Quran Bayram

We are back in Kas ( KASH) and it’s our first of many visits. 1987 found us in Turkey from January until September. We spent Jan-May in and around Kas and then went east, came back in July and stayed the summer. We made friends almost at once. Lots of musicians and artists from all over Europe, but only three Americans. Tess True Heart was the other. More on her another time.

After a month or so Marilyn found a lovely little house in the village, and we left our pension. We had the first floor, a real kitchen and sit down toilet, oh and a cat, actually still a kitten named Miro after the artists. Miro didn’t like boiled goat lungs and rice seven days a week, so whenever he resisted, he’d go to the mouse hotel in the upper yard and eat his fill. This is all the truth. Honestly!

So, we’re taking in concerts at the local bar, there’s only one open, eating with Turks, going to ruins, meeting the smartest man in Turkey, Doctor Sakir Bey, and having a hell of a time.

We dine out three meals a day, Marilyn haunts the carpet shops that are open and becomes a budding expert on Eastern carpets and I start writing The Last Horseman. It’s Paradise! We buy dinner for friends, drink and drive here and there and at the end of the day, the total expense comes to about $11.00US!

Then Paradise is put on hold. You do not wear shoes in a Turkish home. There’s always a bunch of slippers at the front doors, and I just went bare foot. All too small. So one night we come home from partying and I open the door. It’s total darkness until we get two steps in. Too bad. Marilyn is barefooted, steps in and puts a foot right in the middle of some slippery mess. I turn on the light, she stares at the ceiling, and demands I remove what ever she stepped in at once. It’s a gutted rat. Ripped open and enthralls gone. A gift from Miro.

It takes weeks for her to drop the subject. Whoops! Be able to discuss it. And then come Quran Byram. All of a sudden goats begin appearing in the village. Just few, tethered to fences or penned in yards. But as the week goes on there are more and more. By Thursday the place is over run by bleating goats. You go to bed to their harmonies and you are wakened by the goat alarm clock.

Then Friday we awake to sound of chomping axes, and machetes. The side street where we live is running blood. The chopping goes on and on. We round a corner and five goat carcass are hung in a protesting lemon tree. The two males are hacking away, and dropping pieces of skinned goat on the pile at their feet. Goat lungs are a separate pile. When we rush to Dr. Sakir’s office he smile and tells us that this is Byram and the custom is to slaughter a goat and give the meat to the poor. We take that in stride. Sure we do. Later Mustafa asks if we can use our truck to take some meat up to the villages in the mountains and we agree. It’s wrapped in plastic and off we go. I promise to do a Turkish village view another time.

We come home after hours tracking small dirt roads and what do we find? The mayor has left a note. We head up to his office, a little afraid that maybe we’ve over stayed our visa. We haven’t. He just wanted to be sure that his gift, two bags of bloody goat meat has been delivered first hand. So it goes. So the question is, what the hell do we do with this meat, beside feed it to Miro? We can’t do that. It would be an insult. So again consulting Dr. Sakir, we head off to the mountains the next morning with him and make gifts which in his words, “ Will be remembered for ages.”