Welcome again to the story about when I traveled overland to India with a band, funding all our expenses with music. A journey that took 2 years and 8 months, through 32 countries!
In this third part of the story we are in Diyarbakir, Turkey!
If you want to catch up here are the Previous parts:
Part 1 - The Beginning
Part 2 - Cappadocia and Malatya
Part 3 Diyarbakir, East Turkey
Me and Sparrow playing music in Diyabakir
After spending time in Central Turkey and getting in the news, we started getting recognized on the street and by the people we got picked up by hitchhiking. It was quite weird suddenly being half famous in Turkey!
We quickly got invited to play in Mahya Café which was our first stop in Diyabakir - the Kurdish "capital" of East Turkey
Here is an video recording of our concert at Mahya Café (very bad sound! :S):
Then I don't remember exactly how - but we were trying to find out where we could sleep and somehow we met these artists with a studio in the center of Diyarbakir, and they let us stay there!
It was a very nice place, with a balcony with view of the central pedestrian street of New Town Diyarbakir.
Here we would play music in front of the cafés and then go around with the hat to the tables. It was a pretty good way of making money, but I always felt a bit bad to disturb people while they were drinking their Turkish Coffee, even though people generally were more than happy that we came around and always wanted to ask us a lot of questions!
That's how we got into Diyarbakir, but soon Diyarbakir and the Kurdish people would get into us too. This part of the journey left a really great impression on me.
East Turkey is completely different than West Turkey. As you may or may not know, most of Eastern Turkey is inhabited by Kurdish people. The Kurds are a very suppressed people who, for generations, has fought for their own country and to keep their unique culture and language. Kurdistan and the Kurds, though, remains split between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia, as seen on this map:
picture source https://southfront.org/lost-kurdistan/
This post will mainly be about our experiences in Diyarbakir (as you can see on the map on the left side below the U), but we also traveled down to Erbil, or Arbil in Iraq and all the way up north again through Mus, up to Erzerum - more about that in the coming posts.
So we first met the New part of Diyarbakir, which looked different, but not that different than other Turkish cities. The old town and new town is separated by this ancient wall (presumably build by the Romans in 297AD), as you can see on the picture above. To the left is the new town, and just on the other side of the wall, is the very different old town:
Eastern Turkey is generally much poorer than the West, and old town Diyarbakir was really like stepping in to a third world country.
But at the same time extremely beautiful!
Somehow I always find small self build shacks more beautiful than tall modern concrete buildings. And the people there were so strong and beautiful too.
The people..! I don't think I've met a group of people that I have been so inspired by or fascinated by, than the Kurds.
All the time, when we were heading East through West and Central Turkey, people would always warn us of the Kurds. The list of bad things the Turkish would tell about the Kurds was endless! Dishonest, dangerous, thiefs, terrorists.. There has been so much propaganda against the Kurds, and the general Turk believes what the media says - but the Kurds don't!
(Of course Kurdish groups are also guilty of some pretty serious attacks on Turkish people and I'm not saying they are angels, but they certainly were not all that which we were warned about!)
I really felt that these people has seen how many lies the media tells, and they have been so suppressed, so they don't take any bullshit! It's like everybody is a rebel, old and young!
(Just look at this badass woman ;D)
I just really felt that everyone was really tuned on and had a good understanding of how some things work in the world, but instead of just being angry and aggressive, they were keeping their spirits high with a really amazing community feeling. It really seems they felt connected to each other and they were always singing! In every gathering we were with Kurdish people, at some point they would always break out singing, all together!
Well we stayed in the artist studio a while, but didn't want to overstay our welcome, so we decided to leave and headed to the Old Town
The artists waving at us from the balcony :)
Suluklu Han
In the old town we met a mystical old man, who signaled us to follow him.. He didn't speak any English and we never saw him before, he just came to us on the street and made gestures for us to follow him..! So we did!
He took us down a narrow alley behind the vegetable market, and just before we started thinking to explain that we had something very important other to do, we arrived in a beautiful old courtyard!
Suddenly the old man was gone again, but then we met Dilsha, who worked at this place, which was a café and restaurant, and she was going to become a good friend of ours!
Pete and Dilsha from behind
The place was called Suluklu Han - translated "The Leech Inn" ! Apparently this place used to be a "Leech Hospital", where they treated various diseases with attaching a good amount of leeches on the people :S
Later (maybe when they found out the leeches weren't really working..) it turned into a "Han" - a kind of hotel for travelers and then it became the café / restaurant it is today
We got welcomed well in Suluklu Han (who knows what that mystical old man was thinking when he let us there, it seemed more like he was a little helper of the Goddess of Destiny, who magically vanished when his job was done..)
We played a few concerts and stayed at the Suluklu Han, but soon we met Erdal who didn't speak any English, and I don't really remember how, but somehow we ended up staying at his place!
Erdal and Pete in Suluklu Han
A minute after the previous picture a hail storm broke out!
It was nice staying at Suluklu Han, but we were sleeping just in a bare stone room and were also always in a puplic space, so it was also nice to move into Erdals flat just on the edge between New and Old Diyarbakir.
The terrace at Erdal's place where wee were sleeping under the stars
Erdal was a great crazy guy with all his walls painted artistically and always up to fun things. It was a bit of a challenge communicating, but we used google translate to talk, which also gave us some good laughs of strange translations!
Erdal dressed up, playing the flute in his room
Another very nice place in Old Town Diyarbakir
But back to the Kurdish people. I won't go too much into the politics, but it very easily became clear to me how suppressed the Kurdish people were feeling.
For almost a century the Kurdish language was banned in Turkey and the words "Kurds", "Kurdistan", or "Kurdish" were officially banned by the Turkish government. Political parties that served Kurdish interests were banned until the early 2000s and history contains several civil wars and destruction of Kurdish Villages, imprisonments and executions..
police visibility in the streets of Diyarbakir
At the time we were there (Spring 2011), some official restrictions were changed - you wouldn't be send to prison for speaking Kurdish for example, but the language was still not allowed in schools or encouraged in any way.
We witnessed a riot, and police visibility and visitation stations were frequent.
This day of the riot, the air in the whole city turned yellow! I really don't know what the air was filled with :S
We tried to ask people what the riot was about, but everyone just shook their shoulders - just the same old thing you know. A week day just like any other, just a touch more yellow..!
But in spite of it all, the Kurds were the most smiling, singing and warm people! And I am truly grateful to have met and befriended some of them.
Sparrow
Playing music on the City Wall
This is not the end of the story about the Kurds though, most of the connection with the people and culture happens later, when we traveled to the Autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq - which the next chapter will be about - and then back again to Diyarbakir and trekking through the hills of Batman, where we really discovered the rural almost tribal villages of the hills!
To finish this post I'll just include some pictures from the hitchhike journey to Iraq from Diyarbakir.
We stayed a night in the very beautiful old town Mardin and found this amazing abandoned house where we slept
Jeff
Sparrow
Pete and Matt taking a bath!
Me, surrounded by excited women wanting a picture!
Thank you for reading - took me 3 days to finish this post, ha ha (with several big distractions), so I hope you like it XD
Remember to Upvote, Resteem and Follow for the next chapter! <3 <3 Love you all ;D
Community Forums