From Turkey, Recipes And Tales from The Road
Posted: 26/11/2010 8:24:01 a.m.
Doğubeyazıt has been interesting…and not a little heartbreaking. A predominantly Kurdish border town with famously high unemployment, it is poor. And awash in goods smuggled in from nearby Iran (cigarettes, clothing, honey, gasoline); loads of people make their living by wheeling and dealing in black market stuff. The Turkish military station a heap of troops here and their presence on the streets, in the form of heavily armed personnel and armoured vehicles, is a touch heavy for my taste. Streets are down-at-heel and thick with men with not much more to do than drink tea and smoke. As the only western tourist for miles I am the subject of much harmless curiosity. From my digs, fittingly called the Ararat Hotel, I had, if I pushed my torso precariously over the edge of my tatty, cracked concrete balcony, vistas of the majestic Mount Ararat, Turkeys’ highest peak. The cone, even in June, is bright with snow.
High above the town, perched magnificently on a rocky hill overlooking Ararat, the town and the surrounding plain, is the İshak Paşa Palace, one of the most talismanic sights in all of Turkey. It’s the reason most tourists come to Doğubeyazıt at all. Essentially I like the town, if only because it makes no concessions to the visitor- this is as real and as gritty as travel in Turkey can get. My hotel is empty of guests and the hot water isn’t working. I bathe at the local hamam ( Turkish bath house), a seething, humid warren of rooms chock-full of naked women lathering themselves and scrubbing dirty children. It’s too much confronting local colour, even for me. The washing frenzy grinds to a halt at the spectacle of a blonde gebanci in the buff so, with every pair of eyes staring hard at me, I sluice my dusty bits in extreme haste, grab my clothes and scuttle out.
There’s a 6 kilometer-or-so schlep between the town and the palace and I am keen to walk but a local guide warns me off. There are dogs on the way and he tells me they bite. I believe him- I’ve seen those indigenous Anatolian dogs (the most common breed is the Kangol) and they’re monsters. Fully grown males are around 75cm tall and weigh more than I do. Some Chinese girls got savaged here a few months earlier and had to be medi-vac’ed four hours to Erzurum for treatment. The thought of having to go back to Erzurum for any reason whatsoever (the fabulous cağ kebab and heavenly, walnut-stuffed kadaif dolma notwithstanding) was enough to convince me I didn’t need to risk it.
The palace is stunning. Construction started in 1685 and went on for no less than 99 years- which hints at the scale and complexity of the place. A succession of courtyards and grand rooms are accessed through doorways festooned with carved stone portals- the door leading into the large harem is particularly dazzling. As is the decoration in the palace dining room, a glorious confusion of Georgian, Seljuk and Armenian motifs and details. Sumptuous though it must once have been (much of the interior detailing has been lost and the long gone roof is being replaced with a new one), I wonder what life would have been like here for the women cooped up all those centuries ago. In the harem are just two large windows to afford views over the desolate, empty landscape. I can’t imagine living in such isolation, no matter how gilded the cage. Shuddering at the thought, I become aware of invitingly smoky food smells and leave the palace to find the source. It is Sunday which signals just one thing in many parts of Turkey- ‘picnics’! Picnicking invariably involves the hurling of vast amounts of meat onto portable charcoal-burning barbecues. Families congregate en masse somewhere open-air and scenic, such as a park, a patch of forest or, well, on the side of the hill overlooking the palace. The men take charge of the grilling. They concentrate intently on cooking their kebabs and pieces of chicken to charred perfection and bring to mind Australian blokes who similarly rise to the occasion for a barbecue. All that’s missing here are the beers and the inevitable bad aprons. The women attend to salad-making and peeling the blackened skins off grilled aubergines, peppers and tomatoes on rugs near by. The atmosphere is festive and everyone begs me to join them for lunch. I wish I could but I’ve lined up a Kurdish village to visit where my guide promises me there'll be food at a friends’ house.
The drive to the village is through a flat, featureless countryside that seems to produce not much more than tough, short grass. A gloomy blast of grey weather comes in and it seems to suit the landscape perfectly. Here and there children straggle after small flocks of brown and white fat tailed sheep. The flat terrain is broken occasionally by grey stone walls and small villages; these are ragged affairs as people here are poor. Dirt poor. Many are small land holders- or own no land at all and work as laborers or herders for bigger land lords. At this time of the year the villages are half-emptied; people have taken their large flocks up to the yaylas, or summer grazing on higher ground where the pastures are lush. As is common all over this part of Turkey, they camp there for the duration of the warmer weather then return to the villages when the season changes. This is a centuries-old practice from a time when mountainous Anatolia was full of nomads who followed the weather and the good grazing across the vast alpine landscape. There’s still a great reliance on foods sourced and preserved during warmer months for winter survival. During winter the women spin wool and fashion it into hand knitted garments; at the local store in the village I visit with Suley, my guide, I buy some socks.
True to his promise, we visit Suleys’ friend who invites us for lunch. Hers is a typical village home, with one large room where most of the living is done, and a few smaller ones adjoining. I don’t get to see her kitchen. But from out of it – or from somewhere- she produces a simple home made feast, spreading it out on a large plastic mat on the floor. There’s home-churned butter, home made sheep’s’ milk yoghurt, home made cheese, some olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, boiled eggs and, for a sweet finish, chunks of halva. And plenty of fresh bread and gallons of tea. Although she’s younger than me at 45, our host’s face bears testimony to a hard, hard life. She speaks no English but Suley tells me she was married off at 15 to a man much older than herself who proceeded to die fairly early in the piece- although not before providing her with 5 children to feed. In a country with no social security. Two of her young grandchildren sit in a corner and stare hard at me as if I’ve just blown in from Mars. Which I might as well have for all the contact with foreigners they get here. I need to use the bathroom and she’s' embarrassed to show me a secluded corner of dirt outside, set against the wall surrounding her house. I’m humbled that someone with clearly so little to give should so generously offer a complete stranger warm hospitality. Although rustic in the extreme, the food tastes sensational. I can’t recall when I last had eggs with so much flavor and such rich, golden yolks. The bread is chewy and wheaty and vaguely smoky from the oven and the yoghurt tangy, thick and filling. Even the cucumbers, generally not my favorite foodstuff, have a deep, earthy sweetness that quite surprises me. “Village food” shrugs Suley when I exclaim how good it all is. I try to imagine what life would be like here in winter. Electricity is expensive in Turkey and people in these neck of the woods burn hard cakes of sundried animal dung, prepared during the summer months, for heating and cooking. Although it's technically summer, the wind blows damp and cold and the ‘grounds’ of the local primary school are a muddy slick. I poke my nose into the Spartan school room and am mobbed by 35 or so excited young kids. Their teacher graciously suspends her lesson so they can trial their English on me….what is my name, where am I from, how old am I etcetc. Hopefully prospects are brighter for this generation although there’s still a big gap in education and wealth between these eastern most parts of the country and the west. The nation of Turkey, I remind myself for the umpteenth time, is a complex place and still struggling to recover from the tumult of its’ recent past.
Back in town that night, I’m not the vaguest bit hungry but force myself to sample the local specialty called abdigör köfte, at the Yöresel Yemek Evi (literally “local food house”), a restaurant serving home-style food. The cooks are Kurdish women whose husbands are in prison. As is often the case in Turkey it is difficult to find home-style food in restaurants. The soup, kebab, salad-on-the-side formula is ubiquitous country wide and I've had to look hard to find anything different. Here, the food is served from bain maries, lokanta-style and, typical of Kurdish cooking, it’s heavy on stews served over rice. This is sturdy, no-nonsense fare that reflects the austerity of the climate here. They use the sac, a heavy, steel wok-like pan for cooking one of the regions’ famous offerings Saç Kavurmasi, literally ‘iron bowl stew”. The köfte, thought to be named after İshak Paşa’s father Abdi, are large, fist-sized meatballs molded around a central core of butter. Lean, fresh, tendon-free beef is used and it has to be good quality. Bound with eggs, a little onion and some mild spices it is first tenderized with a wooden mallet then left to rest. Once shaped, the balls are poached in water; while this all sounds simple enough the process is actually quite time consuming and these days it is hard to find a good version. Like all the best food in Turkey these köfte sound terribly plain on paper but the end result is greater, in terms of texture and flavour, than the sum of the simple parts.