Eid al-Adha

Eid al-Adha is both a public religious festival and a complicated family observance in Kemal’s account. The holiday’s slaughter of a lamb becomes the center of a childhood memory that he revisits years later with Füsun: a scene of blood and ritual, but also of family custom, disagreement about religion, and an unexpected excursion through Istanbul. Recalled in fragments as he drifts toward sleep, the day shows how a recurring calendar ritual can become intensely personal—and how memory can preserve an event less clearly than the people who shared it.

The holiday in a secular household

The episode takes place on February 27, 1969, the first day of Eid al-Adha. Kemal is twenty-four and Füsun is twelve. As on other holidays, their Nişantaşı home is crowded with relatives arriving for lunch in suits, ties, and their best dresses. Greetings, handshakes, and kisses on both cheeks give the morning a formal, familiar rhythm. Amid the visitors, Kemal and Fatma Hanım distribute sweets, while his father asks him and his brother to buy peppermint and strawberry liqueurs for Uncle Süreyya.

The request exposes a tension in the family’s habits. Kemal’s mother has prohibited the customary serving of the two liqueurs in crystal glasses on a silver tray because his father sometimes drinks too much, and she is concerned for his health. Two years earlier, a complaint from Uncle Süreyya about their absence had led her to question the appropriateness of serving alcohol on a religious holiday. Her challenge opened a prolonged dispute with her fervently secularist, pro-Atatürk uncle about religion, civilization, Europe, and the Republic. The present errand thus resumes a familiar domestic negotiation: the religious occasion is acknowledged, but family practice is shaped by secular conviction, health concerns, hospitality, and the relatives’ insistence on an established custom.

Custom, distance, and the lamb

Kemal describes his parents as indifferent to religious observance rather than hostile to it. They neither pray nor fast, and explain their lack of religious interest through their attachment to Atatürk and the secular Republic. Yet their family, like other secular bourgeois households in Nişantaşı, still sacrifices a lamb for Eid al-Adha and distributes its meat and skin to the poor. The custom remains in place even though Kemal’s father and the rest of the family keep away from the killing itself, leaving the cook and janitor to carry out the sacrifice and distribute the alms. Kemal, too, has traditionally maintained his distance from the yearly ritual in the empty lot next door.

On this holiday, however, Kemal goes outside with Füsun and they watch a lamb being slaughtered. He feels guilty about his apparent indifference to the fact that a child has witnessed the killing, though he cannot quite identify the reason for his guilt. As they walk toward Alaaddin’s shop, he asks whether the sight frightened her and suggests they should not have watched. Füsun’s response is pity for the lamb. The contrast is telling: Kemal turns toward his own unease about their looking, while Füsun attends to the animal’s suffering.

Kemal then explains the religious story behind the sacrifice. Füsun first recounts the child’s version in which the lamb will carry people over the Sırat bridge on the way to heaven. Kemal supplies the story of Abraham, who, after praying for a child, is granted Ismail and comes to adore him. In a dream, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son; Abraham takes up a knife, but a lamb appears just as he is about to kill Ismail. The account connects the animal they have just seen to a story of obedience and substitution. For the children, the ritual is not only a sight to endure: it comes with an inherited explanation that gives the sacrifice a place in a larger religious narrative.

From the errand to the city

After the family’s request, Kemal and Füsun buy two bottles of government-monopoly liqueur, one peppermint and one strawberry, and return to the car. They ask Çetin Efendi to take them for a drive. The excursion extends a holiday errand into a shared stretch of time, with the city itself becoming part of the memory. Years later, Füsun can remind Kemal of much of what they talked about on that drive; his own recollection has narrowed to a stark image of Istanbul resembling a slaughterhouse.

That image is not confined to one neighborhood or to the poor districts. Across the city, in empty lots and narrow backstreets, among ruins and burned-out lots, and even on major avenues and in wealthy neighborhoods, people have been slaughtering lambs since early morning. Blood covers some sidewalks and cobblestones. As the car rolls down hills, crosses bridges, and winds through backstreets, the two see animals newly killed, being chopped up, or being skinned. They cross the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn. The scale of the sights makes the holiday’s customary act impossible to keep at the distance Kemal’s family ordinarily prefers: the slaughter is not a single scene in a neighboring lot but a citywide practice made visible along their route.

Recollection and the persistence of ritual

The holiday returns to the narrative not in chronological sequence but as Kemal is drifting off to sleep after an engagement party. Images from the cold, gray morning come back to him with the strange familiarity of memories entering dreams: the tricycle, going outside with Füsun, watching the lamb being slaughtered, and taking a ride in the car. The recollection begins with details that are vivid but incomplete. When Kemal and Füsun meet the next day at the Merhamet Apartments, she remembers the day better and helps restore its order. She explains that the tricycle had been given to her after Kemal and his brother outgrew it, then returned when she had grown too old for it too. She also recalls that Uncle Süreyya was present because he had asked for liqueur.

This exchange makes the holiday more than a backdrop to a single remembered outing. Its annual customs—the family gathering, the request for familiar drinks, and the sacrifice—provide a structure through which details from childhood remain available, though unevenly, to the adults who shared them. Kemal’s memory holds the city’s bloodied streets; Füsun supplies the tricycle’s history and a relative’s place in the morning. Together, their recollections recover a day in which religious ritual, secular family identity, childhood vulnerability, and ordinary household habits met, without resolving the tensions between them.