.’

‘No, uncle.’

‘We were in jail, together.’

‘Sorry uncle.’

He walks into a tea house, an old man shutting off its lights. ‘Sorry Uncle.’ He asks two men sitting out in front of their cloth shop with plates of food waiting for the dusk ezan to announce the end of the fast.

‘Sorry uncle,’ they say. ‘We don’t know.’

The streets are emptier now, everything shuttered tight. We see one tall young man coming toward us, but he is hurrying elsewhere and doesn’t look up. Dede catches another man with a load full of food in his arms on a delivery run.

‘Sorry uncle.’

His devotion to this friend is touching, and very characteristic of him. In the end we come to a lonely park hidden away in the center of this maze of streets. There is a group of old men sitting on the grass, silently staring at four sealed tupperware containers in front of them. Their hands clasp therir forks. They’re ready for İftar. The park is called Ahmed Xani Park—named for one of the most famous Kurdish poets, their first nationalist, and the first intellectual to write a Kurdish grammar. 

‘Come on, Dede,’ Delal says. ‘Let’s stop and have a bite to eat.  We’re not going to find him.’

A TV blasts from a tea house at the edge of the park. It’s the news. There’s been an attack in Hakkari—9 soldiers have been killed, including officers. The Prime Minister is promising retaliation. The talking heads on the screen are screaming for revenge. The voices echo through the empty streets in an eerie way. We stop everything and listen for a moment.

‘They’re angry,’ Delal says. ‘After all those promises, and all the hopes they raised.  Then nothing changed, and now all that rage is coming out.’

Dede and I walk closer to the TV to see the screen. His eyes are wide, he looks shocked. ‘Nine Martyrs Lose Their Lives!’ flashes the headlines over pictures of one of the officers and his family. They had apparently just had a new baby. ‘PKK terrorists will pay, promises Erdoğan.’

‘I’m afraid its going to start all over again,’ Dede says to me, his voice cracking with an unconcealed despair. ‘All over again. This horrible and bloody civil war.’

There’s a man standing with us, a dark-skinned young teen in a bright yellow shirt. I watch his face, but he shows no reaction to what Dede says.

‘It’s starting all over again,’ Dede repeats miserably.

Dede lost a son to that old war. He was driven into exile and he will probably never see him again.  Suddenly the ezan sounds. The call to prayer breaks over the little plaza and the men on the grass begin to eat. I return to our table where the girls have laid out a spread of bread, salad, cheese, and pırgaç (a Kurdish pastry we made before leaving the village).  But Dede stands staring transfixed at the TV, until a commercial comes and breaks the spell. He notices our voices calling him over, and comes over to eat.

Conag--Part 2, Calling on the old folks.

We travel as a foursome—Delal, Zelal, cousin Husein, and I--paying visits to all the old people’s houses—up one narrow dirt path and down another.  We wind past mulberry trees, ford small streams created by people irrigating their gardens, make way for cows (one young steer gives chase to the girls—he’s almost as famous and feared as Joni.)

A visit runs as follows—you walk in, kiss the old person’s hand and then put it to your forehead (if someone does this to you, it means you are very old so a lot of them will yank their hand away and say its not necessary).  Then the old person—say, the ninety year old grandmother of someone you know back in Istanbul—will leap to her feet to bring chai.  Everyone will beg her not to go, but she’ll dash off to the kitchen anyway.  Then the tray of tea comes out—you drink several hundred cups until your stomach starts to flat up, out of your neck and into your mouth and then you go to the next house and repeat the process.  Sometimes, there are variations. When we went to the dairy headquarters of the village we were, mercifully, served warm milk and honey.

The conversation usually runs like this.  First, to Husein, the old woman of the house will say in a gruff voice, ‘Hey, what’s going on?  You working these days?  Still holding up?  Well, you’re young, buck up.’  Then they turn to me—the American zava (Kurdish for groom and the explanation for me)--and their voice suddenly goes very high and, as if they are dressing a two year old or a kitten waddling unsteadily toward them, ‘And how are you doing, dear one?  Just look at his face!  Who’s a happy boy?  You are!’

Whenever the camera comes out, suddenly everyone goes into National Geographic mode

These visits never stop.  It takes several hours to go anywhere because you must stop at each house on the way for tea.  One woman in a village down near the dam asked me my name, where I was from, how long I had lived in Istanbul, did I like it, what was my job, then turned to Delal and said, ‘Does he speak Turkish?’ ‘That’s how I have been talking to you for the last five minutes!’ I say. On another morning, on a trip to the local hot springs, a passenger boarding Şerafettin’s early morning van sat down next to me and asked in that same high pitched for-kittens voice, ‘Hi sweetie, you speak Turkish?’ Only she asked in Kurdish with only the word ‘Turkish’ in Turkish.  It’s kind of like being asked, ‘Usted puede hablar en English?’ by a Cuban in Florida.

There’s a tree in the middle of the village—the old square—called Pişte Mezara, ‘on the back of the graveyard.’  The cemetery used to be here nearly a hundred years ago, until, accoring to cousin Ali, a flood lifted the bodies out of the ground and they moved everything to high ground on the mountains behind grandfather’s house.  Still, a few gravestones still lie about, and under an old mulberry tree, every day, all the old men sit and have a gossip session.  They invite me to join them one afternoon—the foreign zava—and I try to assimilate by making up gossip about Hussein. (I have one rumor I’d like to spread about Joni, but Delal orders me not to--nevertheless it relates to the fact that I often see Joni palling around rather closely, if you ask me, with another male dog. I have also noticed that the roosters in Delal’s mom’s village—the somewhat distant Zenan—travel around in male pairs, unlike in every other village where there’s always a hen).

One of the men stands and begins to explain about kids (zaroken).  He is saying everything in Kurdish, but by some miracle, I manage to catch the main idea. This square under the tree used to be filled with kids, hundreds of them playing games all day long.  They played a game just like your baseball with a big stick that they hit the ball with.  And they used to have enormous weddings where 80 sheep and goats and cows would be butchered for barbecues that lasted three days or more, and people came from all over the region for dancing (the halay of course, accompanied by the davul drum and zurna pipe), but now there are no children and no animals anymore. And then he switches to Turkish and says, ‘Eski gibi değil’.  Nothing is like it used to be. This is a common refrain I hear out of almost everyone’s mouth. It pops up at least once a day—there’s a powerful sense here of a lifestyle lost. Its ghost still wanders Conag and the surrounding villages, looking for a new body but slowly fading away.  Cows seem to be all that’s left—(including the poopy quartet that paid the unwelcome visit the other day—kept by a chunky woman named ‘Gift’ ). The loss of animal husbandry is the thing most deeply felt—only a few villagers keep animals anymore.  When we travel East to Van with Grandpa, one of the things that transfixes him the most is the sight of vast herds of sheep and goats on the plains of Muş. At the sight of them moving like cloud-shadows over the dry-yellow grass he sighs and says, ‘We used to be like that.’

One of the oldest roads inthe world--from the Urartu Empire.  That's Ararat folks.

One thing that has changed everything are the dams.  The canyon that Conag looks over was formed by the Peri Suyu—literally ‘Fairy Water’ in Turkish, but an actual river, though not a big enough one to make it onto a lot of maps.  As small as it is, there are three dams blocking its flow all within 30 miles of Conag—3 dams!  And more further on. This is supposedly to supply power to a region with less people in it than my neighborhood in Istanbul.  The lakes created by the dams have flooded old villages and grazing land (we swim one day on the lake of the Özlüce dam, the beach is the upper half of a flooded and forcibly evacuated village). The flooding has devastated the traditional economy, and many Kurds believe it is all part of a deliberate plan to make their country unliveable to that they have to leave—don’t know about that one, but three dams for a place with about as many people does strike one as awfully suspicious. They are also flooding major archaeological sites—the current government has little regard for either history or the environment and in fact are removing the protected status on most of Turkey’s national parks so that companies can develop unhindered.  And what an untouched treasure trove of sites!  In this area alone, there are three ruined Urartrurian castles (one in Kiğı, one in Xolxol just 2 miles up the road, and one in Bağın, just 15 miles toward Karakoçan)--all unexcavated and undocumented and falling into ruin.  Who were the Urartrians?  Who cares when you can have malls and copper mines!  This Urarturian bunch built one of the oldest highway systems in the world—just thirty miles southeast of Conag—its ruins are still visible in the brush, a road 16 feet wide paved with gigantic red Stones, and the Turkish government has done nothing to preserve it. It would get in the way of the future car lots I suppose.  The Urartrurian land was called Ararat in the Bible ( yeah, that Ararat) and the area around Conag used to be part of their Empire.  They were probably ancestors of the Armenians, another reason to pave them over with something useful like a high rise as quickly as possible.  But its not just these Ararat people. No. The wall of an old Byzantine fortress was found on a construction site down in the valley—apparently enough gold was buried at its foot that one of the construction workers was able to retire after stealing it.  Another construction site near the village of Hasköy revealed the thousand year old sarcophagus of a child.  Road work and house building and dam building turn these things up all the time.  Yes, ancient civilizations on the borders of ancient Mesopotamia.  Do we need to investigate. Hell no!

The Peri Suyu (Fairy Waters)

Ah, the dams. They are all over the Southeast—part of the locally despised HES civil engineering projects one of which is going to flood one of the world’s oldest cities-Hasan Keyf. Water is such a focal point for arguments in Conag, and for life in general. There is an ongoing local controversy about which village has the best water—Conag, famous for its mountain spring, is generally where people head when they want to fill up their jugs with the best of the best.  The name of the province Conag belongs to, Bingöl, means ‘A thousand lakes’ and is, as local legend has it, the secret location of the garden of Eden because four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates mentioned in Genesis, flow out of these mountains. The fountain of youth, Ab-ı Hayat, is also supposedly located here, and drinking from it grants immortality. It’s not the Conag spring, I can tell you, cause I continue to age.  Drinking Conag water did nothing to stop the arrival of my fortieth birthday, though it tasted good and was quite refreshing!  Kiss Conag’s ass, Evian.

Summer in Conag--Kurdish Village--Part 1



A View from Conag

It is a story immortalized in the film ‘Meet the Parents.’ Boy goes to his inlaw’s house for the first time--desperately wanting to make a good impression on the girl’s family. Hijinx ensues. Boy is humiliated.

This summer, at the end of our honeymoon, Delal and I boarded a bus East for her village, Conag, located in the Northwest corner of the province of Bingöl. It was a rather involved journey. We took a twenty-hour bus first to Dıyarbakir, and from there caught a slightly smaller three-hour bus to Elazığ, walked a mile to the minibus stop in sweltering desert sun, and from there caught an overcrowded van driven by a man who refused to open the windows despite the 100 degree heat (might catch a cold or get a hernia!) to Karakoçan (Kurdish-‘Dep’) where we then made arrangements to be taken the last 50 kilometers to Conag in the village mayor’s SUV. The mayor’s whole family is squished into the backseat with us, along with supplies of food for a week. His two daughters are smashed against the window on the opposite side of the cab from me.

‘You’re going to Conag?’ one asks.

‘Yep.’

‘I’m afraid to go there. We live up in town in Xolxol.’

Odd, I thought. The mayor doesn’t even live there. ‘Why in the world are you afraid of Conag?’ I ask.

‘Joni,’ the girl says in a low voice. Now they only thing that the name Joni brings to mind is Richie’s sister from Happy Days. I have a brief vision of an aging Erin Moran roaming the Kurdish village, terrorizing the unwary inhabitants.

The terror of Joni hits Conag!

‘Joni is the scariest dog in the world,’ her sister explains. ‘He attacks everyone.’

‘He’s not just a dog,’ the first girl says. ‘He’s half bear. People say that his mother mated with a bear in the forest and that’s why he’s so mean. No one can walk the village at night. That dog jumps right at their throats!’

‘Dede found Joni when he was just a puppy,’ Delal explains. ‘The boys in the village used to throw huge stones at him and tortured him in all kinds of ways. That’s why he’s so crazy.’

The path from Xolxol to Conag can only be called a ‘road’ with a bit of imagination. There are parts so cracked, broken, and fallen with landslides, bursts of water, and fallen boulders that I had to close my eyes as we passed. After days of constant travel, when the truck rolled to a stop at Dede’s (Grandfather’s) door, we were exhausted. We unloaded the groceries—the girls would not leave the car for dread of the fearsome Joni. Dede met us at the door with the customary kiss on both cheeks and a hug. We dropped our bags in the bedroom and went for a shower only to find that there was no water in the house due to an ongoing civil war over water in the village.

(Basically it goes like this—no matter how small the place, it is never too tiny for politics. Until a few years ago, there was a fountain in the center of the village that trickled merrily throughout the day, the sound giving everyone the illusion that they were cooler than they actually were. Then the fountain dried up and the older villagers have decided to make do by leaving their sinks, toilets, and hoses running all day. The result—87 fountains and all the houses on the upper slopes run out of water by noon. People have been fighting about it for weeks by the time we arrive.)

At dusk, before dinner, Dede takes me down to his garden below the house. He and the other old men of the village have quite the set up—a spool for a card table, chairs, an impromptu grill where they barbecue chicken and lamb. He then proceeds to give me a tour of his house.

‘This was my wedding gift to my wife,’ he explains. ‘I wanted to marry her, but I was too poor at the time. So starting in 1947, I worked and saved money and slowly got the first floor built.’ The first floor is traditionally for the animals—here many years ago stayed the family’s cows, sheep, and goats. The walls are made of earth and stone and it is the coolest place in the village—the perfect refuge from the brutal summer sun that that week was pushing temperatures above 110 degrees. He takes me upstairs and proudly points out the roof beams. ‘We carried those trees here through the forest from over thirty miles away. But the hardest part was the roof in the television room. I couldn’t quite get the roofbeams to sit level. You can still tell they’re crooked.’ The balcony is his pride and joy, I think. It overlooks the canyon of the Peri Su (Fairy River) and has to command one of the best views in the village. ‘Finally, after two years and lots of work—once I ran out of money and nearly despaired that I would ever finish—I got it done and was able to get married. Since then I have been adding to it every year.’

What is my first contribution to this pride and joy? Read on! ,

The blood, sweat, and toil of two years--and then came the grandson-in-law

Dede and I go downstairs and I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Under the stairway is a mountain of hair with two glowing yellow eyes in the middle.

‘Joni!’ Dede says. ‘Scat! Get out of there this instant.’

He looks at me a bit scoldingly. ‘Now you have to make sure the front door is latched when you come in! The animals try to come in here to get out of the sun and mess everything up!’

It takes quite a bit of doing to get Joni out. For his all his fierce reputation, he hangs his head and stops at every table, chair, and sink to cower until Dede shouts at him again. He clearly has no desire to go back outside and when he does finally waddle out the door, he stands looking hopefully at the latch for at least half an hour before sighing dramatically from the heat before skulking away.

Joni--the apparent result of Dede's mad efforts to breed a bear and a dog.

So no savage attacks from Joni, just a passive aggressive kind of guilt trip.

Remember: Must lock door against half-dog, half-bears.

The next day, I go out for some wood for the stove. I return with two big armfulls of logs and carry them upstairs to Delal. We chat for a bit, the call of nature comes, and I tromp downstairs to go to the bathroom. When I hit the bottom steps I freeze. Four more pairs of yellow eyes. I switch on the lights to discover four cows standing standing against the wall. When I appear, they start to shuffle nervously and shit. I tromp back upstairs to Delal.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘I’ve done something,’ I announce.

Together, the two of us, armed with brooms, manage to drive the cows out. But not without consequences. I don’t know if the cows have been munching a high bran cereal, but they’ve all got the runs. From wall to front door they shit continuously and then once more on the front step for good measure. What is the result of Dede’s new grandson-in-law’s first day? A Jackson Pollock like series of poo poo swirls and blobs from stairwell to street all over the first floor of a house built with his own to hands in the hope of marrying the woman he loves: a year’s sweat and toil soiled with bovine diarrhea.

Dede--the man and two youngsters sent to make his life more difficult

(Miraculously we got most of this cleaned up before Dede noticed--he had been out visiting. An errant and forgotten pile caught his attention a week later when it was already quite dried and easily carried to the garden for fertilizer.)
Luckily animals in the house are not all that unusual anyway. Every night, a whole platoon of bugs (the Kurdish Air Forces) descended upon the house for tea and chit chat, swarming around the porch light in tornado-like profusion. Wherever I went, I seemed to run into a very large grasshopper with leaf-shaped wings—it was on my pillow, flew into my face one night in the kitchen, landed on my shoulder, found its way into my bag. I took it as my totem animal.

Animals abound—there was a donkey somewhere in the village, who, every night around 2 in the morning began to bellow and scream. This set Joni to howling and the two of them would sing duets to the wee hours of the morning.

Then there’s Badi—Joni’s quiet friend, owned by the cranky and somewhat crazed driver of the village minibus, Şerafettin. Şerafettin also owns a cat and a sheep. The sheep is the one that really caught my attention. It leaves little rabbit like pellets of poop wherever it ventures. I named it Stew since it seemed to have no other discernible appelation. Stew is rather focused on food. It’s face is either in whatever pile of grass is nearest or in whatever you are eating. We sat at Şerafettin’s house chatting over tea one afternoon and Stew kept jumping in his lap trying to drink from the glass.

Stew--looking coldly on, thinking of food.

Şerafettin, by the way, is as mentioned before, a bit irrascible. He strikes me as a kind of wise man in the village, impatient with nonsense and only to happy to nip it in the bud before it starts. He lugs the villagers wherever they want to go—whether to town for shopping or to the hot springs for bathing—but his minivan always leaves at 6:30 in the morning. Once, when it was just us going on a trip to the hot springs, we suggested he leave a little later, at seven maybe.


‘Oh so now you’re telling me my job!’ he snapped. ‘6:30!’

Hrant Dink-Şerafettin looks like him
--only much scowlier.  I think its the hair...

But I like him somehow—the kind of guy who calls things like he saw them no matter who gets their feelings hurt. And he has a huge mop of black hair that reminds me alot of Hrant Dink.



When we come over for tea, he announces that we will be staying for while, then goes muttering outside with Stew trotting behind. He wants to pluck some apricots from his tree for us—the only one in the village to still bear fruit. Only the best for his guests. While the others are occupied with their tea, I watch from the window as Şerafettin wrestles with the ladder, shoves it angrily into the branches of his fig tree, and then begins to climb. Not satisfied with the apricots near at hand, he crawls out onto a rather thin branch that quickly snaps and sends him somersaulting to the ground with a tremendous crash that does not in the least distract Stew from his grass munching. I wait for one breathless instant, prepared to call out for help but hesitating because I know, from observation and experience, that the most terrible fuss will be made even if he is completely uninjured. Hours and hours of advice about hospitals and ice and herbal remedies and medication and people making him lie down for days every time he turns around. Maybe some weeping. And so I wait, and sure enough, he scrambles unharmed to his feet, plucks the orange fruit from the fallen branch and tromps inside—the indifferent Stew trailing behind baaing longingly at the fruit in his arms. His Dinkian hair is mussed and full of straw and leaves, but no one seems to notice.

‘Branch broke,’ he says simply and goes into the back to wash the fruit.

And they’re quite tasty.



Alligator Wrestling and the Turkish Parliament

Jasmine Wrestling Alligators

One day I want to write a tell-all memoir about the marriage of an American southerner to a Turkish Kurd. If I follow the advice of the many agents I have been rejected by, the story will be flashy, eye catching, hooky—and that doesn’t mean filled with hookers though that would be hooky. It means, it will read like a book made entirely of back covers. (I just read the back cover of a book about Turkey at a friend’s house-‘and he ends up swimming to Armenia in his underwear!’ it says. Who cares if the writing is good—that sentence is a best seller!)


How’s this?

‘Thrill as Jeff and Delal (name change—something people can relate to--Bubba and Jasmine!) flee Turkish secret agents and then have sex in a cave guarded by PKK militia men who shoot at them as they come out for a stretch. Bubba loses a testicle and struggles heroically against mono-testicular prejudice.’

Of course it will need humor too—that absurd smirky kind of situational humor on par with the cross border underwear swim.

‘While visiting the US South, Bubba and Jasemine learn to wrestle alligators and work for a while at Gator Jungle to raise money for the guerilla movement back in Kurdistan. At the famous Florida gator park, Jasmine drop kicks a Brazilian tourist while passing out brochures dressed as the lovable Cindy Crocodile.’

The reality is, we spent our first night living in the same house—I am officially out of my old apartment of three years—doing not much of anything attention grabbing. And though we are not yet in OUR house (Last night I slept at her grandfather’s place where we’re staying until we can get our apartment unpacked and set up), it was kind of significant for me. Like I said, not much thrilling or funny happened—no sex in caves or alligator attacks. We were both too exhausted from moving, from arguing with my sneaky landlord who is trying to cheat me out of my deposit, and from weeks and weeks of work and buying furniture and playing monitor at elections. Our main thrill was that our couches arrived.

(A brief word about the move—neighbors I had never seen before opened their doors as we dragged furniture down the stairs. ‘Are you moving out?’ they asked grinning. When I answered in the affirmative, they said how unfortunate it was, how much they would miss us. The only person I knew of the whole bunch was the woman below me whose house I frequented only because I often dropped the most embarrassing bits of my laundry onto her balcony when trying to hang it up on my own. We hired porters to do the moving. These men are heroic! One of them, a fifty-five year old bag of bones put our washing machine on his back and lugged it down the stairs. ‘I lost feeling in my thighs years ago,’ he bragged. ‘I stuck a needle in it the other day and didn’t feel a thing!’ His partner, a chubbier and slightly younger guy piled a tower of my crap on his own back—a bean bag, a box of books, and a chair—before traipsing down to the moving truck, trash bags of clothes in each hand. My mother used to say ‘Carry one thing at time!’.)

Delal’s attention was occupied by the news (Mine by the bowl of watermelon). Big things are happening in Turkey. Tomorrow (Or today, as I am writing the next day) the swearing in ceremony for parliament will take place. Several of the new parliemantarians are in jail—arrested on a medley of charges. The Republican People’s Party and the fascist MHP have candidates behind bars for being involved in the Ergenekon conspiracy. Ergenekon is supposedly a deep state organization named for a sort of ancient Turkish Shangri La. They plan coups against the government, incite chaos to justify military takeovers, and fake assassinations--James Bond Villain sort of stuff. It all sounds very silly from the outside, but such things have happened in the past, the 2000s being the only decade that Turkey has not had a military coup.

The Independent candidates—for whom Delal, I, and her sisters were playing election monitor--have several candidates in jail for ‘ties to a terrorist organization’. This usually means they said something not condemning the PKK or spoke Kurdish somewhere official. The most famous of the detainees is Hatip Dicle who was condemned for saying that the armed attacks of the PKK were ‘legitimate self-defense’. In his absence the AKP—the ruling party—has installed one of their own people. Which of course is going over well with the Kurds.

So with so many of their representatives in jail, the opposition parties are boycotting parliament. And if Parliament convenes without the opposition—well, people are predicting all hell will break loose. There are sit-ins, protests, rock-throwers, angrily worded letters to editors. The police are responding with their usual finesse—tear gas bombs fall like rain drops in the Flood. In fact, yesterday, marchers protesting in support of the Independent Block fled from police gas bombs and ran right into the middle of Istanbul’s Gay Pride Parade where they merged into a line of dancing transsexuals. The news papers call this müdahale--'intervention', but they use the same word for when Syrian police shoot down protesters, raze villagers to the ground, and torture people.  Hmmm.  Being in this parliament is important because they are going to rewrite the Constitution, ostensibly, to end the systematic suppression of Kurdish culture that has been in place since the founding of the Republic.

So a big day.

Our night ended quietly. We complained about being sleepy. Jasmine put on her sheep pajamas and stuffed some wedding invitations into some envelopes. Bubba read and put his aching feet on ice. I wondered if I were doing this whole living together thing right. In every respect, I am that dorky elementary school student who needs to see a confirming grade on everything he does. I want a teacher to come in, observe me, and say ‘You receive a 98 for your first night with living with your future wife! Good job, Jeffy.’ Anyway, it was a good night for me.  As a teacher, I give it an A.

And then we wrestled alligators and fought some soldiers—dressed as hookers.