Today Türkiye marks the Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day. They do rather like to celebrate all the good things at once, on a single day. An eastern appetite for grandeur, presumably: a flag in the morning, a run and a concert at midday, and in the evening rakı to the strains of the İzmir March. Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on the 19th of May 1919 (the numerology of it!), and this, according to the official historiography, counts as the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence. Who was fighting whom and over what is a complicated, many-layered question, but the holiday has existed ever since. So we duly remember the great reformer, rejoice in the sporting youth of the nation, and eat well.
Inspired by the spirit of the nation and by a saucepan, I decided to make myself a bowl of ezogelin for lunch. One of my favourite soups: tomato, bulgur, lentils, mint—warming to the stomach and to the soul. I looked it up, as one does, to find out where the name came from, and, as one also does, opened a portal into an ethnographic abyss.
The bride
Ezogelin çorbası means, literally, “the soup of Ezo the bride.” Ezo is a diminutive of Zühre, a real girl from a village near Gaziantep, who lived in the early twentieth century. She was, they say, a beauty, quick-witted, proud and—alas—unlucky.
She married according to the custom of her tribe: a berdel, an exchange marriage, in which two families swap daughters or sons and hold both weddings at once. (A striking feature of the arrangement is that if one of the marriages breaks down, the other is automatically dissolved as well.)
Ezo’s first marriage did not take. Her second, to a Syrian Turkmen, left her on the far side of a border. She pined, they say, for her village, her own soil, her own food. And there, in exile, she cooked her soup as best she could and to her own taste: with mint, with bulgur, with a shade of sorrow. And back in Türkiye they remembered her.
Which brings us to a word. Turkish has gurbet—not homesickness exactly, but the condition of being away: exile, foreign parts, and the ache belonging to them, all in one noun. A person in gurbet is not merely absent from home; he is living in a state that has its own name, its own songs, and, evidently, its own soup. The best cure for it is a plateful of something cooked with love and memory.
The tribe with the awkward name
Ezo belonged to the Barak tribe, Turkmens out of Central Asia. Where the name came from nobody quite knows. (An English-speaking reader may be reminded of a recent American president; this is, of course, pure coincidence—his name is Arabic, from the root meaning ‘blessed.’) On the commonest theory, barak means ‘shaggy’ or ‘long-haired,’ possibly a reference to the appearance or the dress of the tribe. In the old Turkic calendar, Barak was the name of the year of the dog; and in the Oghuz legends there are the Itbaraklar, man-like creatures with the heads of dogs.
The Baraks are thought to have moved into the Near East with the Seljuks, and later, in Ottoman times, to have settled in south-eastern Anatolia, chiefly in the country between Gaziantep and Syria. They lived at first as nomads, driving their herds, and then gradually settled. The Ottomans by turns resettled them, taxed them and attempted to assimilate them—the classic fate of an ethnic minority in an empire.
Today their descendants live mainly in the provinces of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Kilis. Some have become farmers; some have gone to Germany. The language and the customs are partly lost, but the culture survives in wedding rites, in folklore, and above all in the food. And chiefly in the soup.
So the next time you eat ezogelin, remember: this is not simply a soup. It is a woman’s memory, a Turkmen’s gurbet, and a culinary epic boiled up in a distant kitchen in order to get, by one spoonful, closer to home.
Happy holiday, Türkiye. Afiyet olsun—good appetite. And şerefe, naturally, cheers!
