"I don't go round, the world revolves around me. I feel ecstasy; I don't care about anything, like there is no one around. This activity helps me become more ethical. Just like the old dervish song says, the world is a sea of fire. And love is to fall in it".
As if they're swinging
25 year-old Ichsan Batur is a dervish, member of the brotherhood of the modern Sufi (mystic) Chasan Dede.He is also a researcher at the philosophy department of Galatasaray University of Constantinople. He is a circumspect young man, with visible kindness and a bright smile, who is more open-hearted when he to talks to Greeks.
"My parents were disturbed when I announced that I was going to be a dervish, but after a while they accepted it. We are not different from other men, we 're not heretics as some orthodox Muslims assert. It may have seemed excessive to them that for the first time in 1991 we included women in our team. This hasn’t happened in any other place in the world".
Ichsan left us to go inside the Galata Mevleli mosque and prepare himself for his sacred dance. While he was whirling around with his companions, thick snow was falling outside the mosque. It was a quiet Sunday evening in the district "Peran" of Constantinople. The only sound that cut through the silence was the occasional train bell that could be heard crossing Istiklal Avenue.
Even the dervishes' steps couldn’t be heard inside the mosque, as if they were floating without touching the ground. Their arms were outstretched like wings, with their right palms facing the sky and the left facing the earth -a symbolic gesture meant to pull the divine love from above and spread it around through the ground we walk on.
Magic reed
We Greeks, like seeing the dervishes twirling. We may not understand all the symbolisms of their sacred dance, or the words of their hymns mumbled by the chanters but we are impressed by the sound of the “ney” (a type of flute). According to the Sufis, "it’s not just not air, but the fire of love within a cane".
We wonder if musical instruments like the lyre or the tabor sound more Turkish or Greek. As it seems, the truth is somewhere in between. As the famous Greek writer Elli Alexiou once said: "Greek and Turkish people are like two different plants sown in the same pot. They feel like strangers, but their roots intertwine under the soil and their branches above it. If you try to uproot one of them, the other one will follow".
TEXT-PHOTOS: GEORGE ZAFEIROPOULOS
SOURCE: www.greecewithin.com
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