OK, I know that 90% of my blog posts have to do with food—cooking it, serving it, eating it—but isn’t cuisine a major part of any culture? So I’m completely justified in writing all about my newest favorite thing about Turkey: the midnight barbeque. I don’t know if it’s because of the late hours that anyone who works in a restaurant has to keep (THANK YOU, Italian tourists who show up at 10:58, two minutes before closing, and linger for HOURS over wine), but so far none of the BBQs I’ve been to have started before 12:30am. And forget potato salad, or baked beans, or plastic cups of lemonade. Turkish BBQs have only two ingredients: meat and bread. But lots of meat. And tons of bread. At my first BBQ, we started off with a first course of beef, then moved on to spicy meatballs (apparently of a variety that can only be bought in Yasin’s hometown, Adana), then non-spicy meatballs, and finally lamb kebabs. Actually, that first BBQ was pretty great; we all scootered up to one of Goreme’s many “panorama points,” and it just so happened that directly below us there was a huge Turkish wedding party in process. Which leads me to….

The Turkish Wedding. Turkish weddings are EPIC. They last for days and days. Remember how on the day I arrived in Goreme there was music being piped through the town loudspeakers, the celebration of a local couple’s wedding broadcast for the entire town to enjoy? Well, it turns out that this kind of village-wide celebration is not only common, it’s basically an everyday occurrence. Most afternoons, the loudspeakers mounted on one of Goreme’s several minarets click on and the town crier (what else can she be called?) announces that so-and-so are getting married and that everyone (everyone!!!) is invited to the party. In traditional Turkish parlance, this is the “village wedding,” and it is only one part of the multi-stage, week-long process of getting married in Turkey. Other traditions, of which I have only heard and not seen, include a day-long music festival at the groom’s place, in which all of his buddies are encouraged to stop by and dance (a part of the wedding that the bride feels absolutely no obligation to attend); a formal visit to the groom’s home by the bride and her “entourage” (for this event I was told that the women don’t wear traditional dress, but rather the kinds of outfits you might wear to an office party—fun); and Henna Night, in which the bride covers her head in a sheer red veil decorated with sparkles while attendants wave 12 candles above her head, sing traditional Turkish songs, press gold coins into her palm, and wrap her hands in little red mittens. (All of this, of course, varies from region to region and town to town…Turkish wedding traditions are like an endless buffet of song, dance and ritual. I like the one that includes sprinkling coins around the house and then running around to collect them, “like beggars.”) Anyway, while for the most part Turkish weddings seem very much shrouded in mystery (the veils! the candles!), the village wedding is big and brassy enough to make up for it. From our viewpoint at the top of Goreme, we could see the giant bonfire in the middle of the crowd, hear the twisting melodies of Turkish folk songs being played by the five-man band, and even see the men, young and old, snapping their fingers and wildly, drunkenly swinging their hips in time to the music. What a party!

Ah, so this week I took my first days off from the restaurant for a 3-day trip to Mt. Nemrut, in eastern Turkey. Completely amazing! On the second morning of the tour (“morning” being a generous designation), we woke up at 2:30am to drive to the mountain, do a little pre-dawn hiking, and be at the Eastern Terrace near the top of the mountain in time to see the sun rising over the surrounding peaks:


Do you see that river, off to the right? That is the EUPHRATES RIVER. For whatever reason (I dunno, maybe because it was the water source for the first flowering of human civilization…), I was completely bowled over to see this river. Okay, and not only did we get to see it from afar, but the next day actually stopped of on the side of the road and went WADING IN THE EUPHRATES. I tasted it! This is one half of an Italian couple also on the tour, knee deep in the freezing water:


Back to Mt. Nemrut, though. Some background (very short): in 62 BC, King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene (whose full name, somewhat grandly, means “Antiochus, a fair, eminent God, friend of Romans and friend of Greeks”) chose Mt. Nemrut as the sight for a giant tomb. (The bodies buried there have never been found, despite one archaeologist’s attempts to unearth them using dynamite, which, according to our tour guide, reduced the stature of Mt. Nemrut by a good 200 feet but otherwise had little effect.) The tomb was fronted by huge statues of lions, eagles, Greek gods (Zeus, Hercules, Apollo) and of course the king himself. The statues at this point have all been decapitated, but the giant heads are still intact, ranged in front of their seated bodies in a neat row. I don’t know if this picture quite captures it, but these heads are enormous—definitely taller than me, and very imposing. Well done Antiochus, I was very impressed.


After the brisk morning hike, we did a bit of touring around the area. It took all day, but I’ll sum it up with a picture:


And then it was off to Urfa, home of Abraham’s cave (birthplace of the prophet…though Iraqis disagree, Turkish people believe that Urfa is on the site of the ancient city of Ur), a spice market, a sprawling mosque, and many other things that passed in a haze because I had woken up at 2:30 that morning. The main thing I can tell you about Urfa is that it’s a very conservative city; unlike most cities in western Turkey, where you’ll see plenty of women in tank tops and with uncovered heads, pretty much every woman in Urfa wears at least a scarf over her hair, and many wear a çarşaf (the Turkish name for what I think of as a burka, and a word that also means “pillowcase”). Which meant that despite the 100-degree heat I had to wear long pants, and because I am a brilliant packer that meant jeans (why-oh-why don’t I own any breezy, hippie-traveler-style linen pantaloons?), all of which meant I nearly died of heatstroke. But it was OK! Because Urfa was lovely. Here are some men feeding the fish…there are a lot of (very well-fed) fish in Urfa, thanks to the legend in which Abraham, after smashing idols and declaring that King Nemrud was only human, was tossed into a fire to burn when, miraculously, the fire turned to water and all the embers to sacred carp.