Ezra Mannix

On the morning of my wedding day I looked to the sky, searching for an omen. Black clouds, rain clouds, wind, sun, certainly they all have significance, right? The weather WAS a bit iffy, black clouds and wind, not too bad…yet. If it rains on your wedding day, that’s supposed to be lucky, right? But sunny skies are what you need for an outdoor wedding. Can’t have rain on the wedding day? Alanis Morisette now plays in my head. It’s like raiiyaiinn…on your wedding day! What? Really?

Chattering monkeys in your brain, Ezra, chill.

Waking up with mom and dad

My divorced mother and father both stayed at our small, hot (by American standards) apartment on wedding eve — and reminisced about their own marriage — but my future wife didn’t.

Around 9 am, I went out with mom to forage for some breakfast, which turned out to be some good and expensive su boreği. “It’s kugel, basically,” I told my mother, trying drawing a similarity between this Turkish breakfast food and its Ashkenazi Jewish, carb-filled cousin. You need protein, Ezra, I thought to myself, got a long day. It was windy. What does wind mean? Does it mean an unstable marriage? Winds of change? We are going to be on a boat! People’s hair is going to fly. Oh no!

Relax.

You have it easy, Ezra. Your bride may be thinking all these things and wearing a lacey tent and a pound of makeup. I couldn’t help but feel bad for Zeynep, wondering how she was doing.

Bless Mehmet, Zeynep’s “witness” at the ceremony, my “father” at my engagement ceremony, and one of our best friends. He arranged to have our friend Cengiz pick us up at 11:30. As we had breakfast, I tried to remember all the things Mehmet said at the meeting the night before the big day: Make sure you have plenty of 5 and 10 lira notes, because kids will stop a wedding car festooned with flowers for a little extra coin. I knew kids asked for money on the street on a wedding, but didn’t know they’d risk life and limb to stop a car for it. Make sure to have a lot of cash on hand for other miscellaneous expenses. Tell the parents to sit all together at the ceremony…

It must have looked strange to see a man walking around at 10 am in a 1000 TL tux, going corner store to corner store, asking if people could break 50 and 20 TL notes. I wondered if they knew why. Turks often pick up immediately on these kinds of things.

Cengiz came and my mother, father and I loaded in the car for the drive to the parents’ house. We a bit late as per request from Mehmet, who was acting as the intermediary between bride and groom. In Turkish tradition, a brother is a gatekeeper at the bride’s home. He doesn’t let the groom pass until he doles out some cash to show…well, I’m not sure what it shows, a gesture of good faith I suppose. Mehmet told me to have 50s and 100s ready. Zeynep doesn’t have a brother, though, so the job fell to the cousin, Özgür. To our surprise there was no one stopping our way so we entered and sat down in their modest apartment, in Istanbul’s Maltepe district. Homemade Turkish börek (pastry) varieties greeted us, and some çay.

Then it happened. After the suspense, there she walked in to the living room. My bride. I could describe here her dress, her hair. But to me, she just looked like a bride. My bride. I cried.

She was nervous, asking me to play with her hair. We were pretending to talk, lips moving for raw footage that the videographer could put into a montage. After the first of seemingly endless photos, we made our way to her aunt’s wedding car. In Turkey wedding cars are draped in a large ribbon with a bouquet placed on the hood. When the bride and groom leave the house, everyone on the street claps and there is often a motorcade of several cars taking relatives to the wedding, horns blazing all the way.

We were off to the Wedding Factory. For those who don’t know, most couples married in Turkey are officially married in an evlendirme dairesi (official wedding call), usually in their local districts. A young population, a shortage of these district wedding halls, and a summer Ramadan means from May to September, couples are slotted one after the other at 15-minute intervals, an assembly line of life altering moments.

Hair touch up at the wedding hall in Maltepe.

We were whisked to the bride and groom waiting room. Other couples were either coming up before us or entering back from their own wedding to catch their breaths and gathering their belongings. Zeynep’s hair guy graciously followed us around, touching up her quaff as needed. One bride was wearing a full body white dress and white hijab, another an open backed dress showing tattoos on arms and back. This is Turkey.

After a predictable snafu with our “waiting for the couple” music, we entered through what I thought was an elevator door, but was really the entrance door to the Star Trek Enterprise flight deck. We were greeted with hearty applause. The room is a glorified conference hall, with cushioned seats facing a table that looks set for a panel discussion more than a wedding. But this is a socialist, decidedly non-religious looking affair. In fact, religious weddings in Turkey have no legality.

The justice of the peace was a middle-aged bureaucrat. He asked me if I knew why I was there. I said, “I’m getting married” in an innocent, child-like tone, to a chorus of chuckles.

The official then states that upon inspection, we are deemed legally fit for marriage having jumped through all the hoops (to be described soon in a future post). We then sign a large official notebook, and then are given a 6-inch long booklet known as our aile cüzdanı, we stand up to applause. Then I unveiled my bride, and had our first kiss as a married couple. The witnesses on hand (you are allowed two, foreign or Turk, but foreigners must have a Turkish ID number) also gave their emphatic “evets”.

Off the stage, on with the procession

Before the procession, a first photo with our immidiate families. (L to R) Zeynep’s father Ahmet, sister Ezgi, mother Filiz, me, Zeynep, my father David, and mother Alicia.

Then it’s your turn to be a prime minister greeting dignitaries! Your friends and family rush out to a foyer next to the ceremony hall. You stand there. People pin gold or cash on you or put it in a cloth bag. They kiss you and wish you happiness, pose for a photo, and get a small “door prize” for showing up (nikah şekeri, usually a chocolate or small ornament).

Relief was taking over. The burdens of all the ceremony started lifting. The fun was to begin. Some of the people in the procession were acquaintances of Zeynep’s mother and father. “Who was that?” I asked my wife while watching the amateurish wedding video after. “I don’t know, some friend of my fathers.” People you’ve never met dropping a 145 TL gold coin or pinning a bank note on your sash underscores the system of honor and reciprocation that is standard in Turkish weddings: when you go to a business associates niece’s cousin’s wedding, the unwritten rule is that they return the favor when your kid ties the knot.

After hundreds of kisses, well wishes, staring through a camera lens, as part of our American touch, Zeynep arranged to have rice thrown on us. The feeling of being showered by rice was a few seconds of unexpected bliss.

Before we could get into the car, our, the cousin standing in as the tough brother, made his appearance, blocking our way. Laughter erupted as I offered first a 5 TL note, then 10. Finally, 50 was enough to get us through the door and back to the car.

It was off to her parents’ house before changing and heading to a train station to get on a wedding boat. Where else can you do that!

In front of Haydarpasa, waving

At the late great Haydarpaşa train station

I was standing inside the glass-paneled door of the venerable, turn of the century Haydarpaşa train station, Zeynep was standing outside. We were mimicking each other’s slow hand gestures. Seeing each other so clearly, yet unable to touch each other, a metaphor for pre-marriage chastity, perhaps? Emre, our videographer, was taking shots for his montage.

Outside, the revelers were showing up, many of them our friends who didn’t come to the ceremony. At the nikah: older folks, business associates, pillars of the community plus family and the closest friends. At the boat party: younger folks, more friends there to have a good time with the newly minted couple…plus family and the closest friends. The average age must have dropped 10 years in about three hours.

As the wedding boat started to churn into view from the European side of the Bosphorus, One of Zeynep’s childhood friends then had an idea. “Look, I found this picture online,” Fırat said. In the picture were strangers all assembled on the grand steps in front of the train station, waving their hands. Everyone quickly assembled on the steps like a military marching band and hands were no sooner in the air for an iconic photo.

Zeynep’s mother Filiz glances as people socialize on the boat’s “cocktail deck”

Embarking

Then it was onto our pleasure craft, and a look to the skies. A group of unfriendly dark clouds scooted across the sky blocking out the sun and bringing a gust of wind with them Oh gods above us, what does this foretell?

We placed some valuables in the captain’s room and a semi-argument broke out. Nihan, Zeynep’s close friend from university and an extremely helpful uber planner, fretted about the next bit: another Americanism, the giving away of the bride by her father to the groom. So this church/synagogue/all-American church had to be adapted to our Turkish wedding by adding them to our boat reception. Nihan wasn’t sure how we were going to pull it off. Ideas sprang from different angles. Zeynep got frustrated and wanted to forget the thing all together. I went to stand in front of the boats deck. Then, Ahmet, Zeynep’s father (see my “I met Dad” post) came out with our woman, our song played, and all that wedding stress melted away.

Mother of the groom basks in the glorious sunset.

“Look after her” Ahmet Baba whispered in my ear. Then John Lennon’s Imagine began to play. Our first dance. Our very own darling flower girl, 7-year-old Özgür’s daughter, Özgü, was our flower girl throwing petals in the air, we donned those classic Lennon round sunglasses.

Improvising, that national pastime of Turkey, worked out beautifully in our favor. During our dance, the sun came out low on the horizon for a brief, blissful moment before setting below Sultan Ahmet mosque, and I thought about all the things coming together at that moment: my love for my wife, the Bosphorus as the common vein uniting our cultures, and, of course, the golden late summer sun.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

The sky gave us a good omen, if there ever were such a thing.

Imagine all the people.

I love you, Zeynep.