TURKEY ~ Call to Prayer (July 10 2012)

 

Call to Prayer. Kurds.  Halay Dances.
  

It feels like I’m flying through Central Asia.  Since my last Public Letter about Tajikistan, I’ve trapsed through the oldest cities in the world in Uzbekistan (Bukhara and Samarkand), flown in and out of the “New York City of Central Asia”(sophisticated Almaty in Kazakhstan), and danced at two Syrian- Kurdish and Zaza ethnic weddings in eastern Turkey.  Far from my fears that I wouldn’t be able to stand being a tourist for three full months, I’m thriving and loving each day.  

The irony of being a solo traveler is that one seldom travels alone. 
I wake up each day, wondering, “Who will become my new friend today?”  Travelers are much more willing to approach a single person than a couple or group, so I’ve been befriended by wanna-be guides at Ephesus and Pamukkale, intrepid cross-country bicyclists in Uzbekistan, Muslim families, Turkish businessmen, and one day I was adopted by the entire crew of an almost-empty ferryboat crossing Lake Van.  They waited on me as if I was a queen  – repetitive cups of tea, a 3-course hot lunch, photos of me steering the boat, and even taught me steps to the intriguing “shoulder dance” I’d seen at the weddings.

Underground bazaar in old Mardin, eastern Turkey

Taking helm of ferry crossing Lake Van, eastern Turkey

Elegant Muslim wedding fashion

Call to Prayer:  Throughout all these Muslim countries, the call-to-prayer beckons from mosque minarets five times a day, background music to my sojourn.  Often in the big cities, where there are multiple mosques, it sounds like a mini-concert of call and response, the muezzins echoing one another.  With the first call, Ímsak, coming at 4 am, I wonder if there are really people who stagger out of bed to pray and then go back to sleep.  Some mornings it’s so loud through the open windows that I jolt upright, then laugh when I realize I’d slept through it the previous morning.  Most days I’m walking many miles – half of them as a lost tourist, looking for something – and kind people direct me, invariably (fortunately) pointing in the right direction, giving me explicit “you can’t miss it” directions in incomprehensible Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh, Kurdish, Arabic, or Turkish.  By night I’m exhausted, falling to sleep in my cheap backpacker bed, too tired to brush my teeth or wash my filthy feet, no prayers other than the fervent wish that there be no bed bugs.

Rich in travel, impoverished in World History: In addition to the connective tissue of the calls to prayer, there is the almost daily chagrin of how poor my world history background is.  In this part of the world, where leaders and borders changed so often, and entire cities rose and fell with conquerors and earthquakes, it is absolutely necessary to understand eras, periods and empires.  “Any European can tell you when the Byzantine period ended and when the Turkish Republic was founded,” a Turkish guide tells me disdainfully.  Was I absent the day a teacher mentioned the Byzantine Empire, Hittites, Bronze Age?  In the museums and ruins, descriptions start with labels from 10,000 or 1,000 years BC.

Roman ruins at Ephesus, western Turkey

Tourists are required to walk barefoot 
to protect the calcium deposits
 called travertines, Pammukale, 
western Turkey

The mountains and plains of Turkey especially have been such a cross-cross of conquering armies that my head swims.  Turkey bridges Europe and Asia and breezes blow both ways.  Massive freighters and flotilla of tourist boats ply the sparkling blue Bosporus Strait in beautiful Istanbul.  Turkey is a rising power, well positioned to be a peacemaker in the Middle East and an economic gazelle in Central Asia.  In Turkmenistan, for example, the construction companies were invariably Turkish, bringing modern architecture, engineering, electronics, and machinery.  Discussions of joining the European Union are for the moment halted here.  “The EU needs us more than we need it,” is a common rejoinder.

Again and again I reflect on how dated or negative our media images of the world are. In all these “backwater countries”, people have seen the films of Jackie Chan, know names of all the characters in the TV series Friends, can sing Jenifer Lopez lyrics, and know what colors models in Paris are wearing this year.  Like many Americans, though, they, too, imagine that Africans live in huts, that Chinese and Korean people eat dog, and that far-distant places are too dangerous or disinteresting for travel.  Like many of us, they have often never been to major tourist sites in their own country.

              

Hand-carved caves near Hasankeyf 
date to 1000 years BC, eastern Turkey, 
threatened by a scheduled dam.

I’m awed at Herapolis ruins
 to think that these precision square blocks
 were carved and stacked by enslaved people

Guest house host Jon Graham 
brings history to life at theater ruins 
near Mt. Olympus, 
near Turkey’s Mediterranean Sea

Prejudices against Eastern Turkey:  Turkey, where I’ve been almost three weeks now, has had many gifts. But in Istanbul, Turkish people seemed mystified by my wanting to go to eastern Turkey.  “It’s dangerous,” they said.  “PKK are shooting the Turkish army.”  “There is nothing there to see.”  “There is no sea.”  “It will be too hot.”

But I left behind me the fantastic sights of western Turkey after Ephesus’ Roman ruins and Pammakale’s hot springs, skipped Cappadocia where tourist fly over ancient formations in hot air balloons, and headed on a long distance overnight bus to the ancient holy city of Şanliurfa (Urfa).  Suddenly, with no tourists in sight, and me with a scarf on my head, I felt like I’d finally arrived in the “real” Turkey.  Sidewalks were thronged with men drinking tea, tea sellers ringing little bells, women wearing headscarves and raincoat-looking overcoats, and small boys running errands (small boys are surely 10% of Turkey’s economic success).  Shops opened onto the streets :need  a Kurdish carpet?  Dishes?  Children’s clothing? Hardware?  Sellers hawked their war

Turkish streets are filled with men drinking tea, discussing news and sports, and playing backgammon and Rummy Cup, a game here called “OK”.

In Istanbul, tourists throng to the magnificent Hagia Sophia, built in 537 AD as a Roman Catholic church, converted to a mosque in 1453, now a museum.

Joys of folk dancing:  Following a trail of Turkish folk dancing has been my third piece of traveler’s connective tissue.  In my previous post (Dancing beneath a Full Moon, July 7 2012), I let my dance enthusiasm run to detail.   I’ve danced at the two afore-mentioned weddings, on a ferry, in a Halay bar (Halay is the name of the eastern Turkey dance type), and in the aisles of trains and busses.

Kurdish politics:  In eastern Turkey the population is 60% - 70% Kurdish, and I ask people about the PKK.  Some say it’s irrelevant in modern Turkey, fueled only by extremists in neighboring Syria, Iraq, and Iran.  Younger Kurdish adults seem  more interested in building their careers and family businesses.  Activists in the PKK stronghold city of Dyabakir, however, who’d themselves been imprisoned in the 1980’s, took me to the old prison and showed me blood spatters still on the walls and a cavity under a stairway where seven of their friends were punished and left to starve to death.  They said “all Kurds are PKK members in their hearts.  If we need them, they will fight.” 

Blood spatters from 1980’s torture of Kurdish activists on the wall of an old prison in Diyarbakir

Small Assyrian-Kurdish village, once a PKK hotbed of resistance, today sleepy in the hot Turkish sun.

The current government has invested heavily in eastern Turkey – 20% of the population cannot be ignored.  There are fabulous four- lane highways and 22 huge dams, part of remarkable (and controversial) GAP Project that has transformed deserts into fertile valleys.  Still, school teachers do not like to be posted to eastern Turkey, and Kurds say their education and resulting job prospects continue to be are substandard.  On the positive side, the Kurdish language will be offered as an option in schools this year for the first time ever.

Turkey has built 22 impressive dams in the past decade, transforming desert into fertile valleys.

The Turkish govt. and European Union Commission cooperate on a  project to keep Kurdish rug weaving traditions alive in Van, eastern Turkey.

Hicran’s large Kurdish-Syrian extended family welcomed me warmly in Mardin

There was a skirmish in a neighboring town (Dὅgubayazit) while I was in Van, and the PKK reportedly kidnapped two members of the Turkish military.  On the roads and railways, entering and exiting eastern Turkey, soldiers daily check cars, buses, and trains, running the registration cards of Turkish citizens’ through hand-held computers to see if any show up as “terrorists.”  They passed me by, saying merely (in English), “Welcome to Turkey.”

I’m trying to write this quickly, as my long-awaited Iran adventure tumbles toward me, starting with a three day train ride from Ankara to Tehran on the Trans Asia Express!

Madeline               

This was Public Letter 10 sent to friends and family July 10, 2012.