Kurban Bayrami (Feast of the Sacrifice)

Kurban Bayrami, the Muslim holiday celebrating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and God’s subsequent provision of a ram for the sacrifice, is a four-day holiday in Turkey. Schools let out at noon on Thursday and banks closed at 1 PM the same day – surprise, surprise. Thank goodness for ATM machines. The tradition is for each family to slaughter a lamb or ram or even a steer and give the meat away to the poor and needy.

Starting a couple of days ago it wasn’t uncommon to hear a lamb bleating somewhere in the neighborhood. And the president of the university made a couple of jokes about slaughtering lambs during his little Bayram speech. He warned people not to cut themselves and said he didn’t want to see any of them on TV, chasing an escaped animal down the street. If you were in a rural area, you probably wouldn’t think much about a family slaughtering an animal for food. That’s just what you do. But our part of town is all apartment buildings. We just weren’t prepared for the fact that people would slaughter a lamb or even a steer in a vacant lot behind your building or even in a parking area next to an apartment building. But that’s what’s been going on all day.

The photo was taken out of the window of my apartment. You can see the one white sheep and one black sheep huddled against the wall.

Shortly before noon we took the bus downtown to try to locate the departure point for the bus to the airport. Walking to the busstop we saw a guy on a motorcycle with a kind of sidecar. It was more of a wagon for hauling things than a car for someone to sit in. In this little wagon was a black ram, all tied down. Then you saw people driving small station wagons with a white sheep in back.

The other sight we saw from the bus was 10 or 12 lambs outside a butcher shop. The guys had set up shop inside the shop to slaughter a family's lamb for them. I guess the real clincher for me was walking back to the apartment. In a carpark area behind an apartment building that's less than a block from where we live, there were three live sheep, one carcass suspended from a frame and another on the ground being gutted. I felt so badly for the sheep waiting their turn. Perhaps it was the incongruity of this rural activity happening in a very urban setting or just how much slaughtering was going on. If every family is supposed to slaughter an animal, then a lot of sheep or cattle died in Gaziantep today.

"And then there were no sheep left." (from Amahl and the Night Visitors) The carcass of the last sheep is hanging in the yard. In the interim a woman has been hauling off meat in a wheelbarrow.

We talked about how we don't mourn for all the dead Thanksgiving turkeys. Yet somehow all this slaughtering was disturbing. But if we thought about the big feed yards and slaughter houses, we'd probably never eat meat again.