I’m not sure where everyone started speaking Kurdish. If it wasn’t Ardahan, it was certainly Kars. Kurdistan on our route continued through Kars, Iğdır, Ağrı, and onto Karayazı and Tekman İlçes in Erzurum. Back now in the city of Erzurum, it’s nice, given my language skills, to hear Turkish spoken on the street.
Being Kurdish for some people is specifically not being Turkish while others are happily Kurdish and Turkish as part of the Turkish Republic. Still other Kurds will barely even acknowledge that they’re Kurdish instead insisting that everyone is Turkish, and it doesn’t matter. I’m not sure how directly these attitudes correspond to political support. I certainly felt more comfortable dissing Erdoğan in the Kurdish parts of the country. No one seemed very fond of him.
The Kurds are mainly represented by the Barış ve Demokrasi Parti (BDP; Peace and Democracy Party) in parliament. Some folks in Kurdistan (a term that Turks generally disapprove of) voiced support to me for the PKK, which is officially a terrorist group according to the Turkish government and has no members in parliament. How analogous the BDP and PKK are to the PLO and Hamas is unclear to me. In Dağpınar I happened to meet the only member of parliament to represent Kars, a tall, skinny woman, dressed in pants and not wearing a headscarf.
The superb, famous Turkish hospitality continued. However, there was a twist, a dichotomy, let’s say. No where else in Turkey have I been greeted with “money, money” by the boys. Telling them it was shameful (ayıp) almost always got them to stop and often look embarrassed. A couple times adults even asked me for money or, once, for chocolate! If others folks heard this, they would often apologize for their neighbour’s behaviour.
On the other hand people would give us food and once even a beautiful bottle of olive oil, cheese, bread, basil, homemade jam — I can’t remember what all was in that bag. That in the same village where young men had persistently followed us pestering us for money. In one tiny village, Işıklar, a small boy offered me one of his treasured cakes that he was carrying around. How touching!
In Karabağ a couple kindly invited us to stay at their house where we enjoyed iftar (breaking the daily Ramadan fast) together at the end of the day. In the morning, however, the man wanted us to fill his motorcycle with petrol — not an inexpensive treat with petrol running around US$9.33/gallon. Such odd behaviour.
