Last month I attended Istanbul’s Annual Gypsy Festival. There were gypsy bands playing on several stages and family and friends crowded everywhere. Kabobs, Efe’s beer, durums, fish, chicken, and lamb on the grill and everyone as happy as I’ve ever seen people anywhere. 

Music is in their blood. Not just the Turks but throughout the Middle East. Music and dance is the common thread, the memory that runs through them all, which makes them forget their differences long enough to remember that they are one family, and to rejoice in it. 

The sheer joy I saw on faces young and old, ugly and beautiful, male and female. People could not NOT dance. And they could not NOT sing. The soul-wrenching contralto of the female soloist, the horns, the children standing about the stage with hats on...

The gypsies may be much maligned in Europe including Turkey, but when it comes to music no one contends with the fact that it is the gypsies who are the keepers of the music, music that ties hearts together now as it has for over 2000 years. 

Men danced with men, women with women, and men with women and women with men, and children with grandmothers and with each other. They danced with undulating hands held high, feet moving merrily below, they circled each other, moved together, moved apart...this wasn’t a dance of seduction, it was a celebration of being alive, a celebration of the memories of their forbearers. My body got chill bumps as I listened to the bleeding heart songs, and my eyes teared up as I remembered that I too belong to this family of man. That in my soul I am Mediterranean.

The music was played by the musicians and through the bodies of those who danced. Dancing – a joyful human act that has been sublimated in many a modern culture...Americans, French, Argentines, and the English to name a few. The band sang a Mothers Day song in Turkish, and everywhere people turned to the women around them, and sang their hearts out, and my heart melted. 

Music. Dance. Song. In Middle Eastern music I sense the joy of travelers in a caravan, stopped for the night after hours of traipsing through the desert from one marketplace (Cairo?) to another (Constantinople?), the sun gone down, tents set up, and the instruments unpacked, brushed off.

The flames of the fire throwing light on the people as bone tired, they rejoice in yet one more day of love and life, and shared pain and joy - thru music and dance. 

I knew that night that my love for Turkey was more than just infatuation with a new country. There is something here that I recognized nine years ago, and have returned to remember. 

Later that night, I walked down the narrow winding cobblestone streets of Galatasaray, past the music store windows showcasing ouds, durnas, and other Turkish instruments whose names I can’t remember, past the ancient glimmering Galata Tower, and into Dia Market where I filled my basket with eggplants, goat cheese, olives and yogurt and walked the remaining block home, and up the seven flights of stairs to my flat where I dumped the bags in the kitchen and sat down to write with a slice of Istanbul shimmering outside my window like a scene from Arabian Nights. 

Up-lit mosques with seagulls circling the minarets, ornate palaces, ships gliding on the Bosphorus, boat horns, the calls to prayer reverberating throughout the city, seagull cries, and gypsy notes wafting in on the warm night air through my open windows. 

Such is the magic of travel.