A Tale of Drums and Canons

Like I said in the previous blog, in Beypazari, we stayed in this beautifully restored, huge Ottoman house. When we got back to our room after a long day climbing hills and shopping, we were exhausted! We fell asleep around 9:30 or 10. Well, I should say Tim fell asleep around that time. I was wide awake due to the hoard of children playing hide and go seek on the street below our windows (and since there was no AC, we had to have all the windows open). This went on until after midnight. The kids here are not back in school, yet, so they were free, apparently, to do whatever they wanted however late they wanted. They were yelling, carrying on, and making me madder by the minute. I finally got to sleep after midnight and was sleeping peacefully until I was woken up by a loud banging sound around 3 or so. Hmmm...it was still dark outside. What in the world was that? My initial reaction was fear because the sound was unknown to me and was occuring in the middle of the night in a town I wasn't familiar with. The sound started getting louder and closer. I then figured out there was a pattern to the sound. It was like a bass drum was playing. My next reaction was to figure out the rhythm this guy was playing. Let's see...the first couple measures were syncopated and the last one was a triplet. Ahhh! Ridiculous that I was doing rhythmic dicatation in my head at 3 in the morning. Who the heck was this guy?? Then I remembered a book I read about different ex-pats experiences in Turkey. I remembered this one lady who had moved to Cappadocia and had gone to the trouble of buying new Ramadan drums for the village. Ah ha! Ramadan drums. That was it!!! Now I remembered. A man goes around the village, beating a huge drum very loudly, in order to wake all the people up before the sun comes up. That way, they can have one more meal before sunrise. Because after sunrise, there's no food or water til the sun goes down! I peaked out the window when he was on our street to see him. He was wearing a big drum over his shoulders on his front, just pounding away. I was pleased to have figured this out, but not so thrilled that he banged for another hour. I finally fell back asleep, only to be awoken by the firing of a canon. Good grief! What in the world!??! Oh, yeah. That was the signal that the sun was officially up. We had heard the same shot the evening before to signal that the sun had gone down.
The next morning and really the whole next day, I was exhasuted. The children, drum, and canon had kept me up, preventing my sleep. But you know what?? I'm really glad we were in Beypazari to experience these cultural traditions. In Ankara, the big city, we sometimes get a watered down version of culture. Often Turkish culture is intermingled with European, modern trends and often we are in engrossed in our own American community. But in the small historic village of Beypazari, the preservation of history and culture is alive and well.
A little addendum... I once heard a story that my husband slept through an entire hurricane. Though I knew he was a pretty heavy sleeper, I thought that was hard to believe. Well, I don't question that story anymore because that boy slept through screaming children, bass drums, and canons without moving a muscle. I guess when we have kids I'll be the one getting up in the middle of the night!