August 25, 2012
Astonished by Turks: Edirne - Umurci
THE FRIENDLINESS and generosity of Turks astonishes us. We had read it was so but we could never have imagined it. Three times today we stopped at bars and all three times we weren't allowed to pay. At the first, on the right in a dusty, linear village of shanty shops that sold tractor parts and who knows what else, and surrounded by rice fields and wilting sunflowers, we rolled to a sweaty halt and waved to the seven or eight men sitting outside with coffees or tea. Never beer. Our waves and smiles were returned in full.
We stepped on to the sheltered wooden terrace to be greeted by the owner with a shake of the hand, a touch to the heart, and the Turkish for 'Welcome.' And one by one the other men all shook our hand and wished us equally welcome.
They talked excitedly among themselves, then asked where we were from.
'Fransizim' we said.
Much nodding and repeating of the word, although pronounced more expertly than we had managed. And where were we going?
'Georgia,' Steph said hurriedly. When I asked later why she had been so fast to tell only part of the truth, she said: 'Because it may not be tactful to say we're going to Armenia.' She merits a job in the diplomatic service. Turkey and Armenia have been at odds for a long, long time, each accusing the other of massacres. It is because the border is closed that we are having to go through Georgia. Interestingly, when the men studied out little route map, they couldn't identify Armenia anyway and concluded we were going to Azerbaidjan.
We drank our tea and listened to their chattering about where we had been and where we were going, those who'd understood explaining to those who hadn't. They were a little club, villagers who preferred the bar on this side of the road to the larger one on the other. And flattered that we had chosen to stop with them.
When we went to pay, Steph spread a heap of small coins on the table and invited the owner to take what he wanted. He put his hand over the whole lot and pushed it back to her, touching his heart to say the honour was his.
The sensual onslaught of arriving in Turkey had passed by then and life in the countryside was like life among fields anywhere. Just as we had been in backwoods Bulgaria, so we were now in lost Turkey, not through any cleverness but because there's no reason a more conventional tourist would come this way.
Just how true this was emerged spectacularly later, but two hours later we decided that more tea from little slender glasses would make an excellent excuse to pass an hour in the shade. We are back down to sea level and the afternoon heat has risen along with our descent. This time the bar was smaller and the men less numerous. The strange shops were still there and the only traffic was of tractors, some pulling trailers of sunflower seeds. Everybody had the worn pinched look from life on the land beneath a torrid sun.
A small bandy man with irregular teeth he showed by constant smiling emerged from the shop next door, touched his heart and said 'Cay?' Chai, rhyming with 'shy', is the Hindi and Urdu word for tea. In Britain it has been corrupted to the informal 'char', as in 'a cup of char.' But, here, the word has survived untouched in the centuries since travellers first brought news from the sub-continent.
The chai was brought and one by one the men asked the same questions as before. Again they mistook Armenia for Azerbaijan. The little bandy man offered us a bottle of water and looked hurt when we declined. It was only when he refused money for the tea that we realised the water had been intended as a gift as well.
We cut now across country on unmade roads, guided by the bandy man who drew us a map and then called us into a parking area from where he could point out the road we wanted. Well, somewhere we went wrong. The road became rougher and the names on the signs no longer made sense.
Turkey is not an easy country for map reading because the best we have found is a national map of eight kilometres to the centimetre. Understandably not all villages are on it and lesser roads are described in Dutch - there is no English - as beperkt rıjdbaar, which in reality means 'We don't know either', since sometimes the roads have been fine and now this one was dreadful.
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It was when we stopped at a fork by a bridge that the boys found us. Every rural community has a posse of boys on bikes who know where to have mischief and, it seems, where to find baffled foreigners on bikes. We asked them for the village we wanted but the name or our pronunciation meant nothing. They then concluded we could understand nothing at all and led us up the rocky slope to their village to shouts of 'Turisti! Turisti!' We were the first they had seen.
News reached the village bar before we did. We didn't want a drink as much as we needed directions, but chilled bottles in the refrigerator were irresistible. The owner pulled the caps off with a bottle-opener hanging on a string and we drank beneath a picture of Kemel Ataturk and posters about tractors and two grey gas lamps that hung from the rafters for power cuts.
Across from us, a smiling man of about 70 with a round face and the look of every child’s favourite grandfather beamed and gestured heat, tiredness and admiration for effort expended. Effort is understood in communities such as these.
We had two more drinks and again the owner pulled off the caps. Again we sank them appreciatively. And when Steph went to pay, I walked to the small sink and washed my face with the soap provided. Cleanliness is important in Muslim culture. When I turned back, it was to discover that the smiling man and other customers had settled our bill.
We were touched almost to the point of weeping. For a bar owner to charge nothing for tea is a lovely gesture but it costs him little because tea is hot water and he boils it by the litre. But pop costs real money, in a rural society which is not poor but where cash isn't dispensed unwisely. And yet these people had paid for four bottles of drink and rounded up three shy and puzzled girls of seven, eight and nine to meet us.
'They are my grandchildren,' the owner signed.
We talked to them, we as unsure of why they were there as they were. It took only a moment to realise they understood no more of what we were saying than anyone else.
'Wir komen aus Deutschland,' the faintly over-fed oldest girl said. Ah well... France, Germany: from Turkey they're all 'over there' somewhere in the west and the thought was there.
When we got out, the posse was waiting for us. They had stopped shouting 'Turisti' because by now there was no-one who didn’t know. But they did ride with us until they grew tired of the hill and dropped off without a word.
Tonight we are camping in a field above a village in which the only light seems to be in a cow manger. There is no sound but the clanking of cows led back to shelter. We are tired, dusty and dry. But there is a sliver of moon and a gentle breeze and we shall sleep well.
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