Tag Archives: Turkish culture

Jun 23 2016
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A Weekend in a Sivas Village

It’s 11:03 pm and we’re traveling on the otoyol somewhere near Adapazarı. Ten middle-aged passengers on this chartered Metro Turizm bus are dancing the halay in the aisle.  What’s all the commotion? A Turkish wedding on a bus? A young man going to military service?

Strange. All was quiet 10 minutes earlier, when a middle-aged man who had been sitting across from us, a man with missing front teeth and toxic foot odor, was watching Turkish soaps on his in-seat TV screen. Then, the trip leader, Ali, walked up to is seat.

“Hey, you’ve got fans on this bus, man.”

“Fans?” stinky feet replied, head craning toward the back of the bus, lips pulled back in a devious smile.

Suddenly, he stood up, went to the back whipped out a bağlama went to the front of the bus and into a scratchy PA microphone, proceeded to whip the passengers into a frenzy of finger holding and kerchief waving that’s part and parcel of any proper halay dance.  I learned later that this he wasn’t just any passenger with bad foot odor, but a semi-famous musician rented for the weekend, for the sole purpose of belting out Türku folk tunes for the 40 or so passengers. This would go on for most of the bus ride. Most of the 13-hour bus ride.

All the passengers are members of the Kabakçevliği village association (dernek), which supports the village where my father in law was born, the youngest of four children, in relative poverty. Hundreds of Turkish villages have these associations in the big cities to support their memleketler, fundraising to make modest infrastructural improvements to their villages.

Dancing the halay in Kabakçevliği. One of the many halays that were danced. Dancing the halay in Kabakçevliği. One of the many halays that were danced.

The passengers on that fateful night were normal Istanbul residents, but in their hearts, still part of cold, dry Kabakçevliği, with its year-round population of 20 souls. Kabakçevliği is in the southern part of Sivas province, where the Black Sea meets the east-central Anatolian basin and range.

We got onto this party bus after waiting in a June evening from the side of an 8-lane highway in sprawl hell of Kartal, Istanbul, watching as the minaret lights came on signaling Ramadan’s iftar feast.

When we boarded, we were greeted not with the usual hoş geldiniz, nor even handshakes, but with kisses, more kisses from near strangers in five minutes than I received from strangers in my 28 years living in America.

They would say things like: Ah, Zeynep! It’s me, Auntie so and so, we came to your wedding! Ah, you probably could understand even what was going on that day, but such a beautiful wedding.

Sivas village breakfast

Sivas village breakfast

Everyone was related to each other in some distant way.  There was Seher, Zeynep’s aunt’s husband’s daughter from his other wife (he took two wives) and her sister Gülüzar. There were the children of Ahmet Baba’s kirve, or godfather, and a gaggle of laughing, food sharing, mostly middle-aged Istanbul residents.

On our way, we passed through Bolu, then Ankara, all in the wee hours. I fell asleep and was roused at about 5 a.m. by the freezing cold. Despite being June and being on the same latitude as Washington D.C., the central Anatolia plain in Yozgat and Çorum is regularly near freezing at night in June.  Zeynep and I huddled together to keep warm. When I awoke and looked out at the misty plain, I got a first glimpse at the cool mists on the valley floors, and thought about how beautiful this region is at dawn and dusk before the oppressive daytime sunshine.

It’s about 8:30 now and everyone is awake. We’ve just crossed the sinner. Welcome to Sivas! Everyone let out a cheer.  It was time for live music and the morning halay, of course!  Stinky feet struck me as a

Villagers and their Istanbul kin (Ali Abi holds the bağlama).

Villagers and their Istanbul kin (Ali Abi holds the bağlama).

coarse and rude man. But he was no slack with the bağlama.

After passing the Sivas city center and driving two more hours, we finally arrived at the village at around 11 a.m. The village itself is, well, ugly.  It’s motley collection of earthen barns, soulless newer homes, and just a couple of older farm houses with character, one of which belonged to Zeynep’s Aunt Kiraz, who never left the village, lived a hard life, and died in 2013. We were greeted off the bus with more kisses, a zurna (clarinet like instrument) and darbuka (drums) the traditional two-piece band of Anatolian weddings, sonnets and getting off cramped buses.

One thing was oddly missing in Kabakçevliği, but I couldn’t put my finger on until Zeynep pointed it out: there’s no mosque.

Atatürk and Hussayn Ali are often pictured in Alevi living rooms.

Atatürk and Hussayn Ali are often pictured in Alevi living rooms.

Kabakçevliği is an Alevi village. It’s too small for a market, let alone a house of worship (the closest cem evi is in nearby Çetinkaya).  The residents fast to mourn the death Hussayn ibn Ali, Muhammad’s grandson and the first Shia imam, but they don’t fast during Ramadan. Alevis are often staunch Kemalists. The result is, in Alevi homes, one often finds a portrait of Atatürk next to one of Ali.

And they drink alcohol. To drink scotch in the middle of the day in a Turkish village during Ramadan is s strange feeling, yet that’s what stinky feet and the crew were doing minutes before we got back on the bus that Sunday afternoon.  In that way I felt as though I were in a poor village in the Andalusia plain or southern Italy.

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Jul 26 2015
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lighter side of Turkey

Okey: so you’re bored of tavla?

Have you ever passed an attraction in Istanbul, or (insert famous place) in your hometown that you’ve never been to and thought “Hmm, I really should go there, you know, while I’m living here…Eh, one of these days”?

That’s how I felt every time I passed an Okey salonu (Okey room) or kiraathane (which literally means “starkly lit, tackily decorated storefront coffeeshop filled with unemployed men serving bitter tea and overpriced sodas”).

The ıstıka, or okey tile holder.

The ıstaka, or okey tile holder.

The game of okey had always been something that I though I was going to learn one of these days. I was never in any burning rush to learn it. I always figured my time would come, that I would be in a social situation, with, say, my Turkish in-laws at their summer house, sitting around on a lazy evening in the dog days of summer, when one of them would jump up and say “hey, let’s reenact the Battle of Galipoli!” then someone else would say “nah, we don’t have enough plaster cannon balls…I know! Let’s play okey!”

You can hear the sound of okey being played all over Turkey: the gentle clicking of the off white tiles on cheap table cloth or felt topped tables, as a one of the players mixes them around in circular motions with his hands, as if he were waxing the hood of a car with a tissue. The tiles are played from the ıstaka, a two-floor holder of wood, like a double decker Scrabble tile holder. People then seemed, to my untrained, passing eye, to be laying the stones down in patterns, as if playing dominoes.

Actually, the game is really a tile version of rummy…yes, that rummy you played in Mr. Van Ness’ 8th grade homeroom. The object is getting straight sets of all your colored tiles, be them in different numbers, same color (suites, in cards) in numerical order, or three of the same number, different colors.

The twist is keeping an eye on the joker, the wild card, aka, the okey.

Except if no one explains to you, or doesn’t use the article the while explaining a game, you can run into problems, as I did the first time the tile “hand” were laid out before me on the ıstaka:

My wife Zeynep pointed to an upturned red 3 tile in the middle of the table.

My wife: So this is okey.
Me: Why is it okay?
Her: Because we picked it randomly, so…
Me: Okay, but are my other tiles not okay?
Her: No.
Me: Why not? They look fine to me.
Her: Yes they are fine, but they are not okey.
Me: Ah, you mean the okey piece?
Her: Yes! You got it?
Me: Okay.

Me: So what if I get the okey, and I pass it on accidentally to my opponent?
Her: No, that’s not okay.
Me: It’s not? I thought you said red 3 was the okey.
Her: It is!
Me: Okay, okay, let’s just play already.

I think we had this conversation at least three times that evening, leaving me more confused than when I started.

For some reason I had the idea for all these years that it was mind-numbingly simple game. I think a bitter expat told me that once. I suppose it isn’t very complicated. In fact, it involves about 40 percent skill and 60 percent luck, so there is a lot of things that are out of your control, but there is a fairly high degree of skill going once you get in to the team level (four players, you team up with the person sitting across from you). You can play defensively, passing tiles to your neighbor he doesn’t need, even if you yourself need them, and so forth.

Mixing the okey tiles before a game.

Mixing the okey tiles before a game.

Another bizarre thing about the game is the way the tiles are randomized to ensure fairness. Instead of shuffling them 32 times and having the opponent cut the “cards”, each player stacks the tiles five deep, and puts the stacks into rows. Then each person gently plows them toward the middle, rendering the ıstaka multi functional roulette shuffleboard thingy.

Then comes the Byzantine (Ottoman?) process of distributing tiles to the players. It goes a little something like this. The person to the right of the “dealer” roles the dice once to determine who to distribute the first stack of tiles to, then he rolls again and counts that many stacks to his left, and gives the second stack to the same player, then he goes back the first number of stacks back to his right and adds one and gives that next stack plus four to the left again and gives those two stacks to the next guy. Then, the person counts how many times he/she has eaten liver in last year and divides that number by the number of the last okey tile, or something like that…You get the picture.

When it was my turn to deal, my father in law basically guided by hand like a kukla (puppet). I still say swishing the tiles around and picking 14 is the best way, I mean, we aren’t card counters from MIT.

Once I got the hang of the game, it was pretty fun. Similar to Mahjong and Rummikub, okey can be very competitive, yet it is entertaining and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s fairly straightforward, but a game can turn on one wrongly discarded piece.

Tournaments are held in kiraathanes and summer house complexes (siteler) all over the country. Tavla seems very one dimensional by comparison, so if you get bored of backgammon, and your Turkish father-in-law opponent is basically moving the pieces for you because you are playing too slow, try okey.

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Jan 05 2015
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Reflections on Two Turkish Funerals

One thing I hadn’t been to -- fortunately -- since arriving in Turkey was a funeral. My purpose in this post is to inform what to expect when this solemn and sad event occurs.

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Mar 25 2013
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I Met Dad!

ezra mannix and zeynep senturk

From now on I can steal these kisses anywhere! (Without the red wine in hand, perhaps.)

Once I had a girlfriend in the States whom I had met one October. The December of that same year, we went to her parent’s house out of town and met her parents and her little brother. That night I stayed in her room, in the same bed with her. We had no intention of marrying.

I repeat: I stayed in the same house…while her parents were down the hall!…., slept in the same bed and woke up the next morning with no bullet holes in me, no angry cousins waiting around the corner to beat me to a pulp – not a scratch on my carriage. In fact, her mother even made breakfast.

That seems unusual, almost unthinkable to me now – at my ripe 31 years of age no less.

I’ve lived in Turkey for a long time.

I share this tidbit because my beautiful girlfriend and I recently took a first formal step to marriage and had dinner, together with her family, in her family’s home on the Asian side of Istanbul. It was not only my first time meeting her father, it was the first time I had set foot inside the house where the love of my life has been living for a good chunk of her life.

Zeynep and I have been together for 14 months.

It was a relatively modern and low-key affair on that recent late winter evening at the Senturk residence. A delicious dinner of kereviz (celery with walnut and yogurt) salad and chicken with soft jasmine rice was served, a Turkish national soccer match was watched (Turkey beat the tiny principality of Andorra 2-0), delicious out of season fruit was consumed, cay was drunk.

Her father’s name is Ahmet, a name so mainstream its practically ironic (Americans have John and Mary, Turks have Ayse and Ahmet). A smallish man, but tough without an ounce of fat on his frame, Ahmet picks his words carefully. Like me, he is a bit tough to read. He is a warm Anatolian, but never too far from dumping a young man’s body in the Bosphorus if he lays a hand on one of his daughters.

However, the interrogation from father wasn’t as tense as I thought. Sure there were questions about my family, what my father does, where exactly I am from, what I do, where I do my banking, what I think was the real reason behind Sept. 11, etc. But the hardened dad actually cracked a couple smiles before the night was through. The evening ended amicably.

The proverbial application form is in and chances of being a member of the Senturk club were looking good as I headed for the door. I experienced for the 985th time the Turkish tradition of the whole family/friend group coming to the door to stand not three feet away while I put on my shoes, watching with love as if I were a Panda giving birth at the zoo. I had a couple of homemade gul boregi to take home with me for breakfast the next morning

I also carried with me a sense of accomplishment on the jerky minibus ride home that rainy night. A sense that you have to earn the trust of your woman not only as an individual, but also as a member of a family with all her sacred bonds that entails.

It’s a link to another time, but with a modern twist. In fact, the family is modern and secular by any Turkish yardstick, yet Turkish is Turkish, and being embraced by all family members is never something to take for granted.

By comparison, our family units are like loose affiliations,  chambers of commerce of individuals bounded by love, gloriously free to choose their own lives, but sometimes limited in terms of the support and the “reach out and touch someone” factor the members give and receive. I speak not of my own family, for I have been blessed, but I make a sweeping cultural generalization.

The day will come when I can get overnight privileges at their home. Until then the acceptance process has gotten started – and the fun is just getting started.

Gentlemen with a Turkish wife, feel free to add your stories.

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