Nohut

It's good to know from where our food comes.

On my way to work at the hotel, I saw piles of a kind of straw on the sides of the streets. Because I am nosey, I picked one up to see what was inside a sort of thin-walled pod. I discovered a single chick pea (nohut in Turkish) inside. Now I know.

Dried Apricots

Across the street from the Post Office in Uçhisar and overlooking Pigeon Valley, an elderly man has laid out his apricots to dry in the sun. Knees bent on the concrete, he arranges the fruit to look like little dessicated soldiers lined up in rows. Every day, their colors change, from bright to burnt orange.

Tandir Bread

Şerife Anna and I don’t share a mother tongue, but we do have a common language of the stomach. Every other day or so, Şerife Anna makes tandır bread. A tandır is a simple traditional oven. It’s nothing but a cylindrical, flat floored hole in the rock. All cave homes have them.

Şerife prepares the oven by burning twigs and branches until sufficiently hot coals remain at the bottom, then places several metal plates in the tandır to absorb the heat.

Then, she coats rounded dough with an egg mixture, forms a hole in each piece of bread, and sticks them to the side of the tandır The oven is covered with a large metal plate until the bread is golden brown on the top.

Şerife then removes the bread with a kind of hook.

I prefer to eat tandır bread when it’s warm. The crust is chewy-crunchy, the interior soft. It’s best with lots of butter or crumbly village cheese that has been stored in clay pots.

Please note: My original intention was to place the above text next to the appropriate photographs. After fighting with and losing to Blogspot, I am settling for this compromise.

Mulberries

The mulberries are in season in June. When I lived outside Philadelphia, I was the only person I knew who ate them. Between here and there, next to sidewalks and on lawns, huge mulberry trees drop their fruit to leave purple splotches on the concrete. The birds and I are the only ones I’ve ever seen eat them. I used to sneak onto lawns, grab as many berries as quickly as I could, and walk down the street with stained fingers and lips.

In Turkey, there are both white and black mulberries. You can buy dried white ones in the stores that sell nuts, dried fruit and leblebe (roasted chick peas. Yum.) There is a very small ice cream shop in Bebek, about the size of a closet, that sells the best black mulberry ice cream. When they’re in season, you can buy mulberries from the markets and even on the street. Since they are fragile, you have to carry them carefully. More than once I have arrived home with a soggy paper bag of mulberry juice.

Between my apartment and work, there are several white mulberry trees. The fruit is not too sweet and very refreshing. Every day, I stop and eat them. I pull the branches to reach as many as I can. More often than not, the perfectly ripe ones drop to the blacktop before I can pick them. Sometimes, I interrupt another person guiltily involved in the same sport. Sometimes we ignore each other, at other times we help each other. I’ll pull the branches and point while a stranger picks the fruit. Then we give each other moist towellettes from the bottom of our handbags and say “thank you.” (Always have a packet of moist towellettes handy, especially in the summer heat.)

The ripest, plumpest and juiciest berries, the size of half of my thumb, are always out of my reach towards the top of the tree. They taunt me.

Saturday Tradition

On Saturdays, I go to Sultanahmet to visit friends who work in a ceramics shop on a corner facing the Hippodrome. These friends are like a little family, transplanted from Avanos in Cappadocia, who live and work together. Each of them has special tasks assigned according to their complementary skills. Two are master potters. Zafer is charged with giving demonstrations on the pottery wheel on the ground floor. Ibo, unlucky at gambling but lucky in love, speaks fluent Japanese and therefore is in charge of the Japanese tourists. When business is slow, he and Zafer can be found diligently studying Japanese and English respectively. Erdal, a folk dancing expert with years of experience organizing Turkish Nights, speaks Italian and several other languages. He also makes a fine çi köfte, a very spicy kind of meatball made with finely ground, raw beef and bulgur. Şaban, another master potter, speaks very good English and can sell ceramics like nobody’s business. He very conscientiously describes the stages of making ceramics, from forming vessels out of clay to the calligraphic painting and glazing processes involved, and the uses of Hittite libation vessels reproduced in the Avanos workshop.

So on Saturdays, I make my way to Sultanahmet with a treat. Sometimes it’s chocolate or ice cream, maybe fresh strawberries, sometimes börek. On sunny days, we sit outside with tea or homemade Cappadocian wine, watching tourists pass and guessing their nationalities. The shop sometimes doubles as an information booth. At the corner, visitors often consult their maps looking a little lost and on the verge of in-the-middle-of-the-street-dispute so common in tourist areas. Often, they refuse the help offered them from the shop, only to turn back after a few minutes of confused wandering. If business is slow, Şaban teaches me how to play backgammon. I’m not good at it. There are little Turkish lessons for me, and English grammar points for them. Recently, I explained the passive voice to Zafer. I’m good at that.

After a pilgrimage to the silver market yesterday, I stopped to buy baklava for the Saturday tradition. I pointed at a handful of varieties and asked for one portion of each. One portion there was about three times the size of anywhere else, and I accidentally found myself with a box of about 1 ½ kilos of syrupy goodness.

Outside the ceramics shop, a backgammon game with an uncle was in progress next to a huge chestnut tree. I wonder what this uncle thinks of the crazy American who regularly stops by with food. Zafer brought me a plate, and I carried half the baklava to the sidewalk. Once a waitress, always a waitress. A few cousins and a brother arrived; a large bottle of Coke appeared from somewhere. Passersby laughingly remarked that they didn’t know it was bayram (a holiday.) I retrieved the remaining baklava packet from the kitchen, in case.

An elderly neighbor lady with head scarf and hennaed fingers regularly passes by and sometimes sits on the corner. She, like many others like her, sells packets of tissue and mastic flavored gum the consistency of rubber to earn ekmek para (bread money.) Sometimes I buy tissues from her, but yesterday I had already purchased from another lady much like her. Her accent is so thick that I can understand only one in about fifteen words she says, but I do understand when she refers to the American woman who visits on weekends. She was invited to sit and have baklava. She asked for and received a glass of water. Although her eyes said otherwise, she declared she wouldn’t eat because she would rather take some home to her grandchildren. “Teze (auntie) please help yourself and then take some home.” Teze almost greedily took a portion the size of a small slice of pie and happily ate with sticky fingers. She then asked for the grandchildren and with our consent lined a plastic bag with napkins and deposited a few choice pieces in it. At each ever quicker reach into the baklava packet, she looked up as if to ask permission, eventually emptying the box into her syrup soaked bag. Grateful, and happy with a surprise for the children, she thanked me and shuffled her way around the corner to wherever she lives.

Buying Silver

My latest obsession is buying silver beads to make earrings and other beautiful things. I usually buy them at the Tavuk Pazaar, near the Grand Bazaar. Tavuk means “chicken.” There aren’t any chickens in the bazaar anymore, but there are lots of silver and bead shops. Recently, I was disoriented (well, I’m often disoriented. I got myself lost and found yesterday for about 20 minutes between here and there. At least I was in an interesting place.) while looking for the bazaar. A random man sitting on a stool in the middle of the sidewalk asked if I wanted to go to the Grand Bazaar. I asked for directions to the Tavuk Pazaar. Another random man in a bright red sweatshirt asked me why I wanted to go there. When I told him, he said he had a silver atelier in the area. If I went with him, he would then take me where I wanted to go.
I assessed the situation quickly. I decided that if he tried anything, a good public “Shame on you!” would suffice to get rid of him. He took me across the tram tracks, down a side street, into an ugly building, up the ugly building stairs and buzzed us into the workshop. A group of men were working on various parts of silver rings, “Turkish Bulgari.” After a tea, a chat about teaching English and a gander through their catalogue of relatively ugly merchandise (the rings were nice), Aslan guided me to the Chicken Bazaar.
After I had purchased a handful of silver beads, I managed to communicate that I wanted some silver wire. Aslan steered me down a smaller side street to his friend’s workshop. We walked into a dirty corridor and entered a small room where four men were working diligently. One was carving the final details into molded silver crosses. Another was shining something. Yet another was using a huge punch press to make Turkish flag symbols, the crescent moon and star, out of a narrow sheet of silver. Each moon and star fell neatly into a box.
Aslan spoke to his friend who measured a few meters of wire. It was too thick, so we ventured to another side street to an even dirtier little room. His friend put the rolled wire onto a metal thing and fired it up with a blow torch. Then he attached it to a machine that spun and stretched the wire. After I deemed it perfect, I paid the man a whole YTL and we made our way to the street.
About this time, Aslan started to take my arm and repeat my name. Time for my exit. My usual line for anyone trying to sell me something or for whenever I really want to leave is “My friends are waiting for me in Taksim.” Sometimes, I have to repeat this line several times before I can disentangle myself. Aslan headed me toward the tram and on his merry way back to work.

A Visit

My parents came for a visit recently. It’s strange to see family and friends here, but strange in a good way. Usually I go to see them, or describe to them the places I find interesting. In many ways, we have no idea what each others’ lives are like. It’s a relief, in fact, that my mom and dad have seen where I live, and now know that I’m no more in danger of contracting bird flu or being attacked by terrorists than they are. Now they really know I don’t live in the Middle East. What’s normal to me, though, is sometimes little surprising, and maybe sometimes uncomfortable for them. For example, my dad often remarked upon the number of mosques and had many questions about Muslims. At times I found it kind of frustrating, yet on the other hand it’s understandable. We have a very unbalanced view of Turkey in the US. (Frankly, I never thought about Turkey much before I moved to Istanbul, except to be jealous of friends who came here on archaeological digs, and to want to see Haghia Sophia after having taught about it so many times.) More importantly, I think they now understand why I want to stay. Instead of thinking that maybe I’m running away from something, I actually have a place here and (big gasp) a purpose for staying.