Most of the weddings will be between Turkish couples from this and neighboring villages. The brides will be dressed in white, the grooms in tuxedoes, but otherwise these will be thoroughly traditional events, the celebrations stretching out over three days at a time. Occasionally a mixed Turkish-yabancı couple also chooses to plight their troth in the village. Most such couplings are between Turkish men and Australian or New Zealand women, but sometimes there are less predictable pairings, as when one of our Göreme boys-turned-successful-İstanbul-travel-agent recently married a beautiful young Chinese woman who introduced herself to us as “Maggie.”
Theirs was to be a lavish wedding at a local hotel, but it started off in normal Göreme fashion with a sexually segregated lunch party at the groom’s family home. As slices of pide were passed around the table, I sat beside Maggie and did my best to interpret for her, but no sooner had I finished relaying the all-important details of her family background to the assembled women than one of them leant across her, fixed me with a stare and asked “Are you Chinese too?” which, given my stereotypically Caucasian features, was hardly a question I would have anticipated.
For Maggie’s kına gecesi (henna night) we women came together again. No Göreme social event could ever start without a kerfuffle over seating, but on this occasion, we had no sooner got everyone sorted out with a chair than the heavens opened. Only as we snatched up the seats and rushed indoors with them did I realize that in all the excitement poor Maggie had somehow ended up all on her own in the sitting room.
On the big day a fleet of cars gathered outside the groom’s home, and off we all roared in one of those horn-honking, flag-waving convoys that form such an alarming feature of Turkish life. According to Göreme custom, the loudspeakers had issued an invitation to everyone, and we swept into Ürgüp to find the grounds of one of the four-star hotels set up to accommodate as many of Göreme’s 2,000 residents as could be shoehorned round the pool.
Only then did it dawn on me that Maggie had fallen victim to her country’s one-child policy. Her parents had been unable to get a visa to attend the wedding, and she had no brothers or sisters. So there she stood in her white wedding finery, smiling politely, slicing through the towering wedding cake, dancing, and making the best of things, when all the guests had come for her husband and none of them for her.
Toward the end of the evening I ventured to ask if she had at least spoken to her parents. “I couldn’t ring them. I was afraid I might start crying and not be able to stop,” she answered.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
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