Drinking in Hasankeyf

After dinner, we had our 9th cup of tea with the owner of our hotel. I didn’t ever see his name in writing, but it sounded like "Mr. Shell-cat" so that is what I will call him. He loved having us there. He offered to buy us a drink, and we gladly accepted. As we were walking down the street, the power went out. Mr. Shellcat didn’t seem to mind so we didn’t worry.

He took us to a dark building off the street. We walked around the building and went in a back door. We walked into a dark smoky room that was lit by a few kerosene lamps. A man in a white coat and one other man were huddled around a furnace in the middle of the room. He stood up and got us chairs, and a few older men came in a few minutes later. It felt like we were in some kind of secret meeting. It was the kind of dark, smoky, cold atmosphere that you would expect the leaders of a revolution to meet in.

We had a few beers and the power came back on. The man in the white coat ran the ‘bar’ and got us drinks while we sat around the furnace. He also spoke English well and did most of our interpreting while we talked to everyone else. It turned out that Mr. Shellcat owned hotels in many different cities, as well as an oil company in Batman. Half of Hasankeyf was owned by him or his family. We got the impression that he was a pretty important businessman in the area. I’m sure that he didn’t make his fortune on his 30 lira-a-night Hasankeyf Motel. We talked a lot about politics while we where there. Mr. Shellcat seemed fond of Colin Powell because his policy had somehow helped his oil business. As with everywhere else in the world, George Bush got a big thumbs down.

Attention turned to the portrait of Ataturk on the wall. The white coat guy told us that in Turkey if you want to start a business you are required to display a picture of Ataturk on the wall. All of Turkey seems to love Ataturk, and everybody in the room said that he was a great man. The man in the white coat spoke four languages: English, Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic. He was going to be joining the Turkish military and hoped to be deployed to Iraq, because he felt that he could help different people understand each other as an interpreter. He said that the Turkish military provided no monetary compensation, and that he would actually have to bring money with him.

After a few hours, the drinks were still flowing and before long everybody was drunk. Mr. Shellcat kept making ‘coocoo’ signs around his head signifying that he was inebriated. One of the older men started singing in Kurdish, and before we knew it everybody was singing and clapping. These guys were really belting it out with all their heart and soul. Mr. Shellcat proclaimed that Jeff and I should not leave the next day, and that we would stay in his Motel for free. He had already spent more than we had paid for our room on our drinks. Before we left we toasted to Hasankeyf, Ataturk, democracy, God, and Spanish women.

We stopped at Mr. Shellcat’s brother’s tailor shop; he was sewing some stuff. We had our tenth cup of tea. Mr. Shellcat whipped out his wallet and tried to get his brother to make us some suits on the spot, but he was busy with other things. This was probably for the good, because I’m sure he would’ve regretted dropping a bunch of cash in the morning.

When we were stumbling back to the hotel, I checked my watch and it was 11:30 pm. We’d had a full night of drinking and it wasn’t even midnight. I’ve stumbled through the streets of Isla Vista at 4 am many times, but getting drunk with a bunch of old Kurdish men and stumbling through Hasankeyf really took the cake.