Dim Çayı Kurban Bayramı

(So much colder than it looks. All photos by Mary Hunter)

Hey, hey, it is Kurban Bayramı here in Turkey. Folks are sacrificing rams, lambs and goats all over town. And the occasional steer. For the first time we were awakened by the noise of bleating this morning. But we won't be tomorrow, because the goats spirited into the neighborhood yesterday in preparation for the holiday are roasting already.

As we waited for the bus this morning, we saw several pickups roll by laden with quadripeds ready for the sacrifice. The most striking was a full size adult ram in the bed of a small pickup, being calmed, or held down, or something, by an adolescent boy with his foot on the ram's shoulders. This required the boy to sit on the roof of the pickup, as it rolled down the road in light holiday traffic at about 50km/hr. Traffic safety may never be a high priority around here, but on kurban bayramı anything goes.

What is Kurban Bayrami, you ask? It is one of the two most important holidays on the Muslim calendar, and therefore one of the most important in Turkey. It is known in the Arab world as Eid al Adhr, and commemorates Abraham's near sacrifice of his son to God, with God mercifully substituting a ram at the last instant. (Hence the rams and other bleating bleeders.)

On that we can all agree, and you have to love a holiday that all members of all the Abrahamic faiths can get behind, while enjoying savory goat. In theory, at least. Would that it were that simple. There are complications of interpretation, of course, which I am just barely smart enough not to wade into. I'll say only that the complications start with the identity of the son nearly sacrificed. Muslims say it was Abraham's oldest son, Ishmael, while Jews and Christians insist it was Isaac.

It would be too simple to just agree on this, wouldn't it? No harm, no foul? No sir.

A further complication is that this year the festivities of Kurban Bayramı begin on the same day as the atonement of Yom Kippur, a coincidence that happens only once every 33 years. That may not be a huge complication here in Turkey, where the Jewish population is now so small that probably very few Turks have any idea about Yom Kippur. 

For our part, we celebrated the first day of Kurban Bayramı by going to Dim Cayı, a river lined by teahouses outside of town. Each table gets its own little hut, most built on platforms over the shallower part of the streambed, some of them floating on empty barrels, tied to the dock by a line. We got there early enough to get one of the primo spots, a tree house overlooking the whole complex. There are no chairs, just pillows and a low railing, and you lean back like a pasha drinking tea and surveying the bounty.

If you are a tourist, like us, you also swim in the frigid stream and jump off the high platform into the deep water. This is for yabancılar only, as the Turks merely shake their heads in derisive wonder at anyone who could be so foolish as to swim in really cold water.