THE VILLAGE AND THE CITY
A EurasiaNet Photo Essay by YIgal Schleifer: 8/01/03

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Wedged into the mountainous northeast corner of Turkey near the Georgian border, Barhal can be reached only via a winding and rutted road. It seems to be one of those places forgotten by time, its residents bypassed by modern life. But looks can be deceiving. Most villagers have integrated long-held traditions into a thoroughly modern lifestyle.

Barhal is a hive of rustic activity during the summer, when women with baskets on their backs can be seen weeding their small plots of land. It becomes a virtual ghost town the rest of the year, when most of the village’s several hundred residents head off to work in Istanbul and other cities, living thoroughly urban lives.

In Istanbul, the people from Barhal have quietly made their mark, establishing a popular restaurant chain called Saray, famous for its milk-pudding desserts and which offers steady employment for those coming to the city from the village. The current mayor of Beyoglu, one of Istanbul’s oldest districts, is, in fact, a Barhal villager.

"For the last eight or ten years, there really hasn’t been any work in the village," says Huseyin Gevsek, the 48-year-old manager of another Istanbul restaurant staffed mostly by Barhal villagers. "People either go back there to retire or live there off the money their relatives make in Istanbul."

Village residents return to Barhal in the summer for vacation or to work their land. Summer is also the time when some of the younger residents come back to get married, as did Ali Yazici and Saadet Tiras recently. The couple’s wedding party is documented in this photo essay. Yazici, 28, is a construction worker living just outside of Istanbul. Tiras, 20, is a distant cousin of Yazici’s who, up until her early July wedding, was living in Barhal all year round.

The party was held on a sunny Saturday afternoon. In the grassy yard of a traditional wooden home set off a dirt road, big pots of rice, lamb and green beans are cooking over open fires. The guests sit on benches, made out of rough wooden planks, which have been made for the occasion.

The arrival of the bride and her entourage is signaled with several loud shotgun blasts coming from down the road. A friend of the groom’s answers back with his own shotgun blast, and then several more, as the groom anxiously puffs away on a cigarette.

The bride, covered in a gauzy red veil, arrives and is taken inside the house. The men and women eat separately. After the meal, the men unceremoniously yank the benches out of the ground and form a large circle, dancing to the droning sound of the tulum, a bagpipe-like instrument. The women, cloistered inside the house, dance in their own circle to music coming out of a small cassette player.

In a few weeks, most of them will return to their jobs in the city, leaving the village behind once again. In that sense, the party seemed as much a chance to celebrate the wedding of the couple, as it was to celebrate the participants’ enduring ties to their village and its way of life.

"I earn a living in Istanbul, but I have never lost my connection to my village," says Gevsek, the Istanbul restaurant manager. "But now I feel like a Barhal man and an Istanbul resident. I have adapted to both lives. But if I didn’t have to earn money for my children’s education, I would go back to the village in a second."

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Posted August 1, 2003 © Eurasianet
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