Black Sea Dancers

One Saturday last summer I was on the phone chatting with my 94 year old auntie in Australia. She and I love to talk and can do so for hours but this time I was distracted. The sound of drumming was coming from outside my window. At first the noise was muffled and indistinct but by the time I hung up it was almost deafening. I was confused. Ramazan had finished the previous month so it couldn’t be that. Besides, the Ramazan drummers only came in the early hours of the morning to wake every one up for sahur, the meal before dawn. Now it was the middle of the day and I had no idea what was going on. I looked out the window and to my amazement saw two men spinning and whirling around in the middle of the street wearing long colourful skirts. They were accompanied by another two men beating time on large davul, traditional drums covered in goat skin. As the dancers wove in and out of a circle of onlookers the drummers swooped and bowed in time with the music.

 

Grabbing my camera I ran downstairs and joined Selim the waterman, Huseyin the tailor and Kamil our kapıcı, or doorman. They were watching the dancers in the company of the other kapıcı in our street, all of them smoking and chatting amongst themselves. When I eagerly asked about the skirt-wearing men, everyone was highly amused at how excited I was. Laughing kindly at my question Selim informed me they were from Sinop in the Black Sea region of Turkey and were here to help celebrate a wedding. Soon after the bride came out of the building two doors down from mine, a solid girl wrapped in metres of white satin, flanked by stout matrons in tight, shiny mother-of-the-bride cocktail dresses attended by young girls fluttering around them like butterflies in brightly coloured concoctions of tulle and lace.

Although now only associated with folk dancing and wedding celebrations, the tradition of male dancers, or köçek as they are called in Turkey, dates back to the seventeenth century. Originally sponsored by Ottoman sultans, pretty boys around the age of seven or eight were chosen from amongst the non-Muslim populations of the Turkish empire. They trained for around six years before beginning to perform as fully fledged köçek. Before long the art of the köçek moved from behind the protected walls of the Ottoman palaces out into meyhane, or drinking establishments, to reach a wider audience. At one time köçek were more popular than female dancers and were renowned for the sexual nature of their dancing. In fact they so incited male customers to fight for their favours that they were eventually outlawed in 1837.

The heavily stubbled faces and Turkish balcony stomachs of the dancers in my street were vastly different to the slender young boys of past centuries with locks of curly hair falling to their shoulders. The Sinop men, in their colourful multilayered skirts worn over black pants and white shirts were almost aggressively masculine with their solid dance steps and assertive manner, yet they shimmied their shoulders and clicked their castanets with a definite feminine grace. As I watched them twirl joyously around the bride the past and the present merged as they so often do in the suburbs of Istanbul.

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