Istanbul's 'First of the Month Church'

"The ones for marriage are four lira; the rest are two lira," the older woman explained patiently as I surveyed the plastic takeout containers arrayed across the tables she and a few others were setting up on the sidewalk before the sun had even fully risen. Each small tub was filled with tiny colorful trinkets loosely connected in some way to the label on its lid: "araba için" (for car), "okul için" (for school), "bebek için" (for baby), and more than a dozen others.

Despite the early hour, a small trickle of people, mostly women, were already finding their way to this drab street corner around the back side of the sprawling İMÇ complex in Unkapanı, where high walls hid all but the cross atop the Ayın Biri Kilisesi.

I can say without a doubt that I've never run to church before, but not knowing whether this tradition that I'd heard about over the years would be continuing during pandemic times, I figured this way I would have gotten my morning exercise in regardless. So I pulled on long tights instead of my usual shorts, tossed a long-sleeved shirt, a T-shirt dress, and a scarf (just in case – having grown up Protestant and being nonreligious for decades, I'm never quite sure what the etiquette in an Orthodox church should be) in my running backpack, and headed out the door, catching glimpses of a rich violet and magenta sunrise between buildings in Beyoğlu and crossing the Atatürk Bridge over the Golden Horn with morning traffic on one side and fishermen lined up on the other.

The Ayın Biri Kilisesi, a Rum (Greek) Orthodox church, is best known – as its extremely literal nickname, "First of the Month Church," suggests – as a place to go on the first day of each month, to seek good fortune in some aspect(s) of your life. (Its "real" name is variously listed as Vefa Kilisesi, after the neighborhood, or Meryem Ana Kilisesi, based on one story of its origin, in which the Virgin Mary appeared in a dream to an Albanian Orthodox girl and told her that there was a holy spring underneath her family's garden and that a church should be built there.) As with many such folk traditions, actual religiosity seems to be no barrier to participation, with members of the majority Muslim population joining the city's few remaining Christians. After the year we've all had, I too figured any potential source of luck was worth giving a try.

After slipping my more-modest change of clothes on over my running kit, I selected five gold-hued trinkets from the tables outside the church, each attached to a short, brightly colored ribbon with a small safety pin: a hamsa/Hand of Fatima, başarı için (for success); a dragonfly, kariyer için (for career); a lock and key, huzur mutluluk için (for serenity and happiness); a heart, sağlık için (for health); and a slightly different heart, aşk için (for love).

Though I'm told the first-of-the-month ritual can draw hours-long lines when it fall on a (non-lockdown!) Sunday, on this Monday morning, the courtyard enclosed by the church's walls was serene. A handful of visitors sat on benches, chatting and drinking tea alongside some scattered gravestones and column capitals, while others lit candles inside a cabin-like building, or waited to get into the main church. One man walked around handing out candy, which I later learned is a show of gratitude displayed by someone whose wish made previously at Ayın Biri had been granted. 

Icons adorned the walls inside the small but prettily decorated and lovingly tended church, where a slightly bewildering array of rituals awaited. (Fortunately, I ran into a friend who'd visited previously and could provide some guidance.) From one booth, a man offered small keys for four lira each. Next were candles lined up on a stand with a slot for donations. In the corner, a priest asked me my name, then placed a heavy embroidered cloth over my head and intoned some almost inaudible words. Here and in a small chamber downstairs that also houses a holy spring said to date to the early 1700s, people paused before icons hanging on the walls. Holding up their little keys, they mimed the motion of unlocking each side of the cabinets around the images, or tracing their outlines. My nominally Catholic friend suggested I cross myself with each trinket as I moved along the line, which I did, crossing the one representing the wish I most want fulfilled in front of a few different icons for good measure.

If any of my wishes come true, I'll do as tradition holds I should and return the "blessed" key to the church, along with sweets to share with those who haven't been so lucky yet.

Epiphany on the Golden Horn

The bell began ringing out at 12:30 pm sharp, its sound carrying to the water's edge from an unseen church somewhere behind a cacophony of buildings in various states of (dis)repair. No gentle tinkle but an effortful pealing, it continued for a full five minutes as the assembled crowd shuffled a bit impatiently. As its clanking ebbed away, voices murmuring in both Turkish and Greek came to the fore and police swept the spectators to the sidelines. The Patriarch was arriving.

Every year on 6 January, Istanbul's small remaining Greek Orthodox community celebrates Epiphany, the baptism of Jesus – a day they call Theophany – at the Church of St. George in the Fener neighborhood along the Golden Horn. Following what I'm told is always a lengthy mass, the congregation processed to the nearby waterfront, where they joined the awaiting press cadre, at least one Turkish tour group, and assorted other bystanders as a drone circled overhead and small idling boats churned up the waters.

On a pier across a short stretch of water, two men in swimming briefs paced, stretched, and swung their arms. All the while they each kept a keen eye on His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, as the elderly archbishop slowly ascended a platform set up for the occasion, topped with a scroll on a stand.

My position in the crowd meant I couldn't see the movement of the Patriarch's hand, so before I knew it, the two men were in the water, racing to be the first to retrieve the wooden cross that His Holiness had tossed in as per tradition. Pointing my camera in their general direction, I clicked as fast as I could until after one had reached the cross, kissed it, and held it triumphantly aloft. It was all over so quickly; as a woman next to me laughed to her friend afterwards, "I don't even know what I took pictures of!" 

Similar ceremonies were prevented in Greece this year due to the coronavirus pandemic – in Thessaloniki, police and coast guard patrolled the waterfront to prevent them, according to the Associated Press – and both the crowds and the number of participants in Istanbul were much diminished. (Last year's event drew some 30 swimmers on a frigid day, many of whom had traveled from Greece or other Orthodox countries.) But I was pleased to have finally (after all these years!) witnessed this distinctive event, getting my renewed vows to Try More New Things^TM (2021-Style, i.e. locally) and resurrect this long-moribund blog off to a good start, at least for now...

Bittersweet bayram

With smiling children in colorful costumes dancing, playing, and waving balloons around Turkish rock icon Barış Manço as he sings "Bu Gün Bayram" ("Today is bayram"), the video for this cheery-sounding song makes it at first seem the picture of a nostalgic remembrance of holiday festivals past, when life was simpler and nothing more exciting than to wake up to a day off school, with sweets to eat and new clothes to wear.

But listening to the lyrics of "Bu Gün Bayram" after coming across it on Twitter today, the first day of Şeker Bayramı in Turkey (known as Eid al-Fitr elsewhere in the Muslim world), it quickly became clear that this is a melancholy song, tinged with loss. Reading up about it on Turkey's famous crowd-sourced "dictionary" Ekşi Sözlük, I learned that it figures in many young Turks' early holiday memories -- and that it is interpreted as being about a widower taking his children to visit the grave of their mother on the first morning of bayram.

All the more fitting for the start of this year's holiday, which follows a week in which terrorist attacks have killed at least 44 people in Istanbul, 222 in Baghdad, 20 in Dhaka, and 4 in Medina. People in each of these cities are celebrating the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. Now for many, those celebrations co-mingle with mourning. A grieving parent may well be acting out the very words to this song right now. Hepinizin başı sağolsun.

Since you went
Inside me there’s such a hurt that
Only you understand
You are now far away
With the angels in heaven
You dream about us and cry

Today is bayram
The children are up early
Dressed in their best clothes
Wildflowers in their hands
Don’t cry today, mommy

You, in the summer nights
Sometimes through the stars
You winked at us
You, in the cold days
My memory of you warmed my heart most

Today is bayram
The children are up early
Dressed in their best clothes
Wildflowers in their hands
Don’t cry today, mommy

Today is bayram
Hurry, children
Mommy is waiting for us
The angels lamenting on bayram
These flowers please them

(All translation errors and awkwardness are mine alone)

Atatürk'ün askerleri

They'd been out on the street near Taksim Square all week, passing out leaflets calling for "1 million Atatürks" to don masks of the revered figure's visage and assemble outside Dolmabahçe Palace for the 74th anniversary of the Turkish leader's death.

"We will be at Dolmabahçe at 9:05 with our Atatürk masks on 10 November to show that Atatürk did not die and will not die," their flyers read. "We are all Atatürk!"

With the "one million [fill in the blank]" concept overused to the point of absurdity, I half-expected just a handful of stalwart Kemalists milling around forlornly in their cardboard masks. But it was actually a fairly impressive (though of course far-short-of-goal) crowd that gathered to mark the moment of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's passing outside the Ottoman-era palace where the first president of the Republic spent his final days.

Bedecked in Atatürk pins, scarfs, armbands, headbands, T-shirts, and flags, the crowd chanted "We are Atatürk's soldiers!" and booed every mention of the ruling AKP with gusto, then fell completely still and silent when -- as is the custom across Turkey each year -- an air-raid siren sounded at exactly 9:05 a.m., bringing traffic on the typically busy nearby streets to a halt.

I've been fascinated by the Atatürk phenomenon since first coming to Turkey, and while I have a great deal of respect for his accomplishments (and no love for the current government), I've often felt that much of the recent talk about Turkey "becoming another Iran" is the hand-wringing of an old elite bemoaning its fall from long-held power.

But in the wake of Tuesday's U.S. presidential election, I thought I could see in the assembled crowd what some Republicans are apparently feeling following Barack Obama's victory, and what many Democrats felt in 2004 -- genuine fear (whether justified or not) for the future of their country. While some of Atatürk's, shall we say, top-down methods would not pass muster in today's world, he created a unified country out of the tattered remains of an empire. With tensions rising in the Kurdish conflict, over "urban renewal" in Istanbul, and between the government and the secular opposition, it's easier to understand the fervent longing for someone to rise to the challenge of uniting Turkey once again.

İftara davet

Amid the general hustle and bustle of a 550-plus-person-capacity ferry traveling to Istanbul on a Saturday night, a few people quietly unwrap take-out packages of food, arranging each item carefully on the plastic table in front of them and then turning their focus intently to the flat-screen TVs hanging above the boat's lounge. Onscreen, a flashing countdown clock ticks off the minute iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, begins in each of Turkey's provinces, moving from east to west with the setting sun.

While cars speed down Sıraselviler Caddesi in central Istanbul, two men open up a Tupperware container on the back hood of a taxi parked at the curb, ready to share a simple meal when the evening ezan rings through the air.

On a back street in Nişantaşi, a pair of security guards scurry outside with a small table on which to lay their iftar meal in the dimly lit courtyard in front of their workplace.

Unlike in countries where dawn-to-dusk fasting is nearly mandatory, and people adjust their schedules to a more nocturnal rhythm, these small scenes in Turkey are carried out following a normal workday, next to people eating, drinking, and smoking as usual. This year, they also occurred amid increased concern about an "iftar divide" between rich and poor in the evening Ramadan meal. Though the debate could perhaps be compared to the annual appearance of pundits in the United States saying the "real meaning" of Christmas is being lost under a pile of wrapping paper and empty eggnog cups, the wrestling over whether lavish meals defeat the spiritual purpose of Ramadan also has a strong thread of social justice running through it.

Image from the program "İftara davet" on 24 Haber.

The ugly side of Istanbul

Sometimes, you just don't want to be right. Last night after work, I met up with some friends and headed down the main street in my old neighborhood to an "art walk" among a cluster of galleries hosting openings in the Tophane area of Istanbul. Civilized, right? Being as this is Turkey, I was a bit surprised to see some people strolling around outside with beer bottles and plastic cups of wine. As we approached our first destination, Galeri NON, the crowd thickened, blocking the sidewalk. "I hope this won't be a problem for them," I told my German translator friend, thinking mostly that the police might break the event up as they had a recent street party featuring alcohol.

When we finally squeezed our way into the gallery, the first thing we saw was a squat, comic sculpture of a winged Atatürk tipped over on its side. (Go to the gallery's website to see the piece, "Melek Atatürk ya da Rodin Kemalist Olsaydi," translated as "Angel Atatürk or If Only Rodin Had Been a Kemalist"; I'm not posting it here.) "Is that kind of thing allowed?" I joked to my friend. "What? The dog?" she replied, pointing at a skinny dog in a sweater sniffing around the statue. "Only if it pees on the sculpture!" she laughed. Mocking the founder of the Turkish Republic is, after all, punishable by law.

Nationalists and Islamists alike came in for their share of criticism in the politically minded exhibit by Extrastruggle. Our favorite piece may have been the sculpture of a bikini-ed girl lying out on a beach blanket, a jet fighter on her kicked-up feet, reading the 1982 Constitution.

But back to the real story. We left NON, met up with some other friends at Elipsis Gallery, looked at some unappealing photos of naked women, had a couple of drinks, and headed out to move on up the street to the next venue. It immediately become clear, though, that something was going on outside of NON. My favorite photojournalist and I hustled down the street to see what was happening (pure professional interest, of course) as the crowd started streaming back toward us, slowly at first, and then in an increasingly panicky fashion. I saw a few men brawling in the street and, not feeling I needed to see much more, signaled to my friend that we should go. I learned later he had seen a man get hit over the head by a bottle and a woman punched in the face. Bottles started smashing in the street. People were screaming. We ran.

Ducking into a side street as the mob of 20 or 30 young men (and the people running in their wake) passed, we tended to a frightened stranger who had been caught up in the fray and unable to run well due to her high heels. Shopkeepers kept coming up to say, "It's OK," but one man approached us in a very serious way. "There were people out drinking. That's not accepted in this neighborhood," he said. "They're going to come back. It will happen again. You should leave." It wasn't a threat, but, I believe, a good-hearted warning.

Regrouping with the rest of our friends, we learned that a street sign had been thrown through the glass door of one of the galleries as people tried to scurry inside. Debate raged about whether the drinking, the controversial art, or a combustible combination of both, had provoked the assailants. I'll leave that to the local press and the police to decide. (So far, they seem to be leaning toward the alcohol theory.) All I know is I don't really want to be right about something like that again.

UPDATE (Oct. 18, 2010): Turkish media devoted extensive attention to the story of the Tophane attacks, which also made the international news in many countries. Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet contacted me to get my take on the events, and translated parts of this blog post, along with some of my spoken comments, for their 24 September paper.

It didn't make it into the article, but as I told the reporter, I love this part of the city and though I understand I'm among the people contributing to its gentrification, I sincerely hope Istanbul can find a way to continue to develop without marginalizing long-time residents. Given what's happened in Sulukule and what's underway in Tarlabaşı, it's hard to be optimistic, though.

The German culture magazine Perlentaucher subsequently also linked to my post in an article about the incident. The article is in German, so I can't read it, but I'm sure it's brilliant as it's by a good friend who also witnessed the Tophane events. (She said the editor found my link without any tip-off from her.)

* Photos of police standing around the neighborhood, late on the scene as usual, and a man injured in the fray from Habertürk.

The flip side of fasting

When the evening call to prayer rang out as I went to board the tram the other night, the platform attendant called out to me, stepping out of his booth to offer me a date -- the traditional food used to break the fast during Ramadan. Onboard, a man carried a large bottle of water and a plastic cup down the aisle, offering sips to fellow Muslims who had been abstaining from food or drink since before sunrise. In the historical center of the city, families brought pots of tea, freshly baked bread, and home-cooked dishes to eat on the grassy Hippodrome in the shadow of the area's great mosque.

These modest fast-breaking practices, however, are increasingly being supplanted by lavish meals that many say dishonor the spirit of the Muslim holy month -- and create an immense amount of waste....

Read the rest of "Muslims Fight Food Waste During Ramadan" over at TreeHugger, where I blog four times a week about environmental issues in Turkey and around the world. Like what you see there? Subscribe to my personal TreeHugger RSS feed.

Photo by Istanbul during Ramadan by laszlo-photo via Flickr. The illuminated writing between the mosque's minarets reads "Believers are brothers."

Hayırlı Ramazanlar

Non-believers can find plenty to gripe about during Ramazan: getting woken up at 2 a.m. every night for a month by loud, tuneless drummers; having your already-nearly-impossible-to-catch evening serviş bus moved up by half an hour to make sure the observant get home in time for iftar; and feeling guilty about drinking water in the midday heat while your neighbors refrain from letting anything pass their lips in the same 90-degree weather that has you dying for a beer. Oh, and the occasional yabancı friend getting hit on the head with a bottle for imbibing during the holy month.

But at certain moments, the beauty, rather than the bother, of the occasion comes to the fore. Saturday night was one of those times. A slight breeze had picked up as I walked with a pair of friends down through our neighborhood to the main road. As dusk rapidly fell, tables were being set up on sidewalks and in alleys for people to break their fasts, whether with a multi-course meal or a humble serving of lahmacun. Some people already sat in front of their plates, patiently waiting for the sunset call to prayer that signals an end to the day's abstention. (Full disclosure: We did also witness a near-brawl at the local butcher shop that may or may not have been Ramadan-related.) The ezan began to echo out from the mosques as we hopped on the tram, and by the time we got off a few stops later, the mahyas were glowing in between the minarets and the streets were full of people eating and socializing happily.

That night was also the kickoff of "Ramazanda Caz" (Jazz in Ramadan), a series of concerts by Muslim musicians, and about as religious of an experience as I'm likely to have. The atmosphere was indeed reverential as Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem and his quartet played their lovely, melancholy mix of Arab classical music, Mediterranean/Persian/Indian melodies, and, of course, jazz, under the soaring, moodily lit neo-Greek columns of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Fireworks, football chants, and the final ezan of the night blended with the music as the leaves fluttered ever so slightly overhead. The beauty, community, and sense of peace seemed to exemplify some kind of Ramadan spirit, which wasn't even entirely dispelled by the taxi driver who tried to rip us off on our way home.

Maç manyaklik

I've worked at a Turkish newspaper long enough that I've pretty much stricken the word "soccer" from my vocabulary, but when the World Cup rolled around, I didn't spare much thought to all the fuss. Still, when the televisions clicked on at 5 p.m. on the first day of the matches, and looming deadlines couldn't tear any of my coworkers away from the screen, it was hard not to be a little curious. The international nature of the game intrigued me -- Turkey wasn't in it, and neither the U.S. nor England had much hope, but my Turkish, American, and British friends were still riveted. I was amused by the idea that referees had to monitor for swearing in 17 different languages. And there was definitely something satisfyingly cosmopolitan about watching the Australia-Germany match in Turkey while my Danish friend explained it all to me.

Football's still a lot more fun when Turkey's playing, though. Not long ago, I took a visitor down to Nevizade (a popular street for meyhanes and other nightlife) to watch the final match of the Turkish Super League. Bars had set up televisions on every floor, each wall-to-wall with people. The narrow street was nearly impassable due to the throngs angling for an over-the-shoulder glimpse at the screens. When fans of Fenerbahçe (a team I like to think of as the Yankees of Turkish football, and not really in a good way) mistakenly thought their squad had emerged victorious, they set off Roman candles amid the tightly packed crowd, causing the paranoid mind to look frantically about for an escape route from the fire-fleeing stampede that was sure to ensue.

Two years ago, Turkey took a shockingly successful run at the European championship, a development so big around these parts that even I couldn't ignore the nighttime screaming, wailing, and gunshots as our boys progressed through the competition. I watched what turned out to be Turkey's last hurrah at a large and absolutely packed çay bahçesi (tea garden, although this one also served beer) on the lovely Aegean island of Bozcaada, drinking Efes and trying to follow the action on the outdoor screen with the aid of a guy I'd met on the beach, an amusing exercise in that he spoke basically no English and my sports vocabulary was pretty much limited to "takim" (team) and "bayrak" (flag). No matter, I quickly learned to chant "Türk-i-ye, Türk-i-ye!" with the best of them, and that was all that mattered.

NOTE: Check out other Lonely Planet bloggers' takes on World Cup watching all around the world, from Spain to South Korea, Berkeley to Beirut.

1. Mayıs'ta Taksim'deyiz!

It wasn't exactly what I'd expected to hear blaring out of loudspeakers in Istanbul: "¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!"

But the protesters gathered in Taksim Square had dipped into the global pool of power-to-the-workers symbols, donning Che T-shirts and hoisting posters of Marx and Lenin amid those of Turkish leftist heroes, to celebrate their first legal May Day in the iconic location in at least 30 years.

Even though the square is just a few minutes' walk from my house, I was only half thinking of maybe going up to see what was happening until I heard the megaphones turn on and the helicopters begin to circle. I'm glad I didn't miss it. Knowing that the last two years of blockades, riot police, and tear gas were just a small footnote to many years of clashes and a still-unresolved tragedy, it was surprisingly moving to see tens of thousands of people streaming peacefully into the square, carrying the flags of their unions and banners depicting their fallen colleagues.

Protesters triumphantly scaled a building where police snipers had previously taken up their posts, and dangled from the Republic Monument in the the center of the square, cheering and grinning. Enterprising businessmen set up stands to make grilled köfte (meatball) sandwiches or toted buckets of iced water to sell to the parched crowd. Bands played and tired marchers snoozed beneath the trees in Taksim Gezi Park. I wouldn't have believed it could happen if I hadn't been there myself. Her zaman böyle Bir Mayısımız kutlu olsun...

Şimdi asker

The first time I walked into a provincial bus station and was greeted by the chaotic mingling of drumming, chanting, and singing echoing off the building's concrete walls, I had no idea what was going on. Now I readily recognize the caravan of cars clogging the road, horns honking, with Turkish flags draped off the back of vehicles, flying out the windows, and wrapped around young men's shoulders. It's a sure sign that families are sending their boys off to the military.

Absolutely the largest and most raucous crowd I have yet seen doing so gathered at the main İzmir otogar (bus station) last night, their chants of "Bizim asker, şimdi asker" (Our soldier, now he's a soldier) reverberating throughout the building. Young men were hoisted onto shoulders and thrown in the air as their headscarfed mothers wailed and even collapsed to the ground. One had to be pulled off the bus as she clung to her son. Even when it's not so dramatic, the scene never fails to choke me up. The boys are so young and the emotions so unfamiliar to me.

In the U.S., at least where I come from, it's easy to be insulated from the realities of military service. Though I know a handful of people who have served or are still serving in the armed forces, most had already returned to civilian life by the time I met them. And though I worry about friends working as journalists or for NGOs in Afghanistan and Iraq, I have yet to have to watch news reports fearing for a loved one on the front lines.

In addition, despite the friends I have with military backgrounds, it's all too easy to retreat into stereotypes about the kind of people who enlist. In Turkey, you can't do that. In the same way as you can't judge a woman's politics in Iran or Saudi Arabia by whether or not she covers herself, military service says little about a Turkish man -- everyone, whether anarchist, Islamist, or nationalist, has to do it. Of course, the wealthy and well-connected can generally draw easier assignments, but knowing that your soft-spoken friend, your hipster coworker, your pal's little brother, or that nice guy at the cafe down the street could each be plucked from their lives and sent to some remote military post makes strangers' goodbyes all the more poignant.

Deve güreşi

First, let me clear up a couple of misconceptions: Turkish oil wrestling has nothing to do with girls in bikinis and camel wrestling does not involve men tussling with dromedaries. Having now witnessed both sports, I can say that there are some surprising similarities between the two. In both cases, the contenders often do not possess what most of us would think of as, shall we say, athletic physiques. The "action" consists of a lot of slow, lumbering pushing and grappling before the decisive move, and what exactly one party has done to ensure victory can be a bit mysterious to the uneducated spectator. Maybe that's true of all wrestling.

But when it comes to sheer entertainment value, the camels win hands (hooves?) down. First, the outfits. While the human wrestlers don a minimalist garb of tight leather pants and a healthy coating of olive oil, their animal counterparts are bedecked in every kind of colorful carpet, banner, headband, scarf, and other ornament you could possibly think of.

Second, the spectacle. The stadium full of men watching the Kırkpınar Oil Wrestling Festival in Edirne seemed to take their sport of choice very seriously. There was no apparent beer drinking, no raucous applause, no bare chests painted with the names of their favorite wrestlers. Women and children were entertained outside the arena with shopping stalls and carnival rides, but inside it was just intent attention being paid to the two men in the ring trying to put their hands down each others' pants.

Camel wrestling, in contrast, is an all-day fun fair, with the sidelines often more entertaining to watch then the field itself. Children and stray dogs run everywhere, men knock back plastic cups of rakı and get up to dance, sucuk sellers grill up greasy camel-sausage sandwiches on tiny grills, and children and adults alike don festive orange scarves that actually (and awesomely) are embroidered with the words "camel wrestling souvenir." Plus, the oil wrestlers never make a mad dash for the stands, causing spectators to scatter. They don't spray thick, frothy spit everywhere either. (OK, that one's a point for the oily dudes.)

Next up, Turkish bullfighting and men on horseback trying to hit each other with javelins! Who's with me?

UPDATE: An article I wrote about camel wrestling, "Close Encounters with the Wrestling-Camel Kind," was published in the March 2011 edition of Time Out Istanbul magazine. Check it out!

All about Eid

The first day of Kurban Bayramı in Istanbul is kind of like Christmas in any big American city--the streets are eerily empty--except with fewer angel and Santa Claus icons (OK, none) and a lot more animal slaughtering.

This morning, I received the following texts* from a friend who had gone down to the largest local kurban kesim yeri (sacrifice slaughtering place):

10:30 am Dude found slaughter central for tbashi
10:33 am its down by bilgi on the mannekin street. Hfs. Im sure it prolly will still be going if there are any sheep left. ugh
10:33 am So many heads

Kurban Bayramı (Eid Al-Adha in Arabic) is the feast of the sacrifice, commemorating one of the more sadistic stories shared by the three Holy Books, in which God tests Abraham's obedience by commanding him to sacrifice his son--then sends a sheep as a last-minute substitute.

Alas, I wasn't able to get down to the livestock death camp until afternoon, when only a few cow carcasses were left to be chopped up and distributed to various families. Yellow tents full of manure, hay, and, now, blood, had been set up right by the main road to hold the animals. A few scraggly sheep were waiting across the street, hoping no last-minute shoppers would show up. Blood mixed with water ran down the gutters as people hauled their bits o' bovine down the hill in plastic bags. One man frantically called out for another bag as his friend struggled to keep his grisly slab of meat from slipping out of the ripped one he was carrying. A make-shift pulley system at the top of the hill held the remains of two cows, surrounded by spectators, including a group of children.

A couple of the boys started talking to me, the only foreigner around, and I asked them if they would have a big holiday meal that night. "Yes!" one replied, pointing to the gory scene below.

If you want to see what they were looking at, read on, but I wouldn't do it during dinnertime...

(P.S. Sorry about all the dead-animal pictures lately. I guess it's just that time of year 'round here.)

* Another amusing, though less gory, missive from a different friend read:

12:50 pm There is a cow right by your apt! T

More photos:


The scene below the kids:

And across the street:

Cleaning up the big kurban kesim yeri at the end of the day:

Teşekkür gününüz kutlu olsun!

I am, I think, a typical American (read: hypocrite) in that I like to eat meat--especially, mmm, pork--but I don't really want to know where it comes from. It comes from the supermarket, right? In nice, clean little packages of breasts and fillets, hold the sesos and the cabeza and the ciğer (unless, maybe, it's deep-fried), and especially the işkembe. Shudder. To be honest, even handling the packaged cuts of meat makes me a little squeamish.

But, it's Thanksgiving, and if the fact that none of the ex-pats left in town can cook isn't keeping us from celebrating with a turkey in Turkey, nothing will. (We'll be feasting on Saturday, however, since some people have, like, "real jobs" and stuff. No four-day weekend for them here.) So I found myself at the tavukçu ("chicken guy") today, picking up the bird I'd ordered last week. Since I'd made a big point of asking, "Can you completely clean it? Remove all the feathers? Remove all the stuff that's inside?"* and he'd responded, somewhat unconvincingly, "Of course, of course! All you have to do is cook it!" I was a bit taken aback to see the turkey hanging from a ceiling by a hook, with feet, feathers, and all. Its head, or whatever was left of it, in a nice nod toward delicate sensibilities, was covered with a little cone of cardboard.

The tavukçu then slapped my köy hindisi ("village turkey") down on his cutting board, picked up a big knife and proceeded to cut off the head and feet, stuck his hand inside the carcass to pull out the guts (insisting on returning the "delicious" liver and stomach once he'd severed them from the rest of the gunk), and held it over a propane burner to singe off any remaining feather bits. I tried to explain how, "In America, the turkey is already ready. No head, no feet..." He nodded, and smiled, and kept working away.

* I do love that one of the ways to say "remove" in Turkish is yok etmek, "to make non-existent."

More pictures of the tavukçu at work:

It's morning in America

Well, actually, it's not. It's the middle of the night in America. But it's morning in Istanbul, and as we watched the sun rise over the Golden Horn, we also watched Barack Hussein Obama, the next president of the United States, give his acceptance speech.

I'm exhausted and wired and still a bit in shock, and so grateful for all the Turks who have never given me a hard time for being an American--who in fact have responded with surprise and pleasure, even during this dark period for our country--and for the good company in which I watched this momentous occasion. Thank you, America, for not letting me down.

Silah Bayramı

For some silly reason, I thought that Şeker Bayramı, the three-day holiday at the end of Ramazan, was the time when children get all hyped up on sugar. Based on my wanderings today through Fener, Fatih, and Aksaray, some of the more conservative--and hence, one would think, observant of religious traditions--neighborhoods in Istanbul, it's actually the time when little boys run wild in the streets, shooting off cap guns at each other and at random passers-by. Of course, there might be a connection between that and the candy.

Bir Mayıs

There was no dancing around a ribbon-bedecked pole here yesterday. In Istanbul, May 1st is a day to bring out the heavy artillery. (Then again, when isn't that the case?)

It was sunny, beautiful, and very, very quiet as Ayla and I walked up Istıklal Cadessı to Taksim Meydanı, the massive central square in Beyoğlu where protests for workers' rights have been banned since 37 demonstrators were killed in 1977. With probably 75 percent of the shops along the way shuttered, the workers' groups had, in a strange way, achieved part of their goal: making May Day a holiday, at least in this part of town.

It seemed unlikely, however, that they would be able to fulfill their declared intention to march on Taksim, which was completely encircled by fencing and guarded at every possible entrance by mobs of riot police, as well as snipers (ahem, sharpshooters) on the roofs of nearby buildings. I read later that there were 30,000 police patrolling Istanbul.

With area schools closed, tourist season already seemingly in full swing, and transit closures keeping many people at home, there were plenty of gawkers watching the cops watch the empty streets.

And with the square so heavily guarded, what protesters there were ended up in the side streets, including those of the hotel district just northeast of the square, giving coffee-sipping tourists quite an eyeful. (And at least one group of heavily styled and shopping-bag-laden women a noseful of tear gas as they tottered along the cobbled street in their high heels.)

So, we heard some chants, got some whiffs of gas, and called it a day, not realizing that the real action (such as it was) was right up the street from my house!