Ellusive 4th Annual Pistachio Festival for Arts and Culture

This last weekend was the Fourth Annual Pistachio Festival of Arts and Culture. There were big banners all over town. Later I started to see billboards with what was obviously the program for a given day. It was all in Turkish, but there were usually pictures of the performing artists and times. I assume locations were also given but it was hard to know. One of the teachers found a Turkish website and thought she knew where there was a concert of traditional Italian folk music Saturday night. She and a couple of others set off into the night. Luckily she met someone at the bus stop who was meeting a friend who knew where the concert really was – in a new culture center that had previously been a church.

I was busy most of Saturday, but we decided we’d try to seek out the festival on Sunday. Somehow I imagined that there would be a central venue somewhere. We’d seen on a TV in a restaurant reporting on several folk dancing demonstrations and the proprietor said they were in the big park downtown. That made sense. Well, we thought we had located a folk dance event in a park that extends miles sort of SW to NE and ends downtown. On the map it looked like it wasn’t too far from the big mall Sanko Park. So we bussed to Sanko Park and started walking SW. On several occasions we thought we’d located the venue but there was never anyone there. I think we’d kind of given up finding the dancers and were just enjoying this truly amazing park. It is not very wide and basically follows a small creek. There isn’t much water it it and what water there is, is mostly stagnant. But this is an arid environment. I image there is more water in winter. Anyhow, there are several paths. One is more of a sidewalk down one edge. Then there is an unpaved, gravel and/pressed dirt path and then finally a brick path. The latter two kind of meander through the park, crossing over the creek here and there. There are large picnic areas (and there were families picnicking), some even with raised barbeque grills. There were playgrounds and even a tea house. We were truly amazed.

Finally we heard drums and moved in the direction of the music. Sadly, by the time we got there the dancers were leaving. However, we did see their costumes from afar. I was surprised at how elaborate they were. A couple of dancers were even wearing feather headdresses reminiscent of Native American regalia. This is something I’ll have to check out because from the quick glimpse I got, the costumes didn’t look European nor did they look like anything one typically associates with the Middle East. I’m really curious about the origins of this attire.

In short, missed the entire Fourth Annual Pistachio Festival, and I won’t be around for the fifth one. Too bad. But we did discover a very impressive park. We’d heard Gaziantep was known for its parks, and you do see little ones everywhere. However, as yet we’d seen nothing on this scale.