Dimashq #4: KURDISTAN. traveling with a Napolitano and no tourists in sight.

toilet at Syrian/Turkish border post

KURDISTAN. traveling with a Napolitano and no tourists in sight.

Diyarbakir is intense in its initial difficulty. Bus speeds into some kind of boring clean city highways and we exit the bus and hop onto a minibus that rolls us under the humungous grey-black stone wall around the center of the city, crumbling in certain spots where I fantasize that some kind of great artillery battle occurred. We spy orderly European-wannabe streets of shops and stores and cafés plastered with info and ads in the totally bizarre Turkish language which I don’t understand at all, except for its multitude of loanwords from Arabic. Me and Andrea—my new homeboy hailing from Napoli, Italy, who seeks that unsaid spirit-thing too—find our hotel only after intense English-less searching. Yet, we don’t check in just yet, and continue on with our heavy bags, meandering through a crowded covered market street with butchers and fruit sellers and the like, much cleaner than in Syria, which takes us deep into the Old City, which is much less glamorous than in Syria. Muddy water on cobblestone streets, crowds of playful Kurdish children shouting “Allo!” with brown skin and bad haircuts, women in un-revealing dresses and headscarves, and houses of different colors piled one on the other.
We walked around the high, thick, somber city wall that surrounds the epicenter of this “capital” of Turkish Kurdistan. Some fellas mount the wall via some crumbly, huge-gap stairs. Passed a square stone building filled with children splashing loudly in a big warm pool. Alleyways to homes filled with poverty and trash. Walk up the steep forest hill just outside old city gates, up the steps past little quiet girls in headscarves, and through the courtyard of a mosque where children play and old men with long beards and skullcaps are wise. Back through the city wall, along the main street where we unexpectedly encounter a jovial barber speaking R-rolling French who offers to give me an unneeded shave, and back to hotel.
A little cool-off and meditation, then I meet Andrea downstairs where hotel workers watch sad music videos in Kurdish showing PKK fighters killed by Turkish soldiers. Andrea and I both have headaches ringing through our skulls from our unintended all-day fast. My debit card doesn’t work at any bank and I am nearly moneyless and hungry.
We wander once more through the streets of the Old City, and come upon a huge mosque that’s like the murmuring holy heart of the town, built of stone and glass and polished marble by the Ottoman Turks (so I heard) ages ago. The sun is low and the light is dim and children play around the spigots used to wash the body before prayer, set in a circle below a glorious sloping pointed gazebo structure in the courtyard of the mosque complex. Men sit and stand around the entrance speaking thick consonants and tight vowels of the awesome Kurdish language, a relative (and perhaps the mother) of Farsi. Lots of sh and ch and kh sounds. Within the mosque, we pad around the spacious carpeted main chamber, pillars around us and marble dome with Arabic calligraphy above us, and we both sit at the stone window sills reading (or maybe just sounding out) words from the Holy Qor’an. Two older man having an animated debate outside the window.
Looking for a place for food, which is a faaaar distant memory at this point—the last time we ate something of substance having been the black night before on a bus zipping through the scary Syrian desert—we see tiny wooden seats being set up around low tables in the main square of Diyarbakir. Beside the square, huge tents are erected with some folks in hairnets prepping food in big metal tubs for an ifTaar dinner (the meal breaking the fast during Ramadan). Damn it smells good and my head hurts from hunger, but we decide to wait for ifTaar and break fast with the rest of these benevolent mountain people.
An hour later, we get on line for food, much as one might in a homeless shelter soup kitchen, and watch portions of food plop onto our Styrofoam trays in the fading purple-orange light consuming all just before sunset. The food is free of charge and I’m greatly relieved. Andrea and I are seated at a long table with a bunch of scruffy men (the women eating ifTaar in an adjacent tent), including two deaf guys actually singing in Kurdish, which is awesome. People play with the food on their plates, mixing and dividing and staring with desire at the food that is just minutes away from their bellies. I play with my water bottle. The muezzin begins to call the last prayer and BAM, everyone gets on with chowing down. We gulp down bread and potatoes and chicken and soup and rice, and the fella across from me puts some of his bread on my plate, for generous is he and understanding of my feeble body not used to fasting. After we finally swallow the last of our meal, he also gives us cigarettes and smiles.
So after a moment we slip back out into the square, where we are invited to sit with three bearded, smiling Kurdish cats of middle-age in button-down shirts at their tiny table with seats. They wave the waiter kid over and in a flash we are sipping wholesome brown Kurdish tea from little curvy glasses with itty-bitty mixing spoons. The men speak to us rapidly in their heavy guttural tongue, asking us (I think) where we hail from and if we like Diyarbakir. Of course we do. We try to ask questions about other cities in Kurdistan and about their language, and after trying a few words in Standard Arabic, we switch to sign language. They smile and roll strong cigarettes for us and keep hissing slightly to get our attention. The dude on my right, with heavy scruff and yellow teeth and mountain strength, keeps kissing my cheek, and squeezes my shoulders so hard I feel that might cry. The guy is simply overjoyed that I am existing right next to him, it seems. Andrea snaps a few photos and impresses the guys with his knowledge of Kurdish numbers, which are almost the same as the Farsi he studies back at his Escola del Oriente or something like that, in Napoli.
We sit for a whiiiile with these guys, and when we stand and try to pay for the tea, they all tilt heads back slightly and click tongue-tips—which simply means “Na-uh, no” in Turkey—and wag fingers like, “Twouldn’t be right. You’re our guests. Hope you enjoyed the tea.”



the Kurdish men


the mosque in Diyarbakir

reading the Qor'an in Diyarbakir

Şanlıurfa

Andrea

So, Diyarbakir is finished. Sad to no longer be there, in a way, among the nice people who don’t see many gringos, because it felt so intensely real in its remote Kurdishness and here-and-there poverty. Real has many sides to it though, and it can also be maddeningly lonesome, foreign, and dysfunctional. So it was in Diyarbakir, where, at many turns, you had intense Kurdish culture aright, but where nothing seemed to work and where I only communicated at any length with two locals: both brief conversations with sad-eyed tour guides.
But after a ride in a sweet, air-conditioned bus to the ancient city of Şanlıurfa, I am enjoying my Turkish séjour in a little less rough and rugged way. This town, which has various names in Greek, Turkish, Latin, Arabic, Kurdish, and Armenian, and has been the capital of innumerable empires, sits in low plains and rolling hills in fucking MESOPOTAMIA! (literally between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. You know... Cradle of Civilization stuff) in Southern Turkey, southeast of Diyarbakir. Cool town because it’s got life, anima, and breathe. Hot as Damascus, if not hotter, during the day, but pleasant when the sun gets low.
Yesterday, after a loooot of walking and some minibus rides along the Attatürk Bulvarı, Andrea and I found a lil’ hotel. Sadly, my Napolitano companion still had to pay for me because I was clean out of Turkish lira. We grabbed some kebap (or kebab in the English way), which was soul-filling and actually made the cranky, tense traveler I had become open up and enjoy my new surroundings. Food in my belly, and fasting no longer, I felt like “OK, well no one around here speaks my language but that’s just fine because I’m ready to learn Kurdish.”
I did get a lil’ cash exchanged though at a jewelry store. Then Andrea and I promenaded through glorious khaki stone gates into an outer courtyard of Şanlıurfa’s huge main mosque, where children yelped and laughed and splashed water in a pristine man-made stream. Then we cruised through a white marble garden, then airy courtyard outside the entrance to the mosque. Here, men with skull caps, vests, long beards, and very distinct baggy, low-crotch Turkish pants walked thoughtfully to and fro’ with hands counting prayer beads behind their backs. Entered the prayer room after de-shoeing , and again sounded out bitty passages from the Qor’an by the stone window sill, just like in Diyarbakir. Afterwards, more wandering through immaculate marble column courtyards that make you think of all the former beauty and greatness of the old Islamic empires that you hear about in high school, playing a little name game with some local kids, sitting at an outdoor café, and then we began our ascent of the tumbledown part of Şanlıurfa that had been calling our names all day.
The streets were immediately poor, and the concrete houses lining the steep steep steep hill were multicolored and very old-looking. We huffed and puffed up one of the cobblestoned main streets where a gentle little ditch in the center of the street led rivulets of water downhill, and where men gunned their sidecar motorcycles full throttle uphill. Women with facial tattoos and headscarves regarded us from the steps of their doorways. Before long, we had a posse of kids with smiles and pogs (remember those?) following us uphill. Ran into some tanned elder gentlemen in baggy pants that bade us welcome, and met the smiling, well-groomed, Central-Asian looking Murad (Was that his name?). He led us to the hill’s summit, where we met the sweet, dark-featured Redwan: the first fluent English speaker that we could relate to at all in Turkey. We climbed over the low wall outside his home and sat in the dirt amid some trees and ancient grave stones, where we spoke of our travels and possible future destinations in Kurdistan. Murad grinned, and said thick words to Redwan in Kurdish, with recognizable Arabic loanwords like kelima and qalam (“word” and “pen” respectively), complete with ع, ق , and ح sounds, just like in Arabic. Rock.
Kids encircled us and sat in the dust too. As the golden rays of sun-death shined over distant hills, Redwan showed us videos of the archeological site of Gölbeklıtepe and its before-time ruins and the Bedouin Arab town of Harran.


Rewan is a tourism guy, so we agreed to meet later by the holy fish stream beside the main mosque to plan future adventures, and then we moseyed out the gate of the cemetery we were sitting in, and after many goodbye handshakes, we loped down the steep hill of the neighborhood with Şanlıurfa spread out before us and little kids yelling “Money! Money!” behind us.
Me and Andrea mounted endless stairs on an adjacent hill to reach the huge, brown, and famous Cala (from Arabic قلعة/qal3a : “castle”) at the peak of the hill. Never quite got there. Instead we met some wild little kids who played nicely at first, then smirked like madmen and demanded we take their picture, took my voice recorder—which Andrea retrieved—from my man-purse, and who commanded “Money!” and hit and kicked and threw rocks at us while giggling joyfully as we retreated back down. The only thing that saved us from destruction was a beautiful green-eyed girl of about eleven years who commanded them to relent.



part ii
The beat Toyota or whatever inexpensive Japanese-make automobile we’re riding in takes the rough road surprisingly well after we turn off the main highway out of the shabby outskirts of Şanlıurfa, birthplace of the Prophet Abraham (Yea… father of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. That Abraham). The road leads us through vast green, then brown, then yellow fields of agricultural bounty that keep pace with our little speeding car for at least 10 minutes, all the while I hang my arm out the window and actually feel relaxed (?) as longing, sorrowful, stretched-out Kurdish melodies and poetry rattle from the car’s stereo. I tell Ridvan, who is hunched over the steering wheel, how much I dig Kurdish traditional music, how deep I think it is, and how I find that mainstream Turkish stuff to be a bit of a bore. He elaborates on my complaints, shitting verbally on Turkish music. His complaints spread into the realm of linguistics and politics, and he begins telling us how it is illegal for media to be broadcast in any language but Turkish, or any signs to be written in any language but Turkish, and if his kinfolk want to tune into a good TV station in their own language, they gotta search for a Kurdish channel broadcast from Northern Europe. “Stupid Turkish government. They say only we have one country, one flag, one ethnic,” he says. There are a handful of local broadcasts in Kurdish, he says, but the Turkish government limits them in their entirety to 45 minutes a day. Something like that.
We begin the ascent out of the well-irrigated fields and up into a dry plateau region. The dusty road grows wavier, and we must slow the humming engine in order to keep the suspension from being torn out from under the car by the steadily increasing number of bumps, potholes, and ancient rocks coming up from below the dirt-gravel road for air. At first the surroundings turn to dry grass, but then the grass is absent altogether, and instead I look upon fields of stones and shards, and then the vast emptinesses of the land below us, for we are now quite high up. Make some absurdly huge bending turns crisscrossing the road, see some more huge boulders, and stop in an open area. Look around you and witness the Cradle of Civilization resting in the fertile fields below the plateau.
Me and Andrea hop out, make some greetings to a serious, thin boy with sharp features and hair black as mystery who wears a Palestinian kifeya, and waltz over to another kid of reddish hair who’s taking care of some camels that are tied up inhumanely—bored, and restless. As Ridvan stands next to the camels, chatting with the kids in his serious and timeless tongue, the camels continuously try to sneak heads over to Ridvan’s feet and eat him. Over and over. Both Andrea and I give whatever money we can spare to the reddish-hair kid to help feed the camels. The sharp-featured boy who I suppose is the de jure groundskeeper for this holy and land-before-time site, leads us along a dirt path, and voilà: Gölbeklıtepe (which means su’in like “Hill like a belly” in Turkish), a 12,000 year-old Neolithic hunter-gatherer place of worship. I stare down through some meager wire fence around the dig spot, and regard the eight and ten-foot high stone pillars. They are arranged in circles, some not fully unearthed yet, placed around a center pillar. Beautifully carved and smoothed in sharp rectangular shapes, some with another square stone placed—balanced perhaps—atop. The whole complex must have been divided into chambers, because the pillar circles are surrounded by partly destroyed walls of little round stones, and if one looks closely one can see the gap in the wall that leads into what was another chamber with another circle of pillars. It looks like there were little places for people to sit, too. Shadows stretching from the pillars and the little walls and their hollows and recesses are rich at this late afternoon hour. Soulful. Can you see it? What were these people from so long ago worshipping? What did they ask for? What words did they use? A few questions.

On the knoll above the pillar pit, there’s a board with a map and some suuuper-vague information. It mentions hunter-gatherers, 12,000 years, worshipping, and a number of other more or less significant sights around the region. Not much else. I think that’s because it’s a project with no government backing (at least not from the Turkish government), handled entirely by a German team with sparse time to dig because of limited resources from their financiers. Seriously? This is Mesopotamia folks. Let’s discover this awesome shit, shall we?
A holy wind blows and it’s quiet as grace up on this little knoll, with one strong tree for shade in the late-day sun. I look out to the fields of dry gold and moist green, square patches of richness stretching off to the horizon, and imagine that this must have been what the pastures of Palestine looked like almost a hundred years back, around the time the British army wrested it from Ottoman control, and before the followers of Theodore Herzl’s Zionist scheme came to devour the beautiful land, colonize and rewrite history. I imagine this is very much what it looked like.
Back in the car, we slide back down the crisp, dusty road, off of the plateau and its hills of rocky dry. Andrea and I recollect our souls back at base, and go to play dominos with Ridvan and some other Kurds in a big bustling courtyard with tea slurping, dominos slapping table, and Ramadan laughs.



Harran. we want to stay with them in their homes.

I look up at the stone dome above my head and wonder how long it will hold. Andrea probably wonders the same thing too, as he looks up at the cone-shaped ceiling of this chamber in a home built like a honeycomb. A little hole in the top to let smoke out perhaps, like in the stereotypical teepee. Earthen walls around us, soft and orange-brown and dry, with low square doors cut in them leading to adjacent chambers. The walls and almost every available space are covered with some kind of touristy knickknack of low-quality, like a set of shells on strings hanging from something like a clothes hanger, that I guess at one time was used by the inhabitants to keep away evil spirits. These cheap reproductions, though, are only keeping away my money. Some spaces in the chambers are filled, almost tastefully, with skin bags for liquids and really old cooking implements and cosmetic tools, so as to show how the home might have been arranged eighty or a hundred or however many years ago these honeycomb-dome houses were inhabited, but it always has a Museum Village in America kind of look to me.
Outside, sitting under a tent on one of those signature tiny wooden chairs, I watch Ridvan as he exchanges rapid words in Turkish with a local Bedouin Arab guy with black hair in tight T-shirt, the son of generations of Arabs that have been trapped within the Turkish state after their wanderings and followings took them to places like Harran, probably during the Ottoman Empire days, and then the borders were fixed behind them as the empire was broken up and new states solidified. Games of power. And voilà: you have Bedouin Arabs who live on the far southern fringe of Turkey, guarding their mother tongue for all these years while also becoming masters in the Turkish language impressed upon them, and rocking these really cool purple turban head wraps to distinguish themselves from the boiling pot of ethnicities around them.
So I watch, and after a little while an extremely dorky German guy with a video camera comes sauntering up. Him and us gotta be the only tourists around here right about now, and so the locals try to speak to him in Tourism-English as he approaches, but he doesn’t comprehend. He gives one of those classic Middle-Eastern tongue clicks that mean “Uh-uuuuh. Nope,” and goes blasting off in perfect Turkish, though even I can hear his German accent when he speaks. I’m awed, and lean over and spill admiration for this guy’s skills on Andrea in English and French, but he’s been observing more closely and says, “No, I no like this man. He, ah, want to change them. He want to give dem religion.”

Of course. The German dude has been saying kitep dīn (from Arabic kitēb ed-dīn: “book of religion”) in Turkish over and over, and keeps saying something about Protestants. That much I get. So he’s a missionary. I do not like the mission of missionaries. I do not like them, Sam I Am. I would not convert for them in a box, with a fox, in a tree, by the sea. I do not like missionaries,Sam I Am.
Aaaah, this is why he seems so robotic and single-minded in his manners, and why he hands me a brochure on “relaxation”, which I toss when I find out it’s about how to relax through God and his relaxing love.
German god-bringer keeps zipping along in Turkish, and so I play a board game like Mankala on a carpet with one of the Arab fellas. He destroys both me and Andrea every time, saying “ghallabtik” (“I beat you”) matter-of-factly.
Me and the thin, patient Andrea wander out from under the tent and amid some low homes surrounding an open space of khaki-colored soil. These homes are much less snappy-looking than the historical honeycomb houses (most of which are in awful shape actually, and all uninhabited), and some with stone walls around a courtyard. A boy with his finger perpetually up his nose and intensely dirty everything peeks out from a courtyard and I snap a few proud pictures of him. Opposite the home is the famous qal3a
(Yup… remember? “Castle” in Arabic) around which the village is built. It’s probably the main attraction that the few tourists around here come to see, and drop tidbits of money on this terribly poor place to explore. It sits, orange-brown like everything else, nestled in a hill, with thick stone walls, and would be pretty glorious if it were not for the heavy decay it’s gone through. We crawl like bugs over the almost meaningless remains of some collapsed honeycomb houses. From up on top of the ruins of one, I can see that though this village is dry and dusty, it’s really an island of desert surrounded by lush agricultural fields, the result of a recent and impressive desert-reclamation project on the part of the government. How come they missed the village? We stride up a dusty track, and approach some kids playing by a wall. We hail them and are approached by their ringleader: a gruff, energetic girl of eleven years with hawk face and leader qualities within. She keeps asking us questions in her Arabic dialect, and she has to really explain every little thing for me to understand. The way they speak resembles that of Iraq, though the accent is even thicker and harsher, with no refinement of formal education in that language. Kind of like those kids in Bosra, but much more muddy sounding. Andrea tries to speak to them in his Standard Arabic of the classroom variety and they are pretty much bewildered. The young girl orders us to take pictures of certain kids, and drags them up before my camera. Some dig this, and actually push others out of the way so they can be in the middle. The dark, dirty faces of some other little kids just seem scared of this whole camera thing. Andrea continues crouching among them and trying to be one with their level, as I might do. Thank you. Adieu.
We wander back to the tent, where I take a picture of a proud old sheikh-type guy in traditional headdress, and then we fully recognize that, yearn as we might, Ridvan and the locals are asking too much money for us to stay the night in the village with the people, for we are both on our last financial threads. Damningly unfortunate.
So Ridvan carries us away in his automobile, over desert ruggedness and through pastures with the German bloke in front. Me and Andrea talk a little philosophical smack about the guy and his “holy mission” in French. The windows are open and the wind whips while the sun falls.
Ridvan drops the missionary off somewhere, and lets us go at the bus station in Şanlıurfa in the last rays of sunlight. The clean, super-modern station is to be Andrea’s departure point for exploration of Cappadocia on his way to Istanbul before leaving for Italy, and mine for the badly-needed return to Syria. Just as we are thanking Ridvan and getting our bills out to pay him for his services, he hits us with a hiiigh price, which, he explains, we somehow agreed upon before, but of which both Andrea and I are surprised and deflated. Ridvan insists. Our heads fall, for Andrea will now be unable to explore Cappadocia and will have to go, broke, straight to Istanbul, and I may not be able to get home. Whatever. Take your fuckin’money.
Waiting for our bus, while the driver is off eating ifTaar, watching the dusk be dusk, Andrea tells me how sad he is that Ridvan yanked our money like that. He tells me about the places he wants to go in the future, we argue about the meaning of “comfort” when traveling, and I compliment his multilingualism. I sense his incredible depth and almost weep when the fellow tells me that despite all the languages he speaks, he can still not express what he really has inside. “I cannot-a express. I-a have a fire inside-a me, and all the time when-a I try to say it, only water comes out. No one-a can understand me.” The burden of spiritual depth. We share cheap pastries and candy bars and Kurdish tea, and we are brotherly and knowing.
That night, I stay in the cheapest hotel in the saddest border city in Turkey. The next morning I find a taxi office and am given some biscuits and tea by a kindly Arab-Turk. I ride that taxi into my country of origin, broke as a smashed TV. Hungry, dirty in hair and skin, and actually grateful for Arabic language around me, I roll down the hills and into the lights of Damascus that night. Home.


Andrea made it to Istanbul. I hope to see him someday in the alleyways of Napoli.