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.
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
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).
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.
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.