NOTE: Because of the language barrier and culture being a complicated thing, I can't be entirely sure of my interpretation of events. To preserve people's privacy, I'm using pseudonyms for anyone with a distinctive name.
Ara bul. — Hacı Bektaş Veli Seek and ye shall find. — King James Bible, Matthew 7:7
I can pinpoint the moment when the journey started to feel completely real for me. I was sitting in the backseat of a car with no seat belts, surrounded by the smell of leaking gas and the sound of the rear suspension screeching in pain, racing down a dusty country road to an animal sacrifice. You see, in the town of Hacıbektaş, the most holy place in the Alevi faith, there are many little shops selling rosaries, statues, portraits of saints and heroes, and jugs to fill with holy water, and many little restaurants serving food, but all this is the small business. The big business is animal sacrifices, and shops have a sign outside that says "Kurbanlık Bulunur," meaning sacrifices available. But sitting there in the car, I really had no idea what I was getting into. It was my new friend Justice in the seat next to me who was buying the sacrifice, and she couldn't speak a word of English, so all I could do was lean on my very basic grasp of Turkish and fill in the rest with some combination of imagination and close attention. Outside the window, the countryside was barren and parched at this time of year, only plowed fields of bare earth and grazed fields of yellow stubble remained. Here and there were small clusters of buildings and valleys with groves of tall skinny trees. The car pulled over next to a farm complex, and we all got out and walked to a sheep pen without a single thing growing in it. The dusty herd clustered against the far wall in a vain attempt to escape the merciless midday sun and the strong arms of the shepherd, who looked like he might have arrived on horseback from the vast steppes to the far northeast, if he hadn't been dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie. Inside the pen, a strange transaction began, with Justice trying to point out a certain sheep, the middleman giving a price for it, and the shepherd trying to separate it from the herd. There was much discussion about the quality and quantity of meat to be had from each. After many false starts, a victim was selected, slung bleating by two legs, and carried to the slaughterhouse. There its hooves were tied together, Justice and the middleman laid hands on its flank and said a prayer, and then she turned away and came out to pray quietly while the butcher, hidden just out of sight behind a wall, cut the sheep's throat with a sharp knife. Out of a sense of respect, I decided to bear witness to its final acts as a living being, and so I watched it kicking in agony until Justice pulled me away. It wasn't long before bags of meat were being loaded into the car and the shepherd was coming up the hill dragging a long hose to wash away the blood. We turned around and headed back to town.1
At the heart of Hacıbektaş is the tomb of the town's namesake, Hacı Bektaş Veli, a 13th century Sufi teacher who had a huge influence on the Alevi faith and Anatolian culture in general. For millions of people, this tomb complex is something like what Rome is for Catholics or what Mecca is for mainstream Muslims. But because of Ataturk's religious reform laws that took effect a hundred years ago, it can't be officially recognized as a shrine but instead must be called a museum. By this clever sleight of hand, all that's needed is some glass cases filled with artifacts and some informational placards and signs, and then a shrine can be fully supported by the government's tourism department without giving the appearance of state-sponsored religion. And in 2021, the pilgrimages of the faithful made Hacıbektaş the second most visited "museum" in Turkey. I would say the Alevi-Bektaşis have the most distinctively Turkish religion I know of, locally grown from the rich soil of nomadic Shamanism, Islamic mysticism, and Christianity. They have a semah dance that represents the flight of the crane, in which form Hacı Bektaş Veli is said to have arrived from Khorasan. They have a sort of holy trinity formed by Allah, Mohamed, and Ali. They have the Twelve Imams, who resemble the twelve apostles, and a strong belief in miracles and the power of saints to intercede in human affairs. They've also discarded quite a few customs of mainstream Islam, such as praying five times a day, and adopted practices like meeting once a week, traditionally on Thursdays, for a communal service with preaching, hymn singing, and dancing, which is called a cem (pronounced like "gym").
But when I arrived in this little town in a little van-sized bus, I knew none of these things. The driver pulled off a highway exit in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, woke me up, set my backpack on the curb, and oriented me by pointing: the tomb was this way, and that way was the "çilehane," whatever that might be. The bus got back on the highway and I walked the half mile or so into town, paid for four nights in a hotel, walked around a bit to get my bearings, found a place that was open late and served delicious lentil soup, and went to bed. I really had no idea what I was doing there; if Rumi's tomb had left me unmoved, would another medieval Sufi tomb be any different? Well, at least it was a nice place to hang out and get some work done, with a tree-lined pedestrian avenue that ran between two open plazas, on one side of it the tomb complex and on the other side a stretch of souvenir shops, restaurants, and hotels. Yes, I set my sights no higher than four boring but restful days, just getting some work done in pleasant surroundings. But I hadn't counted on Turkey's uncanny ability to work its way into my life in the most friendly possible way, like a warm and wet-nosed animal that simply must snuffle its way into your lap and will not be denied. The next morning dawned with crisp, clear weather, and I was sitting on a bench in dappled shade with my laptop, just getting into the swing of things, when a grizzled and hunchbacked old man wearing an Air Jordan baseball cap stopped to talk. Due to some combination of his regional accent, his lack of teeth, and my ignorance, I could only understand a little of what he was saying, but we completed the usual exchange that established that I was from America and should definitely come have tea with him. It was slowly dawning on me that if I wanted to get much work done, I would have to do it in private.
So we had tea at a nearby shop, which I paid for, in a departure from the usual custom. The old man gave me a card with his name (we'll call him Uncle Abe) and the word kurbanlık. I asked what it meant and he demonstrated with a throat-cutting gesture that was a bit alarming until I looked up the word and decided it probably did not refer to people. Then he took me back to his house and showed me the "dough stone" in his back yard, which Hacı Bektaş Veli is supposed to have kneaded like dough, according to local legend. He kissed the stone and I did too out of politeness, and then we sat on the front porch while his wife brought out tea and a hot yogurt-based soup with garlic and orzo. He was trying hard to sell me on buying a sacrifice, if not a sheep then at least a chicken. He asked how much money I made and I said, "too much," and he said he didn't have any, and long story short I wound up giving him what I later learned was enough money to cover the killing of a good-sized sheep. I guess in retrospect I could think of it as paying for an animal not to be killed, although I have no illusions that any particular sheep was saved by the gesture. Well, it was all pretty interesting, I thought, and my first experience with being fussed over by a Turkish lady. I don't normally like to be fussed over, but it was actually kind of nice, even with the generous side helping of advice about finding myself a Turkish wife.
The next day I had learned my lesson and started work in my hotel room with the big window open to a shady courtyard below and the sounds of men drinking tea and playing cards. But after a few hours of this I felt a bit cooped up and decided to take a walk out of town to the çilehane to find out what exactly it was. Literally, the word means something like "hall of suffering," which refers to a place where spiritual adepts would go to fast and pray, but when I got there what I saw was a cemetery, a row of shops selling souvenirs, and beyond it a path that wound through pine trees, lined with larger-than-life bronze statues of Alevi abdals. Abdals are the poets and singer/songwriters who have composed inspiring religious music over the years as part of a vibrant bardic tradition. There was a statue of Yunus Emre, whose exact connection to Alevism is unclear but strongly suspected. The other abdals were all new to me. Almost all of the statues had a sample of poetry or song lyrics on a signboard in front of them, and many of the lyrics were strikingly beautiful, so I took photos to look over later. At the top of the hill was an area where people had been stacking stones in little cairns and tying pieces of cloth on tree branches, the sort of folk religious practices I would associate with animistic traditions like Shintoism in Japan. As I passed by a large statue of Hacı Bektaş Veli, kneeling with a deer under one arm and a lioness under the other, a woman asked if I would take her photo. I took a few photos of her posing next to the statue, and as I was walking away, it occurred to me to ask whether the photos were okay, but I used an incorrect phrase, and this caused her to realize that I wasn't Turkish.2 She asked where I was from, and then invited me to have tea. On the way to tea, which turned out to be back in town, she bought me a souvenir bracelet, we established that we were both travelling alone, and we decided to join forces.
This is the person I'll call Justice, and I probably could not have made a better friend. She spoke no English whatsoever, talked quickly with a bit of a regional accent and many idioms, and made very few concessions to my basic understanding of Turkish. This made communication between us a bit slow and difficult, but on the other hand, everywhere we went she would stop and talk to all kinds of people, generally starting a conversation by asking where they were from. By listening to these conversations and now and then trying to participate, my spoken Turkish skills began to improve by leaps and bounds. Often she would tell the same story to many people, often about something funny or nice that I had done or said, and this repetition was incredibly helpful. Research has shown that the process of listening to real speech at the threshold of understanding, which is called "comprehensible input" is essentially the only thoroughly proven method for language learning, which makes sense because it's the only kind that's usually provided to babies. And boy did I get hours and hours of input. We visited the tomb and an old cob windmill that was recently reconstructed. We visited Uncle Abe's house again for tea and took a ride out into the countryside to visit some more "dough stones." We spent many hours sitting in a shop called World of Jewelry, which was the contact point for arranging the animal sacrifice. Mostly we just talked with the family that owned the shop, but one day a musician dropped by and everyone sang Alevi hymns. In turn I sang them "Across the Wide Missouri" and two songs by my mom, all of which I'd previously translated into Turkish and memorized.3 Customers came in to buy stuff, often served by the young family members, babies were passed around and cooed over, and we were plied with frequent tea and snacks. All of this felt like a warm hug, and in fact there were several actual warm hugs. I'd been planning to spend only four days in Hacıbektaş, but I was constantly listening to Justice talk about how beautiful her hometown was, and she said that if I stayed a few more days, her friends coming from Istanbul could pick us up in a car and take us there. A Turkish road trip with new friends was too interesting a prospect to pass up, so I said yes. My hotel next door to the jewelry shop was deemed too expensive at around $20 per night, so I moved a bit farther away to the hotel where Justice was staying for only $10 per night, breakfast included.
An interesting character we came across was a man I'll call Destiny Dad. He was staying at my hotel, the expensive one, and every day as I came and went, I saw him sitting with a group of people in the cafe outside. He was quite tall, especially by Turkish standards, with long white hair and beard, always walking with a big staff, and basically if you imagine Gandalf in civilian clothing you won't be far off. He was always with a young woman and a middle-aged couple, and I thought they looked interesting but was too shy to approach them. Justice wasn’t too shy, and as soon as we walked by the cafe, she wanted a picture with the old man, so she went up and introduced herself. It turned out that he was originally from the Netherlands but was now living in Konya, and that he spoke almost no Turkish, relying on his young female companion to translate to and from English for him. He said he'd been drawn to Turkey thirty years ago by the Mevelevi sema, and that he'd learned meditation from Osho (aka Rajneesh4), and that he was a dervish. They asked me if I meditated. "No," I said, "but I pay attention." "He pays attention," repeated Destiny Dad in his Dutch accent. They said they were going to the museum to meditate like they did every morning, and asked if we wanted to join them, and of course why not, so that's how we wound up seated on the floor around the marble sarcophagus of Balım Sultan, founder of the Bektaşi Sufi order. I looked out a small window that pierced through the thick stone wall and paid attention to the wind rustling the leaves of a mulberry tree. After a while a group of people arrived from a tour bus to pay their respects, and as Destiny Dad offered his seat to an older woman, he put his hand on her shoulder and said something. Later, as he was sitting with his entourage in the sun on the other side of the rose garden, smoking cigarettes, the woman approached him and said that he had brought her much peace. He began to speak through his translator, a crowd gathered to listen, and just like that he was teaching them an impromptu meditation class, half the people from the tour bus sitting cross-legged on the paving stones, and more sitting on a low wall nearby. It seemed like these Alevis were quite open to outside sources of inspiration, and the whole scene seemed very sweet to me.
Later, I began to have second thoughts. We were sitting at a cafe, and the Turkish people were all speaking quickly in Turkish, and so I started talking with Destiny Dad in English. He said that Turks were in thrall to religious customs that were just empty imitations of the past, with no real life remaining in them. They knew the right time in the ceremony to cry, and so they cried. He told about a vision he'd once had of a lion sitting on one of the holy dough stones out in the countryside, and how this meant that Turkish people were like sheep and should be more like lions, expressing themselves authentically rather than being tied down to tradition. He said he'd tried to warn them, but that nobody was listening, they were too attached to their families. He thought they should abandon the constraint of rules and tradition. So he taught meditation because it was an internal practice, unconnected to any religion. Now, this troubled me, because to me the Turkish attachment to family and community looked like a wonderful and deeply healthy thing that didn’t need to be disrupted. His ideas, although clothed in the garb of mystical Islam or secularized meditation practice, represented Western values that in my experience have resulted in a lot of disconnection and misery. Of course, this was very much in line with the teaching of Osho/Rajneesh, who was never as popular in his native India as he was in the West, I think because he told Westerners what they wanted to hear. And despite the popularity of meditation, I had my doubts about separating it from its traditional surroundings, and I wondered whether it was a good idea to cultivate an intense focus on the interior, rather than connecting more deeply to the world around us. Justice asked what Destiny Dad and I were talking about and he asked her why didn't she learn English? I asked him why didn't he learn Turkish, and he replied that it would be too dangerous, that then he might speak directly to the people about his views on religion and society. I had to agree. I was disturbed by the encounter, and unable to fully explain my thoughts to Justice, who saw him as just a sweet old man. I took some time to walk around alone and think it over, and called a friend, and eventually my heart settled into the idea that there are many paths from the cradle and all of them end up in the grave. If, as I believe, death is simply a return to the all-pervading universal consciousness, then it's up to each of us to decide how to spend our journeys as separate beings, and to bear whatever consequences our choices might bring, pleasant or unpleasant. From this view, I could also see Destiny Dad as just a sweet old man, following his own heart wherever it might lead him.5
After my experience at Rumi's tomb in Konya and many visits to the tomb complex in Hacıbektaş, I decided that for me, the tombs themselves were only bones in marble boxes. I don't say this to question their value to the faithful, but just to be honest with myself and to not expect some kind of mystical revelation to strike me. And yet, I'm still drawn to such places for two reasons. The first reason is that often whoever takes care of the space has made it very lovely. Many of these holy sites are built up around natural springs or wells. Sufis often use clear water as a metaphor for truth, and it was easy to feel this in a visceral way when putting my hands under a stream of piercingly cold water bubbling up from deep underground, in a place so dry that barely anything can live without it. This water is in turn used to grow lovely gardens. On my first visit to the small room housing Hacı Bektaş Veli's sarcophagus, the place exuded an ineffable fragrance. I wondered if someone had put it there but later, as I walked around the garden, I found out where it came from: roses grew just outside and their smell had drifted into the tomb through the open windows. It's hard to describe the smell of these flowers, but it made every other rose I've smelled seem tame and boring. It was a mysterious aroma, as dark and intoxicating as rotting fruit but pure enough to be the perfume of a saint. And there were other special plants there, like a mulberry tree said to be some 700 years old, more than half dead but still producing berries which the faithful gathered from the ground. The mulberries there and nearby were among the most delicious fruits I've ever eaten, but I think they could never be sold in stores because the berries cling to the branch until they are almost overripe, forcing the picker to wrench them off, sending rivulets of thick blood-red juice flowing down the hand and wrist. As Justice and I picked and ate mulberries from a semi-wild tree at the back of an empty lot, I joked that we should watch out for the police because we looked like murderers. And it seemed to me that these plants, having grown from sacred ground, were themselves considered sacred; to eat them was to take in the spirit of the place, like an animistic communion. Justice gathered seeds from the flowers to plant at home, and when these seeds grew into flowers, her bees would gather their nectar, and then her family would eat the honey the bees made. I appreciated the way this religion was rooted in the land and water and the beings that lived there.
The second reason I thought of for visiting tombs and shrines was that they attract a certain kind of person. If people just want to relax, they go to the beach. If they just want to party they go to the nightclubs in the city. If they just want to be alone, they go to the wilderness. But I think the people who go to holy places are looking for something else, sometimes just for a miraculous cure, but often for a sense of peace and a feeling of connection to tradition and community. These were exactly the kind of people I was looking for, and that's who I found there. On my last night in Hacıbektaş, I got to attend the cem ceremony, the primary ritual of the Alevi tradition. It was held outside in the courtyard next to the tomb and the flower garden. Carpets were spread on the paving stones, and on the low wall in front of the roses sat the dede, the leader of the ceremony, and next to him two young men each playing the saz, a long-necked lute with three courses of strings. A young man with a headband and staff walked around making announcements and keeping order. But despite the unfamiliar instruments and surroundings, it felt to me very much like a Christian church service. The dede delivered a sermon, people came forward to testify, and hymns were sung. The grand finale was the circle dance which represented the flight of the crane. It began with a small group of young people wearing headbands and green headscarves. Moving slowly in a circle while making a series of hand motions, they alternately gathered to the center and spread apart. Then more people were called to join, and the circle grew and grew, and Justice got up and joined them. There were all kinds of people dancing together, young and old, lithe and stiff, upright and bent with age. And I felt that unlike the dance of the whirling dervishes, this was not only for spiritual adepts but for everyone. Circle dances are an ancient tradition of human bonding, and I felt sure this one had made a long trip through the ages to arrive in the here and now. After the dance there was a ritual sharing of food, and then we walked out into the cold night. Passing by the hotel cafe we saw Destiny Dad and his entourage, who had been watching from the outskirts of the cem. They were just sitting down to drink rakı, an anise-flavored liquor distilled from grapes, but we declined and headed back to our hotel. Justice was happy, singing and dancing as we walked. "There's no need for rakı," I said, and she laughed and pretended to stumble around like she was drunk.
The next day, the boys arrived from Istanbul, and we said goodbye to the family at World of Jewelry. Five of us crammed into a tiny Fiat, and the addition of my backpack made it impossible to fit the pieces of frozen sheep carcass from the sacrifice into the trunk.6 The driver was Dr. Ali, an old childhood friend of Justice's. Riding shotgun was Mr. Ali, an accountant, who was a friend of Dr. Ali's. I sat in the middle back seat, with Justice on my left. On my right was Mr. Ali's uncle, Uncle Evolution, a poet and folklorist with the gray ponytail of an old hippie. And so there I was in the backseat of another car with no seat belts, headed for a place I knew barely anything about, wedged between new friends and enjoying their warmth and closeness after the long lonely pandemic years. Darkness fell as we drove east into the night. Uncle Evolution got out his saz and began to play, and we sang haunting Alevi songs as the moon rose huge and yellow above the jeweled horizon.
Ben bozkırım, sen yağmursun, gel hadi, gel hadi, gel hadi Kuru dalım, bana da çiçek, ol hadi, ol hadi, ol hadi Ben ağlayım, yeter ki sen gül, gül hadi, gül hadi, gül hadi Gitme sakın, kal orda biraz, kal derim, kal derim, kal derim I am the desert, you are the rain, come now, come now, come now I am the dry branch, be my flower too, be now, be now, be now I will cry, as long as you laugh, laugh now, laugh now, laugh now Please don't go, stay there a little longer, stay I say, stay I stay, stay I say —Verse from “Sen Bir Aysın”
As best as I could tell, this animal sacrifice business falls somewhere between farm-to-table and a religious rite. Listening in on negotiations, the price seemed to range between say 900 and 3000 lira (roughly $60-200 USD). On the way back, the middleman tried hard to sell Justice on paying to have the meat prepared into a feast in Hacıbektaş, but she politely stuck to her plan of having it frozen for the trip back to her hometown.
Turks come from so many ethnic backgrounds that a fairly wide range of faces are plausibly Turkish, and mine appears to be somewhere within that range. Without my backpack on, I’ve been mistaken for the waiter at a coffee house, and people have asked me for directions. However, once people know I’m foreign, they say my face looks very German, and sometimes they forget where I’m from and start speaking German to me, which I can only understand a few words of.
I had made these translations on my walking trip from Delaware to Ohio, and they went over really well, I think partly because all of them had a spirit that resonated with the Alevi mindset. In the case of “Across the Wide Missouri” I think it’s the sadness of parting and the feel of a wide open landscape. “Fire Fire Fire” is a natural fit because Alevis use fire a lot for worship. “The Roots of my Heart” fits because it expresses our deep interconnection using a metaphor of living plants.
You might be familiar with Osho/Rajneesh from the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.
If it sounds like I’m throwing shade on Destiny Dad, I’m pretty sure he can handle it. Once when someone told him that people had been saying good things about him, he replied, “Only good things? How boring. When will people start saying bad things about me?"
I never quite found out what happened to the meat. It seemed like it might at some point be shipped to Tunceli as cargo in a bus, but I also gathered that often the meat from a sacrifice is used to prepare a feast for rich and poor alike, somewhat like a soup kitchen.
I am absolutely enthralled with the wonderful descriptions of what you see, hear, feel, smell, taste and experience as you journey through these ancient lands. I loved that you sang two of Cynthia’s songs and made such a good friend in Justine. I copy/pasted your thoughts about death and find them soothing. I can’t wait to hear about your next adventures!💞