Eid Mubarak/Happy Ramadan from Karagoz and Hacivat

Our shadow puppet friends from Bursa, Turkey, wish each and every one of you in Provo, Utah, a Happy Ramadan............

Yes, we do have an offbeat sense of humor (for those of you in Dubai who might not get the joke, Utah is a state with many Mormons and presumably very few Muslims). But, our ever diligent Javier the Intern reports there is in fact a Salt Lake City Muslim group!

http://www.utahmuslims.com/

http://www.mormon.org

http://www.goturkey.com

PS: We just found out that our blog has two hits from Cuba! To our knowledge, this is the first time, we've had hits from there.....

This Blog Will Go On.....

Since we are surprisingly popular in Greece (the editor of this blog Tilly Gokbudak, who is me, is a Turkish-American), we thought we's post the first entry of 2013 with an image of the Greek shadow puppet Karagiozis who really sets a bad example for children by walking barefoot (we are just kidding....we like being populr in Greece).

Karagiozis has a Turkish counterpart in Karagoz, a bearded anti-intellectual, who frequently bouts with his frenemy, the benevolent Hacivat.

One of our hopes for this year is to post a weekly round-up of weather temps around the globe on Wednesdays. We will probably annoy folks in both Greece and Turkey by posting the temps in Fahreinhiet, but perhaps one day, we will use Celsius as well.

Here we go:

Athens, Greece 51 (partly cloudy)

Boulder, Colorado* 10 (snow)

Charlottesville, Virginia* 48 (cloudy)

Istanbul, Turkey 45 (rain/yagmur)

Lawrence, Kansas 30 (cloudy)

Paris, France 38 (cloudy)

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 28 (partly cloudy)

*- These are American cities, all of which are also college towns.

Happy New Year from Karagoz and Hacivat

For complicated reasons that we went into greater deal with on our other blog "The Daily Vampire," Turkey and France are not getting along well these days. For the entry on our sister blog, we sent New Year's greetings from the beloved French comic book character Asterix the Gaul. Here, we shall go with a much older entity in the Turkish shadow puppet figures of Karagoz and Hacivat, whom we believe may actually be in the public domain as Turkey has traditionally had more lax copyright laws than Europe and America.

Karagoz, the one with the beard, and Hacivat, the one with the mustache, are the lead characters in Turkish shadow puppet theatre. There is considerable dispute as to when the plays were first performed. According to Wikipedia, it was long believed that Karagoz and Hacivat first appeared during the reign of Sultan Selim (1512-1520), but there is historical evidence to suggest they go back even further in time than the 16th century.

Karagoz represents the semi-literate village dwellers while Hacivat symbolizes educated intellectuals. The plays remain very timely to this day because children can be entertained by them while adults can observe how these two characters represent the deep divides in Turkey, which exist to this very day. Conversely, Karagoz and Hacivat are the best of friends, yet they also can't stand each other.

Secondary characters in the plays, which usually run about ten minutes each, include the Drunkard, Zeybek and the old woman. The plays always conclude with Karagoz and Hacivat having a major argument. There is a similar Greek shadow puppet character named Karagiozis. In both Turkey and Greece, there has always been a concern that each passing generation will be less interested in traditional shadow puppet theatre than the previous one. And, tourists have been known to take a greater interest in shadow puppet theatre than the natives.

In Turkey, Karagoz and Hacivat have long been associated with Bursa, Turkey's fourth largest city and former Ottoman capital, before Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror came to the Bosporus shores of Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453.

Happy New Year to everyone, and we hope you keep reading this blog in 2012.


SIDEBAR: The answer to our Road Trip Quiz from last week was "C" and the answer to the Rabbit Ears Quiz question about "The Brady Bunch" was "A."