Diyarbakir

Diyarbakir: largest city in eastern Turkey, and the major city of the Kurds... it's grown fourfold in the last fifteen years, which means there's a big "modern" city (tall buildings, straight streets, even starbucks and mcdonalds now) outside of the old walled city. We met Mahmood, a friend of Marlene's - also studying at Bilgi in Istanbul - who is from Diyarbakir and showed us around. He was born in a village about 20km south of Diyarbakir; all the villagers were expelled & the village destroyed in the mid-90s, so he lived in the city during his preteen / teenage years and then went to school in Van and moved to Istanbul a year ago.

Before we met up with him, Julia met a guy at a bookstore (the bookstores in Eastern Turkey, at least the ones we've been to, seem to be underground and contain a surprising amount of Kierkegaard in translation) who works at a tourist centre / Dengbesh house - he saw her looking at Kurdish books and started up a conversation... Dengbesh are singers / storytellers - they perform acapella, singing old songs or writing new ones or adding onto the old ones. At the house there was a circle of old men singing in turn... when the singer needs to take a deep breath the rest of the circle joins in for a few seconds to fill in the gap. There are also nighttime sessions, they told us, inside the house; younger singers (there still are some) can come and "try out" for the outside circle. There was a cassette shop around the corner, and after babbling and pointing and sort-of-dancing for a while the owner pulled out CD-roms of Kurdish music - Dengbesh, "traditional" music, and pop music - much of which he's recorded in Diyarbakir (given I know about eight words of Turkish and none of Kurdish, I may not have gotten everything straight). The cds don't open in my computer, but so it goes.