Ezra Mannix

When you live in a different country for long enough, you begin to experience some major life events there. If those years coincide with your late 20’s and early 30’s, you will attend a few weddings there and…maybe you will be lucky enough to have one one of your own.

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 event occurs.

I attended two funerals in the past few months. The first was a Sunni funeral. The second was an Alevi funeral. Both of those who passed on were fathers of friends.

The Sunni Village Funeral

The body of Mehmet’s father in the courtyard of a Sakarya mosque.

The first who passed on was the father of my “godfather”, Mehmet, Ali. Mehmet is a dear friend of ours. He is a sort of godfather because, in the absence of my real father, he “requested” Zeynep’s family for their daughter’s hand in marriage. He was a witness at our wedding. He’s shown time and time again what a true friend he is.

So rushing to his side wasn’t a question when we heard the dire news.

“Hey Mehmet! How you doing, buddy? You want to watch the match?” I called on a Saturday evening in October. Galatasaray and Fenerbahce were playing their semi annual derbiy and being good-natured fans of the opposite teams, we enjoy watching the matches together with my wife Zeynep and our mutual friends.

“I’m…not bad I guess, not bad.”

“What’s up, man?”

Then he told the story: his father had begun mysteriously bleeding internally approximately a week earlier. He was admitted to Göztepe Hospital (in Kadikoy), and his condition deteriorated. I offered my sympathies, then watched the match alone thinking he’d pull through.

But later that evening, a mutual friend called.

“It’s getting really bad, we are going to congregate at the café at the hospital,” she said.

In Turkey, like a lot of other cultures, friends and family congregate near the hospital to be near the grieving at the time near demise.

We sat around on that chilly, rainy Friday night drinking cheap cays with his mom and grandkids, eating homemade börek, pastries and sour ayva (quince) with salt. The fruit was from Mehmet’s village in Sakarya, a forested province about two hour’s drive east of Istanbul. One of Mehmet’s uncles tried to lighten the mood with a story of flipping a 50 kurus coin and it landing upright. “It is basically impossible!” He tapped the table with that proclamation.

Mehmet’s dad’s condition stable, we went home. Next morning, around 10, we got the call that he passed on. We greeted sobbing relatives back at the hospital.

Then, unexpectedly to me as an American, everyone started arranging car ride options.

We were going to a funeral. In a village. In Sakarya. Two hours away.

Not what I expected…though not surprising to me given that Jewish burials also take place very shortly after death.

We rode with Mehmet’s good friend’s brother. It was a crisp, cool sunny day in the bosom of autumn. We turned off the expressway in Sakarya, the topography began to look like parts of the Coast Range in the Pacific Northwest of the US.

Municipalities offer to transport the deceased for free, even to villages hundreds of kilometers away.

We came to the village, on a hillside with varied, modest, cozy looking homes, a slapdash of colors with some haphazard sheds and lean-tos thrown in, potted plants on small front porches surrounded by unpruned fruit trees.

This was a sunni village, so women and men gathered separately to mourn in front of Mehmet’s old childhood home.

Zeynep and I split up, as did our driver friend and his wife. Slowly , a procession of strangers from the village came to shake my hand, and the hands of Surreya and Cengiz, other friends in our close crew who had made the trip with us.

Suddenly, a van showed up. It was the Istanbul Municipality’s Department of Dying, so to speak, and they, as a free service, carry the deceased to his or her final resting place. This service is surprising in that it’s free. More surprising is that they brought the body a couple hundred kilometers.

Prayers were said, hands were held upright with finger tips touching. This pose felt spiritual, a pose for receiving life energy not unlike some meditation gestures I’ve learned.

After a protracted silence, wailing by the widow, the imam, with a portable loudspeaker of terrible sound quality, said prayers over the body.

The men in the group, carried the body to the mosque. There, I shook hands with people and we murmured “Başına sağ olsun” (literally “health to your head”) to each other. This condolence is said among close relatives and distant acquaintances alike when someone dies.

Then I went along with the heard of men and lined up in the courtyard of the mosque, facing the body and Mecca for the cenazi namazı (funeral prayers).

All Turkish Muslim funerals contain some version of the following question/response:

Imam: Hakkinizi helal ediyor musunuz?
Congregation: Helal olsun!

This is a blessing given from the congregation to the deceased. While no exact translation exists, the imam is asking the people in attendance to accept and bless the deceased person, to proclaim before Allah that they have no claims against or misgivings toward the deceased, and will therefore not have any divine grudges, so to speak. It seems like a ritualistic letting go.

Onlookers react as loved ones bury the deceased in a Sakarya village.

We stood. Hands held up, facing the deceased and Mecca. We then turned our heads to the left and right.

All the men then gathered for tea. After a hot cup in the crisp autumn sunshine, the casket was again picked up. The procession escorted it to its final resting place.

Close male relatives began digging the grave, which had already been started by workers. The casket was laid quite deep (though we have the expression “six feet under,” it’s surprising to see how deep below the headstone the casket is laid). After prayers, various male mourners empty a few ceremonial shovelfuls of earth were placed on the casket before the burying began in earnest.

We then returned to the house for some food prepared by neighbors. Helva — a mealy wheat dessert made with milk, water, butter and semolina — is a staple of Turkish funerals. A full meal is often served. In Alevi funerals, chicken/meat and rice and ayran are served. In Sunni funerals, many variety of foods can be served. I can say I enjoyed the best turşu (pickled vegetables) I have ever had.

An Alevi funeral in a Working Class Suburb

The cem evi in the Anatolian side of Istanbul where the funeral took place.

As deaths seem to come in bunches, a couple months later, another friend’s father passed on. Ercan, coincidentally, is best friends with Mehmet, which has proven to be cold comfort for their sharing of sorrows.

Alevi funerals can be said to be less orthodox, especially in terms of separating of the sexes. An imam similarly gives comforting words at an Alevi funeral, and say requisite prayers. Men and women are allowed to stand in line together for this. Post-funeral meals are eaten together as well. In my experience, the prayers said seemed quite similar, with head turning and hand gestures.

One wouldn’t likely see a quote from Mevlana (Rumi) in a sunni place of worship. (“What is the guilt of the sea if your plate is small”).

The biggest difference is perhaps that the alevi funeral takes place at a cem evi. The cem evi is a center of prayer, known as cem to alevis of the Haci Bektas order, and for sema, ritual dances a la the whirling dervishes. A cem evi is a bit like a neighborhood small town church and community center in the States, whereas the mosque is more like a cathedral. The cem evi is not officially considered a place of worship by the government, only sunni mosques are (that’s a controversial topic for another time.)

Cem ceremonies were done in old times done outdoors and with candles, and people gathered outside both outside and inside for this funeral. People often eat in cem evi. A cafeteria and bookstore were located in the cem evi I attended. Songs are sung and even a baglama is played at cem services, though there was no music at this funeral. Nefes, a bit like Christian hymns, are also sung during normal prayer times.

Villagers in Sakarya offered their homes to strangers for a full meal.

On this occasion, plain pide (flatbread) and ayran were distributed to the attendees, as was the usual helva. We offered our condolences. Then we went to a suburban cemetery for the burial. There was no formal procession, as the crowding and distances of Istanbul doesn’t seem to be conducive to walking processions.

The experience felt similar, though the plots for the dead were as crowded in as the plots for the living. I noticed in this graveyard that the average lifespans on even the recent headstones was less than 65 years, a reminder that this was a working class Turkish cemetery.

After Ercan’s father’s funeral, we went to kız kulesi (Maiden’s Tower). It was my first time in the iconic Istanbul landmark. Someone asked: should we have felt guilty about taking pictures and throwing them up on Facebook, since we just came from a funeral? Life’s short,  mumbled. I guess the deceased would want to make sure we lived life fully.

The cemeteries of Turkey were a bit like Maiden’s Tower, which is a tomb in its own folkloric right. I’ve seen them from afar, never entered. I must have passed by cemeteries on busses thousands of times, yet never experienced them fully. But now I’ve entered and left both. And in their own completely different ways, experiencing them are reflections of a fuller life lived.

Basic Differences Between Sunni and Alevi Funerals