On my second last day in Kusadasi (S.W. Turkey) in August 1982, I went into town to try and buy a map of Turkey to take home as a souvenir. One of the waiters from the hotel I was staying at had written down “map of Turkey” for me in Turkish.
Armed with this slip of paper, I approached two men playing backgammon on a pavement outside a shop to ask for directions to the nearest bookshop and ended up watching the game in progress. They were so fast that one player would start throwing the dice and make his move even before the other player had completed his, and seemingly without having to work out the best move. To a novice like me, they seemed to be playing both their turns simultaneously rather than in succession, with both players’ hands at the board at the same time, shifting the counters in all sorts of directions.
In the midst of all this, they still found the time to address my question and offer me a cup of tea—the usual gesture of Turkish hospitality and goodwill, from my experience in my short time there.
I was directed to a bookshop in a quiet little side street but it was shut. It being noon, they were perhaps on their lunch break, so I hung around to wait, pacing up and down to kill time, because my hotel was quite a way out of town. A café a few doors away had a four-person game going which looked like Chinese mah-jong, so, curiosity aroused, I peeped in.
The men—in their 60s, if not 70s—beckoned me in and invited me to sit at one corner of the table, so that I could watch two players at once, to learn. They spoke no English and I no Turkish, but they managed to convey the information that the game was called OK, after the blank tile which works like the joker in a card game, as it is “OK” for standing in as any other tile. Interesting. I wonder who’d imported the game from whom. The Chinese would probably say from them, as they’d invented an awesome range of things.
Very soon, the owner of the café brought over a glass of coca cola, a glass of raki[1], a little dish of cucumber and tomato salad, and a little dish of fruit salad. I told him I hadn’t ordered anything. He said they were on the house. Sweet.
I kept popping out to check on the book store, and popping back in to the OK game, with the players teaching me as they went along.
At some point, a younger man (in his 40s?) showed up, and it turned out that he could speak some English, as he was a taxi driver, so the OK players and the café owner asked him to find out more about me. With the taxi driver’s English being a bit limited, I decided it was going to be tricky to say I was a researcher in a television documentary film company, so I just said I worked in a film company, which the taxi driver interpreted. They all seemed very impressed, with bushy eyebrows raised and green-brown eyes widened in transparent admiration and wonder. (I was then 29, looking 20.)
The reason for this was to become clear the next day when I was wandering around Kusadasi, to have my last glimpse of the place and to say goodbye slowly, and stepped aside to let a car pass on its way down the steep street. A shout from inside the car made me turn round—it was the taxi driver from the day before, hailing me with a hearty greeting in delighted recognition. He told his two passengers (Americans, I think) proudly, in English: “This is my friend from London who is a film director!”
[1] The Turkish anise-/licorice-based drink – the Greek equivalent is ouzo, the French one is pastis, more commonly known under the proprietorial name of Pernod.
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