What's in a name?

I thought I would share one of the things that keeps me amused out here – names.  Turkish names – Christian names, surnames and even place names  often have me chuckling.

While most English names have a meaning if you dig into them, it isn’t often immediately obvious.  The exceptions are ‘hippy’ style names like River and some of those used by eccentric stars – Apple and Peaches spring to mind.  In Turkey, these sort of names are common; Rain (one of our nieces’ names), Leaf, River, Stream, New Moon, Tulip, Love and Wish are all popular girls names, Iron, Soil, Eagle, South, War, Peace and Lion for a boy.

just a nice sunset the other day!

Some of these are very pretty names – both in sound and meaning.  But there are some whose meaning seems to me just weird.  Why would you call your child ‘Enough’? Our second cleaner last summer went by this rather strange name and readily admitted to me that as the fifth child her parents had chosen it for her to show they wouldn’t have any more children – and then gone on to have two more!

For a boy, what about ‘Help’?  In my book of children’s names it says that as well as meaning ‘one giving help’ it is – like ‘enough’ – a name given to a (planned) last child. As in ‘god help me’? Honestly!

Here’s another one that makes Cem laugh on a frequent basis.  An affectionate shortening of the name Mehmet is ‘Memiş’ (pronounced Memish), now used as a name in its own right.  Unfortunately ‘memiş’ is also a common word for breasts – a bit like boobs.  Cem knows a man who is quite an important civil servant who goes by this name and every time he calls, Cem starts quietly sniggering and I know it is ‘boobs’ on the phone!

Surnames, having been made compulsory by Atatürk, were often chosen to highlight the character of the namee…which makes you wonder why people chose things like ‘Madaxe’, ‘Blackpants’, or even better ‘Without pants’.   Sometimes it is the combination of the two names which makes it funny.  We know a family with the name ‘Fox’ who chose to give their son the name ‘Strange’:  ‘Strange Fox’ – sounds more like a Red Indian than Turk!

Finally place names.  Just before we got to Uludağ where we went skiing we went through the small town of ‘Grasshopper’.  Here are some other good ones:  the villages of ‘Mad’, ‘Useless ones’, ‘Calf’, ‘Son of a Goat’ and ‘Mad Ali the servant’.  And one for Frank….’Bald ones’ village!

I suppose you could have the same fun with some of our place names and even surnames  - Cem thought Winterbottom was pretty funny when he first heard it.  Talking of which, I have a funny story about names.  The first time Cem and I were in England together we were renting a car.  As it was being brought to the house, I checked on the phone whether Cem as a Turkish licence holds would be able to be listed as a named driver.  They said fine, as long as they could understand his licence.  As the Turkish driving licence has everything written in English under the Turkish we didn’t think there would be a problem.   However, the not-so-bright man who delivered the car took his licence and looked long and hard at it.  I started to show him how under ‘Sürücü Belgesi’ it said ‘Driving Licence’ and under ‘Soyadı’ it said ‘Surname’ but he still looked puzzled and eventually said:

‘But his name is foreign – how do I translate that?’

And now....watch the cat and the rabbit!

The joys of pet ownership

Some of you will know that despite my usually sensible approach to stray animals (that is we have enough already and they should go to the animal sanctuary to find a good home), this summer, mainly thanks to our guests, we acquired a second dog and a cat. The dog (Poppy) now lives at home with our other dog – sometimes playing happily together, sometimes squabbling. She is very big and can jump onto the garden wall, from where she towers over people walking up the road (which is lower than our garden) and probably frightens the living daylights out them, particularly Turkish people who can be frightened of even the smallest, quietest dog.


The cat – also called Poppy (I did try to find another name for at least one of them but somehow the name had stuck to both of them) – lives at the hotel. There is also a very fat white rabbit which lives in the hotel garden. When the cat is in a frisky mood she stalks the rabbit, who seems quite unconcerned and just hops off in disgust but no particular haste. I actually think in a fight the rabbit would probably win.

When we got back from our ski holiday, the cat was walking on 3 legs. The fourth was so fat and twisted that I thought she must have broken it. We took her to the vet where she amazed me by purring her head off while on the nasty metal table in the vets, obviously in some pain. Must be a sign of nerves – either that or she’s stupid! Anyway the good news was it wasn’t broken but she had a nasty cut that had got infected and I had to give her medicine twice a day for a week (liquid antibiotic squirted into her mouth – surprisingly she drank it without a fuss).

As there are a number of other cats that visit the hotel and having just dealt with one lot of kittens I also had her booked in to be ‘done’ last week. So a few days later she went back in the box, back to the vets and had her op, after which she had a rather fetching bandage wrapped round her middle which pulled her fur and made her walk sideways.

The following day I was at the hotel when the boys called me to come home quickly. When I got there I found the puppy Poppy had been stung by something and her nice pointy snout had swollen to three times its normal size. She seemed not in the slightest bit bothered by this, even though she could not shut her mouth properly, but she looked both ugly and very funny at the same time. Into the car and another trip to the vet- unlike the purring cat, this large dog quivered with fright and had to be held down while he gave her an antihistamine injection.

dog with a fat lip

I have threatened them all with the dogs home if they cause any more trouble. The only one that isn’t a problem is the rabbit, and she is in trouble with Cem as she has eaten his pomilin (a type of oversized grapefruit) trees.

'Make sure you win - or you'll be the sausages next time!'

To add some larger animals to the picture, we went to watch the camel wrestling on Sunday. It was in one of the villages on the edge of Fethiye and was very popular with locals – with a sort of market set up outside and stalls selling things to eat (including camel sausages – is that a threat to the competitors?) The camels were very well turned out with coloured rugs and beads and bells. Five or six of them are in the arena at the same time and two are encouraged to ‘wrestle’ which they do by pushing each other with their necks. The one who goes down first – or runs away (which was the case with a couple of them) loses. There is a bit of pushing but nothing too violent and some of the participants actually didn’t look that interested in fighting. They do produce a lot of foamy spit though, and it is wise to duck when they shaking their heads in your vicinity.  By the way, these camels are kept because of the prestige - and cost up to about £100,000 if they have good form!

WATCH OUT FOR THE SPIT!!

Actually we missed the best sport of the day. The ‘mayor’ of the little suburb it was in wanted to ride a camel. One of the beasts was duly prompted to lie down so he could get on; unfortunately as it stood up – as gently as a camel can – he lost his balance and went head first onto the floor. Nothing damaged but his pride – and it was shown on national news the following day so I don’t suppose he’ll forget that in a hurry!