Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday in the US. Sure, a lot of turkeys are sacrificed, but it’s really all about a time to get together with friends and family and eat and drink and talk. My first experience spending Kurban Bayramı with a Turkish family reminded me of US Thanksgiving. Here, however, we give thanks for not being a sheep (or a goat or maybe even a cow). Another difference is that there’s not as much as drinking in Turkey. Indeed one friend told me that in his family they ate a chicken on Kurban Bayramı because they wanted to drink rakı with their holiday meal.
Chickens and rakı? That probably needs some explanation. Kurban Bayramı in English is Sacrifice Holiday or something like that. It’s a religious holiday in origin celebrated 40 days after the end of Ramadan or something like that. The animal (a sheep, goat, or cow) is sacrificed as an offering to Allah (I’m really going out on a limb here) and since Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol, they’re particularly not supposed to drink alcohol with the sacrificed animal. Following this logic (is there any logic to follow here at all?) if you want to drink alcohol with your animal, make it a chicken. I suppose a pig would work just as well, but good luck finding a pig in Antalya.
I met Hatice in the morning at the covered pazar near her house. I think it was her brother-in-law, Tuncay, or maybe her father who was at the pazar at 4am to get in line for the butcher. They bargained for the sheep (one for Tuncay and one for Hatice’s father) and got tags 25 and 26, indicating the order for the butcher. It was after 9am by the time the butchers were slitting the throats of our sheep. The sacrifice is done with such little ceremony that I wonder why they bother. Most of the Turks I know, including Hatice, think it’s a gruesome, out-dated practice sort of like what the Mexicans now think of bull-fighting. Once again PETA wasn’t there.
