Turkish Dynamite

One perfect, balmy night in a small Turkish town, I met Hulya Celek.

Back home, I find myself thinking of her at odd moments. I am glad I met her. Her spirit inspires me. Her confidence uplifts me. Her kindness, warmth, hospitality and above all, her laughter as as she constantly battles the custodians of tradition make her unforgettable.

It was Rubik’s 16th birthday and we were in Selcuk in Turkey. We spent the morning lazing and walking around the town centre, then went to the Pamucak Beach (about 7 kms West of Selcuk) to swim all afternoon in the special Agean blue in Rubik’s honour.

In the evening, after a revitalizing swim in the heated hotel pool, we walked back to the town centre for dinner. On the way, we saw a bakery and bought a birthday cake for Rubik. Cake in hand, we stopped often to admire the colourful shops full of exquisite carpets, kilims, clothes, ceramics and silver displayed in the shop windows. As we crossed a shop, we heard a clear, loud voice calling from behind us,

“So whose birthday is it?”
Rubik turned shyly and made an automatic reply: “mine.”

A diminutive woman with dark hair and expressive eyes walked up to him and gave his hand an enthusiastic shake. “Happy Birthday.” We exchanged polite pleasantries for a while and went our way.

On our last evening in Selcuk, we went shopping. Rubik wanted to visit the shop of the woman who had wished him so warmly on his birthday, and so we went. The children went into the shop to browse for gifts for their friends while we stood outside on the sidewalk. We could see the lady talk to them animatedly and we heard shouts of intermittent laughter wafting out of the shop. After what seemed to be a long time, I went in to get my children out and found that they had really bonded with the tiny Turkish woman.

They must have spent close to an hour in that shop and Hulya had only about 4 YTL in sales to show for it. But selling didn’t seem to be her primary goal. She was just enjoying the children. “Allah hasn’t given me any of my own, so you must let me enjoy yours for a little bit” she said.

Hulya and I hit it off immediately. While we were inside the shop chatting, her husband was talking to my husband on the sidewalk. As she gave the children their change, Hulya suddenly asked me if I would join her for a cup of chai. I said yes and we found ourselves sitting with our spouses on a table and 4 chairs on the sidewalk, poring over Turkey maps and chatting about Sufism and life in Turkey over many, many cups of apple tea.

Hulya talked to us about her difficulties as a woman entrepreneur in a society where owning and running a retail business was still very much a male bastion. She was constantly bad-mouthed by her neighbours and small, niggling troubles kept being sent her way by other shop-keepers and the keepers of tradition around her.

She talked about the gender prejudices just under the skin of “modern” Turkey. She was candidly scathing about the “new” Turkish women of the big cities (“I know it is so wrong of me but forgive me, Allah, for talking badly of other people!”) and the contempt most men still held for women like her who wanted to live and work like men (“because you see, our hair is long so our brains are much smaller”). The contempt, she said, extended unfortunately to her husband, who was seen as less than a man because he chose to play a supporting role in what was essentially her business.

We were joined somewhere along the evening by Margaret, an Irish woman who was on an extended trip to Turkey and the conversation turned to the seamier side of the tourist boom, which was luring little girls and boys to all the wrong things (“easy money, gambling, little dresses, pubs, discos, drugs--they don’t want to work anymore!”); the thriving “granny tourism” in the Ephesus-Kusadasi area (where older western women were “entertained” by young Turkish men in exchange for gifts and good times) and the general failure of the system vis-à-vis the common citizen.

As we talked about her life, her world, our world and the world in general, cups of apple tea kept materializing and when we reluctantly got up to go back to the hotel, we realized that it was almost 1am!

We walked back to the hotel hand in hand, thinking of the children, hoping they were fast asleep. When we sent them back to the hotel from Hulya’s shop, it was only about 7.30 pm and we had told them we’d join them in half an hour or so.

Rubik was waiting for us in the lobby pacing anxiously and looking like an irate dad.

“Don’t you guys have any sense of responsibility? Is this your half an hour? I was just about to go looking for you!”

We slinked quietly, guiltily, to our room.