Antiochia

I had just arrived in the region and was half-way on the road to the town Samandağ when a man stopped for me in a grey estate car (one of the most typical cars to have in Turkey, including the colour, the kind you sooner or later always end up getting a lift). He introduced himself as “Ali”. I was puzzled, because I was aware that in Turkey usually only Alevites give their kids this name, and I had not known that Alevites also existed in this region, thinking them restricted to the Hacı Bektaş Turks in Central Anatolia and the Kızılbaş Kurds of the East. Mr. Ali cleared up my confusion, and I got to understand that the Shi'a subgroup of Alawites, most famously known as the denomination the al-Assad regime of Syria belongs to, call themselves 'Alevi' in Turkish, too. A more bookish term is Nusayrı.

When I arrived in Mr. Ali's house, I met the family. The female family servant, a poor class lady wearing sharval and headscarf, was delighted at my coming. “Oh Mr. Ali, did I not predict you that you would have a foreign guest when reading your coffee grounds a few weeks ago?”, she exclaimed. That may not have been the case, but it was a nice way to be welcomed.

Only a single time before someone had read my fortune. There was no remonstrating that I did not believe in such humbug, Candan (whose name translates as ´from the heart´), the neighbour girl of my friend Kerim, went straight ahead: `You will take on your back one person and the two of you will go to another person. Then three people, maybe you and these two people, maybe you and one of them and another one, will go and meet someone who has the letter M in their name. There will be a soft breeze the moment you meet.` She might as well have been predicting an ice storm on a summer´s night, nothing remotely the like ever happened afterwards, but I did appreciate her poetic way of stating these things. In any way, in my time in Hatay, Mr. Ali was not the last of the people I met, who told me my arrival had been predicted in their turned over coffee cups some time earlier.

Nargiz, the daughter-in-law, was 23, and wore tight, tapered jeans as they are fashionable across the globe now. But she was originally from a poor family in a village, and was married when she was 16, had her first kid the same year, and now already had her fourth baby.
Ipek, the daughter, was 18, and dressed in fashionable jeans and T-shirt. Up in her room between the two of us, she said to me she could not wait to go to university. It wasn't important where, but far far away from the society here with its stifling codes. “Here, people marry each other right after meeting, as a deal between families. Usually you cannot divorce. Only if there is domestic violence involved it is seen as acceptable. But if a woman that has been married is seen talking to a married man, the gossip immediately starts. And here it is even not that bad. Further East, in towns like Mardin and Urfa, the locals even make fun of foreigners wearing short-sleeved shirts and so on.” Over the following days, showing me around became an excuse for Ipek to avoid family events and hang out with her friends instead. Her parents thought it was just her and me going on her scooter, but in reality, there were three of us, taking a friend's car: Fine-limbed, honey-eyed Ipek was flirting with a handsome, tanned young lad wearing crisp bright blue and green shirts. He lived in Saudi Arabia, where a working stint is very lucrative for the Arabs of less-developped Turkey. He had previously been in Dubai, but after the economic crisis of 2008 left the UAE. They drove me to the seaside and showed me some thousands of years old graves and tunnels, and also made me visit the last Armenian village of Turkey, in the mountains above the town. The villagers of Vakıflı are used to tourists visiting them and their modest and modern (but not entirely unprepossessing) church. But, to be honest, mostly we were out drinking.

One evening out in the bars by the seaside with them and some other friends, a middle-aged woman looked at me intently for a short moment, before her eyes wandered down to my bare, ringless hands. Instead of adressing me she approached Ipek, who was standing next to me. “Bu kız evli mi?”, she asked, 'is this girl married?'. She was thinking of her unmarried son.
Ipek did me a favour and just dryly said 'yes'.