Istanbul

August 13, 2011 at 8:32 pm (Travel)

I was only in Istanbul for 2 days, and in that time I didn’t get very far out of the historic tourist center; nevertheless, I really liked it. As I’ll explain a little later, Turkey holds a unique spot on my places-visited list, and I was intrigued by the culture, the architecture, the customs, the jewelry and the food.

The People

The first thing I noticed about the Turks was how quick they are to smile. Initially, I thought that these smiles were just coming from people who make their income off of tourists like me. I was suspicious of smiles, and even more so, of help. (Hey, you come live in Ukraine for 2 years and see if you don’t have the same surprise and skepticism at friendliness to strangers.) This initial skepticism was in a way supported by a man who appeared out of nowhere to help us figure out the tram system in our first minutes in Istanbul. After walking us through the steps, and before walking away, he held out his hand for money. I had my guard up after that, but still, I couldn’t avoid the help. Men on the street, after asking if we wanted to eat kebabs or buy leather shoes, would often offer to direct us to where we needed to go. On our trip to the Whirling Dervish performance, one young guy actually took our map, and upon not knowing where we needed to go, went to the store next door and got another older man to help us. This man walked us all the way down the street and around a corner, pointing us in the right direction and not asking for any money. Then, as we continued down the street, at least 4 more men asked us where we were going and pointed us in the right direction. Of course, this help was peppered with the constant attempt at corralling us into one or another restaurant. At one point, assuming that the man wanted us to come to his restaurant, I said, “No, I’m not hungry” and pushed past a tiny man blocking my way down the street. “NO,” he screamed, running to get back in front of me, “I did not ask if you were hungry. I want to tell you where to go.” Ha, I felt horrible after that. It’s difficult to distinguish between the hassling of shop keepers and those who really just want to set you on your way, but still, I can say that the Turks I met are generally very friendly, helpful people.

Dervishes

Ok, now think back to your childhood. If you were anything like me and my sisters, you watched Disney’s Fantasia countless times. You’d fast-forward through the boring geometric shapes at the beginning, feel a tinge of fear at the crescendos leading from a volcano to the death of the dinosaurs, giggle at Mickey’s magic hat mishaps and dance along with the Twirling Flowers, all to get to the best part of the movie: the Dancing Hippo and the Half-Naked Centaurs. (And that’s where the movie ended for us. We usually skipped the Devil’s Mountain section. If you’ve seen it, you understand why.)

I want you to take yourself back to the Twirling Flowers, which appear sometime during the Nutcracker Suite. Just before the Twirling Flowers take the stage, a group of mushrooms perform a repetitive bow-and-twirl dance. This goes on for a bit, along with some jumps and other acrobatics, then the flowers appear. They follow the path of a stream, spinning faster and faster as the water glides towards a waterfall, their petals swirling outwards like large skirts.

This was one of my favorite parts of Fantasia (after the Dancing Hippo and Half-Naked Centaurs of course), and vague memories of this flower show has almost always been called to mind when I heard of the Whirling Dervishes. Over the course of my life, I’ve picked up a fact or myth or two about the WD’s, and I’ve always found them intriguing. I knew that they are in some way religious, and I knew that they twirl until they fall into a trance. And they wear funny clothes. That’s all I knew.

So I was really excited in Istanbul when I saw that there was a Whirling Dervishes performance. I convinced C, L and L to come along.

The show took place in a very small, cave-like room. There were maybe 70 people sitting in chairs that were situated in a multi-layered horseshoe with the open end facing a small stage, and in the center of the room was a dance floor. The first 15-20 minutes of the show involved a mesmerizing 4 man traditional music performance. Then the Dervishes entered. Five men wearing large, tubular, beige hats that seemed to sit just on the top of their heads and floor-length black cloaks covering floor-length white “dresses.” (There are official words for all these pieces of clothing, but I don’t have the brochure at the moment and certainly don’t remember off the top of my head.)

The men knelt on the edge of the circle and one of the band members began recited some verses of the Koran, his voice rising and falling in a deep baritone. The music started again, and one at a time the men slowly stepped from one end of the circle to the other, making deep, reverent bows to each other and the audience multiple times. With their hands crossed over their chests, the men continued bowing and slowly moving in circles for maybe 5 minutes to the accompaniment of the music. Then, the flute began to play, and on that cue the black cloaks were removed and the whirling began and continued for 30 minutes straight. With a few more initial bows, the men began to twirl, slowly releasing their arms up into the air, then out to the sides, the right palm facing up and the left palm down. As their arms extended, so did the edges of their white cloak, and I was immediately brought back to my memories of Fantasia. Up to then I had thought it only a coincidence, just some connection my mind made independently when hearing of Whirling Dervishes and thinking of the Fantasia Twirling Flowers. But upon seeing the bowing ritual and remembering the Mushroom Dance I was convinced that this was no accident on Disney’s part. The Whirling Dervishes had to have been motivation for this section of the movie. Interesting….

(Note: I just wikipedia-ed Fantasia, and the Mushrooms are apparently Chinese, and there’s no mention of the flowers being Dervishes. BUT, I claim my right to free, artistic interpretation, and once Disney put it out there, it is what I want it to be.)

Also interesting, the meaning behind the Whirling Dervish ritual. The official name of the WD’s is Semazens, and the ceremony is called a Sema. According to the brochure, everything they do in the ceremony is connected to love. Love from God, love for the world. The whole point of the whirling is for the men to shed their egos through love, made possible by whirling, so they can be closer to God. The ceremonial outfit represents this: the black cloak representing the death of the ego, and the shedding of the cloak meaning that the ego has died and true connection can now be attained. The right palm facing the sky signals receiving love from God and the left palm facing the ground signals passing the love from God to humans, keeping nothing for the self. Their odd hats, tilted slightly to the right as they spin ever faster, are the color of a burial shroud and represent a tombstone (and they must also have something to do with keeping balance). The music has meaning, too. The flute is the voice of…darn, I forgot, it’s either the prophet or God.

By the end of the performance I felt incredibly calm, almost as if I had been meditating for the past hour. I can only imagine how the men feel while they do this. I was somewhat skeptical about the religiosity of such a performance, thinking that inviting tourists to pay to watch your religious service might in some way diminish the whole “drop the ego” goal, but they were very strict that no applause was allowed, and the atmosphere was quite solemn, like a church service. This practice is connected to Islam in some way, but I have yet to map that connection out. From what I can tell, only men are allowed to participate.

Of the 15 people present in the ceremony, all were men.

Where’d All the Women Go?

Which brings me to another prominent aspect of Turkey: there are no women! Of course, in the touristy sections women are all over the place, but a few times I was in areas where the women seemed to have all of a sudden disappeared. And it was weird to feel so outnumbered. The first time I noticed it was in the bus station just after we arrived in Turkey. I went to find out where our bus would be, and in a few seconds realized that out of the 100’s of people around me, I could only see about 4 women. And those 4 women were clearly not Turkish. Also odd, none of the men really said anything to me. There were some stares, but for the most part, very little hassling. I’m accustomed to the much bolder Ukrainian man cat call (literally, instead of whistling they make the same noise at women that Ukrainians make to cats, a sort of “tsk, tsk, tsk” thing). The second very noticeable lack of women moment was just after the Whirling Dervish show. We walked out into the streets lined with outdoor cafes to see hundreds of men eating their meals together, and very few women. I had to search carefully to find the one or 2 women per 70 or so men.

Culture

This absence of women is new to me, because I’d never been in a predominately Muslim area. But despite that, I did really enjoy the cultural differences Turkey offered. These differences make Turkey one of my all-time favorite places I’ve visited, and it is mostly because the Western and even Eastern European cities I’ve been to offer a lot of the same ole same ole. It was time for me to experience something a little different.

In Istanbul, I walked into a mosque for the first time, and while the interior was very different from the beauty and grandeur of

something like the Sistine Chapel, I really appreciated the intricate patterns that cover every inch of the mosque interior. The Blue Mosque was huge, with towering arches covered from floor to ceiling in intricate patterns and a rich red carpet that felt kind of homey and comfortable to my barefoot feet. There is nothing on the carpet but so small shelves for people to set their shoes, and huge, simple chandeliers hang from the ceiling, hovering maybe 5 feet above the ground.

The Blue Mosque is a big tourist attraction, and they had a section roped off for us tourists to linger. We went to another mosque that seems to be in more regular use and had to cover our heads, but the Blue Mosque only required covering shoulders and legs. In the smaller mosque, a few men were praying: kneeling, standing, bowing their heads, kneeling again. Two of the men had little girls sitting next to them, patiently watching their dad and grandfather pray. I found this interesting. I guess there is a point when girls are no longer allowed in the main room of the mosque, which fit with my impression that Islam is a very segregated religion. But as much as I disagree with the segregation, seeing these men doing their best to be good examples for their daughter and granddaughter kind of put it into perspective how little I know about Islam.

Also, I must say, the call to prayer is quite an effective morning alarm. A 5:15

wake up call. Every morning. It happens quite a few more times throughout the day, but the morning one always seemed to be the one I noticed most.

Sofia Hagia

The Sofia Hagia is now a museum, but it started out as a Christian basilica and before it was made a mosque. It’s also one of the 7 Wonders of the World (apparently), but I thought it was most interesting just because of its uniqueness as a house of both Christian and Muslim worship. It’s very, very old, and when the Muslims took over the city, the Christian paintings and other icons were covered over with plaster and the traditional Islamic mosque patterns were added. Once it became a museum, the Christian mosaics

and such were uncovered, and now it offers the original situation of both crosses and Arabic side-by-side.