Kurban Bayramı

If blood, death, or animal sacrifice offends you in any way, now’s your chance to stop reading, and you most certainly should not click through to the pictures unless you’re okay with seeing those sorts of things.

This week is the four-day Kurban Bayramı festival, which is the second most important holiday in the Islamic calendar. This is something I have avoided dealing with in past years because it involves sacrificing animals by slitting their throats, and I get a bit… emotional about that. Usually I just have to stay in the house, because the place where they do it in our part of town is an empty lot that is visible from where I live, so if I go out, I see it. One half of the lot fills up with sheep and goat farmers, and you can buy your animal there, and then you go to the other side where they have a big concrete slab and meat hooks, and that’s where the deed is done. There are plenty of butchers and assistants and whatever. They do several hundred animals before the day is over.

This year that empty lot has been bought by a private investor, so no kurban. However, our apartment complex has a slab-and-hooks setup in one of the common areas, and I figured my more devout neighbours would be doing their sacrificing there.

A couple of days ago I started thinking about how I was going to handle this. Would I go down there and take pictures? It’s not very often such a significant and unusual event comes right to my doorstep. Historically, the photographers I have admired most are not just the ones who can get the best shots, but the ones who can turn off their personal feelings regarding what is happening at any particular time, and simply concentrate on capturing the moment instead. Anyone who has ever met me in person knows that I am ridiculously mushy when it comes to animals— any time I see any kind of animals when I’m out and about, my initial reaction is to squeal and run toward them, offering kisses and hugs and cuddles, and snacks if I have any. I have no qualms about smell or mange or anything like that; everyone gets equally enthusiastic affection. I also have no sense of embarrassment or shame about it— in fact, I don’t even notice other people around me when I’m in an animal trance.

When I woke up on Monday morning (the first day of the bayram) I was still thinking, I wonder if she’s going to go down there or not, unable to detect even a slight leaning in either direction, and completely detached from the fact that she was me. I got out of bed, started to go about my daily routine, and didn’t think much more about it.

About an hour later I walked out onto the balcony and saw a goat tied to a tree right outside our building, near where the slab is. I grabbed my camera and got a couple of long shots of the goat, then stood there blankly for a while. After a few minutes, a man in an apron appeared from behind one of the buildings, and suddenly I thought, wow, they’re doing it now, I’d better get down there. Next thing I knew, I was out the front door.

I wasn’t nervous; during the ride down in the elevator my only concern was whether I might come back a vegetarian. I pride myself on never making major life decisions based on knee-jerk emotional responses (i.e. I would never be a born-again anything). That’s not to say that I don’t ever take my gut feelings or intuition into account, but rather that I use them only as one piece of a puzzle that is solved by rational analysis. If I ever do make the decision to adopt a meat-free diet, I want it to be because I weighed all the options and came to a logical decision, not because a wittow wamby wooked at me wif his wittow pweading eyes and I fell apart.

When I got down there, the apron guy was sitting on the concrete slab, smoking a cigarette. I asked if I could take photos of the goat, to which he enthusiastically nodded. After I took a few shots, I asked when they were going to sacrifice it. He shrugged and said he was just waiting on everyone to get downstairs. I asked if it would be okay to photograph the actual sacrifice. He said that he had no problems with that, but it would be up to the owners of the individual animals. Plural. I asked how many more animals he was expecting, and he said there would probably be four or five, and that the participating residents had chipped in to hire a butcher to assist, and the butcher would be arriving soon. I guess he thought I was concerned about how they were going to handle that volume of meat.

Slowly things started to come together. A delivery truck arrived with another goat and three sheep. Various families trickled down from the buildings and started assembling. In the end there were maybe 25 people in total.

I don’t feel I need to say too much about the specifics of the kurban itself, because I think the pictures tell the story more than adequately, and there are plenty of explanations in the captions. I will, however, note these few things, which for the most part are impossible to convey with photography:

• The only time during the entire event that I felt any emotion other than boredom (there was a lot of waiting around) was before the very first sacrifice, at the moment when I first saw a man walking with a knife in his hand. He didn’t even have an agenda, he was just meandering around and happened to be holding a knife, and when I saw it, my heart raced a little. Other than that, I was fine. No feelings whatsoever, positive or negative, which surprised me.
• Looking at the photos when I got home was about a thousand times more difficult than actually being down there and photographing it. In fact, I had to stop a couple of times and get away from the screen. I think the difference in response is largely due to the fact that 90% of the actual event was people standing around doing nothing, whereas 90% of the photos are all the intense bits with no break.
• The families brought their small children down there with them, like it was no biggie. At first I thought, how on earth can you let your five-year-old watch a man cut a live sheep’s throat open? Then I thought, actually, if I’d been casually exposed to stuff like this when I was a kid, and taught to accept it, maybe now I wouldn’t be as freaked out as I am about any subject remotely involving death or mortality.
• When you open up the throat of an animal that’s still alive, a very strong and curious odor emanates from it. I asked what it was, and the butcher told me it’s a combination of freshly oxygenated blood (warm metallic smell) and bacteria in the esophagus (internal body odor, basically). By the time they got to the third animal, I couldn’t smell it anymore.
• There wasn’t as much blood as I had imagined there would be.
• Goats respond with anger, sheep with fear. The goats were very vocal and struggled a lot. There was a lot of kicking. The first one even managed to get away briefly, which provided some comic relief as people ran around trying to catch it. The sheep were terrified, and quiet. They didn’t fight back, they just trembled and waited.
• It takes a lot longer than I expected for an animal to die this way. Even after it’s technically dead and the head is completely severed, the eyes look around for a few seconds, and the body continues to buck and kick for nearly a minute.
• Everything was kept really clean. The bleeding was confined to a very small area away from the slab, and while they were skinning and butchering, the slab was hosed down almost constantly. Anything that needed to be thrown away (hooves, skulls) was bagged up and disposed of immediately.
• There was a tremendous sense of community. Everyone had their role. The men butchered, the women cleaned and packaged offal, and the older kids cleared away the stuff that needed to be taken to the dumpster. It kind of had the same energy as when there’s a big family dinner and everyone is helping to prepare some small aspect of it.

The residents who participated in the kurban were very welcoming toward me, and overwhelmingly accommodating about the camera. Nobody had any issues with me at all. They most certainly perceived me as an outsider rather than as their neighbour, and they seemed comfortable with that arrangement, so I played along. Basically I just wanted the best possible atmosphere in which to take photos, and that’s exactly what I got.

The full set of 66 photos is here. Because of flickr’s TOS and also because I’m mindful that not everyone wants to be exposed to these kinds of images, many of the photos are marked as restricted content. They are not private, anyone can view them, but in order to see all of them you’ll have to be logged into flickr (signup is free if you don’t already have an account) and you’ll have to have your SafeSearch filter turned off (which is in your account settings).

I have no idea what significance this experience will have in the context of either my photography or my life, but I do have the feeling that I crossed a line that intersects both.

Oh, and by the way, I’m still an omnivore.