15 Dec
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/33222252[/vimeo]
It’s time for me to start travelling again. I have much more fun on my travels than when I am holed up in my loft, however gorgeous it is. And it is not in Shoreditch that I am going to push the door of a normal looking building to find rather good looking young men making yufka the way their fathers and grandfathers did before them. Or mothers and grandmothers as they would have done in earlier times. These guys were working on the ground floor of a regular building in Gaziantep in south eastern Turkey right next door to my favourite ice cream place, Ozgüler. I would have missed them if it wasn’t for the big sign advertising yufka. Unlike filo, yufka is slightly baked after being rolled out.
Share this :
26 Sep
I still remember that fleeting image of red peppers lining the road as I drove from Izmir back to Istanbul at the end of a fabulous boat trip way back in 1982. I didn’t stop and always regretted not having taken a closer look. So, when I came across a similar scene a couple of weeks back as Jason, Filiz and I drove from Gaziantep to Maras, I immediately asked the driver to stop the car.
The set-up was slightly different. The sheets were further away from the road, spread in the middle of the fields, and there were no women working – back then, it was all women, dressed in the typical floral pants, busy spreading fresh peppers or packing already dried ones. This time, they were just men and the sheets were plastic and fairly dark as against the brilliant white cotton ones I saw back then. Still, the work was the same. The men were spreading fresh peppers to dry or gathering the already dried ones to pack into large bags to carry to market. Read more >
Share this :
17 Sep
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/15045623[/vimeo]
I am finally starting to find my way around Gaziantep — I have the worst sense of direction ever and I still get lost after several visits to the city — but now I know how to get to my favourite jeweller in the city. Gold is very important in Gaziantep and people buy kilograms of it to celebrate weddings and births. In any case, Platin Jewellers is on Gaziler Caddesi, a pedestrian thoroughfare like Istiklal street in Istanbul, and it is owned by the wonderful father and brothers of my equally wonderful friend, Filiz Hosukoglu. As I walked back from the shop, having bought a miserable 4.2 grams of gold ( or a sweet pair of earrings for my niece), I heard loud chanting and saw a whole group of licorice drink sellers distributing free drinks while invoking Allah in all his merciful ways and in between, shouting hayrat, hayrat (from the Arabic word khayr and meaning distribution, good deed or gift). I didn’t quite understand what was going on until later when Filiz and then Tim, the lovely owner of Anadolu Evleri, another of my favourite places in Gaziantep, explained it all to me.