Falconry on the Black Sea coast

I’ve been a pretty hopeless blogger recently. At least part of the reason is that I’ve been working on a long piece that has occupied far more of my time than it perhaps should have done.

It’s a 15,000-word article about atmacacılık, a falconry tradition practiced mainly within the Laz community in Rize and Artvin provinces. It’s about other things as well: the different kinds of cultural and environmental destruction to have afflicted that region over the past century, the tea industry, the allure of birds of prey, and the Black Sea itself. I first began working on this story nearly a year and a half ago, on and off in the background, so it’s been a long time in the works. I’m now doing edits and it will hopefully be published sometime this summer in London-based literary magazine The White Review (I wrote a piece about Gezi Park for them here).

To give you a flavour of what atmacacılık is about, I’m posting the story I did on it for the Times when I first visited the region in September 2012, along with a few of my photos.

Some of you may ask: “With everything going on these days, why the hell has he been writing about this?” Well, those people will be glad to hear that with this out the way, I’ll be reporting more closely on the deeply worrying developments in Turkish politics, on the upcoming elections, and also hopefully becoming a slightly better blogger.

Here is the Times article from September 2012:

Kemal Özbayraktar remembers a time when every boy in his village was obsessed with sparrowhawks. Today he is among an ageing group of falconers trying to keep alive one of the world’s more unusual hunting traditions.

Every late September on the northeastern Black Sea coast of Turkey, hundreds of local men take to the mountains carrying a stick with a small bird perched on its tip.

The bird — a red-backed shrike — is caught and trained to act as a lure for wild sparrowhawks, tens of thousands of which migrate through the region between September and October. After trapping the hawks in nets, falconers spend a week taming them before using them to hunt quail. A month later they release them to continue on their migration.

“When I was a child there were 5,000 falconers in this area. Now there are 300,” said Mr Özbayraktar, 70, head of the falconry association in the town of Arhavi. “When something is declining this fast it cannot survive.”

Movement to the cities, modern forms of entertainment, and the availability of firearms have caused the tradition’s popularity to plummet. The coastal strip of rice and wheat fields that once provided habitat for the migrating quail has given way to tea plantations and expanding towns. Hizir Yogurtcu, 80, has kept sparrowhawks since he was ten years old. “There used to be rice fields all along the coast and they were full of quail,” he said. “Now there is only concrete.”

The birds once provided important seasonal subsistence within the Laz community, an ethnic group of about 90,000 in Turkey’s Rize and Artvin provinces. Now, as both the quail and the sparrowhawkers dwindle, international falconry groups are taking an interest in how the hunters tame hawks in the space of a few days. “The sparrowhawk is the wildest of raptors and one of the hardest to handle,” said Turan Basri, a British falconer who visited the region this week to research the tradition. “I’m amazed that they can man them in such a short space of time.”

The key, falconers believe, is intense and constant human contact. In Arhavi and other towns along the coast, perches for hawks are seen in streets, restaurants, and cafés. Owners take their hawks with them everywhere, constantly stroking them and keeping them awake late into the night, until they lose their fear of man.

The taming of wild birds of prey was once widespread. Known as “passagers”, wild birds caught on their first migration were seen as preferable to reared ones by falconers because they did not need to be taught to hunt.

The practice has long been outlawed in Britain, Europe, and many other parts of the world, but in Turkey an exception exists for sparrowhawks, where falconers use only recently fledged females. In 2010 falconry was added to Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage.

Since then, falconers have been lobbying Turkey to recognise this status. “What you’re seeing in Turkey is a very focused form of falconry that hinges on the migration,” Nick Fox, a leading British falconer, said. “The whole technique is geared towards manning the birds as soon as possible and then releasing them at the end.”

“It feels sad to release them,” said Mr Özbayraktar, “because you invest so much effort to train the bird, and some of them are very special. If it’s a good bird, I’ll say to it, ‘I’m releasing you, but promise to send me two of your best daughters next year’.”

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‘The Gardener’: the murder of Anne Bury

A picture of Anne Bury and Veli Acar, at Veli’s family home near Dalyan. Photo by Warren Allott.

As Turkish cities are again rocked by violent clashes between police and protesters and the country whips itself into dangerous hysteria, the British press is in town.

We’re not in Istanbul, Ankara, Hatay, or any of the other centres of unrest, but in the picturesque Aegean town of Dalyan covering the murder this week of British woman Catherine Anne Bury by her jilted Turkish lover Veli Acar.

Contrary to what some Turks may believe about the foreign media malevolently eying and exploiting their affairs, we are mostly interested in what’s happening here when it involves our own citizens. Unlike any of my stories about Gezi Park, my story on Tuesday about the death of Anne Bury appeared on the front page of the Times.

It was a particularly upsetting murder. Three generations of the same family – mother, son, and grandmother – on holiday celebrating the mother’s birthday when a gunman invaded their home at night, wounding the son and grandmother, before shooting down the door to the bathroom where the mother was hiding and killing her as she cowered on the floor.

The Telegraph, Mail, Sun, Express, and Mirror have all flown correspondents and photographers out from London to race around Muğla Province chasing the story. Over the past few days we’ve interviewed the murderer Veli Acar’s parents, his best friend, Ms Bury’s son Alex, who is in hospital recovering from a shotgun wound to the leg, and Veli Acar’s English ex-wife as well as various other friends and neighbours.

When people learn about these kinds of stories they are generally filtered through the broad stereotypes that the format of news and tabloid journalism inevitably engender. Drawn from the reporting of myself and other correspondents here over the past two days, this is an effort to give a slightly more humanized version of what appears to have precipitated these awful events.

According to Veli Acar’s family and friends, he and Anne Bury met about seven years ago, when he was in his late 30s and she in her late 40s. He was a captain on a tourist boat in Dalyan and she took a trip with him, which led to the start of a relationship.

She was a lawyer from near Middlesbrough in northeast England, but was working for a company in Saudi Arabia. According to Veli’s family and friends, she would visit Dalyan about four or five times a year for between a week and two weeks at a stretch, and they would spend time together on his boat. They would visit his home and have dinner with his family.

I went to the family bungalow outside Dalyan, which was modest and rundown in comparison to other dwellings in its small village. The family farm oranges, lemons and pomegranates. Dursan Acar, an elderly and sickly man suffering from diabetes, told us that Veli is one of six children, and the only one who is unmarried and does not have children of his own. “They lived like man and wife,” said his father. “We loved Catherine [Anne] and she loved us,” said Veli’s mother Müzeyyem.

They showed us pictures of Veli with  tourists on boats – laughing in the water, smiling in group shots – a very different image from the brutish, grim-faced man photographed being led to court handcuffed and flanked by jandarma. 

Family and friends were clearly horrified and baffled by the murder. Özay Akdoğan, Veli’s friend of 20 years, said: “He is not one for the party lifestyle of the nightclubs with the women, he had his lady and he was happy. His life was his boat, sometimes he would drink alone on his boat but I never once saw him fight anyone, it’s not in his nature.”

Veli’s family didn’t have any pictures of him and Anne together, but they did have a huge, dusty print in a faux-gilt frame concocted from separate photographs that showed the two of them in front of a cheesy seaside sunset.

It was a creepy object and perhaps offered some insight into the pair’s relationship. It was composed from passport photographs: them both staring ahead with blank, formal expressions. It was at once utterly un-intimate, but also seemed to be a testament to the intensity of his obsession. One of his friends told me that this or a smaller version of it had hung in Veli’s boat.

About three years ago, Özay Akdoğan told me, Anne bought a pair of luxury villas in Dalyan and the couple ran it as a tourist operation. Veli would pick up people from the airport, take them to stay at the villas, and then take them out on his boat.

Recently, some kind of money dispute developed between them in relation to this business. At some point in the last few months there was an electrical fire at the villa and Veli had to sell his boat to Özay to repair the damage. After that, he fired the man who was working there as a caretaker and began doing the work himself. According to some accounts, Anne had  ended the relationship because he was demanding money from her.

Anne’s family seem to have been totally unaware that any romantic relationship existed between them, and still claim that Veli was nothing more than a gardener. They issued a statement yesterday saying that reports that they were a couple were “completely untrue”.  

“It appears that the person that Anne employed as a general gardener/handyman, to look after her holiday villas, has committed this terrible crime,” the statement read. “We cannot comprehend the mentality of somebody who would do this to three lovely people who would never harm anybody.”

Mr Acar’s parents believe  her family’s lack of knowledge may have inadvertently helped precipitate the murder. They said in particular that her 24-year-old son Alex was unaware of the relationship and that they had not seen him visit Dalyan before.

The villa in Dalyan in which Anne Bury was murdered on Monday morning.

Last Saturday night the family were celebrating Anne’s 56^th Birthday at the villa. When I went round there on Tuesday evening the wrinkling balloons still festooned the garden. According to the account Veli himself gave to his family and to Özay Akdoğan, he had been sitting drinking rakı with Alex, who at some point said: “What’s the gardener still doing here? Fuck off.”

Veli swept all the raki glasses off the table and an argument ensued that ended in his angry departure. The family then called the jandarma and told them they were scared because Veli had threatened to kill them. The jandarma arrested Veli and held him  overnight before releasing him with a warning. At some time between 5am and 6am on Monday morning he returned to the house with a pump action shotgun.

I spoke to Alex in the hospital on Tuesday evening. He seemed keen to talk: I guess it was because he had been sitting alone in the bed for the past day and a half, without visitors, books or English-language television, unable to easily communicate with staff and probably turning the events over in his head.

He described waking in the middle of the night and seeing a figure over his bed brandishing a gun. He had stayed up late because he was anxious after the earlier argument, and had only got to sleep about an hour earlier.

“I recognised it was Veli and I tried to reason with him. I told him it didn’t have to be this way.” Veli gestured for him to go through to the other bedroom where his mother, and grandmother Cecilia, were sleeping.

“They had locked the door because they had heard our voices,” he said. At this point in our conversation, the hospital’s security guards realized they had admitted me to his room without gaining the proper permissions and asked me to leave and return in the morning. I did not hear the rest of Alex’s account, and since then the family have decided to manage all press contact through the British Embassy.

According to other published reports taken from the Turkish press, presumably originating from the police or jandarma, Veli then shot Alex in the leg (he suffered a broken tibia and a severed main artery and vein). He shot Cecilia in the back, although it was a light injury and she has since been released from hospital. He then shot Anne as she lay on floor hiding in an upstairs bathroom.

Shortly afterwards, he appeared at his friend Özay’s house, and awoke his father and mother and told them: “I’ve killed my wife, I’ve shot her son, I’ve shot her mother too. Take me to the jandarma.”

Ozay spoke to him at the station, and recalled him weeping and recounting the argument on Saturday night, saying that “they told me to fuck off… She left me empty. I have nothing now.”

Last night, it still did not seem entirely clear to me whether or not the pair were in fact lovers at all. Could Veli be a meticulous and convincing fantasist, capable of making his family and closest friends believe he was in a relationship with Anne? Could his family and friends be mischaracterising the relationship in order to lessen the legal penalty for the murder? In Turkey, ‘crimes of passion’ tend to receive lighter sentences.

Any doubts over this question have been more or less laid to rest, however, by the Telegraph, which scored today’s scoop: an interview with Veli’s Scottish ex-wife, Ruth McGarry, who said she divorced him in 2010.

She told The Telegraph: “It was because he entered a relationship with Anne that we separated and I decided to divorce him.”

The ex-wife said that she presumed that Miss Bury knew that Mr Acar was married to her, adding: “He preferred foreign women. He told me he had been in love with a Turkish girl and she left him and married someone else, and he did not trust Turkish girls after that.”

Miss McGarry said she and Mr Acar were together for more than ten years and, while he had a shotgun and loved hunting, she would never have believed him capable of killing anyone.

In enquiring about the mentality behind this awful murder I am by no means seeking to excuse it. Also, if I have humanised the perpetrator more than the victims, it is only because the latter – quite understandably – have been reluctant to share their side of the story. At this stage, however, it seems this tragedy may have hinged on Anne and Veli’s vastly different perceptions of their relationship.

Speaking to Veli’s friends and family, it’s clear his bond with Anne was of central importance to his life, and also to his livelihood.

She, meanwhile, whether through embarrassment or a simple desire for privacy, kept that relationship secret from her family. When it began to break down, Veli’s sudden transition from ‘lover’ to ‘gardener’ before the unsuspecting eyes of her family must have been all the more humiliating and devastating.

For Anne’s family, I imagine the fact that this stranger and interloper who took her life is now claiming a kind of intimacy with his victim must compound the awfulness of their loss.

Update: Since I posted this, the Mail have run this story showing Mr Acar and Ms Bury together, for real this time, and shedding more light on their relationship.

Southeast Asian hawk moths

(An Oleander Hawk Moth – Daphnis Nerii – image courtesy of Paul Nichol)

This post falls firmly within the ‘Etcetera’ category of ‘Turkey Etcetera’. You could say I’m expanding into other areas of interest, which include entomology, and in particular a family of moths, the Sphingidae, or hawk moths, which have fascinated me since I was a child. On a recent holiday to Malaysia I saw several different species, hence this post.

On the occasions when butterflies and moths are written about outside of an academic context, it is almost a cliché to mention Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov was an accomplished lepidopterist. In his memoir, ‘Speak, Memory’, he describes the hawk moths as the ‘jets of my boyhood’. It’s a good metaphor not only for their characteristic swept-back forewings and streamlined bodies, but also for the appeal they hold for children inclined to obsess about and collect insects.

A typical example is the one pictured above, the Oleander Hawk Moth (Daphnis Nerii), a large species occurring through southern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Many of the hawk moth species are varying shades of grey or brown, but Daphnis Nerii, with its green marbled wings and unlikely streaks of pink, is often considered one of the most beautiful of all moths.

The Sphingidae are the fastest-flying insects after dragonflies, and can travel at over 33 miles per hour. In contrast to the meandering flight of most Lepidoptera, they are almost bat-like in the air.

But the moth that sparked my own interest could not have looked less like a fighter jet. It was the Poplar Hawk Moth (Laothoe Populi), one of the most common species found in the UK, but which has a very unusual appearance, holding its underwings ahead of its forewings when at rest, with its abdomen curved sharply upwards. When I found one sitting in an empty bathtub at my home when I was nine or ten, it looked as improbable as an old biplane.

The only hawk moth to have forced its way into the popular consciousness is the Death’s Head Hawk Moth (Acherontia Atropos): large, mainly dark brown, with a yellow and blue streaked abdomen, and a pattern resembling a skull on its thorax. Long considered an ill omen in European countries (for obvious reasons), the moth has some odd characteristics. It emits a high-pitched squeak when alarmed, and often raids bees’ nests to steal honey. This was the moth bred by Buffalo Bill, the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs, and shown (with some minor photoshopping) on the posters for the movie.

So anyway, here are the hawk moths I found in Malaysia:

Despite its distinctive green eyespots on the forewings, it took me a lot of trawling online to identify this one as Daphnusa Ocellaris, quite common and apparently something of a pest in Southeast Asia, where the larvae feed on durians, a type of fruit plant.

When I saw this moth, I thought it might be a melanistic form of the Oleander Hawk Moth, pictured at the top of the post. But after doing some research, I discovered it was a similar though less spectacular species, the Jade Hawk Moth, Daphnis Hypothous, which is more typical to Southeast Asia. It is surprising how often there is some subtle but unambiguous mark that distinguishes similar-looking species from one another. Here, it is the white spot at the tip of each forewing on D. Hypothous, which D. Nerii lacks.

This ordinary-looking moth is Theretra Silhetensis. The scuff marks that you see on the heads of some of the moths suggest how long it has been since they emerged. Unlike some species of lepidoptera, which only live for a few days, are unable to feed, and whose only purpose is to breed and then die, hawk moths live for up to a month.

At first I doubted this was a hawk moth because of the way it held its forewings almost perpendicular to the body – unusual among the Sphingidae. But after a little research I discovered it was Ambulyx Canascens, also apparently considered a pest species in Southeast Asia.

This one, photographed mid-wingbeat, is Theretra Clotho. Its abdomen, thorax and forewings are a pretty uniform olive brown colour, which makes it fortunate that I got this picture, revealing its distinctive dark underwings and black spot at the base of the abdomen.

And how did I find these moths? By intrepidly hunting the corridors of my hotel, which were open-air and lit during nighttime. It was, as you can imagine, a thrilling holiday, especially for my girlfriend.

(05/06/12. Please note, the first picture is not mine. I nicked it off the Internet, and now can’t find the source. I would credit it if I could.)