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Christmas in Turkey, Part II

So. Santa. Santa flying over a mosque. Santa omnipresent in a Muslim country. What gives, you ask?

Well, as I mentioned in a previous posting, that beloved “American” icon has his roots in, where else - Turkey. Humor me, if you will, while I relate the story of Santa, who is really St. Nicholas, a Christian Turkish saint.

St. Nicholas was born in 260 AD in Turkey (of course!!), the son of wealthy parents that raised him to be a devout Christian and then died when he was young. There are many stories and legends written about the kindness and generosity of St. Nicholas - perhaps the most famous of a poor man who had three daughters. He could not afford a proper dowry for them which left them the option of being sold into slavery. St. Nicholas wanted to help, but was too shy to do it in person so he went to the man's house and threw a purse filled with gold coins through the window on three different nights.
One version has him drop the bag of gold down the chimney to avoid being spotted by the father; another version has the bag falling into a stocking drying above the fire (you see where this is going?)
There are further stories of St. Nicholas calming the seas during a violent storm, saving people from famine, and protecting children as well as many other kind and generous deeds done in secret. He expected nothing in return. Obeying Jesus' words to “sell what you own and give the money to the poor,” Nicholas used his whole inheritance to assist the needy, the sick, and the suffering. He dedicated his life to serving God and went on to become the Bishop of Myra. Celebrated as a saint a century after his death, he became the patron saint of many cities and countries, with 2,000 churches named after him - 400 in England and 34 in Rome alone.
And how did this Turkish Christian bishop become the fat, white-bearded red-suited Santa we know today?
Some say the Dutch brought the tradition of St. Nicholas to New Amsterdam (NY), some say it was the Germans who brought it to Pennsylvania. Regardless, John Pintard, the man who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, pushed for St. Nicholas as the patron saint of New York and the Historical Society. Washington Irving joined the society and published Knickerbocker's History of New York, which contained many references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. The Society held its first St. Nicholas’s day anniversary dinner in 1810 and an artist was commissioned to create an American image of St. Nicholas for the occasion. St. Nick was depicted as a gift-giver with presents for children in stockings hanging by the fireplace.
Then in 1823, a poem called “A Visit from St. Nicholas” – that we know as “The Night Before Christmas” – was written and became a classic. It was immensely popular and further solidified the image of St. Nick as we know it today. Slowly disappearing was St. Nicholas the European bishop, who reappeared as a round, bearded elfin figure. At the same time, the saint’s name -the German Sankt Nicklaus and Dutch Sinterklaas - morphed into the more phonetic Santa Claus.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf. . . .
American artists began to pick up on the images in both Washington Irving’s work and the poem and Santa Claus continued to evolve into a red-suited figure by the 1920’s. And then in 1931 (you knew American commercial interests had to have a hand in all this) an artist for Coca Cola began 35 years of Santa illustrations for Coke that firmly established the image we know today as Santa Claus – a rotund, bearded man with a twinkle in his eye, apple cheeks and a white fur-trimmed red suit. He was such a commercial success hawking all sorts of products that he has been exported BACK around the world and threatens to overwhelm the kindly St. Nicholas. So it goes.
Anyway, much, MUCH more than you wanted to know of course, but then that is the curse of a blog…
So Santa being essentially Turkish (and the Turks have intense national pride) resulted in a proliferation of Santa all around Ankara - for New Year’s, of course. There were Santa mugs and Santa candles and Santa ornaments and 5-ft tall Santas and heck, just about Santa everything. Which was lovely and convenient for a couple of children in a foreign country and excited about Christmas. Santas everywhere! (There were even Christmas carols on the radio, although I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how that corresponded to the Turkish New Year).

So all the work of creating a Christmas atmosphere in Turkey was removed, except for one tiny detail that did not escape my laser-focused five-year old.

My son, a budding civil engineer at five, always needs to know exactly how things work PHYSICALLY. Well, here we are in Turkey this Christmas, ensconced in an apartment with no fireplace. So of course he expressed great trepidation on just HOW Santa was going to get in to deliver the all important loot if he couldn’t come down a chimney. Living in a foreign country is a daily exercise in being creative and this holiday was no exception. We gamely explained how Santa lands his sleigh on the balcony, as opposed to the roof since we have no fireplace, and hence, no chimney to descend. I see my son dubiously eyeing our narrow 8th floor curved balcony as I’m enthusiastically describing Santa’s near genius ability to land his sleigh and eight reindeer anywhere, physics be damned. This creative explanation also necessitated deciding which window to leave open so Santa could get in from the balcony. My kingdom for a chimney…

You know, they don’t prepare you for this kind of situation when you are planning to live abroad. Sure, I can mail a letter, hail a cab, barter in the marketplace, but no one told me I would have to rework a sacred holiday legend.

Christmas in Turkey, Part I

Ah, the holidays abroad. The time of year when you try to uphold the traditions of your own childhood and culture, both for your children and yourself. We enjoyed our Thanksgiving and even managed a traditional dinner, along with the glee of being able to say “We’re eating Turkey in Turkey!” I, in a fit of childish behavior, had to make the joke right at the beginning of the meal because I couldn’t take the tension of waiting to see who would say it first.

But how to create a Christmas atmosphere for your children while living in a country that is 99.5% Sunni Muslim? Well, as it turned out, we didn’t have to do too much work. Christmas, so to speak, is everywhere in Turkey.

Obviously, the Turks do not celebrate Christmas, but they celebrate New Year’s the exact way we celebrate Christmas – with a tree and presents and St. Nick (I will get to this in another blog posting, but the fat man in a red suit that you know as Santa Claus is actually St. Nicolas, who was, of course, TURKISH. As I mentioned in an earlier posting about the history of Turkey, anything that was important in the ancient world has to do with Turkey.) So there are lighted, elaborately decorated, and to our eyes, “Christmas” trees everywhere – in building lobbies, malls, and city squares. Conveniently, New Year’s is just a week after Christmas, so to our kids, everything was decorated for Christmas. Our apartment building has a tree in the lobby, as does the building next door. All of them are fake, but no matter where you look the spirit of Christmas is here.

But our children have never had their own Christmas tree (for various reasons over the years) and we decided that this year, they would. So began the hunt for a real Christmas tree in Ankara, Turkey. Armed with some vague addresses of where people MAY have bought a tree last year, we set out. After a couple of hours, many liters of gas and no luck, we briefly contemplated a nighttime raid on one of the many lovely coniferous forests in the southern part of the city with a saw and dark clothing, but decided it was not worth being sent home for a felony should we be caught. But lo and behold, as disappointment began to reign, my sister, visiting for the holidays, noticed a bunch of pine trees propped up on the curb a couple of blocks off the Konya highway. A few exits and U-turns later, we actually found what she had spotted – a small, well, I hesitate to call it a nursery but that’s the closest word to describe it, “nursery” tucked into the sidewalks of an urban neighborhood. The trees were spindly and droopy but live. We picked the most robust, robust being a very relative term, 3-ft tall-on-a-good-day tree, bargained the guy down to about $100, and loaded it into my trunk.

And how to decorate? Well, you can get decorations everywhere in Ankara. The large store across the street has 2 50-ft aisles of, uh, New Year’s decorations – string lights, bulbs, ornaments, candles, tinsel, Santa figurines, Santa cups, Santa mugs etc. Could have knocked me over with a feather I was so surprised.

So call it New Year’s, but my kids were treated to a lovely Christmas here. Turkey really is a crossroads between the east and the west. But the whole season could be summed up in an ornament I couldn’t resist buying, a gorgeous hand-painted tree ornament depicting Santa in his sleigh, riding through the sky….over a mosque.

Hitting The Bus

Did I mention that I had a Minor Altercation with a large red metro bus?

Mmmm… I didn’t think so. That was fun. And now I have a formal introduction to the ways of processing a car accident here in Turkey. I dearly hope I won’t need the information for future reference, but I’m not holding my breath.

The whole event was more unfortunate and annoying than anything else. I didn’t even hit the bus, I merely rolled a bit too close to it. We each remained motionless for a minute while the traffic was stopped, and then when the bus started up, his protruding back bumper hooked my headlight. Completely my fault, but really no big deal. A $14.95 light for my car, and a bus bumper that someone could have banged back with a hammer. At home we would exchange licenses and insurance info and be on our way in ten minutes. But we are not at home.

The most important thing to remember is that if you move your car after an accident here, you are automatically at fault. Each vehicle has to remain exactly in place until the traffic police arrive (oh yeah, you can imagine the possibilities). So since chances are you will be sitting there for a while, one hopes that a) the accident occurs in a remote traffic-free zone where you are not subject to the anger of delayed commuters and b) that there aren’t a lot of other accidents that morning to take up the time of the traffic police. I was lucky with neither.

It took the police three hours to get to the scene. We kept calling them and they assured us they were on their way and then finally, after two hours and many phone calls later, admitted they had 150 accidents to deal with that morning and would be a bit delayed. ANY OTHER location in the world I would have said, “Yeah, right – spare me the theatrics.” In Ankara I can only say, “150? That’s all?” The modern day Sisyphus is alive and well and He Is A Traffic Cop here in Ankara.

So after they finally show up, it takes another hour to process the accident. You each give your side of the story to the policeman who diligently writes it down. Oh, AND you have to submit to a breathalyzer test. All this for a busted headlight and dislodged bumper. Fortunately I skipped my usual beer-on-my-Cheerios breakfast that morning and my drunk and disorderly morning conduct was nowhere to be seen.

So lest you think that you are done, you need to go to the Central Police station a few days later for the judgment. They give you a copy of your statement which somehow doesn’t quite match what you said, but that you are allowed to correct. Those of you that know me will laugh at the image of me firmly but politely telling this mass of Turkish police that “no, no, I never HIT the bus, just sort of ROLLED into it. That needs to be changed.” My husband always laughs at me splitting hairs when it never matters. As it were, I was deemed 100% at fault. Which is true, although they often rule against the foreigner.

So, four hours of my time and a trip to the police station. And the epilogue? I’ve become insufferable because I can say to my husband, who hates my car, “That’s why I bought a junker. The odds were just too high.”

The Sound of Turkish

I’m back. Sorry for the long hiatus.

I’m back and finally in a Turkish language class. It’s really taken me too long to sign up for one - inertia can be a powerful force – but better late than never. The Turks are just the nicest people I’ve ever met (have I said that before?) and I really want to communicate with them beyond a smile and hand gestures.

And after some instruction, I have to say I really like the Turkish language, despite some unusual linguistic concepts I need to get my head around (i.e., there is no verb for “to be” or “to have”!!). It does have a logic and an order that appeals to my dominant left brain.

One of the biggest differences from French (which I have studied intensely and most recently) is that every single letter in a Turkish word is pronounced. In French you could easily drop four or five letters in a word, which sometimes happens in English as well, but in Turkish you can’t even forget a single letter (can you imagine if you had to pronounce every single letter in “through” - ta-ha-er-o-u-ga-ha?) This makes it much easier to hear an unknown word and be able to look it up. But of course, when speaking Turkish, you have to actually remember this rule.

For example…The windshield wiper on my car snapped and in desperate need of a new one, I went to the auto parts section of a local big box store. Since my Turkish is so limited, I brought the broken wiper with me and held it up with a smile. The salesclerk asked me the make of the car. Reflexively I pronounced Renault in my best french accent – rolled the r just so, the e like “ay”, pronounced the au like a long o, and dropped the lt. The nice gentleman looked at me blankly. I tried again. A furrowed brow. Don’t know why I was so slow…then I carefully pronounced each letter separately, inserting a y between the vowels – Re-na-yu-l-t. Instant comprehension, lovely smile, I had my windshield wiper.

Which brings me to another facet of Turkish – you can’t have two vowels next to each other, which is a boon to us poor foreigners. Every single vowel is always pronounced exactly the same, and you don’t have to remember how the sound changes if there is a second vowel like, a vs. au or o vs. ou , or ei or ie, etc. On the off chance a combination of suffixes produces two vowels, they just stick in the letter y. Just think about the double vowel sound possibilities in English with even this small example of ou:

Dough – long o
Furlough – long o

Through – sounds like ew
Ghoul – sounds like ew

Cough – short o
Ought – short o

Enough – short u
Rough – short u
Tough – short u

Bough – sounds like ow
Noun – sounds like ow

I’m not a linguistics professor, but do you see ANY rule here?

As for international relations…the political situation with the PKK has really brought out Turkish national pride. It reminds me of the US shortly after 9/11, that brief time when everyone was flying the American flag and proud to be an American. It’s like that every day here since the tension escalated on the border. There are Turkish flags hanging from windows, over doors, in taxi and bus windows, from car antennae, huge 75 ft. flags strung between apartment buildings. My children attend a Turkish school, and they have a lobby display - shrine, really - to Ataturk with balloons with the Turkish flag hanging from the ceiling. The nationalism here is rampant and oddly appealing. I guess the stark divisions in the US sadden me. I would give anything for a presidential candidate that could unite us, and yet I fear that no matter who wins, 50% of Americans will reject the winner on party affiliation alone. Can you blame anyone? Everyone has fanned the flames of partisanship in their own way.

And to close on an upbeat subject -

GO RED SOX! Red Sox Nation is alive and well in Ankara, Turkey.

The Temperature in Turkey

Not even the weather in New England changes this quickly.

We left Ankara last Friday, in shorts and T-shirts and enjoying the 70-75 degree weather, to travel down to Side, a town on the southern coast of Turkey for a couple of days. Now granted, the Ankara locals were saying that this constant warm, sunny weather through October was not usual. But who listens? The weather was typically lovely and Mediterranean in Side, sunny and in the low 80s with occasional thunderstorms. Indeed we left Side on Monday in the blazing hot sun. But the temperatures dropped the closer we got to Ankara, and by the time we arrived home, it was 35 degrees. Yikes.

It was rather embarrassing on the way home to hop out of the car for gas and facilities in shorts and flip flops. I endured the stares of more than a few people as I walked my son to the gas station bathroom in his shorts and sandals while the two of us shivered. My Turkish phrasebook doesn’t list “But it wasn’t this cold when we left!” and really, would it have helped if it did? I was a bad mother. Two of the gas station attendants took one look at our outfits and then checked out our license plate, as in, “What country are these idiots from?” The plate might say Turkey but we’re from the land of Denial, my friends.

But nothing like driving to get a feel for the geography of a place, and it really was a gorgeous trip. The land around Ankara is almost lunar, with nary a tree to be seen. The land is parched and brown and windswept. But as you drive south past Konya (home of the whirling dervishes, a subject for another blog posting) you go over a high mountain range of green coniferous slopes that is reminiscent of California. The summit is at 6000 ft. (No snickering from the western corner, please, that’s high for those of us raised in the east) and from there you coast all the way down to sea level in Side, with palm trees, banana plantations and balmy blue ocean water. I can highly recommend it as a vacation spot. To hearken back to a previous posting regarding the history of Turkey, did you know that Mark Antony and Cleopatra once canoodled in the ancient roman city of Side? Bet you didn’t. Neither did I, not to beat a dead (Trojan) horse. I thought about asking for the room they slept in, but I refrained.

As for temperatures of a different sort…I have not personally felt any change in attitude towards us as Americans since the Armenian Genocide resolution passed last week. There was a small demonstration outside the embassy, and many public statements from Turkish officials promising dire consequences for U.S.-Turkey relations, but so far my daily interactions with Turks feels no different. The newspapers here, which are famously inflammatory, printed the headline “27 Stupid Americans” after the committee voted 27-21 in favor of the resolution. I think most Turks are extremely upset, but are too polite to express it to me. Although if the resolution passes in the House, as they are expecting in November, I think things could change rather quickly and unpleasantly. What can I say? We are all extremely disappointed here and hope that the resolution doesn’t pass. I’ll leave it at that. For those of you that know me personally, you can email me if you are interested and I’ll go into more than I can in a public space.

Ramazan

We are in the middle of Ramadan, known as Ramazan here in Turkey, the Muslim holy month. While the world recognizes Ramadan as a time for fasting, it is also an opportunity to refrain from envy, anger, greed, backbiting and gossip. The fasting is a time to turn away from worldly concerns and concentrate on a deeper spiritual relationship to God, as well as a reminder of the hunger of the less fortunate of this world.

For observant folks, nothing can be ingested between sunrise and sunset. Eating, drinking, smoking and sex are all prohibited during this time. Indeed for the most pious of Ramadan observers, the ban can extend to the licking of stamps.

Each morning drummers circulate through the towns and cities to awaken everyone an hour or two before Sahur, the large meal before dawn. This of course is helpful for those Ramadan observers who have a long hungry day in front of them and don’t want to oversleep (drummers have no snooze button), but pure hell on non-observant light sleepers. It just all depends on where you sleep and where the drummer walks. One of my friends has a bedroom that sits right above the alley of the drummer’s path, so she was awakened every day around 3:30 AM until she got used to the noise. She was so excited when after 2 ½ weeks she finally managed to sleep through the drummer. Her husband, however, swears that the drummer was actually IN their bedroom the other night. We have been fortunate (or culturally deprived?) as to not hear a drummer in our part of town – I don’t know whether we are heavier sleepers, have better sealed windows or perhaps just a weaker-armed drummer.

The dates of the holy month are based on the lunar calendar, which is about 11-12 days shorter than the solar calendar, so Ramadan drifts backwards year to year. This of course presents serious ramifications as Ramadan slowly backs down into summer. Sunrise materializes about 5:30 AM during the summer months, which means those drummers will be wandering around a lot earlier to remind you to eat. And the sun doesn’t go down until after eight PM. A long hungry day. That’s not even taking into account the heat. Can you imagine going the whole day without any water? This summer we had weeks of 95 degree + weather. The day during winter is a little over 9 hours long. The day during summer is 15 hours long. That’s 360 more minutes without water, and I’m sure you count every one. Next year Ramadan starts on 9/1 and it will be another ten years before Ramadan arrives in the cool increasing darkness of early spring.

To help manage the times of each day, different businesses will print out a chart with each day of Ramadan, and a column for the exact time that day of Imsak (the hour that fasting begins), Gűneş (sunrise), Őğle (noon prayers), Ikindi (midafternoon prayers), Akşam (evening/sundown) and Yatsı (night prayer). I picked one up at the Armada mall here in Ankara and it reminds me of the tide charts I see around my father’s Florida home.

So after the long day of fasting, many people go out with family and friends for IFTAR, the evening meal during Ramadan that breaks the fast. Often you will find that restaurants are crowded and neighborhoods deserted during the month’s evenings. This of course has no bearing on the everyday expatriate life except in rare circumstances like if, oh, say, for example, one Sunday night during Ramadan THE RADIATOR PIPE IN YOUR BATHROOM BURSTS and starts gushing coal-black sooty water at an alarming rate, and the Titanic comes to mind and there’s no one to help because your building manager is at an IFTAR dinner and all your neighbors are at IFTAR dinners and the whereabouts of the water shut-off for the apartment (which unfortunately you didn’t know was bizarrely hidden in an obscure closet) is unknown, and there’s not a single plumbing business open on a Sunday night during Ramadan and oh, hey, I have a brainteaser for you:

Question: If a pipe gushes X number of gallons of sooty black water per minute, how many minutes does it take to reach Y number of inches of water in the bathroom before it spills out all over beautiful hallway hardwood floors and bedroom carpet?

Answer: Fewer than 30 minutes, which is how long it takes someone to come to the house to shut off the water.

Those rare circumstances can be killers.