At the beginning of 2006 thirteen Hungarians – musicians, folk-dancers, filmmakers, photographers and coordinators – started their journey to Turkey, and after two weeks they came back with their packages full of experiences about modern Turkish music and films, and the everyday life of tiny Kurdish villages.
The film is a mixture of a chain of our memories and documented life-sites, edited out from the huge amount of shot pictures we made there with the help of music (Replikas /TUR/, Tarik Arkan /TUR/, Sarikamis /KURD/, Fanfara Complexa /HUN/, etc.)
 

If you would like to watch the film click here!

(the film is at the bottom of the page, consists of six parts)

/Planned narration./
Yeah. It ended somehow like this. We hadn’t believed that the end would be so pleasantly exhausted, kindly cradling into dream, with such a lot of experiences, when we were looking for our hotel on the main street of Istanbul the first day after arriving at the airport.
In Istanbul the half of our team got on a coach and crossing the Bosporus, the boundary between the European part of Turkey and the Asian one (Anatolia), climbing through on snowy mountains, they got to Kars. From the fairly known Istanbul to the totally unknown Eastern edges of Turkey.
Our destination was the city of Kars – which takes the traveller 23 hours and 1500 kms to get there-, the county town of the Eastern region of Turkey, situated at the Southern slops of the Caucasus, near the Ararat. Its architecture still keeps the Russian influence, as it used to be the most southern edge of the Russian Empire. Nowadays it is considered to be one of the most important centre of East-Turkey. It has a population of 80 thousand people with all the peoples living in the Caucasus, though it’s mainly populated by Kurdish people. The city together with its unbelievably European mayor is working hard on the development of the region, signed by the Europen Film Festival held here and the totally crowded seats among the audience.

Our coach, after a 1500km – long journey – stopped at the boundary of the city. We got off the bus a little exhausted. The phones of the organizers were switched off. We tried to know our ways around and it turned out slowly that the „service” which had been mentioned by the organizers so many times meant nothing else but the local bus taking the traveller into the city.
 

 
On our way to the city once everything stopped for a moment, remembering Atatürk’s death, the popoular Turkish leader, who separated Islam religion from the politics and created a developing country getting closer to the progressive, European culture. At last the bus stopped, we had to get off and a few minutes later our host appeared in front of us.

The title of our tour movie is a summary by Chris Potter, world-wide known American jazz musician, who joined us as the 14th traveller and as a honorary member of the MEDIAWAVE. The movie would like to show fragments of our adventures and experiences not forgetting about the comments of the tour’s participants.

The coordinators of the Turkish festival, as they had been to our festival earlier, built the parade just before the opening ceremony of the festival, upon the music of the Fanfara Complexa and the folk dancers. Since the rhythm of the two folk music is quite close to each other, the audience joined them singing, dancing rapidly. Of course, we needed Tuncel Kurtiz, the Turkish actor as famous and respected as László Mensáros in Hungary, who otherwise had been a member of the jury at our festival.

We offered the organizers to cook some typical Hungarian food - , though we had to notice, that the stew, we had thought to be the most typical Hungarian meal, in fact it isn’t at all. At least it is as well-known, common meal in Turkey as in Hungary. The festival provided us a restaurant and its staff, who first gazed at us and our fights preparing the ingredients, then they gave us a hand in it and finally they asked the receipes of the pancake, the bean-goulash and the casino egg. Jasim, the main chéf of the restaurant made friends with Joci Egri, our colleague. He was called asbest-handed, as he always checked the frying pancakes with his bare hands.
The Hungarian meal exhibition took place finally on the square in front of the festival centre with the accompanionship of the music the Fanfara Complexa gave.

The organizers of the festival invited us to a so-called polo match, a usual sport game played by the neighbouring towns and villages’ citizens every Sunday. We didn’t manage to get the main concept of this game, probably inherited from the ancient times, but it looked very much like a social festival, eg. a football match between the teams of Ravazd and Écs on Sunday afternoons, only with the exception that it was played by riding horses. The huge audience came mainly from the neighbouring Kurdish villages. Even the mayor of Kars visited the match with the accompanionship of „Old Beard”, the leader of another town. After the match we were the witnesses of such a great original Middle-Asian circle - dance with the guidance of the mayor, we had only seen in Chechen movies before.
 

 
Leaving the festival… (here the narration ends…)