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Squatters in the Kackars
Mountainous trek and portrait of mountains...
Mountains have always divided peoples on both sides. The Kackars, a band of mountains 30km wide (by 70km long) in northeast Turkey, have for centuries isolated the Hemsinlis within. These Caucasian-looking people, pale-skinned and blue-eyed, are as Turkish as Aborigines are Australians. Rooted to their traditional semi-nomadic life, in the foothills they scrape a living by growing tea. Over summers' many of them march their cattle into fresh pastures 2,000 metres up the mountains, to their clusters of log cabins, called yaylas, clinging to steep slopes.
The Hemsin region, especially the forested foothills between the Black Sea coast and the Kackars, seems to belong to the Far East. The white-water of the Firtina River lashes at its rocky banks like a trapped snake; and every half a kilometre or so elegant stone-arched bridges, wide as corridors and covered in creepers, span the river. Wooden houses, their facades curtained with drying corncobs like clothes on a washline, nestle among the tangled cloud forest. As our bus rushed up the road that runs along the bank of the Firtina, wide-eyed cows with long horns watched us from the road verges. Young women wearing bright clothes waded hip-deep in tea plantations, clipping bundles of tealeaves and stuffing them in wicker baskets strapped to their backs. We passed Camlihemsin, a one-street village of detached houses, one of the largest Hemsin villages in their 15,000-strong mountainous enclave.
Ayder, 40km inland and our springboard into the mountain settlements, had the air of a `supplies' village at the edge of a wilderness. The hurried sounds of people arriving and departing, straggling in and out of the mountains, filled the afternoon. Locals greeted each other and chatted in the one-street village, and a handful of soldiers wearing full gear, including guns strapped to their shoulders, hung outside the grocer's watching the goings-on (waiting for the Soviet invaders that never came). Farmers prodded their cows home, shouting above the cows' clanging bells that echoed up the slopes. Three young women paraded down the street wearing fresh clothes stiff as paper; they wore the characteristic headgear of the Hemsin women: leopard-skin-patterned bandannas wrapped like a turban and silver-plated beads dangling around their necks. Low clouds and mist cloaked the forests, and the air carried the the sweet fragrance of conifer forest.
The drizzle pattered the hoods of our jackets and we crossed the street and stepped into the lobby of the Hilton, its smoked, wood-panelled walls warmed with a metal stove. We followed the proprietor down a corridor, up railless cement stairs and to our bathroom-sized, cement-floored rooms. A chill wafted through the hollow corridor, and the other residents at the Hilton, two Israeli couples, came out to greet us.
After nightfall pools of light in the street marked the open grocers and souvenir shops selling hand-knitted woollen jumpers and socks; in the darkness, the fluorescent lights, as if beacons, attracted the handful of westerners roaming outdoors. We ate in the only restaurant open, where we met an Australian couple. They had just finished university and planned to drift around the Middle East for a year. Sharing a dish of muhlamet, similar to Swiss Fondue but with tastier cheese, we gabbled about the beauty of the region.
The 30-something proprietor sported an Elvis hairstyle and wore a bomber jacket. For every question he answered with an assuring 'no problem.' A mix of dishes? "No problem." Beer in the bottle? "No problem." Every time he said 'no problem' he paddled out his open hands in a gesture that suggested a bulldozer removing obstacles. As he flashed cheeky smiles, like many of the Hemsinlis he seemed merrily outrageous; a man who likes his drinks and never wakes up before 10am.
The next morning we woke early to trek to the yaylas. With an eye on the thin clouds that patched the sky like a loose jigsaw puzzle, we kitted up in full mountain-gear. But when we met our guide, 30-year-old Adnan Pirikoglu, we felt overdressed; he wore jeans, trainers and a light jacket.
We set off up the path into the crisp air, threading through the cloud forests of fir, alder, beech, birch, oak, and creeping vines. Occasionally we met farmers herding sheep or cattle, and a lone man axing a tree. When the trees thinned, we glimpsed our first yayla nestled into the side of a slope, a cluster of shacks of greying wood and thatched or corrugated-tin roofs.
Beyond the yayla the path became a fuzzy patch of trodden grass at the bottom of a wide valley that led up to the mountain's inverted-cone peak, glazed with dirty-white snow and piercing the clouds. Our destination was the yayla on the other side of the mountain. We crossed a stream on a couple of logs tied together and waded across meadows of plum-coloured blueberry bushes. In the last hundred metres to the ridge we laboured over a half-foot layer of snow - two steps up, one down. Adnan strolled ahead nonchalantly, one hand tucked in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette, all along crooning thoughtfully.
On top of the 3,000-metre-ridge Adnan pointed to the mountains across the valley, naming each one as if pointing out the crops in his backyard. I imagined him growing up as a restless teenager, sniffing around the mountains like the wild boars in the forests. His self-taught English had come handy. He learned English, he explained, by studying the instructions on tinned food and jars of coffee, and at a later stage by reading magazines with a dictionary at hand.
Clouds scudded through the peaks, and shafts of sunlight beamed on the mountains' green shoulders. Far below a river glinted in the sunlight. Some people call the Kackars the 'Pontic Alps', a fitting label given the similarity to the Alps. If the Alps are a European trekkers' playground, the Kackars would be a trekkers' paradise. But few trekkers have discovered the Kackars, mainly because no maps and trails exist. Publicity is by word of mouth; that's how the two Israeli trekkers at the Hilton found out about the Kackars. A kilometre below us we saw the rusting, corrugated-tin roofs of the cluster of twelve shacks where we would spend the night.
Despite their size, and wide valleys that could swallow up towns, the mountains are intimate. They did not look daunting and scary, just overgrown, rolling hills. Given the sparse settlements and no roads and maps to give the mountains a perspective of size, looking over the mountains seemed like looking over the fields in my backyard. It seemed safe to be cradled in the mountains, and I could understand why the Hemsinlis squatted here for good. They had originated somewhere in Asia, tribes on the move who got stuck here. According to the two main theories the Hemsinlis either descended from the Heptacomete tribesmen of old, or else were stragglers of the eleventh century tribes who parented the modern Turks.
Down in the yayla Adnan's aunt (our host) and her neighbours greeted us with a round of ayran, a root-tasting milk drink. We dropped our bags in the low-roofed and windowless cabin whose walls were black with soot. As in every other shack the ground floor housed the cows, and the first floor consisted of a room a little larger than a garage. In one corner low stools were arranged around a flickering fire. The smoke of the fire swirled around the interior, choking it, as minus a chimney, the smoke could only slowly waft out through cracks under the eaves. In one corner a metal oven stood under a shelf cluttered with dishes, plates, cutlery. Three straw mattresses - our beds - lay on the wooden floor.
Later, we watched the middle-aged women hurrying up the slopes with the agility of teenagers, to round their cattle and bring them inside for the night. The sky had cleared and I watched Ozlem herd her family's cows. Soon, as she does every winter, Ozlem Sari, 15, would move to her brother's on the coast for schooling. In the cowshed she tied the cows and squirted their milk into a bucket. The cows' skin was draped over a thin frame of shoulder and hipbones, and Ozlem only managed to squeeze a glass of milk from each. Yet she tugged till the last drop, while the cows brayed and tried to kick her. That evening we sat by the fire sipping tea and trying to talk to Ozlem, her mother and Adnan's aunt; on the ground floor, the cows entertained us with their cacophany of thumps on the wooden floor.
We spent the next day roaming about without destination, and in the afternoon we followed the stream back to Ayder. In the forest we bumped into an old women watching over her grazing sheep. She rested, her back hunched, on a stick. The backs of her hands were ropy, and her tangled hair was stiff as the bristles on a broom. Adnan spoke to her and I raised my camera, but she pricked her head like an angry cock, yelping and waving her arms. "She is a Muslim, she doesn't want you to take pictures," Adnan said. In this non-religious region, the old woman was in the wrong place here: the small mosque in Ayder, built of cracked and greying wood, seemed shut and deserted at all times; the Hemsin region was the only place we visited in Turkey where a muezzin did not wake us at 5am.
In Ayder we checked out of the Hilton and into the Pirikoglu, Adnan's hotel named in the family's surname. It was an extension of the house; the lobby tripled as living room and kitchen; it had a warm wooden flavour, carpet-clad sofas, a flickering TV, and embers of firewood crackling in a metal oven. The three hotels in Ayder were all extensions of former homes, catering for the trickle of trekkers whose number is swelling from summer to summer. With larger rooms and carpeted floors the Pirikoglu was a level up from the Hilton, and a homely hotel. "If you want to eat, make tea, or watch TV, make yourself . no need to tell me," said Adnan Pirikoglu, the sweep of his hand passing over the kitchen.
We smelled of smoke so we headed to the hamam. The hamam stood in the village centre, large as a factory, whitewashed and flying the Turkish flag. On our first day we had thought it was a public building. It is divided into males and females' sections. The marble-covered walls, pools, sinks and silvery bowls were as lush as a sauna in an up-market health spa, somewhat unexpected in a poor mountain village. A blond-haired local lay on the slab beside the pool, a Walkman blasting music in his ears. Steam rose from the 60oC water in the pool, channelled from mountain hot springs.
A moustached man whom I recognised as another guide told me they had a party that night at his hostel. I asked what type. "It's a tourist party, you make it, you make what you like. Me? Observer." We met such open-mindedness among the Hemsinlis every day. Invitations were also common - while pacing around Ayder, families would invite us in for tea.
In the end we decided that the nine tourists in Ayder, most of them couples, could hardly swing into a party atmosphere. So we spent the evening with Adnan's family, in the warmth of the kitchen. Adnan's mother knitted wollen socks. Adnan and a few neighbours watched football on TV, and all of us sipped one tea after the other. Tucked here in the mountains, tea and football seemed to be the only two craves the Hemsinlis shared with the rest of Turkey.
© Victor Paul Borg
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