I realised Yemen was also the poorest country of the Arabian peninsula the moment I entered Sana'a airport. This drab, old building is a far cry from the modern facilities and gleaming terminals of Middle-Eastern airports such as Dubai, Bahrain or Doha. Yemen was once covered by fertile fields in what now is a desert. The Romans knew this wealthy land as Arabia Felix, as opposed to Arabia Deserta in the North. Market cities like Sana'a grew rich from trade in incense, coffee and foodstuffs. But black gold and natural gas now trump incense and coffee, so Arabia Felix has become the pauper of the region.
Yemen is a very interesting country with weird statistics :
- the literacy rate is only 35%. The most prized schools in which well-off Yemenis try by all means to have their children enrolled are Turkish ones opened by Fetullah Gülen, since those schools are said to give the best education . There are fourteen Fetullah schools in Yemen, of which four are exclusively for girls. Whenever someone learns you are Turkish, they immediately mention those schools. And due to those schools, they like Turkish people.
- the population is around twenty million and there are around sixty million AK47s ( of its well-known name Kalashnikov) in the country. So many that there was an interesting sign at the very entrance to our hotel.
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| NO KALASHNIKOV PLEASE |
- Yemen grows coffee. Yemeni coffee is great. Wrong. Even though it is where coffee originated, Yemen used to grow coffee. Now they grow qat (we will come to that later on). The coffee , or rather the black brew they serve as coffee, is the worst I have ever tasted. Be wise, and if you ever decide to visit Yemen, take your coffee with you. And say ''no'' to all your friends who ask you to bring them back coffee from Yemen.
- Belkıs, the Queen of Sheba whose visit to King Solomon is narrated in the Bible, lived in Yemen and her empire was in Yemen. Can be discussed, since the same story is told in Ethiopia where people insist that Belkıs's empire was in what now is Ethiopia.
A short historical overview : North Yemen became independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The British , who had set up a protectorate around the southern port of Aden in the 19th century, withdrew in 1967 from what became South Yemen. Three years later, the southern government adopted a Marxist orientation. The massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis from the south to the north contributed to two decades of hostility between the two states. The two countries were formally unified as the Republic of Yemen in 1990.
As to the people, they are Muslim of course, and of the strict variety. No need to mention women's rights, since they are practically non-existent and all women in the cities wear the black niqab, and cover their faces as well. In villages women seem more relaxed and the face can be seen. Their niqab is not black but made of very colorful material ,some with golden threads in it. It looks much more joyous. Be it in the city or in villages, women do not allow you to take their picture, so most pictures of women I have taken is from the back, not that it makes much difference, especially in the cities, since all you see is a long black sheet.
Below the niqab and the veil, you can only imagine what exists by looking at shop windows. I have seen things that even I would not wear.
Something strange happened one day in Sana'a. The group was visiting a mosque and I was a little bit behind taking pictures when a woman agreed to a picture with some kids around. After I took the shot, she told me, in sign language, to follow her. Using the same language, I made it clear that I should not lose the group. As she insisted, I said to myself so what. If I loose the group, I know where the hotel is. And I followed her. We walked a bit, and came to a small door that she opened, and we were in her house. She closed the door so we would not be seen from the street, opened her veil and asked me to take a picture. She was so kind and seemed happy to have shown me her face. I had the feeling she wanted me to know who she was; not a shadow behind a veil, but a real person, with a face. I was touched. Then we hugged, she kissed me on both cheeks, put down her veil, took me back to the mosque and left.
Nowadays, jambiyas are more of a status symbol than a weapon, especially that the country's liberal gun laws make it possible for anyone to go to a gun market and buy anything ranging from automatic rifles to hand grenades. Jambiyas still occasionally come out of their sheath but mainly during events such as dances at weddings.
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| TWO GROOMS SOON TO BE WED |
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| MEN DANCİNG AT A WEDDİNG. |
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| JAMBİYAS FOR TOURİSTS İN SANA'A OLD MARKET |
You cannot go to Yemen and understand the country if you do not grasp the importance of a leaf in the cultural life of Yemenis. That leaf is called qat. Qat is a shrub or small tree native to the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It contains an amphetamine-like stimulant that is said to cause excitement, loss of appetite and euphoria. Qat chewing is confined to the regions where it is grown because only the fresh leaves have the desired stimulating effect, and those can be preserved for only twenty-four hours maximum. So fresh leaves have to be bought every day. Qat is so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes much of the country's agricultural resources; it is estimated 40 % of the country's water supply goes towards irrigating it. Another drawback of qat chewing is that three quarters of Yemeni adults chew qat leaves each and every afternoon for a period of at least five hours. Since excitement slowly leaves place to euphoria, you end up with a nation of very low productivity in every field and not much constructive work is done. On a more micro-economic level, Yemenis spend about one quarter to one third of their income on qat. Some among the poorer segments of society willingly forego food in favor of buying qat.
Alcohol is forbidden in Yemen due to religious reasons; qat has become the addictive substitute of choice.
In Yemen, qat is much more than just a drug, a stimulant. It is a way of life. Men's mind focus on the qat market by late morning every day. You can easily observe this since our driver as well started looking right and left at around midday everyday, slowing here and there, and finally stopping somewhere to buy the cherished leaves, only after which he relaxed again.
Chewing of qat is purely social, but gender separated. It starts after lunch, the main meal of the day. Merchants chew qat in their shops or stalls, drivers and their passengers in their vehicles, and workers at their job sites. The act of communal chewing promotes interpersonal interaction. Business transactions are completed, marriages arranged and news is exchanged during those sessions. Social pressure forces people to participate in qat chews. If they prefer not to, they will be labeled as social outcasts.
So every day in the afternoon all Yemeni men (and women too at home but you do not see them) start ruminating . As you chew qat, but do not swallow it, adding leaves little by little, those ruminating men start getting bigger and bigger bulges on their cheek. And towards the evening, chewers become increasingly introverted and meditative since the excitement stage is at an end and the euphoria stage sets in. Entire days are thus wasted.
I have never seen a whole country ruminating all together. Qat seems to be a ''green god'' that has a powerful hold on the people of Yemen.
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| WHO İS WORKİNG ? |
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| EUPHORİA STAGE OF QAT CHEWİNG |
Yemenis are interesting, true, but maybe more so is their architecture. And to visit Old Sana'a, Shibam in the Hadhramut Valley, and villages in the countryside is a must if you ever visit Yemen.
Sana'a, the 1.500-year old capital of Yemen, is set on a wide plain surrounded by mountains. It is said that Sana'a is the oldest inhabited city in the world and was first created by Noah's son, Shem. Unfortunately, nobody can confirm this.
In the past, the city used to be a walled town with six entry gates which, until the 1960's, were all locked at night. Until that time, all of Sana'a was the Old City and it is only after 1962 that modern Sana'a was built. Today, only one gate remains, the Bab el-Yemen, built by the Ottomans in 1870. It serves as a landmark separating the old town from the new.
I gasped when I entered the Old City for it was as if I had entered another world. The walls enclose a maze of stone and mud brick buildings that rise four, five or even seven storeys high. The facades are decorated with elaborate white friezes. The intricate frames of the arched windows are set with colored glasses. Many buildings date back four centuries, some even eleven centuries, and this is really a medieval city. Going around the old town is exciting. Any single house, any single street, any window, any door, surprises you in another way. It is just like walking in another time, another atmosphere. You feel as if you are in a fairytale world of gingerbread houses decorated with vanilla frosting.
Yemenis seem to have a natural genius for architecture and they build in a distinctive style unique to Yemen. Called tower houses, the tall buildings accommodate a single family. Each level has a different function: the ground floor is for the animals, the second floor is for storage, the kitchen is on the third floor, bedrooms on the fourth and on top you have the sitting room to entertain guests. Carved wooden enclosures are designed to allow the women of the house to look upon the city or to see who is knocking at the door without exposing themselves .
The souqs (market) of Old Sana'a are called Souq al-Milh, meaning Salt Market. Even though that used to be the main item traded in the past, today the souqs contain an array of goods from spices to grains, through clothing , brass ornaments, cotton and silverware. I had heard silver jewelery is very good in Yemen but had not realised there would be more than you could ever want in the souq. I had to refrain myself from bringing everything back home.
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| COFFEE GRİNDER |
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| A SHOPPER IN THE SOUQ |
To travel outside Sana'a, you need to have a travel permit of which it is advisable to have dozens of copies made since at each roadblock the authorities will demand to keep one. But it is well worth the effort. Within half an hour , I found myself in a village where a house gave me my first impression of what was to come.
We then reached Wadi Dhahr and the five-storey Dar al-Hajar or Rock Palace of Imam Yahya, built as his summer residence in 1930. The residence was built like a fortress but in an unbelievable feat of human engineering.
We continued to visit the villages of Yemen, some clinging to hill tops and indiscernible from far away, having totally become part of the rock it stands on, others literally hanging off a cliff face, still others built on a precipice, but all more beautiful and breathtaking than the last, and the whole in very rugged terrain.
One village has to be specifically mentioned though : Zabid. Zabid is one of the oldest towns in Yemen; it was the capital from the 13th to the 15th centuries and a center of Islamic learning due to the University of Zabid. Today, however, it is a sleepy village of some 300.000 inhabitants with eighty, still active, Koranic schools.
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| THE YOUNGER YOU LEARN THE KORAN, THE BETTER İT İS (!) |
What contributed to the fame of Zabid were not the Koran courses of course. Rather, it was the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini who fell in love with Yemen on his first visit to the country and filmed his famous ''1001 Arabian Nights'' film in the Nasr Palace in Zabid in 1974. The palace itself is a 19th century Ottoman building. I should add at this point that the Ottomans first invaded Yemen in 1538 and had to leave in 1635. They came again in 1872 (one wonders why) and left in 1919 when the Empire was dismembered.
Before leaving Yemen , you must also visit Shibam, a plane journey away from Sana'a, in the Hadhramut Valley, in the North-East of the country. First you have to pray that there is no sand storm in the valley, since this is a common occurrence which makes you wait at Sana'a airport for an unknown number of hours. We waited five hours. When our plane landed and we came out of the airport, we were met by three policemen with their Kalashnikov ready. What have we done? In fact, it is the Yemeni Government that obliges tourists to be accompanied by policemen wherever they go in the Hadhramut Valley since it is afraid of tourists being killed and the effect this would have on the already quite poor image of the country.
Shibam was originally created in 200 B.C., but became the capital of the region in the 3rd century A.D. It was located at an important caravan halt on the spice and incense route across the Southern Arabian plateau. Little of the original city remains though. In the 10th century, it was destroyed by tribal attacks, then from the floods of 1298 and 1532. The actual buildings were constructed after the last flood so what we see today is still around 500 years old. Shibam's tall, narrow , mud-brick houses are packed together so densely inside the city walls that the English traveller Freya Stark, back in the 1930's, christened this city ''The Manhattan of the Desert''. Some call it ''the oldest skyscraper city in the world''.
Shibam is characterised by three 5s: 500 years old, 500 houses and 5.000 people living in it. When the population grew, New Shibam was built opposite the old town.
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| SHİBAM UNDER A SAND STORM |
Shibam has scarcely altered since it was last rebuilt in 1533. But after the demise of caravan routes, Shibam went into a slow decline, losing its inhabitants to emigration. The most famous of those emigrants is the family of the infamous Osama bin Laden who emigrated to Saudi-Arabia. The walled city has one single entrance gate. Shibam developed on a rectangular grid plan of streets and squares. The town is unique in its concentration of tall houses, five to seven storey high. The tallest house rises 29,15 meters above its entrance on street level and has eight floors. Many others have seven floors,but the normal height is five floors. The traditional houses are built of mud-brick, on stone foundations and with walls that are one meter thick. They are plastered externally with mud plaster mixed with chopped straw. The top one or two levels are protected from rain by lime plaster which makes Shibam look as if it was covered with snow. The ground floor is used for animal and food stores, the first floor above, for small animals such as sheep, goat and chicken, and to store firewood, grain and vegetables. The second floor is reserved for business and for the entertaining of strangers by men. The private parts of the house start above that, the women and children usually having priority to use the third and fourth floors, and the men sharing with them the relaxing rooms on the topmost two floors, the reception room or majlis always being on the top floor. At high levels in many of the houses small doors allow access to neighbouring houses so that women can visit each other without putting their veil on to descend on the street.
Yemen, with its long history going back to biblical times, its medieval atmosphere, its villages hanging on mountain cliffs, its towns which are architectural wonders (as such recognised by UNESCO who put Sana'a, Shibam and Zabid on its World Heritage Site list), its people who are nice even if a bit dazed, is in my opinion the most interesting country in the Arab world. And there is only one way you come back from Yemen, by humming that old Turkish folk song (which unfortunately I cannot translate to English):
Havada bulut yok bu ne dumandır
Mahlede ölüm yok bu ne figandır
Şu Yemen elleri ne de yamandır
Adı Yemen'dir gülü dikendir
Giden gelmiyor acep nedendir.
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