Son Bir Yolculuk - Part 2
By Jessup Eric William
You can find part 1 here.
Hatay
There’s a special tense in the Turkic language group, something unique to their languages. My Turkish teacher calls it Duyulan, which kinda means “overheard.” I call it the “gossip” tense. It has different names when it’s used in past, present, or future, but it has the same effect on the listener: you cannot trust this statement and take it as fact. It’s something I heard. It’s a surprise. It must be! Who would have thunk. Who knows…
Every single regular tense in Turkish can be put into this tense. Any sentence can be transferred over to give it a sense of instability, a sense of folktale and legend. It’s as if some shadowy mirrored duplicate of their thoughts and speech exists in the parallel, coming out of their mental corners and alleyways to release a miasma of doubt into the proceedings, or to simultaneously wink and raise an eyebrow at the cold dry facts of the world. If a regular tense is a steadfast dog, this gossip tense is a black cat, popping into the foreground for a moment to keep a gypsy fortune teller employed.
Like all meaning in Turkish, this tense comes in the form of a suffix attached to the verb, noun, or adjective at the end of the sentence - you’re always left waiting until the end in Turkish. Depending on the vagaries of their vowel harmony rules, the suffixes -muş/müş/mış/mış are added. To an English ear, there is no better sound to convey the un-firm, the non-concrete, the fog of man and woman, then the sound “mush.”
Hatay is a mushy place. Even the name is a bit of an artifice, a real piece of -müş. It’s name was invented by Atatürk in the 1930s in an attempt to link the region and Turks in general to the pre-Greco-Roman peoples of the Hittite Empire. The theory - called the Sun Language Theory -goes that the Hittites were of Sumerians extract, who were the first widespread users of language. They slowly invented it in their hinterland homes of central Asia while exalting the sun, the same hinterland homes of the Turks thousands of years later in the early medieval era.
Thus, somehow that first language, which the Hittites a thousand kilometres away somehow also spoke, must have somehow been proto-Turkic. Therefore the first civilizations in Anatolia where Turkic speakers, and Greeks and Arabs could truly hold no claim to homeland in a place that had always been Turk(muş), even if no one knew it. It was a popular piece of propagandic lingualism in the early days of the republic, when some historical justification was needed for complete Turkification of Anatolia, but it’s all really a bunch of -muş if you ask me. It’s a well known fact that Turks didn’t enter Anatolia until the 11th century AD, but if this theory were true, it seems the Turks selfishly kept their special, gossipy, mushy tense for themselves after inventing language for the rest of us.
Beyond its name, Hatay is a bit of an anomaly in Turkey for a few other reasons. It has a long history, but that makes it no anomaly, as every place and tradition here is probably in some way connected to the first humans to reap what they sowed, to inscribe their thoughts, or to cast metal, and then bash it into a head. No, Hatay is an anomaly not just for its past, but for what it is today in Modern Turkey.
Before we crossed the provincial border into Hatay, it was the youngest region in Turkey, and still is today. It was annexed by Turkey from French Syrian Mandate in 1939 after a widely considered phony referendum. The area then was roughly 40% Arab, 40% Turk, with pockets of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Kurds to round things out. Always a transitional zone between ethnicities, religions, and geographies, the region was never easy to define; it was at once part of Anatolia, part of Syria, and the Levant. After defeat in WWI, despite a few hundred years of relative multi-ethnic, multi-religious peace, the Ottomans lost the region, and it went from the Ottoman Sanjak of Alexandretta, to the Autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta under French protection.
In short order, the French, it seems, grew weary of protecting it, and the Turks grew thirsty to get it back. Hence the name change to Hatay, and the carefully crafted referendum. Some think that the French let the theatre-show of a vote happen, having secretly offered the soon-to-be former Sanjak to Turkey in exchange for help in the fight against Nazi Germany. But it seems that Turkey got the best of the old fat man with no food in the pantry that was the French Empire; the autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta became the Turkish province of Hatay, and factions within the Turkish government continue to sympathize with the Nazis, and waited until the dust of WWII had settled before openly supporting the Allied cause.
I could go on about Hatay. This place is a black hole of history and information, a book-lined labyrinth where you never find the minotaur. I’m now convinced that a solid 2% of all Wikipedia entries relate somehow to Hatay.
But what to include? What unturned pebble of history do I skip across the still surface of my story in Hatay? The influx of Armenian refugees after the genocide? It’s former place as the “cradle of Christianity”? Home to Antioch, the third largest city in the Roman Empire for a time? The time that a Sramana monk from India - named Zarmarus - met Emperor Augustus before continuing on to Athens where he burned himself alive (his tomb is still there, next to an Airbnb site, I imagine)? That both Paul and Peter preached here, making it possibly the land of the first Christians? Should I pepper in references to every people and leader that have passed through? That is has been captured and lost by the Turks, the French, the Ottomans, the Mamluks, the Crusaders, The Seljuks, the Byzantine Empire (who were really Roman), the Umayyad Caliphate, the Persians a second time, the Romans (the real ones), the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, Alexander himself, the Persians the first time, the Assyrians, the Neo-Hittites (not to be confused with the Turkish Republic), the Hittites (Atatürk’s Hatay) the Amorite Kingdom, the Akkadians, and uncountable nomadic knuckle-draggers since time immemorial?
No, fuck that. Back to my tribe. It was our turn to take and lose this land.
2. Arrival
We had arrived in Hatay, but to only our own fanfare. Our drinking was loud, and our music poured out onto the dry roads, staining it with life and carelessness. There was no military checkpoint, no police checkpoint, no grumpy old man on the side of the road telling us to turn it down even. It was just another place in Turkey, and why shouldn’t it be, and why shouldn’t we be here? After two days of non-stop movement we had arrived in Hatay, border to the world’s most famous civil war at the time, entry point for ISIS oil-smugglers, paladin-like journalists, and all sorts of shady characters. And fools such as us.
We had to tone down our act though. The Painter, Damat, and Gelin were with the Gelin’s family in Samandağ, which lay on the mediterranean coast past the more major cities of Iskenderun and Antakya. If there were no checkpoints so far, there was no point in our drunken boorishness creating one. At least that’s what I thought, but my compatriots did not. We sped through the province in a frenzy, finally closing in on our target. The music grew louder, the beer drank quicker, and the Driver, dear god the Driver’s driving would have made that Sramana monk grip the side door in un-monklike panic.
The Young-one had notched up her youth to another level, preparing for the awkward greeting between her and the Painter. I can’t remember if she was on the phone with him, or if it was the Dentist. This period of the story is a bit of a blur. I don’t know who arranged what, but we were driving to meet him, and we were all chomping at the bit to finish this journey. We were jittering with animalistic anticipation; probably all looked like hungry dogs with our tongues out of our mouths and our heads out the windows.
For me to say that I knew what was happening next at any given moment would be a lie. I was like a pack mule in their caravan, going wherever their loving lash led me. We whipped into a small park in Samandağ, both cars in a row, and there was the Painter, sitting on a bench and waiting for us.
The Young-One was first into his arms. She attacked him with drunk love as he first recoiled and then gave into her strategy and hugged back. We all had to wait a bit before she let go and started to dance. “We are not old, we are not old”. Speak for yourself, I thought. After taking turns greeting the Painter, we had to get out of the park before the Young-One’s dancing and shouting got us in trouble. We got back in the car and headed to the beach I soon discovered.
The town had that run-down concrete feeling of many Turkish towns, but there was something different, a different energy on the streets. And my friends felt it too, it wasn’t just my poorly attuned western antennas. It felt like it was cast in a different light. In Istanbul, the blue, green, and grey somehow pop out more to my eye. Here, it was the yellow and the grey. The Nature said “welcome to Arabia” as we made our way to the beach. I thought it’s all the same grey; not the Nature’s favourite colour I imagine.
The beach was, well, grey. We parked and continued on as we had before, but with one more vital member to our tribe. There was a hot, dry wind, and the water had a rather uninviting colour to it, but that didn’t stop the young one. She danced and screamed her way into the sea. A pair of young men were close by watching her in her disappearing wet, white t-shirt. One of the men entered the water, about knee high, about 20 metres away. Between him and us was the dancing young-one. She had taken off her shirt and was yelling into that wine-red sea of the Mediterranean like many before her I imagined. She turned around from facing us and the young man got a quick look of her young breasts.
I’ll never forget that imagine; in the foreground my dear friend, drunk, euphoric, topless, and screaming at an indifferent body of water; in the background the armpit end of the Mediterranean, with Mount Kiliç and the Syrian shoreline in the background during the peak of the Syrian Civil war in 2016; and in the middle ground, a teenage boy from Samandağ, with a big shit-eating grin on his face, giving his friend two thumbs up because he just saw a pair of tits. What the hell were we doing there? Pure -müş
3. Cousins and Counterfeit Whisky
It was past dusk when we rolled into the Gelin’s family compound. Set about half way up a hill in a quiet yet developed part of town, the family digs seemed to consist of a few small apartment buildings. Or, they had just temporarily taken over the neighbourhood, as people seemed to be spilling out of all the surrounding buildings, buzzing around and hugging back in forth with the transient authority that comes with a traditional family wedding. For the next few days this was their kingdom, and all non-marrying neighbours would kneel before their divinity. Would we?
The ground floor had a veranda, much like the one in Mersin of the Peppers of Bayram. Uh-oh. What strange fruit would be foisted upon me this time? My fears quickly evaporated though, as I saw the Damat, Gelin, and a big smiling bear of a man greeted us as we got out of the car. The man-bear was Gelin’s father, the temporary king of this temporary kingdom, and he was waiting for us in his largesse. He had heard of our impending arrival, but especially mine. “Nerede Kanadalı?!” I heard. Gelin introduced me and he crushed my hand before crushing all others.
We were brought to a table with nary a suspicious pepper in sight! Giant plates of unknown foods were spread out and packed so tightly that there was no room for the fast appearing rakı and whiskey bottles and glasses. “No fear”, no one thought and no one said, with good friends and better drinks, the glasses should never touch the table, only our mouths! For we are all poets in hindsight.
A strange tasty mix of drink and food was enjoyed by all as Gelin brought out all the members of her extended family. There was pideli köfte and her brother, rakı and her sister, and a clearly counterfeit Chivas Regal and roll call of cousins; topped off by the young lightning strike that was cousin Ali. He was 17 or 18 years old, 90% smile, and took to me like me to pideli köfte. I quickly became his Canadian brother, his Kanadalı Kanka; with a secret handshake developed within the first 5 minutes of meeting each other.
While we relaxed and swam in the warm shallow waters of this largesse, the provider, Gelin’s Father never stopped smiling, never stopped filling up our glasses or patting us on the back. The home made rakı was potent, and between its lethality and the spicy food, the taste of the counterfeit whisky was well masked. The Damat whispered to the Painter, who transferred the whisper to me, not to mention that it’s fake. Gelin’s father doesn’t drink whisky often and he can’t tell the difference, and he probably paid full-price. For me it was part of the show, part of the well-intentioned joy-inducing opulence of his daughter’s wedding.
Or so I thought. I really don’t know. So much was going on and I was catching tidbits of info here or there, but my friends were too busy and enthralled to stop and translate the smell of the roses for me. I was fully in the -muş of Turkey; not really sure what was happening and left to infer my way through the proceedings. I by no means complain of this feeling. I was happy and felt lucky to be there at that moment. But I got the feeling that I was gonna be friends with that black cat of Turkish’s unknown parallel tense. Neck deep in a lovely mush.
The wedding was the next day though, and all were tired; the family from days of planning and traditions, and their new guests from dodging lazy cops and spicy peppers. All retired for bed.
We were brought to the Gelin’s brother’s apartment. Mattresses and sectional couches provided enough sleeping surface for our product-less caravan. The floor resembled the dinner table from before; with all the mattresses and cushions butted up, there was barely an inch of floor tile visible. I can’t remember where I slept, but I remember seeing the Painter and the Young-One snuggling up on the floor. Their first night together in 4 or 5 months, in a sea of smelly friends next door to random relatives. I felt for them before passing out.
4. Vakıflı
I mentioned earlier that Hatay is an anomaly in Turkey, and for many reasons. It seems to have often been at the fulcrum of history, the unfortunate pivot point for some large scale turnover in empire, religion, and tribe. One of those points is the village of Vakıflı.
In the last nadir days of the Ottoman Empire during and after WW1, the long-standing Armenian people were forcibly removed, enslaved, and mass murdered by the state. Neighbourhoods in Istanbul, and villages and towns throughout eastern Turkey that were once more Armenian than Turkish, have long been forced to forget or wash over the cultural legacy and memories of the people that once lived there.
These people were butchered by an insecure Turkish-Ottoman state, not by their Turkish neighbours. Many tried to resist, and some survived, but very very few managed to stay. However, as far as I can tell only one place managed to do all three. That is the hilltop Armenian village of Vakıflı in Hatay.
In July of 1915, the forced deportation of six Armenian villages was ordered by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior Affairs. The Ministry of Interior Affairs. Bureaucratic names like that have always filled me with dread. The more bland the name, the more heinous the deeds it hides. The Ministry of the Id seems more apt to me.
Names aside, as Ottoman troops converged around the scattered towns, the long-standing Armenian residents (and Ottoman citizens) coalesced on Musa Dagh (Moses Mountain). They resisted for 53 days, thwarting all attempts by the Ottoman Army to round them up and God knows what to them after such fierce resistance. The novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel does a better job of depicting it than I ever will if you’re interested, despite getting the number of days wrong.
Numbers aside, the story goes that just as provisions and ammunition was running low, French and British ships in the Mediterranean spotted a flag on a hilltop that read "Christians in Distress: Rescue". And so it was done. The resistors were evacuated to Port Said and brought back to their hilltop villages on Moses Mountain after WW1, and lived under the protection of the newly created, and previously mentioned French Sanjak of Alexandretta.
The sense of protection probably changed drastically when the Sanjak became the Republic of Hatay oh so briefly, and then the Turkish Province of Hatay in June of 1939. Many of these few Armenians left for Syria, and many more settled in the village of Anjar in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. But the people of Vakıflı stayed, as the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey.
We woke up the next morning ignorant of all of this in mid July of 2016, after Ramadan, nearly 101 years to the day of the start of the Musa Dagh resistance.
The wedding was that evening, but to pass the time in a civilized matter, and perhaps to keep us away from their finite cache of booze, a tour of the area had been organized by one of the Gelin’s cousins. After a long wait for a short shower, we all assembled downstairs and drove as a convoy through the town and into the surrounding hills. The small valleys below were peaceful organized seas of farmland, probably growing citruses, olives, and other things lovely. It was all a bright fresh green and blue that day, a drastic change from the gray and yellowishness of our arrival the night before, or the loud concrete towns below.
The tree-lined streets sheltered us from the hot as hell sun. We parked and walked to one rather conspicuous looking tree, surrounded by a few tourists. Once again, little had been told to me, I was unsure of where we were going and what we were doing; in the lovely muş still.
The tree was evidently old. It was squat, gnarled, split and decayed in a few spots, with spindly branches reaching out in all directions, like the skinny legs of a well-fed spider. It was beautiful, and after some explanation by Gelin’s cousin, and a translation from the Scientist, I understood it’s significance. It was the Tree of Moses.
Tree-ring testing places it at about 3000 years old, but the truth of legend places it much older than that, for it grew out of Moses’ staff when it was touched by the waters of immortality. That’s when I learned the meaning of Musa Dagh; the staff of Moses begat the tree of Moses, which begat Moses Mountain. Later, while researching the Armenian resistance for this story, I learned that the resistance leader was named Moses Der Kalousdian. But where are the waters of immortality today?
We continued our tour, learning then that this sole remaining Armenian village in Turkey had been forced into the Republic by that flimsy referendum. Everywhere were knick-knacks of all religions for sale. It was explained to me that the area was proud of its diversity. Armenian, Greek, Turk, Arab, Jew, or Orthodox, Catholic, Aleve, Sufi, Shi’ite, and Sunni; all of tribes and religions had commingled here, and probably only really fought each other to the death when some distant ruler demanded it of them. And now here they all were still, reduced to capitalist chotskies. I wanted to buy one of each.
Much of these different people are gone now or have been “Turkified”; forced to speak and learn only Turkish. Even the large Arab population, such as Gelin’s family, were not allowed to have Arabic schools. In fact, due to the vagaries of the Turkish Republic’s laws on religious minority groups, only the Arab Christians of Hatay were allowed to teach their children Arabic, not the Sunni Arab majority within the minority. Finally, it pays to be a Christian in Turkey!
There are too many things to unpack in some places, and Hatay is one of them. But like I said, a lot of this diversity is gone now. Most Greeks are in Greece now, the old Romaniote and Ladano Jews are in Israel, the Arabs in Syria, and the Armenians in Armenia or France, or Phoenix, Arizona for some reason. The sad irony is that in some ways, Anatolia was a more diverse and accepting place under a theocratic monarchy that ruled by fiat - before it tried to modernize and industrialize; before the the Young Turks - then under a secular modern republic that ruled by elected officials.
But maybe these few remaining Armenians on Musa Dagh, the descendants of the resistors would strongly disagree with me. We finished our tour with a late breakfast, consisting of mostly the greatest and most-varied spread of olives I’d ever had, and a coffee in a cafe built into a waterfall where you could sit and dip your toes into cold ponds of water, under the shade of trees while the sun waited for us up above.
5. Düğün
The time was upon us! No more tangents into sad histories, no more braided narratives of past and present; this was the future we had travelled for, the reason for my return, the reward for fish-bowled Kurdish boys in robot costumes, the consequence of passed-up peppers, the sweet harvest of fast-growing friendships, the result of over 1,800 drunken kilometre!
We had left Istanbul like the initial spark on a long fuse that snaked its way through Anatolia; through puddles of ayran and rakı and under the armpits of cops until finally reach the long-suffering nitroglycerin on Hatay. This was Düğün day. The groom’s knee had been dirtied, the coffee had been salted, the parents had nodded, our tribe had been summoned, and the cousins, O how the cousins had been gathered. The Wedding was upon us!
And I had nothing to wear.
One pair of brown pants to my name, and they reeked of 3 days in a car in 40 degree weather. That was it for slacks. I had to buy a white linen shirt in town, and for my feet I wore my black ropes from Spain. White, brown, and black; hopefully my dancing would be more coordinated than my style.
I wasn’t looking so bad though. Every man resembled me in their get-up. It was too fucking hot for a suit, only the Groom and the wedding party would be forced to suffer through that, and the women in our group wore colourful light dresses that added some flare to our linen uniforms.
The Damat and Gelin had headed to the wedding hall earlier with family and close friends. We were left on our own, scrambling to get ready, drink rakı, and show up not too late. After a few last minute tweaks and checks, we were all in the cars and ready to go, when suddenly the Nutritionist opened the door and jumped out of the rolling car. After yelling something in Turkish, she came back with little towels for all of us. We rolled down the windows, blared the music and waved our flags as the Driver screeched out of the neighbourhood and into the approaching dusk.
We drove though Samandağ with pride; the driver somehow steering and stopping while using both hands to honk the horn. He was karate chopping his steering wheel, like the two cleavers of an old-fashioned butcher making steak tartare. We rolled, with towels of joy in one hand, beer in the other, making sure Samandağ knew that there was only one wedding today.
We arrived at the wedding hall to multiple weddings happening next to each other. This seemed to be the wedding district. After a little confusion, we managed to find our location after disturbing only one other event.
We passed through the front gates and did our best to compose ourselves as we were greeted by the parents. Gelin’s folks, our hosts were gregarious in their welcoming, but the Damat’s were a little stiff, not quite sure what to make of this already sweaty posse in front of them. There was a pool to the right of the entrance that already looked welcoming, but we made our way upstairs to the main event.
The wedding hall was long and brightly lit; a stage in the foreground right led to a grouping of circular tables followed by a balcony at the back of the room, which was in fact the front of the building, and overlooked the near-distant Mediterranean as the sun hung low and bright in the sky. The room lacked the overly symmetrical arrangement of weddings that I had attended in Canada. The bar, the stage, the dance floor, and the ceremony would all take place here; it was ready to be used.
We were directed to a table with a trembling bottle of rakı in the middle. This was to be our station, our grounding stone when we got untethered from reality. We quickly poured a drink of the Aslan Sütü and went to the balcony for cigarettes, not for the last time. After a quick glance down at the adjacent wedding, the one we had almost improved, we were beckoned back in for the beginning of the ceremony.
I was running on fumes, fumes of cigarettes and rakı, and my anise poached brain doesn’t remember the order of events for the night. My memories come back like vivid, debauched images in an unreliable stereoscope that wants to be a kaleidoscope. But I’ll try my best to relay them.
The bride and groom came out to their wedding song, I think. The wedding song first? A different order than I’m used to. Perhaps all the bureaucracy of marriage - the vows, the witnesses, the documents, the blood stained bed sheet inspection - had been handled already. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me Until the End of Love coming through the speakers. Much like Dylan’s Man in Me, it had a chorus that a bunch of drunks who speak different languages could get on board with.
La la
La la la la la
La la la la la
La la la la laaaa
But we abstained from adding our lovely harmony to the proceedings, and cheered as the Damat and Gelin danced together. She wore a large, flowing red dress, a tradition from older times. I then noticed that the roof had been retracted, and in the clear dry night air of Hatay, they danced under the stars as we watched, and some cried.
After the dance (or before, I don’t know), all the women surrounded Gelin in a circle and closed in. What strange form of siege is this, I thought. The Nature kindly explained it to me. This was some ritualistic crying circle. All the women in attendance would converge upon the Gelin and make her cry somehow. Somehow, how strange. How far would they go to ensure waterworks? Did they have secret insults on the ready, stored in their memories since childhood to use right now? To taunt and demean the lovely Gelin with some repressed childhood insecurity, making all the mental damage worthwhile? Or would they simply beat her with reeds, freshly cut from some ceremonial stream that moses once pissed in? I was thinking out of line and sideways. The Gelin cried amicably and the women hugged her with their arms and their own tears. I breathed a sigh of relief and put away my cable jumpers for later. Maybe the Damat would need to be induced…
Then, after the crying ceremony (and before), we went for a smoke. The Scientist was looking a little sickly. His thin, malnourished body seemed to struggle with the gravity of the situation, and gravity in general. With a little help we got him back to our table before the next ceremony. For this one, I was going to be included, we all were.
Man and woman were paired up, holding a candle in one hand, and then conjoined by a mutually-held towel in the other. I was to be with the Damat’s sister, a huge honour no doubt. She however, was not so enthralled by my minor celebrity. Never making eye contact, and nervously holding the towel with me, we joined the procession walking around the Damat and Gelin.
Looking back, I can see why she was put-off by me. There had been moments of interspersed dancing (I think by that point), and my white linen shirt was as translucent as a glass of undiluted rakı, pre-Aslan Sütü. My side of the towel was probably soaked in sweat by the end of our slow circumambulation of the happy couple.
But with all the duties and traditions done, it was time to get even sweatier. The band switched gears, the master of ceremonies, seemingly yelling the whole night already, found a new threshold, and we all poured into the dance floor. Two drummers, carrying the large davul style drum around their waists, lowered the booming cylinders to the floor. The Damat jumped on top and danced with his wife as she waved a towel at him. We all joined in for minutes straight of the sweatiest, happiest, thigh destroying dancing I’ve done in my life. Young cousin Ali challenged me to keep up with him, in some kind of masochistic speed squat competition. It felt more like sports training, sports training while drunk and in between cigarettes. After countless lowerings to the floor, we both gave out and collapsed. Who beat you, it didn’t matter. He said I love you bro as he helped me to my feet.
I looked over at the table. The Dentist’s light blue shirt was a dark sea blue now from sweat. Padowan looked like the pills were just kicking in, the Nutritionist’s laughter was rendered silent by the music, The Painter and the Young-one were dancing together with the Damat still on the drums, Sex Machine was now a sweaty sex machine, and the Nature was standing calmly over the Scientist, who was dead.
His lower body was still sitting in the chair, but his upper half was sprawled out, flat on the table. We lifted him up and took him to the balcony for some fresh air and cigarettes, but it was no use. He was a marionette without strings, free to collapse into his own uselessness. We brought him back to our table, tempted him with rakı and then took turns guarding him as we continued to dance, yell, and drink.
We carried on, for how long I cannot say. I wish I could remember more of that night, that wedding that felt like the perfect accumulation of the friendships made and experiences had in Turkey in 2016. But maybe there is good reason why I don’t recall the details and order like I have for other parts of my time here. I was fully engaged and blessed out with my friends. I closed whatever journalistic eye I have; closed off my mind to collecting details and jotting down playful turns of phrase. Did I open my third eye and pierce through the -muş, or fully embrace its unembraceable nature? Either way, when I think of that night I draw a blank on many details, but feel a sentimental warmth instead, and that’s alright for me. I was just a wedding guest, having the sweatiest time of his life with friends, and it felt so good I didn’t pay attention to it. All the more fitting. Pure -muş.
But at some point, it came to an end. I do remember that. The wedding hall, and the families probably had enough of our obscene tactics (I think at some point we were dancing like russians while drinking rakı straight from the bottle). We were ordered out, but not before ensuring that whatever remaining rakı and booze would be brought to the houses for us to continue. With that guarantee from the Damat, we gathered ourselves, and the still dead body of the Scientist, and headed out of the compound. As we passed the pool near the exit, I gave Padowan a sly look, and we both caught the security guard catching our sly look. Just as he started saying “lutfen, havuza girm-”, we were in mid-air. After we splashed in fully clothed, the rest of our crew joined in. Screams of yapıstır echoed throughout the night air. We would have thrown the Scientist in, but that risked reviving, or drowning him. We had successfully crashed the right wedding.
We got back into our cars and made our way to the Gelin’s family compound. I was in a car with a cousin of hers, his wife, and the Scientist. While racing through the streets, the cousin started a chant for the Beşiktaş football club. Suddenly the Scientist was alive! His arms shot up above his head and he joined in with the chant. “Çarşı, çarşı”, something along those lines. They howled together the whole ride home. If we had only known, that this was the only medicine that could have brought the Scientist back to life. We would have ordered a few cc’s of Çarşı long ago. But he was back with the living now and ready to once again attack the rakı.
Or so we thought.
We waited after our arrival back home, but the Damat was slow to hand over the booze. He finally came in, no doubt pissed that he had to control his barbarian friends while his wife awaited him in their wedding night bedroom. He had brought the last dregs of the homemade rakı, a mere sip for our insatiable self-destructiveness. He had a mutiny on his hands.
The Painter pleaded, the Young-One pointed a finger, Padowan, who had long ago lost his jedi-like composure, screamed obscenities in short bursts. The Nature shook his head in the corner in disbelief with the Dentist and the Nutritionist (who was laughing no more). The Scientist yelled, “Çarşı!”
The Driver lay on the floor, unconcerned with such stationary matters.
Despite our despair, the Damat held his ground. This was to be all the booze given to us for the rest of the night. With his final statement, he left the room and took the energy with him. We were left wanting, but everyone slowly accepted the new-found non-rakı reality (after we finished the home-made dregs) and turned for bed.
Not me though, I was determined to make something of the dawn. I had brought my camera with me, but had not used it once. With a few remaining cigarettes, flattened and moist from my ass pocket, I set out to capture the early risers of this frontier town. The Young-One too was interested in joining in on my blood-shot patrol, and was just about to head out with me when the Painter said from a cot on the floor “Yağmur ya…”. They still hadn’t had one decent night together. She turned back and said “but who will protect him from ISIS?”
I grabbed her by the shoulders and calmly advised her to stay with the Painter, and that I would be alright. She easily agreed and stumbled back to their cot. I left them in the dark of the room and headed out into the approaching dawn.
It was all useless. I stumbled around for a few minutes, found a main road and tried to take a photo of a few women in niqabs walking by. I must have been an interesting sight to them. Still wearing my near-see-through wedding shirt - not to mention pool-soaked everything else, I tried repeatedly to lift my camera to my eye and focus, but it felt like a stone-made snake in my hand. It swung around in my stupid hand, as my stupid body swung around the quiet of Samandağ. I nearly fell into a gas station pump, before abruptly stopping in the entrance way of the service store, only to see the clerk sleeping with his head on the desk. I thought of the Scientist.
I managed one decent picture of that peaceful soul before I realized I was about to do the same - fall flat on my face into whatever hard object was unfortunate enough to be my pillow. I turned back and allowed my impressive internal-drunk compass to guide me through the uniform buildings and colours around me, and back to the Gelin family compound. I’m pretty sure I physically crawled up the stairs, and dragged my body across the floor to the only remaining section of open couch, and passed out.
6. Departure
I was awoken with a start. The Nature, the Dentist, and the Painter were all standing above me. “Hey buddy, it’s time to go.”
I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours. I checked my phone and confirmed, it was only 9:30am, not their style at all. I quickly surmised that the choking off of the rakı last night had caused some friction between the two warring parties, my tribe of friends and Gelin’s family. It seemed they didn’t really want us here anymore, and we didn’t want to be here anymore. Everyone was ready to go, and everyone was ready for us to leave; except for me. I was a soggy wreck, a beached whale that never once had grace, even while in my natural currents. They were all waiting on me, the intrepid photographer who was still walking like all the endolymph fluid had been drained from his ears, mixed with gin, and shot back into his system.
I was hurried into the car, after I scrambled to pack my few things. I hoped I didn’t forget anything, but I later knew I had forgotten to say goodbye to Gelin’s father or Mother, or her cousin Ali, my one night kanka.
I was in a car with the Dentist, the Driver, and the Painter and the Young-One. We shot out of Hatay with hungover gusto and stopped in Adana for lunch. When I got up from the back seat, I opened the car door and stepped outside into the blazing, resentment inducing heat of Adana; they say they shot at the sun here, and I can see why. As my feet touched that 1pm asphalt, it was then that I realized I had forgotten something - my shoes! I was shoeless in Adana.
I let out an authentic “Allah Allah” and cursed my friends for the morning rush. The driver saved me though. He went to the trunk and pulled out a pair of soft blue flip flops for me. To this day, they are the most comfortable pair I’ve tried on, and every friend of mine covets them; including the Driver, for I have never given them back. In fact, as I sit here now, writing this story 4 years later, I’m wearing them still.
We ate ciğer and made our way to Kaş for the night. We convinced a private beach to let us sleep on their beach chairs for the night. We had one last night all together, drinking beer, recalling the whole trip and wedding, as the sea lapped on in the background. In the morning the Scientist, and Sex-Machine took off for Istanbul with one of the cars. The rest of us were to go on to Muğla, where unbeknownst to me, hell and high water awaited.
Down to only one car, the Nutritionist, Padowan, and the Driver headed there to meet up with the Damat and Gelin, as they would be joining us by plane. The rest of us would hitch-hike to Muğla; the Painter and the Young-One together, and myself with the Dentist. We started this together, we would end it. We walked up the switch back road from Kaş as a group, but the Dentist and I held back for half an hour or so; no need to overcrowd the road.
One way or another, we all had to make it to Muğla by the evening. We weren’t done yet. A cabin in the woods was awaiting us.
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Jessup Eric William is the pen name of an English Teacher in Istanbul. He came here on a whim in 2015 and has returned to live, write, and experience the city. He is interested in combining personal experience, journalism, history, and myth into one form of story-telling.
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