Vegans in a village

There are two charms of Vienna that Istanbul lacks: Christmas and nobody thinks I'm a Russian prostitute. The first one is fairly simple. Christmas is completely absent from the Turkish social fabric. No one is getting ready spend a week with their family, no one is buying presents, no one is finishing exams, big box retailers haven't been promoting the holiday for the past three months, there are no lights, no music, no Advent. Having arrived to Austria last night, I'm soaking up as much red and green as possible and looking forward to the Christmas market tonight.

I feel the second needs a bit more explanation. In Turkey either you are married or a prostitute if you are tall and have blue eyes and are walking with a Turkish man. And even though my look is a lot more Harry Potter than Anna Kournikova, I still got the treatment.

I'm getting distracted. This was not the color of my past month. There was the two weeks of Anduin's visit which gave way to the trip into the southeast of Turkey with Psalters. So I'll pickup there.

Considering that I changed clothes every day, eat meat with some gusto, have never given myself a tattoo, dumpstered, or dreamt of "after-culture" (what the world looks like when the current institutions implode and the survivors are nomadic), we all got on amazingly well. They are great, living out their Christianity as radically as any people I've ever met. Their sound comes from the Diaspora, Bedouins, Gypsies, slave spirituals. They wanted to meet Kurdish refugees and learn from them and from their music.

Our days looked like traveling steadily east in a minibus across a rather wide country and eating more than we deserved. All went well until we reached Diyarbakir and found ourselves on the radar of the Jandarma, the military police. Our group was something of an anomaly. Erkan, of couchsurfing fame, soley dealt with them, but they effectively truncated our time in the east. It is something of an affront to an American to have ask and receive permission from military police to stay the night in a village.

But that felt to me only sensational if frustrating - and hopefully gave the Psalters some solidarity with the Kurds even if it didn't come through direct connections.

The further east we got, the more it resonated. It is beautiful country. High, arid (though they've plowed up every rocky hill they can get their hands on), big sky, reminding me of another place I love. It was a sort of Silk Road tease. All I wanted to do was to get in a Land Rover and keep driving east to Van, into Iran and on.

In spite of the red tape, though, we did manage to crash a wedding and stay two nights in a Kurdish village that will be one of 300 villages flooded when the Tigris is dammed. You know it's a wedding because everyone is out in a field shooting their guns in the air and dancing, and you know it's a Kurdish village when they kill a lamb for dinner and everyone sits around for hours eating and smoking. We also looked up two Syriac churches. They still give the service in Aramaic, and we had an audience with the bishop at the monastary, but they have a difficult row to hoe as they are not allowed to do any seminary training, nor bring anyone in from outside. There are still some things to be ironed out before EU membership.

I spent the end of the trip with Erkan in Istanbul where we visited some of his family and friends (a full-time job when your grandfather had four wives) and caught the Topkapi Palace. I liked Turkey before, but thanks to him I now feel prepared to rave about the country to anyone who will listen.

Tomorrow, I will meet dearest friend Leah Miller in Frankfurt and look forward to a few days with her before heading to Israel for Christmas.