Today I met up with my friend August to walk around Ulus, the old part of Ankara. After a bit of wandering, we found the Haci Bayram mosque, one of the oldest and most revered mosques in the city. Haci Bayram was a Muslim mystic who founded a dervish order centered in Ankara in the 15th century. Unfortunately, my lack of understanding of Islamic mysticism prevents me from going into much detail, but basically, dervishes were orders of mystics who had certain rituals or beliefs in addition to the teachings of the Koran. Westerners are most familiar with the whirling variety, but that's actually only one dervish order, the Mevlevi (followers of Mevlana, aka Rumi), who were originally based in Konya.

(Note: It's hard to tell if you don't know how Turkish is read, but the word haci = the more familiar hadji, a person who has gone on the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.)

Anyway, this mosque is very pretty and also houses Haci Bayram's tomb. August and I decided that since there were plenty of tourists (albeit all Turkish ones) there, it would be ok for us to be touristy and go in, too. We only had one head scarf between us, so I took it first, donned it, yanked down my knee-length skirt a little to make it cover more leg, took off my shoes and prepared to go in.

Just as I was about to hand August my purse to hold, an obviously religious middle-aged woman coming out of the mosque came up to me, put her hands on my shoulders, kissed my cheeks and said (in Turkish): "Thank you! Thank you so much, my dear! My good girl!" Apparently she was overwhelmed that a foreigner and apparent non-Muslim would cover her hair to go into a mosque. Unfortunately, I was rendered speechless by this display, so the woman didn't even have any way of knowing that I understood what she was saying. Still, August and I agreed that it pretty much made our day.

Cranky post

On Tuesday we had our end-of-program talent show. It wasn't really the end of the program - we still have another week - but the junior version of our program (high school kids) are leaving tomorrow, so we did it with them.

Part of the show was a reenactment of a kina gecesi, a henna night. This is a party that happens the night before a wedding, where a bride's hands are painted with henna and her female friends and relatives sing her songs about marriage, like the one we sang:

Let them not build their house on a high, high hill.
Let them not take our girl to a faraway land.
Let them not despise our girl, the apple of her mother's eye.

Let it be announced even to the birds in the sky: I miss my mother.
I miss my mother, and my father, and my village.

I wish my father had a horse, so he could get on it and come to me.
I wish my mother had a sail, so she could unfurl it and come to me.
I wish my siblings knew where I was, so they could come to me.

Yeah. Most depressing wedding song ever. It's from the days when marriage sucked even more for Turkish women than it does now. Usually brides came from a different village (as is the practice in many traditional cultures), so marriage often represented a girl leaving everything she knew to go live as the lowliest family member in a new household.

(As for marriage sucking for Turkish women now, I could write a lot about my impression of gender relations here, but I won't... yet.)

Apropos of that, my host mom keeps asking me if I miss my mom. Every time she asks, I say, "A little bit." To be honest, living in Turkey is not that different from living in DC - I'm not in the same place as my mom, and we talk on the phone sometimes. So I've explained to Host Mom several times that I don't live with my parents, but she doesn't really seem to be able to comprehend that. (Turkish kids live with their parents until they get married, and many of my friends' 20-something host siblings actually seem completely unable to function (e.g. feed themselves) without their mothers.) Finally last night she asked me why I always say "a little bit." Instead of explaining yet again that I don't live with my parents anymore, I said, "In American culture, it's not so good for a 25-year-old to complain about how much she misses her mom." She was shocked. It led to a long and uncomfortable conversation about how egocentric (I would say "individualistic") Americans are, how no one ever helps each other in America. I heard a lot of that in Russia, too. I do think American society is more individualistic than group-mentality based, but I get tired of defending it to people who think it's the worst thing ever rather than just a different way of doing things.