On Destiny: This is the Story of What Brought Me Here, Which Has Nothing to Do with Chance

by mariebarry

Perhaps those of us who can believe in our destiny find it in every passing moment, in every heartbeat. Perhaps it is easier to see when a foreigner, like the stranger sitting beside a distant sea and marveling at the waves drawing nearer as the tide comes in at twilight, like the grandfather’s apple peel in one long spiral still attached to the fruit but moving into space like some ancient hymn.

The word for luck, for chance, is common in everyday conversations. İ do not know so many words here. Simple descriptions and metaphors are important to my communication skills. İ know how to say something is sweet, in a crazy kind of way, or that something is vast, or mixed in the way you can get a box of mixed varieties of baklava at the pastry shop. İ stopped studying and İ learn from life, remembering words that people use and trying them in new situations. Some metaphors cannot translate. İ learned the word for a sunflower seed we were eating. İ asked if the heart is a seed. Or if women has seeds. Or if birds eat seeds and if plants grow from them. The dictionaries never can describe true meanings, only life can give you the understanding necessary to communicate, to understand the intricate and delicate patterns of our minds shaped by language.

People called me lucky often, for traveling, having a handsome husband, being free on weekends, not spilling the glass of paint on my tile, finding a life here. The word for lucky is şanslı, which comes from French, the same as the English word “chance”. Every time someone used that word for me, it was as if my life were a roll of dice in the atmosphere of the abyss.

İ finally explained that İ do not believe in chance, but rather the thing that is like chance, but that which comes from God and is more like a gift. İ learned the new word for how İ understand life, mukadderat, which because of the mixture of soft and hard vowels, İ immediately understood to be from Arabic. Turkish is interesting because in the first quarter of the twentieth century the language underwent a reform which changed the script from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin one. At this time, many words were extracted from the language, in particular ones that were derived from Arabic and Persian, and new ones were added. Some survived, though, particularly ones that describe spiritual truths and are derived directly from the reading of the Koran, which every Muslim does in Arabic whether or not they understand what they are reading. This is where the Turkish words for perfection and for destiny come from. Generally, words derived from Arabic, easily noticed by the lack of vowel harmony (which is the trait that distinguishes Turkish words and makes the ones with many vowels like tongue-twisters or brain freeze for an English speaker), are the best words in Turkish to use to describe spiritual experiences, like destiny.

İ learned the word for destiny, mukadderat, in Turkish and İ was reminded of how strongly this previously unnamed phenomenon has been part of my life here for the past five months and before. İ want to tell a story about destiny, which has nothing to do with chance. This is the story of what brought me here.

Three years ago, a man called Golden-Tongued invited my now-husband to dinner. He was a married man from Turkey whose wife had recently come to America. Her name is Light. My now-husband mentioned me and the invitation was extended. When the day of our dinner arrived, we all expected different people as we stood on opposite sides of their door from each other, the women nervous and the men dutiful. But we soon learned we were near matches in personalities grown on opposite sides of the world from each other. We told them that night that we were interested in learning Turkish and this cemented our long friendships as we immediately began going to their home weekly for language lessons, and tea.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Turkish culture and world view is their understanding of knowledge and its purpose. They do not copyright their minds the way to which I have grown accustomed. Like the apple cut into same the number of slices as people in the room, they divide and share their knowledge equally without storing extra for themselves. I have never encountered a Turkish person who would refuse to teach whatever it is you would like to know. There seem to be no secrets, no holding back of techniques. My teacher tells me she will borrow one of my recent designs later and remake it. It is not mine. It is ours. Everything. The apple. The idea. The work. The knowledge.

Two years ago, İ was browsing the library for books about çini, aware of my hopes to come to Turkey to learn the form following graduate school. I had found some books called “Iznik” highlighting the Ottoman art with little information about what had become of the form. As I wondered the sixth floor of the colossal seven-story research library that is always thick with the smell of binding and endless pages, I came across a substantial book called “Turkish Traditional Arts Today”. When I opened the book, it smelled of the library and the pages beamed as if made of light. I looked at the pictures of rugs and calligraphy, woodworking and vases, and çini, arranged beautifully by region, by form and by city.

Turkish cities are amazing. No city slips through the cracks. Each one has a specialty, a history and a food. Edirne has amazing tiny fruit-shaped soaps and Mimar Sinan’s masterpiece mosque. Eskisehir has pipes carved with the faces of sultans and scholars from a local white stone and golden statues left from King Midas who lived there centuries earlier. Bursa has silk and Iskender kebab. Çanakkale has delightful eccentric ceramic vessels and a giant graveyard for military heros. Kütahya has fermented yogurt soup and çini.

My husband always reads my books before I do. I sat “Turkish Traditional Art Today” on the footstool beside me with intention of enjoying it after finishing some work and started painting. I was in the midst of some fog of imagination when my husband caught the scent of library on the footstool and snatched it away. I likely did not notice he had thieved the book until he spoke the word “Kütahya.”

The book gave the key to my searching: the history of çini in the little-known city of Kütahya as opposed to the brief-lived but glorious few hundred years in which Iznik was the Ottoman çini capital that then declined in the seventeenth century. Kütahya had been a secret ceramics center for hundreds of years and had an unblemished çini tradition that had continued since Ottoman times. Perhaps they had not forgotten the secrets of the art. I read of the city and looked at the pictures of the places I had never been, the people I had never met. The narrative of the story began the year before I was born and continued into the early nineties during which time the author, Henry Glassie, was traveling and researching in Turkey.

The people in Kütahya speak Henry’s name like he is a beloved uncle who lives his mysterious life in another world. His name from their tongues reminds me the names of men, the ones in the great old novels, who traveled abroad by ship and come back to their home with stories of music-making machines and magic carpets. They know one other American and it is Henry. I can see he has a warm home in the hearts of the people here.

One year ago I wrote a proposal to come to Kütahya. My introduction mentioned my dream of coming back to the land of singing ferryboats. When I had visited Istanbul in 2008, during which time I saw çini for the first time and felt compelled to return again to study it, I had witnessed something I found astonishing. On a ferryboat, some young boys spontaneously began playing their guitars and singing songs. Everyone on the boat began singing along with them, except for the two foreigners. I longed to know what they were singing, feeling I may never witness a moment like that again. Several weeks ago in Istanbul, I again boarded a singing ferryboat. I nearly cried.

Ten months ago, my husband and I visited the home of our friends Light and Golden-Tongued again. We had visited nearly every week for over two years, exchanging languages, sharing stories, telling of our research, our hometowns, our ideas about humanity, our hopes for the future. My husband and I were on our way back to our homes in the mountains for our wedding before moving to Turkey and our friends had just brought their newborn son home from the hospital. The moment of the return to the door through which we had met for a goodbye (or more like a Turkish görüşürüz, “I’ll be seeing you”) felt monumental, as if it were just a dream, some amazing moment from the torn pages of a book you find in your grandmother’s old things from before the war. I could hardly believe that moment was real; it exists beyond the bounds of the everyday. We have not been back there since then. We live in their homeland now, and they live in ours. My husband and I even ate an incredible dinner with both sets of their parents in Istanbul two months ago, tasting the hazelnuts from Golden-Tongued’s hometown in the mountains of the Black Sea region.

I read a book about the Black Sea once that wrenched my heart like no other book of history. It rewrote the history of the Black Sea region by erasing the invisible lines that bind countries together and instead proposing that people are connected by bodies of water and that the Black Sea, with its thriving upper crust and its breathless depths, binds the people around it to its shores in a unified culture. I have been told the sense of humor in the Black Sea region is astonishing and delightful, unexpected and regarded quite jokingly by all other Turkish people, but perhaps that is a story for another day.

Six months ago, I did not know where I would live when I arrived in Turkey. I had a passport with a new name and a visa that calls me a scientific researcher but all else fell in the great expanse of mystery. My friend named Light and one of the men who married my husband and I each knew someone to help us. The friend of the man was a lady named Daydream who is living in Kütahya now, teaching school, who had lived with her husband for several years in the United States while studying. The friend of my friend named Light is named the Greatest.

Turkish people keep friends like no other people in the world. It is easy to marvel at their ability to extend love.

Five months ago, I learned my husband would not be accompanying me on my initial travel to Turkey. He would wait in America for a visa due to a retroactive new law. Four days later, I boarded the airplane to Turkey alone, where I had no home and enough language skills to drink tea, ask directions and listen to a weather report. Like some angel of comforted heart, the cousin of my friend Golden-Tongued picked me up in the airport in Istanbul. The next day I took the bus to Kütahya across the stunning plains in September with mountains rising like great rainbows of earth. I was amazed at the beauty of the desert-like expanses, the brightly painted and tightly-developed cities along small lakes and the rocky cliffs where shadows of wolves kept watch. Each beautiful city I passed I wondered if it would be mine.

My friend the Greatest greeted me as I stepped off the bus. Her face was the same glowing moon with rosy cheeks as our mutual friend named Light and I immediately recognized their kindred hearts. The Greatest lives in the United States with her son and her husband where she taught for some time at an inner city school before temporarily coming back to Kütahya to live with her parents. She had fallen ill soon after conceiving twin girls. Needing extra assistance, she came home to Kütahya. Before I arrived, she was just three months pregnant and bed-ridden on an IV under the care of her mother. The day I arrived was the first day she was disconnected from the IV. She was eating an ice cream cone that her father had bought for her, happy to be out of the house. I stayed with their family for two weeks.

İ arrived in Kütahya on Thursday and on Friday there was a meeting scheduled to talk with someone at a çini workshop where a friend of Daydream worked. When I arrived at the çini workshop, I met a man named Gentle who is kind beyond what his name implies; he is the brother of one of the greatest contemporary çini masters. My two new Turkish friends and the man named Gentle spoke in Turkish and I struggled to keep up. A women passed by the window outside the office and I smiled at her. Months later, she told me that at that exact moment she had just finished a prayer for a new friend to come work in the workshop with her. When she passed by the window, she thought I must be the answer. Her name is Smiling Moon and she is my teacher.

Two months ago, one of men in the upstairs room of the workshops lent me the Henry Glassie book which I was so fond of with its library scent before moving to Turkey. Sitting at my beloved table in the çini workshop, I opened it again to the beautiful chapter on Kütahya and began reading. It told the story of Henry’s discovery of Kütahya. He was browsing shops of hand-crafted goods in Istanbul the year before my birth trying to find a trail to the most spectacular of the Turkish traditional arts. He was not particularly interested in the çini he saw until he came across a plate of particular beauty with the name Ibrahim Erdeyer signed on the back. Henry followed the trail to this twenty-four year old artist living in Kütahya in 1985.

İ was surprised at the name I found on this page, which I had so easily passed over in the year before. I walked outside the workshop door and gazed at the orange cursive writing on the door beside ours which reads, “Ibrahim Erdeyer”. I had knocked on the door two months earlier with my friend who was visiting me in Kütahya. We met in Turkey in October. We are both here studying ceramics. Amazingly, she spent her youth in a city in the Appalachian Mountains just a three-hour drive from my hometown; we are both from sparsely populated southwest Virginia but we met halfway across the world from our hometowns. She had seen a panel painting she loved of a tree of grapes through a window outside my çini workshop with the name “Ibrahim Erdeyer”. I wanted to help her find the artist, so we knocked on his door, but no answer. I tried to locate him with such fervor that my desire to meet him, and my failure to do so, became a joke among the women in our workshop.

İ suppose it makes sense that I had searched for him with such fervor. Ibrahim Erdeyer is the trail that led Henry here. And it is because of that precious moment the year before I was born upon which Henry found the plate by the Kütahya artist Ibrahim among the thousands of plates in the markets of Istanbul, that I am here.

One week ago, a man knocked on the glass door to the outside of the workshop, through which I often see big yellow wild dogs running in the snow, and I somehow knew the moment had come. The man seemed in some frenzy, with his car from 1972 full of unpainted plates. He brought them in, the sub-zero air pouring into our workshop as he ran back and forth with the stacks of scalloped-edged plate and then drove away. I asked my teaching why the plates were there, although I already knew the answer. They were the plates for Ibrahim Erdeyer’s destiny paintings. I smiled when I saw the artist (who I often had seen pace by the window, like the yellow dogs in the snow) was knocking.

İ am afraid to speak to Turkish men. Turkish men have different accents than Turkish women making them difficult to understand and the standards of behavior between men and women in this traditional Anatolian city are so different than in America that I find it easier to simply remain silent rather than appearing too forward. I read that Turkish women are more formal than American women, and that I should not smile at men who are working as cashiers and waiters, that Turkish women do not smile so readily at such sorts of strangers. Sometimes I find my smile uncontainable, though, so I shudder to speak. My Appalachian friend from Turkey tells me I giggle in the most peculiar way whenever I speak Turkish.

İ thought to speak to him. I somehow wanted to tell him how he fulfilled my destiny, but surely that would sound forward from a strange young women from the land of dreams. He needed to make ten trips to carry those stacks of unpainted destiny plates to his studio next door. When he left with the first stack, Smiling Moon offered to introduce us. She asked if I wanted to meet him. She knew I had been searching for him. Yes.

He was as kind as Henry’s stories make him out to be, and I thought to cry, since this is a new behavior I am learning from my kind-hearted Turkish friends, but I didn’t. He wrote his email address on my crumpled vellum sketches, marveling at my recent works with such kind eyes. He told Smiling Moon how warm Americans are, how he has visited there several times, most recently going to Oklahoma. He spoke kindly of his dear friend Henry who I have never met but who gave me this most amazing gift. He told me he had met Henry before I was born. He was the same age as I am when he met Henry here in Kütahya. I told him I was very happy to meet him.

That is how I learned the word for destiny in Turkish. I told my teacher that it is not luck that brought him into the room, the painter of destiny plates, but that it was destiny, mukadderat.