For my birthday, in the middle of March, Mark took me to Ankara Opera. We thought the performance would be at the opera house, but no it was in an unmarked building on the other side of a very busy dual carriage way. With minutes to spare we ran across the two-lane traffic flowing in both directions, only minimally avoiding the cars; through the snow I might add and you might notice our muddy shoes. It was worth it, although 'opera' turned out to be a series of songs performed by various groupings of the six singers. I haven't got much idea when it comes to Turkish music....my impression is that it is somewhere, like the rest of Turkey, between East and West. I think there is a wide diversity of musical genres and I think many of the people that we meet have a sophisticated taste in music. The sars, a stringed instrument with movable frets, accompanied some of the songs and a piano the others. What really impressed me was, in a couple of pieces, how they managed to amalgamate the sars and piano, two instruments using a different criteria for tuning....but what do I know!!
The last piece was a rendition of a song that everyone seemed to know as they all joined in with it. I could understand three words....Çanakkale, dusman and genc......Çanakkale was the location of a war crisis in 1922, 'dusman', I knew from my Urdu means 'enemy' and genc means 'young people'. At Çanakkale, it dawned on us, we were the dusman, the enemy...it was a crisis with the British that was overcome by the young people. The lady who took the picture didn't seem to mind that we were the enemy she had just been singing about! Of course it was a hundred years ago, but it reminded me that we must never have any notions of superiority when it comes to nationality. We need to walk humbly and remember that Jesus' Kingdom is, as He said, not of this world.
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