Gaziantep’s Pistachios and the Turkish Family that Adopted Me for a few Days
Travel Notes: Turkey Part II
Burcu (pronounced in French accent “Burllu”) and his brother Hussein Jon picked me up at the bus station. I wasn’t able to tell them that my bus was running one hour late, and they had to wait until I arrived. Their apartment was on the other side of town. Their parents, Mehmet and Jana, welcomed us at the entrance with open arms and kind smiles. None of them spoke English, so I communicated through their children. Hussein Jon spoke more fluently than his older sister because of an Erasmus program he had studied in Italy. It was from this last experience that the family thought of using Couchsurfing (an application to connect travelers and locals around the world) to receive a foreigner (me) so that Burcu could practice and improve her English, as well as learning about other cultures. This was their first experience with the application, as well as mine.
Jana prepared a feast for the welcome dinner: Karniyarik (eggplant stuffed with ground meat, tomatoes, onion, and a touch of salt and olive oil), Icli Kofte (Turkish meatballs), and Yuvarlama (yogurt soup with chickpeas, olive oil, and other spices).
There was an awkward silence when I asked Mehmet how he and Jana had met. Burcu translated the question to her dad who, after a few seconds of hesitation, said to me with a slightly broken English, “Arrange Marriage,” and burst into laughter. I was a little shocked at first, but then I remembered that they had different customs than mine. One realizes that the social norms we live under can be as arbitrary as those that seem unusual to us in other places. They had been married for 26 years and looked quite happy. In the end, love is not something that is born suddenly one morning, it is something that is built with time and through the experiences we live together.
Mornings with the family began with a large Turkish breakfast. Every available empty space in the table was filled with plates of olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, jams, French fries, cheeses, bread, yogurt, tea, honey, and casseroles of diverse plates. I usually sat between Hussain Jon and Mehmet, who wore a comfortable red tracksuit and turned on the television at the corner of another table in the kitchen to watch the news. They asked me if Turkish soap operas were also famous in my country; apparently, in the rest of the world they were. “No,” I said without ever thinking that I would return to Mexico to find my Mom turned into an addict of the predictable Turkish dramas, composed of 80 percent suspense music and 20 percent intense stares.
Jana’s dishes were the tastiest I had in Turkey. On one occasion trying Ezogelin, a spicy mint lentil soup, Mehmet said to me with a laugh, “Now you see why I married my wife?” I really liked Mehmet; he had a good sense of humor.
My first night I slept in a room shared with Hussein Jon until I realized the next morning that Burcu had slept in the living room while I occupied her bed. Despite their objections, I moved my things to the living room and spent the remaining nights sleeping under the portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
I had already heard of Ataturk from Alper back in Istanbul, the name literally translates into “Father of all Turks.” Mustafa Kemal was the creator of the Turkish State after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War; he secularized the government, adopted the Latin alphabet, and unified the various ethnic groups in the region. Before Mussolini, Hitler, Tito or any other 20th-century populist leader achieved success in their respective countries, Ataturk had already built a personal creed for his charisma and leadership. Despite the fact that he ruled Turkey in an authoritarian style until the end of his days, I did not meet a single Turk who did not view him with respect and admiration. All houses in Turkey have a portrait of Ataturk in their living or dining rooms.
Gaziantep, one of the oldest cities in the world, is located in the south of Central Anatolia, just 97 kilometers north of Aleppo, Syria. It is not a very popular place among tourists, it’s not as if there is a lot to see there anyway. But the people were quite nice and with Mehmet, who worked at the tourist department of the city, we were able to visit the Fortress in the city center, the Zeugma Mosaic Museum (the largest of its kind in the world), and the zoo with a special entrance to the primate area, where we met Can (pronounced “Jan”), my primate cousin. The four-year-old chimpanzee was rejected by his mother and found shelter in the hairy arms of his Turkish caretaker, a short, mustachioed man that became Can’s true mother. Can was a mischievous chimpanzee who would climb into our arms and scream without reassurance until his mustachioed mother held him in his arms again.
Gaziantep is internationally recognized for its pistachios. Among its specialties is the Baklava, a cake made with crushed pistachio paste in thin layers of filo — similar to puff pastry — and bathed in honey; or the Kanafeh -also known as Kunefe — a semolina cake with butter and cheese dipped in syrup and ground pistachio. High cuisine desserts, but quite cloying for my palate. Personally, I had a predilection for Lagmanchun, also known as “Turkish pizza,” almost as famous as the sweets in this region. One afternoon we had dinner at a place specialized in Lagmanchun that Mehmet knew near the old Citadel. The equivalent of the little taquería hidden in a corner of the center of Mexico City that only your 27-year-old uncle knows about. After not letting me pay for dinner, we went to a cafe in a downtown Bazaar. The owner, a friend of Mehmet, had a peculiar and striking life-size wax figure of his late father. Of course, it was not disturbing at all, much less how excited he was when he asked us to pose next to the figure for a picture. We sat next to a group of 30-somethings inside a room that appeared to be carved out from the walls like a cavern under a mountain. I remember the surprise I had when one of the boys in the other group proposed to his girlfriend right next to us. Mehmet and Jana wiped the tears from their eyes, just a few months ago their eldest daughter had gotten married and left their house to go to France with her husband. They were a very close family and despite being happy for their daughter, it still hurt them to be separated from her. We drank a special Gaziantep coffee made of pistachio. The consistency was thick, the same as normal Turkish coffee, but greenish in color and had a hot chocolate flavor that transported me back to the cafe where Mom used to take my brother and me before dropping us at school back when we still lived in Coyoacán.
I met Ozan in a cafe next to the University of Gaziantep. Ozan was the second Couchsurf host to welcome me into the city. Burcu and Hussein Jon insisted on accompanying me because they did not trust the stranger I met online. Quite ironic, if you ask me.
Ozan was a high school English teacher and he invited me to a couple of his lectures in an attempt to motivate his students to practice the language. All the students wore black and not because they were from Melbourne (reference joke for a future anecdote), but because it was the dress code required for all high school students in Turkey. Most of them did not speak English, but those who did had a higher level than mine and Ozan’s. More than being interested in my travels or experiences, they wanted to know if the stories of the Mexican drug Cartels they heard were true. One of the boys challenged me to an arm-wrestling match I only won because my pride was willing to get my arm hurt rather than to lose to a super-developed fifteen-year-old.
I spent my last afternoon in a Beyran restaurant with Hussein Jon and Burcu. Beyran is a traditional lamb meat soup cooked with garlic and spices. The meat was so tender it melted the same instant I put it in my mouth. It was not the first time I had tried something like this, in Guadalajara we have the same dish: Birria. I said goodbye to Jana over a video call in the restaurant. It was quite moving as she didn’t mind shedding a couple of tears, neither did Mehmet when I visited him in his office right before I left. Four days with them filled me with the love and affection that only such a warm and affectionate family could offer.
Written on February 20th, 2019.
This article is a continuation of my previous post: City of the Seven Hills.
Article based on Memorias del Este.
