GROUP JOURNAL FOR

The face of Erzurum started changing 30-40 years ago with the coming of the university. Having a university not too far away from their homes in Eastern Turkey enabled families to much more easily send their children to a university. Previously when the only choices were Istanbul or Ankara, many fewer people, especially women, from Eastern Turkey went to university.

As we approached a village outside Erzurum, inhabited by all Kurds, we came upon a woman sitting in a field beating piles of washed wool with a stick to fluff it before use in mattresses or pillows. As we got off the bus to talk with this woman we were immediately surrounded by approximately 50 children and a few adults from the surrounding area who were as interested in us as we were in them. This village is approximately 5 miles outside of town and is stereotypical of villages in this part of the country. The city is growing and coming closer and closer to the village. There is urban sprawl in Turkey. The city has 299,000 people and sits at 1,800 feet.

Out in pastures and cultivated grasslands farmers will stack up small cairns of rocks with 3-6 stones. This is done to signal neighbors to keep their livestock out of the field. After the harvest when the landowner knocks down the cairn he is giving a signal that it is permissible for others to graze their livestock. The benefit then is that the stubble is eaten and the landowner gets to use the manure that is left behind. It takes two cows to produce enough dung to provide fuel for heat and cooking for one family for one winter. Anything extra is a bonus. All through our journey we have seen pie-sized handmade disks of dried dung and square or rectangular bricks (approximately 10x12x2 ½ inches, made using a shovel and a mold). Most often these dried fuel cells are neatly stacked in long walls similar to stacked cords of wood. I saw very few flies associated with these stacks of dried dung.

In the village we saw freshly cut and dried bales of hay (similar in size to our machine baled hay from home) neatly stacked as many as 30 bales high on the tops of the village homes. These slightly tapered stacks keep the hay close by and handy for feeding livestock through the winter and provide insulation for the homes. In the winter when some hay is needed someone climbs up collects a sack full and climbs down to feed the animals. The hay that will fit onto one family’s house will feed 50 sheep for the winter. In this particular area winter can bring sub-freezing temperatures as low as minus 30-40 degrees Celsius and snow. To our questions about possible hay fires from chimney sparks, we were told that occasionally in the summer yes, but not often. In the winter suppression from the cold and snow prevent fires. The more often cause of rooftop hay fires is sparks from the crude electrical wiring that brings power to the village homes.

As we walked through the village on narrow lanes the only vehicles anywhere were a few tractors and some horse carts. Several loaded hay carts were loaded such that had they been more than a few inches wider on either side they would not have fit down the lanes. 12-18 children, and a few teens and adults accompanied us as we walked along. The village population is 1,014 people in 250 homes. The children are of mixed sexes, but the teens are males only. It would not be good manners for teenage girls to engage in this behavior.

In one of the homes we were served tea (of course) and shown scarves. Local women purchase these scarves and then, mostly during the winter, they add fringes, in this case, of a tatting material. The scarves were offered to us at a cost of 10,000,000 TL, or approximately $7.80. The shotgun hanging on the wall was for fox, wolf and wild birds.

The day before our visit a young woman in this household had planned to leave with her fiancé to Germany, where he is a foreign worker. At the very last minute she was denied an entry visa by Germany. She showed us her packed and ready to go suitcases, her dowry cases. They were full of her handiwork, her school records, and all the other records and hopes of her life. All this was cut short. Her fiancé was back in Germany. She will likely not see him for as much as a year. There was much laughter in the home, but not much from her.

Some of the teen-age boys in the house were wearing leather pouch amulets around their necks that contained short poems or various positive sayings. These are for good luck and to ward off evil. A local boy who was in the fourth grade told us he has one hour of homework each night. People in this village are bilingual. Turkish is taught in school and Kurdish is learned at home.

The walls of the homes in this village were 2-3 feet thick and made of various combinations of stones and concrete brick. The ceilings are wood beam covered on top with wood planking and that is covered by soil and sod for a living water repelling combination. The roofs are 1 ½-2 feet thick.

AT 11:00 a.m. leaving the village it was 87 degrees. In the city we saw pony carts working along side full sized trucks and buses. The use of the carts is one of the normal hauling options, just on a smaller scale compared to the big trucks.

At the restaurant for lunch we were the only non-locals at a popular restaurant. For the main course we had skewers of very tasty lamb kabobs. The seasoned pieces of meat start out tightly packed onto a large horizontal skewer, which is then rotated and roasted over a fire. Each of the smaller serving size skewers that we were served was inserted along the long edge of the large cooking skewer picking up the cooked meat along the surface. All of this was then separated with the slice of a knife and hurried to our tables. The meat was garnished with raw onion, tomatoes and sweet peppers. Flat bread, similar to a thin flower tortilla served as a utensil to pick up the hot meat. We were offered a desert called dolma, 4 by 1 inch shredded wheat wrapped around chopped walnuts and drenched in a thinned honey mixture. Another option was baklava. Some of us had several helping of both to be sure we properly appreciated these pastries. Neither was as sweet as baklava at home. The whole lunch of several skewers of meat per person, all the garnishes, bread, desert, sodas and desert came to approximately $3 per person.

After lunch a shopping opportunity led us to a variety of items including cloth and jewelry. One kind of jewelry was that made of the black stone Oltu. It is mined near the city of Oltu, which we passed through the day before, and is unique to this place in the entire world. Many of the pieces were strings of different sized prayer beads. Some have silver decorations on each bead. I paid 40,000,000 TL for three strings of beads including the silver tassels on two. A local Turkish woman who is an English teacher helped me in the shop with language translation. Her pronunciation was very good.

From shopping we visited an old building that once was a medrese. In central Asia astronomy, literature, medicine and small craft skills were all very big. Schools that taught these subjects, along with religion, were called medrese. In the 17^th century superstition gained more emphasis than the other subjects taught. The tree of life images we saw include both Christian and pagan symbols. The building architecture is related to its educational function with upper level rooms that housed students and teaching areas on the lower level. The orientation, high sides, and open top of the building provide wind protection and take advantage of warming sunrays particularly during the winter. As the story goes one of the building towers was built by the master and the other by the apprentice. The latter turned out to be more beautiful so out of respect to his master the apprentice committed suicide. Some of the building stonework shows Iranian influence and other parts have Central Asian characteristics. The daughter of a sultan, who in 1253 had the medrese built, is buried inside and people still come to pay their respects to her.

Back to Melitour home page next page

MELITOUR EASTERN TURKEY TOUR