A freezing rain was falling. Everything was covered in mud. But no one bothered me. The politeness of the Turks I’d met so far had been astounding. I’d come expecting sodomy and Midnight Express, and instead I got Miss Manners. Why, the entire airplane had burst into applause when our pilot had managed a successful landing in Izmir. The only sour note had been a fellow passenger who told me that hotels in Konya were so scarce, I’d probably have to sleep in the local jail.
“My friend,” said a voice in English. “Where are you going?”
A teenage boy in a leather jacket was blocking my way. I told him I was lost. He took me to a rambling old building that reeked of urine. Another man showed me a room with a wood burning stove. One million lira, he said. One million? I thought sleepily. Then I realized it was five U.S. dollars. Beats prison, I thought, lying down on the rough woolen blanket. I was asleep instantly.
THE FRENCH, THE DUTCH, AND THE ETHIOPIANS EACH STYLE themselves as the heavy in making coffee the world’s most popular drug. But it’s the Turks who are The Man. They were the ones who’d controlled the port of Mocha during its heyday. A Turkish ambassador introduced the French to coffee. Retreating Turkish soldiers abandoned those fateful bags of beans at the gates of Vienna, and Turkish merchants addicted all of the Adriatic Coast.
My reason for coming to Konya, however, was our old friends the Sufi mystics. If it was the Sufis of Yemen who discovered coffee, it was the Turkish Sufis who spread it throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Konya was the headquarters for their most famous Sufi brotherhood, the Mevlanas, known as the whirling dervishes, because they achieve a religious ecstasy by first sharing a pot of ceremonial coffee and then spinning in one spot for hours on end. The week I arrived in Konya they were holding their greatest festival, the Wedding Night, celebrating their founder’s death seven hundred years earlier.
I woke up from my nap completely disoriented. All I remembered about my trip was the plateau around Konya, an ocean of green that had swelled in one seamless wave up into the grey dawn. I had no memory of getting off the train or checking into the hotel. I noticed a business card lying on the bed.
Excellent! Quality! Priceliness!
Ataturk Shopping Center
Turkish Carpets
I remembered: The boy who’d brought me here had given it to me. He had a carpet shop. I decided to go get lunch.
“My friend!” The boy was waiting for me outside. “How was your nap?”
I scowled. How had he known I was sleeping?
“My name is Ahmed. You will come to my shop and take tea? Very close.”
“Yes, hmm…” I said. “You have a carpet shop, yes?”
“Yes—but no sale! Money is not everything.”
“We are of one mind.” I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him for the bad news. “For you must realize that I have no interest whatsoever in purchasing a carpet.”
“Of course!” He tried to pull away. “No problem!”
I tightened my grip. “No, no. I will gladly come for a chat. I will even drink your tea. I will not buy a carpet.”
“Yes, yes…”
“Or a kil’m or a prayer rug…”
“No…”
“Or a shawl.”
“No shawls!”
“So I have told you and you understand?”
“Yesyesyes! No buy shawls. Come!”
I ended up taking tea with a gloomy middle-aged man who owned the shop. We talked about business (terrible!), then the weather (awful!). He seemed a touch morose, so I cheered him up by telling him about New York. Everybody carries guns, I said. They’re all high on drugs. It’s common for people to swing in through the window and rob you while you eat dinner.
He shook his head in disgust. “But tourists, they still come?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said. “It’s really much too dangerous. And the prices!”
A boy came in with a tray of tea.
“For example,” he said. “A cup of tea would cost…”
“Three hundred thousand lira,” I said. That’s $1.25. “But why do you drink tea? I thought that Turks drank only coffee.”
“No, maybe in the past. Now tea. It is our culture.” He shook his head dolefully. “Turkey is a modern country now.”
“It happens. But you know, I was told that in the old days, when the Ottomans ruled, a woman could get a divorce from her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee beans for her needs. Have you ever heard of this?”
“Beans?”
“Yes, you know.” I made a shape with my hand. “They are—”
“Yes, yes, I know beans.” He looked disgusted. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
And with that, he turned to his friend and ignored me. He didn’t even look up when I left. I asked Ahmed, who was loafing around outside the shop, why his boss might be so offended by my question about the beans.
“Beans?” he shrugged. “Who knows? My friend, listen. There is a French girl in your hotel.”
“Really?”
“Yes—I am telling you! You will help me catch her, yes?” He put his arm around my shoulder. “You catch her and bring her here to the carpet shop for me? We catch her together!”
“I’ll let her know that you’re looking for her,” I said truthfully. “Now about the dervishes…”
“For tickets you must go to the istadyum.”
“Istadyum?” I repeated. “What’s that?”
“Istaydum!” he repeated, making a motion with both hands like someone shooting a basket. “Istadyum! Ees biscuit ball.”
The whirling dervishes held their prayer ceremonies in a basketball stadium? At first I thought this was some special “tourist” performance, but it turned out that this was the only venue in which the government would allow the ceremony to take place. The whirling dervishes were actually illegal and had been so since the Ottoman Empire was overthrown in the early 1900s by the father of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. One of the first things that Ataturk did when he came to power was root out everything associated with the Ottomans. He rewrote the Turkish language, he outlawed beards, he even changed the weekend from Islamic Friday to Sunday The whirling dervishes were closely associated with the Ottomans, so he banned them outright, restricting the performance of their prayer ritual to once a year in Konya and then only as a “folk dance.”
Knowing this made sense of a peculiar incident I later saw at the so-called Whirling Dervish Museum. It began when an older woman in a black veil knelt in the museum doorway and began chanting. Two guards instantly pulled her to her feet. After a heated discussion, they let her go into the museum. I noticed one plainclothes guard following her around, tugging at her veil and hissing. Finally she slapped something into his hand, and they parted. But I’d caught the flash of Turkish lira—baksheesh.
I noticed a number of people discreetly praying before an exhibit of an elaborately decorated cask with a four-foot-tall turban set at one end. It turned out that this was the turban that had belonged to the cult’s founder, Mevlana Celealeddin-i Rumi, known in the West as the poet Rumi. The turban and the cask, which contained his body, were thought to possess magical powers. The supposed museum was actually a mosque, one of the holiest spots in Turkey, despite which any Muslim wishing to pray was obliged to pay off guards, who were under orders to prevent any kind of religious activity on the premises.
It’s still a touchy issue, especially with the growing power of the Turkish Islamic right wing. When I went to that evening’s “folk dance performance,” the program book said only that, upon overthrowing the Ottomans, Ataturk visited Rumi’s tomb and declared that “the large number of artifacts…in the convent and tomb rendered them a valuable museum collection.” There was no mention of the cult being banned or of the resulting tension. Everyone going in to see the performance, however, was frisked for weapons.
I have no idea whether American basketball is actually popular in
Turkey, but the place for that night’s performance was the real thing, right down to the huge Coca-Cola banners hanging from the ceiling. The only difference was the twelve-piece orchestra wearing fezzes sitting under the northern hoop. The place was full, and no sooner had I sat down than the main lights went off. There was a wandering flute solo. A pink spotlight hit a man in a business suit who proceeded to sing one of the longest, slowest songs I’ve ever heard, both profoundly passionate and, to my ears, slightly cheesy. It all made me think of a Las Vegas lounge act, the way he gestured, his suit, the cordless microphone. Then I realized that I was probably watching a mutation of the Sufis’ traditional coffee-sharing ceremony. His song had once been “the cries of devotion” that the dervishes sang out as they took coffee from the hand of their sheykah priest and achieved the marqaha, or coffee ecstasy, that was necessary for the night-long ceremonies. There are any number of descriptions of the ceremony from the eighteenth century, all roughly equivalent to the following excerpt from H. C. Lukas’s The City of the Dervishes:
In the lower order of the dervishes they would share a red pot of coffee, taking the cup directly horn the sheykah’s hand, squatting in a circle, crying out thanks to God, “Help us, oh Allah!” and starting to sway. “Ya Meded, Ya Allah! Ya Meded!” As they get worked up the cry and the swaying becomes more intense, the cry changed to “La ilaha illa, llah, la ilaha illa, llah! There is no God but God!” Finally to “Ya hu!” (Oh God!) The groups like the Howling Dervishes [called Naqshibendi] chant themselves into ecstasy. Some use the sword [called Rufa’i].
The importance early Sufis attached to coffee is indicated not only by its use at the beginning of their prayer ceremony and their passing the cup from hand to hand (a ritual of intoxication in Islamic eyes). The clue to coffee’s deeper significance is the color of the serving vessel. Almost all early manuscripts agree that the brew was served by the sheykah from a ceremonial red vessel. The color red had a special meaning to the dervishes. It symbolized the mystical union with God that was their goal in prayer and articles of that color were believed to stand on “the Threshold of the Spiritual World.” In the ceremony I was about to see, the sheykah sits on a red pelt and so becomes, by virtue of the pelt’s color, the living manifestation of Rumi. That the brew was handed out by the sheykah himself from a ritual red vessel suggests it was viewed as a sacred inebriant crucial in preparing the devotee for union with the Ultimate Reality (some Sufi groups still use hashish for this purpose).
As the forty-five-minute prayer song ended, twelve men wearing black shawls and fez hats shuffled onto the court one step at a time. They were the dervishes. The man waiting at the northern free-throw line was their sheykah. As each dervish came face-to-face with the sheykah, everyone bowed—sheykah to dervish, dervish to sheykah, dervish to dervish—in time to the orchestra’s wailing music. There was a pause. The dervishes dropped their black shawls to reveal spotless white vests and skirts. Again they started shuffling around the court. This time each dervish was kissed on the cheek when he reached the sheykah, at which he peeled off into the center of the court and began to spin. Soon the court was filled with serenely smiling men, their white skirts billowing out about them as they spun round and round and round and round without any apparent effort.
Every facet of the ceremony is symbolic. The dervishes’ black shawls represent their graves, their white skirts their shrouds, and the fezzes, banned by Ataturk, represent their tombstones. The music of the bey reed flute that precedes the ceremony is the song of the reed yearning to rejoin the reed bed, symbolizing the human spirit’s desire to return to the Ultimate.
After spinning for twenty minutes, the dervishes stopped, and the shuffling-bowing-kissing procession began all over. The entire sequence was repeated four times, with each spinning cycle, called a Selam, inducing a different level of enlightenment. By the final Selam the dervishes have become living incarnations of the stars spinning in the heavens, an homage to the Koran stanza, “Whatever is in the skies or on earth invokes God.”
The ceremony is a form of prayer and not designed as spectator sport. Watching it, I went from fascination to boredom to hypnotic trance. Traditional Sema ceremonies continue until dawn. Some sects slash at each other with swords as they whirl to show the intensity of their trance. Others howl in ecstasy. Out of respect for the audience, however, the dervishes in tonight’s ritual achieved Ultimate Truth after a mere three hours of spinning. As the ceremony ended, the dervishes put their robes back on and returned to earth. Finally the sheykah, a small, hooknosed man who had remained silent all evening, spoke.
Dogu da bati da Allah’indir,
nereye donerseniz Allah’in yonu orasidir.
Dogrusu Allah her yeri kaplarve her seyi bilir.
It was from the Koran, Surah Baqara 2:115. All fifteen hundred “folk dance lovers” stood to chant it with him.
To God belongs the East and the West,
and wherever you turn is the face of God.
He is the All-Embracing, the All-Knowing.
EVERYONE HAD WARNED ME AGAINST TAKING THE OVERNIGHT train from Konya to Istanbul. They said it took twice as long as the bus (nonsense), that it was unsafe (rubbish) and so overheated that passengers’ clothing caught fire (this is actually true). It was just a 1920 train full of funky-smelling chairs and lit nonstop by that ubiquitous Turkish fluorescence that makes everybody look like a corpse, which is pretty much how I felt by the time I disembarked in Istanbul. The next morning I had to take a ferry from the train station to reach the city proper. Hulking mosques surrounded by knife-like minarets guarded the approaching shore. To the right, through the falling snow, I glimpsed the towering ruins of Istanbul’s ancient walls. To the left, I could see the palaces of the Ottoman Empire. It seemed a heavy, gloomy, place and as the boat glided through the black waters of the Bosporus, I slipped into an exhausted depression.
Coffee arrived here at the height of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, when a couple of Syrians named Hakm and Shams opened a coffeehouse, circa 1555. Cafés were already quite common in places like Iran, but Istanbul’s coffeehouses were the first truly secular settings for the sacred brew. Gone was any pretense of working oneself into religious ecstasy; men lounged and smoked and sipped. Some cafés offered poetry readings; others had singing girls and puppet shows. But most were devoted to gossip. Even pro-coffee scholars, like Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri (writing in 1558), complained that the Sufi coffee ceremonies had been replaced by joking and tall tales.
“Things reached such a point that the coffeehouses were filled by professors, hypocritical mystics (Sufis), and idlers who did not work…so that there was not a seat to be had,” wrote sixteenth-century historian Ibrahim Pecevi. “For people said there could be no place for enjoyment and rest equal to these.”
To heighten their patrons’ pleasure, Istanbul’s cafés offered “special” coffees containing faz ’abbas, a blend of seven drugs and spices that included pepper, opium, and saffron. Other treats included honey-hash balls and sheera, hash or marijuana mixed with tobacco, which could be smoked in water pipes—or mixed into coffee, creating an Islamic speedball, a “life-giving thing…which they [addicts] were willing to die for,” according to famed Ottoman writer Katib Celebi.
The vice of choice, however, was sex. According to the seventeenth-century English traveler George Sandys, cafés doubled as brothels, with “many coffamen [keeping] beautiful boyes who serves as stales [prostitutes] to procure them customers.” Ottoman moralists called them “dens of abominable practices…with youths earmarked for the gratification of one’s lusts.” To enhance their experience, wealthy Turks sometimes perfumed their cups by holding them upside down over a brazier of smoldering myrrh, a technique traditionally used by Bedouin women to perfume their genitals before making love. Others laced up to thirty cups a day with the aphrodisiac anbar, which we know as ambergris. “The most general mode of doing this is to put about a carat weight of ambergris in a coffeepot and melt it over a fire; then ma
ke the coffee in another pot,” wrote Edward Lane in his 1836 Modern Egyptians. “Others keep a piece in the bottom of a cup and pour in the coffee; a piece of the weight above will serve for two or three weeks.”
Obviously this was something I wanted to investigate firsthand. However, a few visits to modern Turkish cafés convinced me that aphrodisiac coffee was a thing of the past. (“You want love coffee?”) So I headed for Istanbul’s spice bazaar, a former mosque on the banks of the Bosporus now crammed with parakeet food. Having come from the more primitive souks of Yemen, Istanbul’s bazaars made me feel as if the modern shopping mall was evolving before my eyes. It seemed to me the key difference lay in the sidewalk. The Yemenese street of rough paving stones oozing mud had been supplanted by Turkish pavements smooth as a baby’s bottom. This completely changed the stall’s needs. Yemenese stalls barricade themselves from the street’s filth; Istanbul’s merchants allow their goods to overflow. The additional space allows a greater variety of goods, in turn requiring a more complex display, hence individually packaged products. The merchants, too, are different. When you meet a Yemeni coffee man, you know him immediately. He smells delicious. His Turkish cousin stinks of cash.
He does, however, speak English.
“Yes, yes, of course I speak the English. Sprechen Deutsch, parle français.”
“Habla español?” I asked.
I asked because I had noticed that, while the merchants at Istanbul’s Great Covered Bazaar advertised they spoke German, here at Misir Carisi, the spice bazaar, they all claimed to speak Spanish.
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