We have arrived. Aya
Yorgi is lying before my eyes like a provocative but submissive bride. Sun rays
having softened, hitting Aya Yorgi’s surface at a very acute angle from above
the hills the cove is nestled against, her color is emerald not the turquoise
of the mid-day. You would almost wonder if she has gotten polluted, sure enough
The Water is as crystal clear as it always has been. My heart is singing with
the beauty surrounding me, that of the guests of the wedding on one hand but
more so with that of The Water, my Aegean.
Aya Yorgi, with all its serenity will soon witness the joy and laughter spilling out onto her bosom from our Gulce's wedding
We are led to the
facility, which used to be a salas (rustic) country café 20-30 years ago. In
the old days, the café had some 30-40 plain wooden tables and chairs for four.
When you came to Aya Yorgi on any day, you would rent one of these tables as
your “campsite” for the day. You would swim all you wanted in the small enough
and large enough cove according to your taste of swimming.
Ekin the awesome, lips pursed her colors inside and out sparkling...
Umut and Zeynep, the older brother and sister of our five-kids family
David, Ekin, MIke, Zeynep, Franzie, and Umut, our partnered kids except for the bride and the groom...
Our clan except for Gulce, her husband and her parents
Oguz taking Gulce's hand with "permission" from her father...
What a beautiful memorialization of a happy, dedicated life beginning for this pure young couple
The most touching hug must be this one: Gulce in her mother Suzan's arms...
Zeynep airborne in Ekin's arms when David and Baris look on...
Gulce'm, may you climb up the steps of life with ease and peace to have joy and love throughout life with Oguz
Aya Yorgi, 13 years ago, much more serene than what it is now, imagine what it was like in 1980s..
When you needed to
come to land, you had your table to return to a few yards from the water. Drink
and eat all you wanted, you did, but The Water was there waiting for you all
day long into the dark of the night when you headed back to Izmir and to the
week calling your name, having been energized with all Aya Yorgi had to offer… A glimpse of my
beautiful Ekin on fire wakes me up from this nostalgia… She is always a
fireball, but in her asymmetric bright orange dress, she is ablaze… We hug and
she lands a loving kiss on my lips! Such passion for life and love, how can I,
or anyone for that matter not love her to pieces? How lucky David is, I hope he
appreciates this invaluable piece of jewel with his loving kindness holding her
in his loving presence. I suspect, he does; the two days I will spend with him
will help me get to know him better at this second encounter since their
relationship started. He is a piece of jewel as well, for sure.
Then my eye catches
Umut and his fiancée Franzie walking in with Aysegul and Yildiray, Umut’s
parents. Umut, the big brother of our collective four children. How he has
always overseen all our children: When Zeynep was doing her study-abroad year
in Istanbul, Umut was also attending Istanbul Technical University. I know well
from Zeynep’s sharing that Umut had protected Zeynep from couple of unfortunate
mishaps, and who knows how else he had supported her during her stay in
Istanbul that I don’t know about. I know from social
media posts that any two, or three or more of our kids end up in Istanbul for
whatever reason, the first person or people they look for happens to be the
other Coluk Combalak youth members. Over good food and good conversation
accompanied with raki, boy do they drink raki just like water, they have
remained connected with an ever-growing bond amongst this small clan of five
kids! What a gift, to have found sisterhood and brotherhood among five siblings
with ten parents!!! Talk about
resource-rich kinship…
As soon as our eyes
connect, we rush to each other. Meditative hugs abound… Franzie has as big a
smile as all of us. Although, this is the first time I am meeting her, I heard
so much about her, and she must have heard a word or two about me at least when
my daughter Zeynep visited Umut and Franzie in Mexico just a few months ago,
that we hug each other as warmly as if she had been in our big family for
years. She will connect with us all with such warmth and submission through the
night, there will come a time I will go to Umut and joke with him “Umut, are
you sure this girl is a German, it looks like you found her in the countryside
of the Black Sea…”, which is where Umut’s family is from through and through.
We crack up, lovingly, affectionately…
The Coluk Combalak
gravitates around a table on the terrace built right on top of The Water! Suzan
and Levent are missing, being the “owners” of the wedding, they are greeting
all their guests. I look around, Levent’s siblings and their spouses, Suzan’s
siblings and their spouses and kids and extensions are all around. These young
people were all my patients in my private practice in Alsancak until 2 decades
ago… Such a reunion, hugs and kisses, caring, loving words of reconnection… I
am as happy and content as one can be.
I want to document in
my own way this celebration, although I know that professional photographers
will do a superb job. I want to catch spontaneous moments revealing the true
selves of everybody, especially Gulce and Oguz and Coluk Combalak. I check in
with the Coluk Combalak occasionally. During one such instant, we catch Levent,
walking Gulce, his daughter in his arm from the far end of the board walk toward
the crown, parallel to the Water. This facility indeed is a phenomenal place to
hold a wedding. My entire being is filled with joy and love for the first of
our five kids, starting a new life.
Levent, the father walking his daughter, our daughter Gulce to her husband-to-become
Just before getting
on the terrace, where the wedding crowd is anxiously waiting for the bride and
the groom, Oguz walks onto the boardwalk and Gulce is transferred to his arm
from her father’s. Although, in all this tradition there is the theme of women
being owned by men and being transferred from one ownership to the other, the
love and joy and caring written all over the faces of everybody involved in
this process override all psychosocial dictates of patriarchal society. All I
can see is how much love and effort were put into raising Gulce by her father
and mother and with how much love and caring Oguz takes her hand…
Oguz taking Gulce's hand with "permission" from her father...
As Oguz now guides
them both toward the stage where the ceremony will take place, the best men and
Gulce’s maids follow them. Ekin is one of Gulce’s maids. The wedding ceremony
takes place on a very small stage set up at the west end of the terrace right
above the water. It is an unforgettable scene against a sky turning into light
orange spiced up by the setting sun. The beauty and energy of youth make up the
skyline against the beautiful sky.
After the ceremony,
Gulce and Oguz are expected to visit every group of guests at their table to
thank them for their attendance. I am traveling around them to take pictures. I
bet this would be a bit of a chore for the young bride and the groom, since it
is not just shaking hands. Everybody wants to give them hugs and kisses. They
obediently and lovingly hug everybody and pose for everybody for the
memorialization of the moment.
Gulce posing to somebody else with her aunts and mother, who cares, I document the moment, too
In Turkish weddings
traditionally, people give the bride jewelry from golden bracelets to
necklaces, to earrings and nowadays other jewelry with precious stones. In the
most conservative traditional sense, a section of the wedding is dedicated to
people getting in line and giving the jewelry to the bride herself, in fact by
pinning the jewelry onto her wedding gown. Families would then assign a trusted
individual, who would bring a purse to collect all this jewelry to return to
the bride and the groom right after the wedding. Apparently, tradition has
changed and wedding organizers assign a box to this purpose and all such gifts
are collected.
Hence after Gulce
and Oguz visit each table on the terrace, we are ushered into the restaurant
section of the facility where we will have dinner and dance and music will boil
the blood in young veins. Our table is reserved for Coluk Combalak and all our
extensions. Tables are very elegantly laid out. Instead of the traditional
candied almond wraps distributed to every attendant, they chose to make
donation to …. Announced to every guest with a bookmark left by the plates on
the tables. How thoughtful and wise… Then starts the
music and Gulce and Oguz open the dance floor with a beautiful tango. We are
all appreciating this beautiful audiovisual feast, some of us with tremendous
affection, too. Every time I look at Aysegul’s face, it is full of deep love
and connection no different than Suzan’s face. After their beautiful show,
others start joining in first with slow dance. As raki consumption increases,
so does the tone and pace of the music inviting all to move from tables to the
dance floor.
And that’s what we
do. Levent is one big dancer, he dances with every single woman, it seems like
at this wedding. When it is my “turn”, I feel like any moment, I will be
airborne. What a pleasure to become adolescents again at our child’s
wedding…Franzie becomes one of us in no time. Whoever leaves the dance and sits
down, she spots and pulls back to the dance floor, typical Turkish ownership of
a dance floor. In just a few hours, this woman with her big smile, even bigger
heart carves a warm spot in my heart for herself. I am so happy to see that our
kids are finding wonderful human beings as partners… Hours go by and as
some of the guests, who will be traveling an hour to go back to Izmir start
leaving, Gulce disappears for a moment and returns with a shorter version of
her wedding gown!
Coluk Combalak table, and whoever caught this, did so when nobody was posing!
That is new and very smart. In traditional sense, the poor
bride would wear her long and heavy bridal dress until the end of the wedding.
It looks like, Gulce will have a fancy white dress that is much lighter than
the actual bridal gown to go on with their dancing into early hours of the
morning.
Around midnight, we
“elderly” leave the young people to the second phase of the wedding and load
into our van to go back to the hotel.
Entire Coluk Combalak with its extensions! Thanks for bringing us together Gulce and Oguz
It was one beautiful evening of
fraternity, reunion, celebration of the first wedding of our chosen family,
which not only brought all members of Coluk Combalak together for the first
time since we started meeting regularly five years ago, but also brought
together our children’s partners as well. We all celebrate this gift mostly
silently, I suspect. I am exhausted from all the dancing, but my heart and
mind, and body are all in union in this blissful calm and peace.
As we ride the van
to the hotel, I recite silently my loving kindness meditation mantra “May we
all be well and happy. May we all be at ease and peace. May we all be held with
loving kindness in loving presence. May we all find love and joy in life.” May
Gulce and Oguz find all this serene richness in each other… The nexgt morning,
I will wake up for another and last swim in the Aegean before gathering around
a now-more crowded breakfast table since Levent’s sister Gunes and oldest
brother Ibrahim and his family will also join us. They have all become
my friends over the 4-5 decades we spent together on this earth. We all have
signs of “livedness” and we all have lived. We had ups and downs in life, we
had difficult terrains that we had to conquer, we had losses that left the
creases between our brows… But we also had lots of love, lots of laughter,
friendship, and joy that left other creases around our lips… If not dyed, our
hear is gray to white. Nevertheless, and perhaps because of all this livedness,
I love them all…
Levent's brothers and sisters waiting for the van to take us to the wedding: Aya Yorgi
The next morning, when my dear friends Saniye and Mehmet volunteer to drop me off at the airport shuttle station, as I settle down in the bus, I am happy to the fullest, but also sad for having to leave these beautiful people, who have given me more than I ever could give to them for decades now. As tears trickle down my cheeks, I send them all my deepest gratitude and love until our paths cross again... We part our ways until the next time. And that seems to be in
Croatia, where Umut and Franzie will get married in August of 2019. Can’t wait.
I love you all my Coluk Combalak...
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| Saniye and Mehmet seeing to my departure from Cesme to catch my flight to Istanbul, my dear friends... |
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| Raki indeed doesn't settle in the body as it does in the bottle! Our kids are having a lot of fun dancing |
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| Ekin and Umut |
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Gulce and Oguz with Gulce's paternal aunt Gunes,,,    |
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We say hello and thanks
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