Bayram

This past week was the Bayram holiday. Calling it “Bayram holiday”, though, is slightly redundant, as Bayram means “religious holiday”. To Arabs, the end of Ramadan is known as Eid al-Fitr. Here, Ramadan is called Ramazan, and the holiday marking the end is known as Şeker Bayramı. Şeker means sugar, and the entire festival is basically a bacchanalia of eating sweet things. The actual date of the holiday changes every year in accordance with the lunar calendar, so I was lucky to get an entire week off. Depending on what the religious officials in Ankara deduce through their telescopes, the government decides how many days the holiday lasts. What’s kind of amazing for me is that this decision-making process takes place only a few weeks before the holiday begins – imagine trying to plan Thanksgiving while not knowing when to make your travel reservations until two weeks before.

Traditionally, one travels and visits family for Bayram. My host family and I went to visit my host father’s family in Ünye, on the Black Sea coast. Ünye is a town of about 70,000 people (which, in my book, makes it a city, but not in Turkey). We stayed with Bulatcan’s aunt and uncle in a big, cold cement block. Like many of the houses in Ünye, it seemed half-finished. Bulatcan’s grandparents lived on the second floor, and Bulatcan’s aunt and uncle lived on the third. The first and forth were literally just bare concrete.

Turkey follows the same convention on floor numbers as France, so I live on the “first floor” even though I have to climb up a set of stairs. The floor you walk in on is “zero”, but for the sake of simplicity I just used the US way above. The process of mental metrification continues apace. Length and weight aren’t very difficult – I can estimate things in meters and convert to kilograms without breaking a sweat. Temperature, however, is still difficult, and I don’t even try to deal with gallons and liters, much less litres. In my opinion, here’s why: when you think about length or weight, even if you are given a measure in feet or pounds, you still have to think about what it truly means. If you are wondering if you can lift the suitcase and someone tells you it weights forty-one pounds, you still have to think what exactly does 41 pounds mean? With temperature, however, 78 degrees is a much more visceral and absolute measure, one that can immediately conjure the appropriate mental image.

But I’ve digressed slightly. The Black Sea region produces about 70% of the world’s hazelnuts. We went to see “my” village in Turkey, where the hazelnuts are grown. (I’ll try to get some pictures up.) Bulatcan’s great-grandfather still lives there. It was pretty cool to see four generations of Bulats sitting together. I found it very amusing to see Bulatcan’s grandfather, who is probably 70, smile and yell “baba!” (“dad!”) when he entered the room.

Bulatcan’s great-grandfather is probably over 90, but he doesn’t know exactly. When you look at old tombstones, it’s a bit confusing because the Ottoman Empire used the Islamic calendar and the Turkish Republic uses the Western Gregorian one. Thus, one can frequently see birth-dates in the thirteen-hundreds and death-dates in the nineteen-hundreds.

I’m going to try and upload some pictures. I still need to find something to use for a senior photo, although I’m sure that I’m ridiculously late by now. The next month is going to be a little rough as I have a bunch of college applications, so I probably won’t get to the blog as often as I should.