First day
Culture shock number two came at 4.20am as I was woken by the sound of the call to morning prayers from one of the mosques in the locality of our hotel. In the still of the night the haunting yet melodic sound echoing through the empty streets outside was quite something. Spooky is the only word for it, if that is not demeaning of its importance to the faithful. I fell back to sleep with my heart racing.
After breakfast we met with the artists from Diyarbakir and nearby who we were to be working with, before setting out around the town to get a feel for the places we are to be working. Diyarbakir is surrounded by 9km of walls, apparently 3-5000 years old, and was also central to the recent (and in some senses ongoing) conflict between the Kurdish separatist PKK and the Turkish army. This conflict has displaced very large numbers of people form the Kurdish countryside to the city, where many now live in very deprived housing of a standard which is as far as I know unknown in Western Europe. The scenes we came across on the street were the sort of things I had only seen previously on TV – women baking bread in outdoor ovens, children running around in swarms trying to sell packets of tissues, and old men pushing wooden carts filled with old rags, scrap iron, and both dead and live chickens. It’s hard not to feel uncomfortable in this sort of situation, but the people were nonetheless friendly and seemed pretty happy despite their obvious poverty.
We visited a former army base which had also been used as a prison, the neighbourhood mentioned, and also the main shopping streets of the old town, before leaving the city walls to head towards the newer part of the city; the contrast could not have been greater, with the afternoon’s meeting place at the Diyarbakir Arts Centre being situated in a modern shopping centre. We sit here just inside Asia, but not so far from the edge of Europe, and this frontier position certainly shows. Oh, and following from my earlier and totally unrelated story about the World’s Biggest Rucksack, the shopping centre has what is probably the World’s Biggest (and therefore Best) Bouncy Castle. At times like these I wish I was 10 again!
Oh, and there is wireless in the hotel, which is of course very welcome.
