Kurban Bayram

I don't know how long it takes to kill a sheep. Nor do I know precisely how one goes about doing so. I've never heard the sounds sheep make while dying, and I can't even imagine the process of turning a furry animal into the various lamb shanks, chops and doner kebaps of the world. I figure its just a quick slit of the throat, but I really don't like to figure such things.

My trip along the Aegean to Efes and environs was one I knew I had to do before leaving Turkey. I didn't plan on going during Kurban Bayram (literally, Sacrifice Holiday) but it simply worked out that way.

Here is the Turkey I don't experience in Istanbul,as the charm wears off it feels just like Another Large Metropolitian City and simply becomes another place defined by traffic, crowds and multi-national chains on every corner.

In Selçuk, just a short drive south of Izmir and an hour's flight from Istanbul, sheep dominated the landscape. It was not just the sight but the smell. Countless sheep coralled into makeshfit holding areas along the roadsides. A boy no older than my students smoking and half-heartedly watching a half dozen sheep grazing in an empty lot. A rickety pick-up truck jam packed with sheep lumbered in front of us. Their heads bent low, I thought I saw a few lift their eyes towards me and stare longingly like...um, like sheep on their way to the slaughter.

I asked my students about the holiday, and they rolled their eyes in that 'oh of course we are not that provincial and if we are we won't admit it' way. Not everyone feels it their duty to slaughter, and you don't have to get blood on your hands to reap the benefits of the ritual slaughter. I learned that you can contribute to a Mosque and have a sheep slaughtered on your behalf. I feared waking to the bleeting of dying sheep, but even so, the whole thing it seemed surprisingly moral.

On the whole, I managed to avoid the watching the life eek out of a sheep thing. Only a few peripheral sightings: On our walk through a quaint neighborhood to the Seven Sleepers, I turned my head to the left and looked through a narrow opening into a courtyard, where a bloodied sheep hung upside down. I instinctively turned my head before I could really be sure I saw what I know I saw. What I thought was polluted water turned out to be a stream of dark blood running to a sewer. A man tossing grocery bags of what appeared to be garbage into the back of a truck, but were in fact plastic bags filled to the brim with bloodied sheep's wool spilling out through the handles like so much cotton used for fake Christmas snow. My brain wasn't trained to register such images. I kept turning them into something else. These snapshots of slaughter are scattered between shopping, driving down beatiful highways into picturesque sunsets, basking in the sun at the temple of Apollo and drinking wine by the fire. Here was proof that the slaughter had happened, but I had been busy on some other planet at the time, drinking wine and talking about my problems.

As I walked through ancient ruins, first Greek and then Roman, I thought we are no better or worse today than ages ago; as legend has it bacchanalia festivals often rose to a fever pitched frenzy that resulted in human sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice hasn't gone away in the west, just the blood associated with it. I didn't find it inhumane. Maybe if I'd known one sheep personally I would, but its hard to grasp the proportions of mass slaughter. The saddest I've ever been over the death of a farm animal was years ago, when I read Charlottes's Web.

The day after, there were still plenty of sheep roaming free. You've made it, guys! Another year written in the book of life.

In a way I like Kurban Bayram because it is visible; and to that extend I feel a part of it (if only watching from the wings) in a place where so much occurs behind closed doors in a language I cannot totally understand.