Category: Turkish Women

The Faithful Retainer

We enjoyed mezes and drinks in Sofiye’s lush garden and we were in joyful, mellow mood. Towards the end of the evening Sofiye’s maid emerged from the kitchen having washed up and wiped down. She joined us at the table to eat a modest meal of pasta and salad. She asked Sofiye about Liam and me and Sofiye asked us how she should reply. ‘Honestly,’ we said. We studied the maid’s mystified expression as she grappled for several minutes to make sense of the information. We thought it cruel to persevere so we settled on cousins, and she seemed calmed by the clarification since village people like to keep it in the family.

The teetotal maid became quite intoxicated by the laid back charm of the evening and, with reckless abandon and without warning, whipped off her head scarf to reveal dark, silky hair fashioned into a single squaw-like platted ponytail which she draped across her left shoulder. Excited but anxious, she looked to the assembly for approval. We gave her an ovation. Sadly, it was but a brief moment of sovereignty. She replaced the head scarf as we left to totter home down the lane.

Love Thy Neighbour

After an long, exhausting day at the beach we returned home to a bit of a do. Our shared courtyard was ablaze with candles and Bubbly Beril was busily dressing her patio table. Moments later, the flamboyant Sofiya floated through the garden accompanied by a younger woman slapped up like Coco the Clown on a bad hair day. Beril turned to Liam and explained in broken English that she was throwing an impromptu al fresco dinner party and we would be joining them.  In five minutes. The menu was a generous selection of calamari and un-filleted fish.  This was Liam’s worst nightmare – he simply can’t do fish bones and tentacles are an absolute no no. I watched my husband attempt to keep his gag reflex in check, but he struggled. Eventually, he resorted to stashing cuts of rubbery squid in the pockets of his bermuda shorts. Oh the shame.

The evening was an eclectic mix of insults and complements, with Sofiya acting as the unofficial translator. Her companion was half cut from the start. She sat po-faced and aloof, only opening her mouth to demand more rakı. My attempts to engage her in a friendly tête-à-tête went largely unrequited. When she did speak it was to brag about her English – a result of a ten year stint in Texas (or Teksars, as she called it). Her pidgin dialect seemed little better than my Turkish, but I let it go. The miserable Coco became more and more inebriated. As her tongue loosened, the reason for her truculence became crystal clear – I was the problem. She unleashed an unprovoked broadside in my direction about foreign residents not speaking Turkish. Caught on the back foot, I attempted to placate her with a humble apology and a promise to do better. Dissatisfied, she continued to snipe. After an hour I could take no more and asked Sofiya to intervene  – she did so with grace and tact, as I would expect from an ex RADA girl. Sofiya’s friend delivered a theatrical but fake apology topped only by my own fake acceptance of it. She withdrew to the opposite end of the table to sulk and sup.

I do accept that my lack of ear for languages will hinder a meaningful engagement within my host community. However, to be dressed down by an old sop who, after spending 10 years in the USA, could hardly string a few simple words together in English was a bit rich.

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Enchanted Jack

Last month the fabulous people at Displaced Nation asked me about:

  • My most enchanting experience this summer
  • My least enchanting experience, and
  • Tricks of the trade for dealing with the unforgiving heat.

I feel a little trilogy coming on.

Displaced Nation Trilogy – Part 1

Bodrum is the most secular and modern of Turkish towns. Normal social rules don’t apply here. It’s where people come to escape the conformity of everyday Turkish society. However, scrape the surface and you will find magic of a different kind. We were visiting our friend Jessica – a thoroughly modern Millie and a gorgeous Bodrum Belle to boot. Jessica lives just a few hundred metres behind the swanky marina with its luxury yachts and raucous watering holes. Her home is set within a traditional quarter of whitewashed buildings huddled together along narrow lanes. As we approached her door, we noticed an elderly neighbour dressed in traditional livery: floral headscarf, crocheted cardigan and capacious clashing pantaloons. She sat cross-legged in a shady spot of the garden and seemed to be plucking a fleece. Liam and I are self-confessed city boys and asked Jessica what the old lady was up to. Apparently, she was preparing the wool for hand carding, straightening and separating fibres to weave on the spinning wheel she kept in her house. The amazing woman hummed as she plucked, happy under the cool of an ancient knotted olive tree and doing what women have done in Turkey for millennia. Now you don’t get that in Blighty.

Part Two tomorrow – Disenchanted Jack

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Sisters are Doing it for Themselves

I’ve never really got futbol. In my experience, few gay people do. Having said that, there is a Gay Football Supporters Network and London has its very own gay-friendly team, the London Titans, who play serious soccer in local leagues. So what do I know? Perhaps times are changing and the sport is finally shedding its well-trodden racist, sexist and homophobic image. I suspect the jury’s still out on that one. In any case, it’s too late for me. I’m set in my gay old ways. The only football game I’ve ever attended was when I popped along with my sister to watch my young nephew proudly captain his little league team in a local park. My usually calm and matriarchal sibling was transformed into a screaming harridan. Such is the intoxicating power of the beautiful game.

England gave football to the world then ruined it by exporting hooliganism. The tribal thuggery that afflicted the English game in the 80s and 90s has largely died out but is still alive and kicking in many other corners of the world. Fenerbahçe, one of Turkey’s top soccer teams, had a bit of bother with their own fans of late. Rather than play their matches behind locked gates, they decided to punish their unruly supporters by filling their stadium with women and children only. Men were persona non grata. It was a rip-roaring success that hit the headlines. The ladies electrified the good humoured ambience as they partied in the stands, sang, chanted, waved and danced. They knew all the words and all the moves. Was this a just a cynical gimmick to attract positive PR or a genuine attempt to keep the bad boys at bay and let the ladies shine? Who knows? Still, women are invading the pitch all over the world these days with their own local and national teams. Are Turkish women finally coming out of the kitchen and doing it for themselves? I do hope so. Go girls!

Thanks to Marie for the inspiration for this one.

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Turks and Tampons

My third Guest blogger is Alexandra from Death by Dolmuş. Alexandra is a Yankee lass who teaches in Istanbul. She writes about the quirky side of life in the ancient city and has a mild obsession with public transport. Alexandra also publishes an amazing photoblog. If you don’t like discussions about women’s itty bitty parts, don’t read the following (oh, go on).

There are strange things that occur in Turkey. I am pretty on top of most of it, but from time to time things do catch me off guard. I’m unfazed when a man brings a 12 foot (4 meter) ladder into an over-packed dolmuş (roughly 5 meters long itself.) I’m unfazed when my bank calls to ask permission of my employer when I wish to close my account (obviously a mere mortal like me can’t be trusted with such a serious decision.)

I was caught off guard when my colleague, a punk, riot-grrrl feminist with red hair (not Irish red, but like, the color red) and combat boots, moans to me, doubled over in pain, ‘Gahh, I wish I hadn’t left the window open last night.’ It had been a sweltering 80 degrees (25 C) and I couldn’t understand what that had to do with her abdominal pain. ‘The wind, the night air, you know, it gives me cramps.’ Efendim?

Now, I’m fairly certain that cramps are caused by your uterine walls contracting to expel the lining. But, you know, who can say for certain…

I was constantly appalled by the lack of knowledge these university educated women displayed about their own bodies and the science contained in them. I know Freud thought that hysteria (that vague, female-ish complaint) was caused by a ‘disturbance’ to the uterus, but I’m pretty sure somewhere in my 6th grade sex-ed class, I remember learning something different…

As I was moving out, I had an enormous amount of tampons that my roommate and I had hoarded like we were preparing for the apocalypse. God knows when we would be able to find tampons again, so every time we ventured out of the Islamic Republic of Turkey, we bought up the store like they were going out of style.

Not having space in my luggage for 47 boxes of Tampax Pearls, and with the confidence that I could pick some up any time nature called at my nearest pharmacy (that’s a chemist’s for you Brits), when back in the US, I decided to give them away. Because honestly, who doesn’t like free tampons? Apparently, Turkish women.

So that’s how I found myself, on my last day of work, sitting in a locked office with my colleague, demonstrating how to use a tampon. I unwrapped it, showed how the applicator worked, as she dissected the tampon I had handed her, checking that the string was in fact well secured at the center. I extolled the tampon’s virtues: you can go swimming! (Her face lit up, what do you mean? She asked in disbelief.) You can wear white pants with no fear! Thinking back to all those tampon commercials of my youth, you can go shopping with your fresh-faced friends and laugh to your heart’s desire while spinning around in circles to demonstrate your new-found freedom!

The Good Samaritan

Liam had popped out to the cashpoint to withdraw the rent money. While he was gone Beril, our neighbour, ran into our shared garden shouting for help. I leapt from the radiating sofa, slipped on my flip flops, followed her out of the gate and along the narrow lane that runs along the side of our cottage. Beril led me through the large ornamental gate that lead to Sofiya’s courtyard. I found pedigreed Sofiya heaped in a flower bed. Her knees were blackened and bloodied, her white delicate cotton dress crumpled and muddied. Her grimaced face gave the pain away. I examined her wounds. Fortunately, they seemed no more than a graze and she was able to move her legs.

I galloped back down the lane, through our gate and back into the house. I nearly tripped myself on my wobbly, flopping footwear. I quickly washed my hands then returned with antiseptic cream, kitchen towel, large plaster dressings, paracetamol and water. I gently washed Sofiya’s wounds with the towel soaked in bottled water, unscrewed the cap of the cream and dabbed the ointment onto the cuts. She winced a little but otherwise seemed calmed by my attention. We gently lifted her from the bedding and Beril helped place Sofiya’s arm over my shoulder. I held her firmly round the waist as she hobbled across the garden to the ramshackle conservatory. I gently lowered onto a floral sofa and went in search of the kitchen. Beril followed behind. I located the fridge, opened up the freezer compartment and removed a tray of ice. Beril immediately understood my intention and hunted around the busy kitchen for a plastic bag. She found one wedged at the back of a deep pan drawer. We filled the bag with ice and returned to the patient. Beril placed the cold press against Sofiya’s knees.

‘You must be careful. One fall might carry you off,’ I said.

‘Me, darling? No, I’m invincible.’

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All Quiet on the Eastern Front

The guns have fallen silent on the eastern front. The constant heated arguments between our neighbours have mercifully abated. Whatever they were rowing about appears to have been resolved, for the time being at least. Lazy days on their side of the proverbial fence have become one long languid banquet. They eat constantly. I appreciate freshly prepared Turkish cuisine is  less calorific and much healthier than most Blighty fare, particularly the convenience variety. Even so, if I shoved that much food into my mouth I’d be as big as the house. Perhaps this is why those pretty, slim young things with impossibly tiny waists and bums like two plump puppies in a sack develop into wide-bodied wrestlers. Not the steroid enhanced Yankee WWF kind. I mean the saturday afternoon grab and grunt kind that I used to watch on ITV’s World of Sport in the 1970s, brought to you by Dickie Davies. I realise this analogy will fly right over the heads of my non-Blighty readers.

Turk Season

July is Türk sezon and Bodrum is crammed with a richness of middle income people of all generations drawn from across the country taking their annual holidays before the start of Ramazan. The narrow streets are grid-locked and the air is filled with the piercing sound of cross monotone horns. We wandered out into the sticky evening to imbibe the ambiance and sink a few jars. We ambled behind the multitude of multi-generational families promenading along the marina. We headed through the bazaar, past the cheap boys with their cheap goods and snaked along Meyhane Sokak. Miraculously, we found a free place at one of the tall tables outside the semi-gay bar we’d stumbled across the previous year to enjoy the good-humoured scene around us. Alcohol consumption, particularly by women, is generally frowned upon in wider Turkish society. However, there was little evidence of this in the tequila slamming crowd. We had a ball.

Whirl Like a Dervish

DervishTo celebrate our deliverance from delirium, we fancied a night on the tiles and chanced upon a small nightclub, very Turkish and surprisingly chic. Turkish pop filled the room and young trendy things revolved around the dance floor like whirling dervishes. There was one tiny sensory drawback though, prompting Liam drunkenly to declare ‘my gift to Turkey is deodorant.’ Foreigners were definitely in the minority, though we caught the eye of a couple of likely western ladies, one of whom was topped off with a curly ginger perm and who writhed around the dance-floor like orphan Annie’s grandmother. We sang The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow knowing full well that it always does in Asia Minor at this time of year. Happy and contented we made our way home in the wee small hours picking up a kebab on the way; a very distant relation to the slop that’s dished up in Walthamstow.

I Believe the Children are our Future

For all the fast talk of political Islam and a return to piety, there truly are two sides to this magnificent resurgent nation. Istanbul’s Kadir Has University clearly has a modern, progressive curriculum that allows students to express themselves in  music and dance in a fun and inclusive way. I’ve picked three great examples of this. The first two are uplifting romps that had us rolling in the aisles. The third brought us to our feet. You’ll see why at the end.

You might also like to look at Turkey’s Got Talent. I challenge you not to at least smile.

Yes, this really is a duet with Jennifer Saunders, presumably remixed from Shrek 2.

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