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 örek (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.