ramadan drums

A little over a year ago I wrote this insomniac post, kept audible company by a band of Ramazan drummers winding their way around the streets below. I thought of it again today, when I read this article in the IHT (not bad, despite a foolish headline) about Ramadan's pleasurable contradictions in the beloved city:

The old ways linger in this modernizing Turkish metropolis, whose 15 million residents are both eager and hesitant to be embraced as European. The feeling is perhaps most tangible during Ramazan, as the Islamic holy month is known in Turkish.

There are, for example, the drummers: roving bands of men who walk the streets about 4 a.m., pounding cumbersome double-sided davuls to awaken the observant in plenty of time for preparing and eating breakfast before the fast begins at sunrise.

Not everyone appreciates these village criers. Deluged with complaints from the sleep-deprived, aldermen in several neighborhoods have banned the Ramazan drummers. Some local muhtars, or village leaders, have even urged people awakened by the pounding to alert the police.

But other officials defend the practice. Drumming for tips "is an old tradition and it's not necessary to ban it," Fazli Kilic, the mayor of Istanbul's central Kagithane neighborhood, declared recently on a Turkish news Web site.

My secular Alevi flatmate loathed the drummers, and my enjoyment of their music was somewhat tempered by the timing (usually between 2 and 4 am). But reading this now I find myself thinking fondly of them, and of the other fond curiousities--güllaç, the lightbulbs strung between minarets to spell out sacred messages, the special seasonal advertisements from the likes of Coke and Co.--sketched in this piece. I have been working on a little essay about last year's Ramazan-in-İstanbul, but the heartstopping disappearance of a very large chunk of my iPhoto library has halted my work. So here I sit in the Apple Store, waiting for the best possible measure of redemption.