Kurban Bayram

It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to a day.

Sally had arranged to meet Wayne at a bus stop in the middle of Istanbul. The initial hurdle was the location. Tarlabaşı is a long street that connects touristy Taksim square with the bridge to Eminönü, an equally touristy area. Taksim is the so-called centre of Istanbul. It’s where most public transport services start and finish: Metro, dolmuş (yellow taxi vans), taxis, and buses. It’s also a good starting point if you want to go shopping, window gazing, or tourist spotting along the forever crowded Istiklal street. Eminönü, by contrast, houses the famous Grand Bazaar.

The difficulty for them wasn’t finding Tarlabaşı, but finding the correct bus stop along this major through route.

Wayne was pretty sure he had the right one pictured in his mind. They’d agreed to meet by the bus stop that was closest to Pera Museum. Luckily the bus stops were far apart so there weren’t so many to choose from near Pera. It turned out that he did in fact have the right bus stop. So in the end it wasn’t the location that made for the auspicious start to their day.

The second issue, as is often the case in Istanbul, was timing. Generally there is little chance of two people arriving at an agreed meeting point at an agreed time. Distances that usually take 20 minutes can, on some days, take 2 hours. When the local municipality decides, for example, that major road works are required, they close down one or two lanes to traffic and this causes the normally slow traffic flow to grind to a halt.

On top of this the impatient drivers tend to ignore possible gridlock situations and simply plough on ahead at intersections and thus end up in the middle of them at a stand still loudly honking their horns asking those in front to move along.

The reason for their outing was that it was Kurban Bayram. Turkey has two main bayram (religious celebrations) during the year: şeker and kurban bayram. During Kurban Bayram Muslim families sacrifice an animal “to honour the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his first-born son Ishmael”¹.

Whilst some do this themselves the majority prefer to leave it in the hands of experts. Historically this meant that streets like Tarlabaşı would be covered in animal blood on the next working day. In 2010 the government created a law preventing this, stating that slaughtering could only take place in designated areas. The general interpretation of this law by the people is: you can kill animals anywhere you like provided you don’t get caught. Hence what happens in practice is some people gather in local neighbourhood car parks early on a Saturday morning to perform or observe the ceremony. A mechanical hoist is brought in together with a reasonable head of cattle. The local butchers are then the masters of ceremonies.

Wayne, deciding that Sally would be late, headed off in the direction of the junction that he and Sally would need to take off Tarlabaşı to reach Kasımpaşa. They had heard there was a chance of finding a slaughtering taking place in Kasımpaşa as this was a traditional area for kurban bayram. Whilst he was walking he sent a text message to Sally.

“I’m walking down Tarlabaşı” were his exact words.

Sally, being an accommodating woman, quietly accepted this when she’d rather have asked why wasn’t he waiting at the meeting point. So she too started walking down the street.

Six rapid text messages later and the fact that they hadn’t met up made them realise they weren’t walking down the same street. Following the text messages an argument ensued about how Wayne’s initial message was or wasn’t clear, depending on whose perspective you took. Sally had walked down a steep hill from the junction and was already in Kasımpaşa.

The process of sending text messages already had them steaming under their collars. When Wayne said to Sally that they should walk back to the bus stop she ‘lost her toys’.

“I’m not walking back up that steep hill!” she screamed down the phone at him. “Why weren’t you at the bus stop at 9 like we agreed?” she asked.

This, in turn, had Wayne fuming because he had been at the bus stop at 9am.

“I was there! Where were you?!” he retorted.

“I was there!” she barked back.

Further discussion ensued and the final straw was when Wayne, in a heated moment, called Sally “Sarah” by mistake. It was an innocent mistake – he was always confusing them with each other. Upon hearing her name Sally promptly cancelled the call on her mobile.

“Ugh!” Wayne said to himself. He of course realised his error. Furthermore he understood how she felt. Killing the call seemed a bit abrupt, but he wasn’t in a position to argue the point. He also realised he would now need to ‘eat humble pie’. Even though he knew he should call and apologise, he just couldn’t bring himself round to admitting he’d made a mistake.

Instead he continued walking back to the bus stop wondering what he would do with his now empty day of the day. He briefly considered walking into Kasımpaşa alone, but the prospect of spending the day by himself wasn’t appealing. Thus he decided to head back home to his warm bed and try to forget all about it.

In the back of his mind was the slim chance that he might spot her. He had had a feeling that they were quite close to each other when they were talking on the phone. During the conversation they had discovered that they where at the exact same place at 9am except that they were on opposite sides of Tarlabaşı’s wide street and had simply not seen each other.

As Wayne looked up the street he noticed someone he thought he recognised as Sally sitting down at the bus stop. His hopes were raised that the day wasn’t going to be a total disaster.

When he reached the bus stop he found a sad and dejected Sally.

“Hey” he posed tentatively.

“Mm” was the response he got in return.

Whilst he still wanting to defend himself and suggest it was a bit childish to hang up the phone, luckily for him he realised this wasn’t going to take him anywhere he wanted to go.

“Sorry” he forced himself to say. He continued to apologise. It wasn’t looking good. His optimism that the day could be recovered was rapidly diminishing. He wondered what he could do to rectify his misdemeanour.

In the end frustration got the better of him.

“Are you going to stay like this or can we put the past behind us?” he asked. He’d said this before he considered the responses he might get so immediately after uttering it he was immensely nervous.

For the second time that day he was lucky. Sally took his question well and realising that she too wanted to turn things around changed her tone of voice and was more welcoming.

They finally managed to patch things up and headed down the road to Kasımpaşa together.

Once they reached the outskirts of Kasımpaşa they realised they didn’t have any idea where in Kasımpaşa they should go. Neither of their Turkish was good enough to ask a local so they choose a random direction and looked about for a suitable sign or clue as to where there might be some people conducting the bayram ceremony.

Wayne was getting a little edgy as he didn’t want to spend the next two hours randomly walking around Istanbul with no result for their efforts.

Just as he was about to ask Sally for the fourth time if she minded walking around without knowing where to go, he spotted two men out of the corner of his eye. Later he couldn’t say what drew his attention to them other than they seemed to be walking with a purpose.

“Hey. Shall we follow them?” he asked Sally conspiratorially.

“Erm. I don’t know.” she hesitantly replied.

She had already explained to Wayne how she felt a little unsafe in this area. It wasn’t until she mentioned it that he noticed the lack of women. She also said that there was no chance she would have come here alone. It wasn’t the first time Wayne was reminded of a woman’s perspective of the city. Most of the time he was oblivious to the danger for women, so when reminded it took him a little by surprise no matter how much he understood the reality of the situation.

Nevertheless he encouraged her to join him in the little adventure and follow them.

At last the inauspicious start to the day had turned. As they walked through the small doorway they found themselves in a small car park with 8 cars, 12 cows, and a small crowd of locals.

Two cows lay on the ground in various states of being slaughtered and a third was in small pieces by a covered area of the car park. So all in all there were three distinct groups at work on different cows.

After the initial affronting smell and unusual site Wayne settled down to watching the show. He had forgotten, but Sally reminded him that she was a country girl and this kind of thing was common where she came from.

They agreed that it was worth waiting around to see an actual kill as they had both seen animals being skinned and chopped up before coming to Turkey.

Before they got their chance a group of 3 men approached them. They looked harmless enough. One was an elderly man of about 70, one closer to their age – roughly 35, and the last a youngster who seemed to be just tagging along.

“Hello” the middle aged one offered in a friendly manner. “What are you doing here?”

Sally and Wayne both suspected this might be the end of the show. However, it turned out that they were just concerned about strange people being aware of the illegal activities.

They asked how we knew there were cows in the car park and we explained that it was just by pure chance that they were there. Either way they made a good impression on the locals. It was just as well they’d both been keenly aware that pulling out a camera and acting like tourists would have had dire consequences.

After a little more friendly banter between the two groups the locals wished Sally and Wayne well and left them to it.

It was about this time that a new animal was being shepherded over the to the temporary winch.

Their opportunity to observe the slaughtering had come.

It took quite a long time to get everything in place and ready. First the animal had one hind leg tied to the winches’ hook. This was then cranked up high in the air to reduce the cow’s mobility. Once in the air they tied her hind legs together and lowered her to the ground. Then it was the turn for her fore legs to be bound which took a little longer, as she had more freedom to kick about on the ground.

After she was fully bound various men took positions around her to hold her down and ensure she didn’t trash about.

Whilst this was happening I noticed a young man approach the cow with some knifes in his hand. Initially he looked fine, but as proceedings progressed he looked more and more nervous.

At first he tried to help hold her steady, but as he wasn’t overly large or strong he left it to the others.

As he had stationed himself by her head and was holding the only knives I presumed that he was going to conduct the sacrifice. This proved to be the case.

After a bit of struggling she finally settled down and relaxed. This was when the “ceremony” started. The young man said a prayer to Allah and then started carving away at her neck with a tiny butchers knife.

The first thing that struck Wayne as odd was that it wasn’t just a case of making a large chop to her neck. For some reason he thought it would be over in a matter of seconds. The second thing was that she remained calm whilst her neck was being cut. This Wayne found incredibly bizarre. How could she not feel her neck being sliced open?

He wasn’t aware of Sally’s thoughts and given that she didn’t say anything and had been brought up near farms he guessed it wasn’t of any consequence to her.

As the process continued the cow started to get agitated. At this point there was a clear cut and the young man was getting further into her neck.

An older man, probably the local butcher, came up to him and gave him a different knife, which made a huge difference. The new knife was clearly sharper than the previous one, as the work then continued at a much faster pace.

At this point both Wayne and Sally had a clear view of the cow’s inner workings and she was noticeably feeling the pain. The windpipe was broken and she was violently thrashing at this point.

The men holding her down were visibly anxious. Sally felt that this was because they were loosing their grip on her and things looked to get much worse. However, Sally and Wayne became aware that the source of the mens’ concern was not for themselves but for the cow.

Indeed, a mother, with her flock of children nearby, had her charges turn away from the miserable cow and look at her instead. Sally told Wayne later that she was asking them questions about school as a way to distract them from the poor cow.

One of the elder men couldn’t bear watching any longer and took over from the young man. He immediately commenced jabbing at a particular spot and, although it still took a while for the stressed cow to die, she finally gave in.

Not long after both Wayne and Sally left the crowd to their tasks and headed out of the car park.

On reflection what had been a tortuous start to the day had completely turned for the good. Both Wayne and Sally were happy that they had been so lucky to be able to witness the ceremony.

¹ Source: Wikipedia