I know it's been a while! Turkey blocked blogger because someone was using it to stream video of a football match, or something like that, and I just figured out how I can access it at my school (which uses the international server yay!). Anyway, I have quite a bit to catch up on.
So, quite a while ago (a month maybe?) I went to Diyarbakir and Mardin with Tyler, Jamie, Ethan, Lewis, Dan, Tim, and Juliayn. These two towns are in the south-east, in the region that is sometimes, and very controversially, referred to as Kurdistan. In fact, Diyarbakir is considered the "capital" of Kurdistan by many Turkish Kurds at least. One of the group mentioned going to Kurdistan in his facebook status and immediately incited a heated status-comment debate involving primarily Turkish students at Koç versus international students at Koç, the former passionately rejecting the use of the term and the latter defending it. One of the nights we were there we spent a couple hours just following the argument as people were posting.
Both towns were really interesting in totally different ways. Diyarbakir was like a culture shock. It really felt like a different country than Istanbul. Not only is this a highly Kurdish area of Turkey, it's also very close to the Syrian border (as well as the Iraqi border) so there is a great deal of Arabic influence in various ways. First of all, the accent is highly influenced by Arabic; at times I even thought some people were speaking Arabic when they were actually speaking Turkish. Also, the landscape, dry, rocky, hilly, yellow, with little vegetation, very well fit some of my associations with a more Middle Eastern climate. Something I really liked about it was that it was way less touristy. Not many people spoke English and walking around felt much more like a legitimate experience of local life. It's more conservative there and there were a lot styles of dress I hadn't seen before. Paricularly, I saw several old women who wore a different style of head scarf and had interesting tatoos on there chins and/or foreheads. Here's the only picture I got of one such woman (but you can't really see the tatoo):
First, we walked around this big market. It was incredibly crowded and all locals. They were selling fresh produce, cheap shoes and clothes, traditional scarves, etc. Then we started exploring the massive walls that run through the town. They were kind of like vertical mazes, somewhat run-down with varyous passageways to the top. There was also evidence of all kinds of shenanigans going on there, including massive homemade water bongs.
While on the walls a group of pre-teen boys started asking us for money and at one point even tried to steal one of our cameras and pick someone else's pocket. It was kinda scary cause we were on the top of an ancient wall. We got down and tried to lose them, but they followed us. It was interesting to see how the boys were communicating with each other through hand signals and whistles. Eventually, we got to a mosque and a very nice man there sensed that something was going on and helped to scare them away. We ended up having tea with him for a bit.
The next day we went to Mardin. It was sooooo beautiful. Old Mardin is a smaller town built on a hillside overlooking a vast exanse of flatland that extends to Syria. This expanse is cultivated and in the atmosphere looks blue-green so that I was constantly thinking it was the sea. What is most striking about Mardin is the architecture. It's dominated by these old buildings that are all the same golden color of sand, blending into the surrounding rocky landscape. They are decorated and carved in gorgeous Arabic styles and patterns, from courtyard arcading to the way the columns are carved.
We did a lot of walking around the city, saw a couple mosques and a monastery that had been converted into an orphaage. It was incredible just to be there, in such a beautiful place. We also ran into a demonstration celebrating the Kurdish new year, Noruz, which was the next day. They were playing traditional music and wearing traditional costumes and waving flags.
It would have been really neat to be able to stay the next day and see the Noruz celebrations, which involve jumping over fire!, but the half of the group I was leaving with had to leave too early. The other half of our group, though, had a really good time joining in the festivities.
