From TODAY’S ZAMAN

In the UK there is a curious offense called twoccing which is named after the initials of the words “taking without the owner’s consent.”                              
 
It’s an offense which has to do with stolen cars and is usually associated with the sort of young men we used to call tearaways or yobs, but who have recently been renamed feral youth. I suppose we must have some sort of car crime here in Göreme even if I can’t remember hearing about it, but I was reminded of the term recently when, on one of the icily cold days around the new year, a friend was holding forth about his own youth in neighboring Avanos.

These days not many of the locals still keep donkeys, but in the past one of the sadder things that used to happen was that, with the advent of winter, some of the poorer people would abandon their animals to fend for themselves on the streets. I well remember seeing one such wretched beast wandering down the middle of the road in Ürgüp with the traffic backed up behind it. It was not a sight I wanted to see again.

My friend was describing how a group of his contemporaries had decided to round up some of these abandoned donkeys and go for a ride on them. When he came to look for one, however, they had all been taken. On the other hand, in a nearby field a neighbor was keeping a donkey that he had no intention of abandoning. It was a well-fed donkey. What’s more, it even had metal shoes on its feet.

“I went into the field and took that donkey,” the friend said. “We were riding through the snow when suddenly it collapsed on the ground and starting twitching.” For a second he couldn’t understand what was happening. Then he felt a tingling in his lower legs and realized that there must be live electricity nearby and that the donkey’s shoes had attracted it.

“I leapt off the donkey,” he said. “But it was already dead. I didn’t know what to do, so we just ran away and left it there to be covered up by the snow.”

Of course the loss of such a valuable animal could not go unnoticed, and soon the neighbor discovered what had happened. “I got such a hiding from my dad,” the friend said. These days, I suppose, the gendarmerie (military police) might be called and my friend might have ended up with a criminal record for this rural variant on twoccing. Back then, though, such problems were dealt with privately.

Days later and the same friend was on his knees in a carpet shop, kneading a vast mountain of minced steak with salt and pepper to make çiğ köfte (raw meatballs). He was using his own recipe which involved a little less spice and an extra sweetening of pomegranate juice and walnuts. The köfte, once finished, he doled out to us on little napkins of lettuce. If only a few of the feral twoccers in British towns could grow up into such enthusiastic Jamie Olivers.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
 
15 January 2009, Thursday