Nothing wrong with that, of course, since many of my neighbors keep budgerigars. Still, this was a hotel I tended to think of more in terms of cats and the odd dog rather then birds.
“What’s that?” I asked and someone reached up behind the bar and lifted down a cage containing two little blue budgies. They were huddled up against each other, which I hoped was from affection but suspected might be from fear. “Cem bought them for his fiancée. They’re a Valentine’s Day present,” I was told.
How sweet, and what a change from the usual situation which tends to consist of my neighbors half jokingly, half seriously reeling off the list of Valentine’s Day tokens that their husbands had failed to give them.
Of course Valentine’s Day (Sevgililer Günü in Turkish) is a wholly imported celebration that makes very little sense in a setting where most people even today still have their matches made for them by their families, something that I still manage to forget from time to time, so deep-rooted are our cultural assumptions.
Having grown up in a society that believes in marrying for love but that has a horrifying divorce rate, I’m perfectly happy to accept that arranged (as opposed to forced) marriages are at least as likely to stay the course as those entered into for more romantic reasons. Yet still my default mental settings assume that everyone marries for love, so when a young Göremeli recently said to me, “I’d like to get married this year,” I automatically responded “To whom?” since I didn’t remember any mention of a girlfriend.
He looked at me blankly. “Oh, I don’t know yet,” he replied with a shrug, and at once I remembered. Not a girlfriend, but someone his family would find for him, maybe a relative, maybe even someone living abroad, probably in Germany.
It’s not that long ago that people in Göreme were married off when they were little more than children. Many of those marriages have survived although rarely do the couple want their own children to marry at such tender ages. Nowadays it seems as if young women in the village either go to university, in which case marriage is delayed, or are paired off with someone just before they turn 18 so that they can be married as soon as it’s legally permissible.
For boys it’s different. They mainly seem to hold off on seeking a partner until after they’ve done their military service, which means that most of them are marrying in their early to mid-20s.
Sometimes I’m really not sure whether a couple is marrying for love or not. On the surface it may look as if that’s the case, but then a bit of scratching beneath the surface reveals that, no, they were deliberately introduced with marriage as the intended goal.
Then there are the many marriages between Göremeli men and foreign women (only very rarely is it the other way round). One might assume that these were love matches, and perhaps they are in a way. Sadly, though, at least one of the couple may bring a mixture of motives to the match, which is hardly surprising, given the village background.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
