A tale of four festivals

We would occasionally meet the village leaders at the tea house and would discuss the problems of the village and ways in which we might help. It is worth noting that it often seemed that the only help required from us was in the form of money. We accepted that compared to many of our fellow villagers we were in fact well-off and were prepared to pay a certain amount of voluntary "community tax."

I have quite forgotten whether it was one of us settlers or a village guy who came up with the idea of a village festival, but the proposal was indeed tabled (amongst the playing cards) and was adopted. One month from that day we would have a one-day festival in the empty field in front of restaurants "A" and "B."

It was left to our Turkish friends to come up with most of the entertainment and the best that we could offer was our nomad tent that would be manned by Die Frau and her Australian friend Christine. Christine was making and attempting to sell small leather gifts, and Frau at that time was painting decorative motives onto beach pebbles; paperweights if you like. We erected our tent the day prior to festival day and rose early the next day to load our stuff for transport to the site. Right at the last minute I decided to take our professional sized tea making apparatus and the necessary ingredients.

Thus it was that our tent became the village (free) tea house for a day and the center for the mad gypsy band, the dancing, the gaming and a few invading (poor) art exhibitions. The villagers had managed to kidnap the entire paying compliment of a passing gullet who were a German Choir on holiday, and although they must be considered the stars of the day, it is fair to say that we were the centerpiece. The whole thing was comparable to an English village fete and was considered a huge success and enjoyed by all.

The follow-up festival was two years later and was not so successful. It was decided that restaurants "A" and "B" had benefitted far too much by the location of the first fest, so this was held at the official village center. No music this time but half a dozen stalls manned by possibly the worst Turkish artists ever assembled in one place. The village ladies have always stayed well away from their men at the tea house and did so now. The men, of course, were happy to observe the festival from their seats at the gaming tables; a true flop.

The third festival was simply amazing and it somehow snuck up on us. It is unclear who the actual instigators were, but soon money was flowing in from the EU and various other international sources. Greek and Turkish universities took on the organization, and somewhere behind the scenes the thing took root and simply grew and grew.

The first clue we had indicating that something special might be happening was about a week before the day when a whole field full of tents sprang up; they were to accommodate the students from our own major cities and from Greek cities. Then some of the organizing kids showed up and began truly organizing, something which in these parts tends to start several hours after the supposed start of events. Things were looking up. Soon the kids came to us with a request for our maps of the valley. We furnished the maps and chatted about the forthcoming event. In the course of our conversation they asked whether we knew of any musical acts that might perform. I volunteered a trio comprising two guests of ours playing the African “kalimba” or thumb piano and myself on tea-chest bass. The kalimbas are tuned to a pentatonic scale so that any fool can sound reasonably proficient and quite exotic, whilst the tea chest bass added a degree of rhythm with hardly a change of pitch and in this case was indeed at the hands of a musical fool. We were to be at least better than an empty stage.

The day before the event was to start our little band approached the organizers to hesitatingly enquire whether there would be a microphone and amplification. The kids didn't bother to answer, instead they told us to go to the site of the stage that was being set up in the same field as the first festival in front of restaurants “A” and “B.” There we saw a stage the size of a tennis court with speaker stacks that would have done The Who justice. The sound boards were the size of two ping pong tables, and there was enough lighting for a small airfield.

If I remember well the festival spanned two full days with the Saturday night being the main event. I estimate an attendance of some 3,000 people -- a fair proportion of those being Greeks. The music included a punk band, which our village ladies demonstrated their appreciation of by their hand clapping and swaying, and topping the bill was Baba Zula accompanied on stage by the opera singer Semiha Berksoy. Baba Zula describe their music as “Oriental Dub” but that title does little justice to their broad range of influences; you should Google them.

The musical event that lingers most in the minds of those who were there was a concert by a Greek bouzouki band. They sang songs of the Rebetica genre and were joined in chorus and in equal number by both Turkish and Greek members of the audience, each in their native tongue. The youngsters of both countries joined hands and danced together, whilst the older ones sang on and no doubt remembered events of 80 years ago that had led to the separation of two peoples who had previously lived in peace and harmony for a thousand years. Many of the older folks shed tears, and I know of two guests from more distant European countries who did so too.

The fourth and final festival was just about as successful as No. 2 and must be remembered as one to forget.

And so, over the course of some five years, we had gone from our village fete to our Woodstock, and finished with the equivalent of an afternoon's entertainment at Maplin's Holiday Camp. Now life has returned to quiet normality with the men at the tables and the ladies in their homes or in the fields. Some would say that the quiet normality is all we need, but personally I'm not at all sure.