Destination: Turkey

Flying to Greece to meet our “Best of Greece” tour, I anticipated big, noisy Athens followed by vivid village experiences.

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I started daydreaming about the fun I’ve had in Turkish villages (where I’ve had more experience) and how that offered an insight into that culture. Like little flip-floppy butterflies, I caught them somewhere over Greenland and lay them out here: I was in Güzelyurt for everybody’s favorite festival of the year: a circumcision party! Locals call it “a wedding without the in-laws.” The little boy, dressed like a prince, rode his donkey through a commotion of friends and relatives to the house where a doctor was sharpening his knife. Even with paper money pinned to his uniform and loved ones chanting calming, spiritual music, he must have been frightened. But the ritual snipping went off without a glitch — and a good time was had, at least by everyone else. On another occasion in central Turkey, I was invited into a village home for tea, or chai. While my hostess prepared the chai, her little boy let me finger his ancient-looking eagle bone flute. While we played, I heard his father playing another flute from a hill above the village. The woman went about her day with the comforting sound of her husband tending their flock. He was away…yet they were somehow still together. Turkish villages are ugly, with unfinished buildings bristling with rough rooflines of rusty concrete reinforcement bar. For years I assumed Turks just didn’t care how things looked. Then a friend told me, “In Turkey, rebar holds the family together.” In times of demoralizing inflation, rather than watch its value shrink in a bank, Turks invest any extra money in a family home. One wall, window, and roof at a time, they slowly construct a house bit by bit. Turkish parents strive to leave their children the security of their own home. At the edge of town I came upon a school stadium filled with students thrusting their fists into the air and screaming in unison “We are a secular nation.” I asked my guide, “What’s going on — don’t they like God?” She explained, “No, we love God. But with the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism just across our borders, we Turks are concerned about the fragile ‘separation of mosque and state’ — which is guaranteed by the constitution the father of our nation, Ataturk, gave us.” One evening, a village mayor invited us into his home. Children played squawky instruments and beat drums as all present danced in stocking feet on hand woven carpets. Dancing in Turkey is easy — just hold out your arms, snap your fingers, and wiggle your shoulders. I was dancing with the mayor’s wife. Between tunes, he wanted me to know I was completely welcome in his home. He pointed to the most sacred place in the house — the Quran bag which hung on the wall. He said, “In my Quran bag I keep a Quran, a Bible, and a copy of the Torah. It reminds me that Jews and Christians, like we Muslims are ‘people of the book’—we all worship the same God.” Village artisans enjoy showing off. I visited a woodcarver famous for creating exquisite prayer niches. Every village in the region wanted one for their mosque. My friends and I observed while chips flew. Suddenly he stopped, held his chisel high to the sky, and declared “a man and his chisel, the greatest factory on earth.” I asked to buy one of his carvings. He gave it to me saying, “For a man my age, just to know that something I carved would be taken to America and appreciated…that’s payment enough. Please take this as my gift to you.” As the sun prepared to set, we climbed to a roof top to observe a dervish whirl. Dervishes are a Muslim sect who follow the teachings of Mevlana. While tourists typically see the whirling dervishes as a kind of cruise-ship, shore-excursion entertainment, it is a meditative form of prayer and worship. The dervish agreed to let us observe if we understood what the ritual meant. He explained that with one foot anchored in his home, the other foot steps 360 degrees around as if connecting to the entire world. One arm raised and the other lowered, as he turns he becomes a conduit, symbolically connecting the love of God with all of creation. He spun himself into a trance. With his robe billowing out, his head cocked peacefully to the side, and his arms a tea kettle of divine love, the sun set on the village that offered such a rich insight into a world so far from my own. Simple encounters in a remote village anywhere in the world remind me that other people don’t have the American dream. They have their own dream. Turkey, the size of California with 70 million people, has the Turkish dream. That doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t threaten me. It makes me thankful.