However that was precisely what happened to me recently, and I cursed myself for my idiocy in not having upgraded to a camera-phone along with most of the rest of the world. Readers who live in İstanbul will need no introduction to the Mehter Band, which plays regularly at the Military Museum in Harbiye and increasingly sallies forth to take part in festivals elsewhere in the city. However for those less blessed, a word or two of background probably won’t go amiss.
The Mehter is thought to have been the world’s first military marching band. There is some uncertainty about when it was founded, but by the 16th century bands of musicians much like today’s were certainly in existence. The players came from the Janissary corps, the group of influential soldiers who surrounded the sultan and provided his bodyguard. Their music was loud and powerful, and depended a great deal on huge bass drums whose sound was believed to scare the living daylights out of the enemy.
This week the Mehter Band finally showed up in Göreme, and I discovered that the encounter in Nevşehir had not been the one-off, unadvertised visit from İstanbul that I had assumed. Turns out that the Nevşehir authorities had decided to employ their own musicians two years ago. Now the band had arrived to entertain a group of Israeli tourists in the local amphitheatre. The guests lounged in comfy chairs under a canopy and puffed on nargiles as the band, dressed in their familiar bright green and red uniforms, ran through a program of music so loud that I caught at least one elderly member of the audience sneaking his fingers into his ears.
Back in the 18th century Mozart heard the Mehter Band playing and went on to write his “Turkish March” (aka “Turkish Rondo”), so presumably he found the noise less ear-shattering. Beethoven, too, was a fan of the Mehter (and there is no reason to think it contributed to his later deafness), and he, too, was inspired to write a Turkish march. Then in 1826 Sultan Mahmud II dealt the band a death blow when he had the Janissaries massacred during the so-called Auspicious Incident (a very nasty fire in Thessaloniki).
Since most of the music had not been written down, Turkish musicians were forced to turn their eyes westward when time came to revive the tradition in the mid-20th century. But of course, it’s much easier to revive the music than the traditions that went with it. Dispatched to the belediye (municipality) to announce the concert over the loudspeakers, I queried the appropriateness of its four o’clock timing. “Won’t most of the tourists be out on tours?” I asked.
“Ah, but the musicians work for the Valılık,” I was told, which translated means that they are nine-to-five Mehter members. From terrifying military marvels to pen-pushing civil servants. How the mighty have fallen!
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
