Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 56

One of my favourite dishes which Cengis made in the Çayhane was, and still is, menemen, a singularly Turkish dish made with tomatoes, onions and green peppers which are sweated in butter until soft, and then into which an egg is scrambled. With fresh village bread and a glass of Efes, this was nirvana to a budding field surveyor like me. Another collation I made my own was a plate of two fried eggs, with the dark yolks bursting, dipped with fresh crusts. My Turkish at that stage didn’t stretch to the full kizartilmιş yumurtasι, ‘eggs that are fried’, so I would order with my abbreviated version, yumurta pfssss, to indicate the process. Many a dish did I order of ‘yumurta pfssss’ over the months. But in the end it somewhat backfired on me. One particular evening, near the end of the excavation, a night when for some reason I was especially popular – I must have bought a round of drinks or something – the recipient villagers, without consulting me or Cengis, each ordered plates of ‘yumurta pfssss’ and then donated them to me, so that I ended up with seven plates-worth, a total of fourteen eggs, all of which out of politeness I had to eat. Never again!

It was in the Çayhane that I learnt most of my Turkish, and much more importantly, my great admiration of and my love for the Turkish people, something which has become more profound as the years have rolled by. Haltingly, in my case anyway, we discussed major topics and characters of the day. Recurrent themes were:

Amerikanlar fena. ‘Americans are bad’, on the basis that the bosses were American and responsible for the wages, and therefore were always fair game.

Ümit fena ‘Ümit is bad’, not unnaturally I suppose, in that he was the Management’s right-hand Turk who was also the hire and fire merchant.

Ruzgar fena ‘the wind is bad.’

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