First days in Kurdish Diyanbakir

· We are staying in the “old city” – surrounded by a six kilometer long, 20 metre thick stonewall (enough to contain many rooms) running about 15 metres high – within which is a dense, crowded, frantically busy mix of shops of every kind, hotels, offices, markets and mosques. The first day we walk much of the wall, sometimes inside, sometimes out, sometimes on narrow footpaths on top, although my session of vertigo up there quickly makes me return to terra firma quickly. Begging urchins meet us with hands out, ‘money’ on their lips. In some areas, thick ruins of hovels cling to the outer wall. It’s in one of these areas, where I’ve gone in search of some lion reliefs on an outer wall tower, that a group of small boys approach, led by the tallest (perhaps eight or nine) with a mangy dog on leash, the whole gang asking for money and the tallest (self-conscious machismo, dramatic eyes and voice) threatening to set his dog on me, a dog far more interested in the garbage nearby. It was all like pretend gangsterism, all the more comical because guidebooks caution against walking along the walls alone because of real thieving gangs.
· In search of the small town bus ‘station’, we find ourselves in an open market with mounds of cabbages and cantaloupe each the size of very large watermelons (and the watermelons are exceptionally large in these parts), the usual displays of pomegranates and peppers, but also an area where men bring in chickens to be throttled and plucked. Three arrived per sack, heads sticking out through their own holes. Other carts were laden with live chickens. Nearby, two men squat in a puddle of feathers, plucking away. When I asked to take some photos, one of those ‘Turkish’ moments seemed to erupt: – excited conversation from every direction, posing and posing again, then more discussion and I’m urged to mail the photo, which I agree to do (I already have a long list of addresses from other days and other photos). Then someone is found who can write the name and address, which itself sparks another burst of comments. When I re-write the address, checking word by word, eight or ten men watching carefully, each offering opinions … then suddenly it’s all over. A circle of quieter conversation closes again around the chicken carts and pluckers … apart from one man who has been leading many of these exchanges, and who now beckons me aside and asks for his own photo to be taken, striking a very self-consciously master pose. No talk of address. He seems to want the special attention and to just see the result on the screen. Satisfied , I guess, he goes about his day.
· It’s time stop referring to crowded Turkish city neighbourhoods and the frantic whirl of sounds, people, voices, colours, smells. This is ‘normal’, as one Turk said today.
· A word that takes me back to Istanbul: I read today that the great flat round hot stone on which you lay with others in the hamams is called a ‘gőbektasi’, literally: navel stone.