The Wild Wild East

Every family has its black sheep; the uncle who drinks too much or the wayward daughter who hangs out with the wrong sort of boys.  Usually, a successful hush-hush campaign ensues and the black sheep is never mentioned in polite society.  However, sometimes it's not possible to keep a lid on this family 'embarrassment' and a whole can of worms is opened when an attempt to contain them is made.

For Turkey, their black sheep are the Kurds.  In the wild wild east of Anatolia, the Kurds are the predominant people making up around 85% of the population of towns and cities like Diyarbakır and Van.  They have their own language, their own history and their own ideas about their future - independent of Turkey.  For decades, the mere mention of Diyarbakır conjured up images of the PKK and terrorism.  Nowadays, the protests are less violent on the streets, but the determination to break free has in no way diminished.  I met countless numbers of people eager to declare that they were Kurdish and not Turkish.

If you travel east and keep going until you hit Iran, you will stumble upon once such Kurdish town with an almost complete 'non-Turkish' presence.  In fact, the only 'Turks' that I encountered in Doğubeyzit were the ones wearing the camaflouge green of the military.  Every other person would immediately identify themselves as Kurdish as an introduction.

It's not only the lack of Turkish faces that strikes you as different about this quaint little border town, though.  It took a couple of minutes of sitting outside a cafe sipping çay before I could put my finger on the oddity that was bothering me; I hadn't seen a single woman on the street in the 3 hours I had been in the town!  Later on in the evening I glimpsed a few old woman wrapped up from head to toe hurridley doing their grocery shopping in the bazar, but apart from that Doğubeyzit could comfortably be described as a town for the boys.

Sitting and talking to Edem, a local back home for the summer from studying in Izmir, the conversation naturally drifted to girls or more accurately the lack of.  Edem informed me that that part of Turkey was particularly conservative in its beliefs and that the women would stay at home and only the men were allowed out on the streets to socialise.  When I asked him how anyone ever found a wife, he told me that everyone had an arranged marriage; usually set-up at one of the countless weddings that took place.  Sometimes, he said, you were lucky enough to see your bride once before the ceremony so you both knew what the other looked like in advance.

The 'Kurdish' heartland of Diyarbakır isn't quite like that - for starters there are plnety of girls and women walking the streets and not all of them cover their heads the traditional way.  Saying that, it was rare to see teenage girls and boys mingling or young couples strolling through the numerous parks.  Another local, Rezan, invited me to sit with him and his friend for a nargile (waterpipe) and the conversation once again got back to girls.  They wanted to visit Europe because they had heard it was easy to find a girl to have sex with who didn't want to get married first.  I told them that the vast majority of 'western' girls were nothing like the stereotypical image many 'eastern' minds portrayed them as, but when pressed further I had to admit that it was possible to be intimate with a woman without being married first.  This seemed to please them at first, but after some reflection they decided that that wasn't really what they wanted as they could never marry a girl like that themselves.

This is one example of the 'backwards' thinking that a fair number of Turkish people alluded to when talking to them about the Kurdish people.  Stuck in the past and fanatical where just some of the ways that I heard these people described in the west of Turkey.  Many people are still unwilling to forgive the years of terror they went through as a result of terrorist attacks carried about by Kurdish 'liberation' groups.

In turn, the Kurds still resent their 'second-class' status in a country that claims them as their own.  Until recently, it was forbidden for 'Kurdish' to be spoken and taught in schools and music and films in their language were banned.  Edem still couldn't move on from losing the girl he loved in Izmir because her father refused to let her date a boy from the east.  In addition, they still feel shame that it was their grandfathers who were responsible for the deaths of so many Armenians, under the orders of their Turkish masters.

Istanbullus may be right about their 'brothers and sisters' in the east being behind the times in their ideas and customs, but one thing is for sure; the hospitality I received while I was there was genuine and very warm.