Musical wedding chairs

To judge from the quantities of chairs in transit you wouldn't think that there could be any danger of a guest being forced to stand. Long experience, sadly, has taught me that you would be wrong.

Recently, I attended a kına gecesi (henna night) for a bride-to-be in the tiny backwater village of Çiftlik. Keen to see whether it truly was, as my neighbor had told me, “like Göreme when you first came here,” I did not head straight for the village hall on arrival but instead sneaked away for a quick look around beforehand.

Big mistake. By the time I'd seen what appeared to be everything that there was to see (i.e., not much) and returned to the hall there was not a seat to be had for love or money. Instead I was forced to perch half a buttock on the edge of a plastic table and hope that the person whose opposite buttock was supporting the other side would not move and make the table seesaw downwards on my side.

This, I thought sourly, was part of the explanation for a curious fact about local weddings recently raised by a friend -- namely that people rarely look as if they're enjoying themselves. At the time, I'd put this down to the volume of the music since the memory still lingered of the last wedding I'd gone to when the only way it had been possible to stay in the same room as the happy couple was if I stuffed my ears with enough tissue paper to protect myself from almost certain noise-induced deafness.

But it had been a while since that wedding, so I'd forgotten the chair factor that means that all but the youngest and most enthusiastic of dancers spend most of the evening guarding their seat for fear that to move from it would guarantee having to spend the rest of the evening standing up.

Anyway, as they say in America, once I'd managed to establish buttock-lock on the table, I was free, at least, to watch the proceedings in comfort, if not to take part in them. And so, in due course I saw the bride-to-be's friends and relatives form an arch with their arms while others held up lit candles so that she could process down the hall to the chair set up at the far end. There, her mother approached with a basketful of small packets of henna as a phalanx of iPhone-equipped female photographers formed a wall around the bride in her pretty red veil.

Fifteen years ago, everyone really did get their hands hennaed, a cumbersome procedure that involved having a golf-ball-sized piece of henna secured between the palm and the bent fingers, then tied in place with a rag so that the staining effect could take place overnight. Lately, however, young people seem much less keen to have their hands daubed in this way, so now the little packets of henna are handed out more or less as wedding favors.

That brief excitement over, we sipped on our bottled water, munched on our packeted peanuts, then made a beeline for the bus back to Göreme for fear it would leave without us (to be continued).

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave house in Göreme in Cappadocia.