The Eid al-Adha Sacrificial Custom

The Eid al-Adha Sacrificial Custom appears in Kemal Basmacı’s account as both a religious observance and a public feature of Istanbul life. His family participates in the annual rite while keeping its secular distance from its religious meaning and practical work. A holiday journey with Füsun makes that distance newly visible: as the city’s observances unfold around them, Kemal tries to explain the custom, hears a more direct account from Çetin Efendi, and retains the day as a powerful image of ritual, devotion, and memory.

Secular practice and inherited custom

Neither of Kemal’s parents prayed or fasted, and he describes them as indifferent to religion rather than hostile to it. Like many married couples raised in the early years of the Republic, they associated their secular outlook with their love of Atatürk and faith in the secular republic. Yet the family, like other secular bourgeois households in Nişantaşı, still arranged for a lamb to be sacrificed at the Feast of the Sacrifice and distributed its meat and skin to the poor according to custom.

Their participation was carefully distanced from the act itself. Kemal’s father would not take part in the sacrifice, nor would anyone else in the family; the cook and janitor handled the distribution of alms. Kemal recalls that he, too, had kept away from the annual ritual in the empty lot next door. The household thus maintained the outward practice while leaving its execution and religious obligations to others. The custom sits at a boundary between inherited social observance and the family’s modern, secular self-description.

Abraham, Ismail, and the substitute offering

During the holiday outing, Kemal attempts to explain the custom to Füsun through the story of Abraham and Ismail. He tells her that Abraham, having prayed for a child, adored his son Ismail; then, in a dream, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice him. At the moment Abraham was about to obey, a lamb appeared in the son’s place. Kemal explains the substitution as an act of mercy, while also emphasizing that Abraham’s willingness to obey was what God had tested.

Füsun presses the story’s difficult implication: would Abraham really have gone through with the sacrifice if the lamb had not appeared? Kemal answers that he would have, and that God’s confidence in Abraham’s obedience explains the lamb’s arrival. The child’s question turns a familiar religious narrative into a problem of trust, obedience, and the cost of devotion. Kemal’s explanation is uneasy, and the encounter leaves him aware of his own uncertain relation to a practice he has long kept at a distance.

Çetin Efendi’s account of devotion

As they ride through the city, Kemal asks the chauffeur, Çetin Efendi, to explain the custom. Çetin describes the sacrifice as a demonstration of loyalty to God, modeled on Abraham: the worshipper shows a willingness to give up what is most precious, without expecting anything in return. Kemal slyly asks whether the reward is entry into heaven. Çetin replies that the outcome belongs to Judgment Day and that the offering is not made to secure heaven; its meaning lies in love and unconditioned giving.

Çetin also makes the idea accessible beyond religious observance. A person may give something greatly valued, carefully cherished, to someone truly loved without seeking repayment. This comparison shifts the custom from a formal act of worship toward an ethical principle of self-giving. Kemal acknowledges Çetin’s knowledge, while the chauffeur responds modestly and recalls his family’s experience of the film The Prophet Abraham, starring Ekrem Güçlü. His family wept at Abraham’s obedience, at Ismail’s acceptance of his father’s duty, and again when the lamb took the son’s place. For Çetin, the shared emotion in the cinema expressed the same belief: giving what one treasures most, without expectation of return, can make the world beautiful.

The city as a record of the rite

Kemal and Füsun’s drive expands the custom from family observance into a citywide scene. From Maçka and Dolmabahçe toward the Golden Horn, across the Galata Bridge, and onward beyond the Aqueduct of Valens toward Fatih and Edirnekapı, they encounter signs of sacrifice across rich and poor districts alike. Kemal remembers the scale of the day as overwhelming: the ritual was not confined to backstreets or poorer neighborhoods but was visible on major avenues and in affluent parts of Istanbul as well. At Fatih, Füsun sees hennaed lambs for sale and asks whether they too will be sacrificed.

The route also complicates the impression of a city uniformly absorbed in solemn observance. Near the old city walls and poorer neighborhoods, Kemal remembers orchards, rubbish-strewn lots, workshops, and occasional signs of the ritual alongside the more festive scenes: carousels and swings, children spending their holiday money, and Turkish flags displayed on buses. The three travelers fall silent for a long stretch. The day’s observance encompasses both the sacrifice and the public holiday around it, with the city’s different neighborhoods giving it distinct settings.

Memory and the custom’s lasting meaning

The episode is narrated from the perspective of later recollection. Kemal says that Füsun could subsequently remind him of much of what they had discussed during the long drive, whereas his own memory held chiefly to the image of Istanbul on that cold, gray holiday. The distinction gives the custom two forms of persistence: remembered conversation and a visual impression of a city marked by a repeated annual rite.

Kemal also connects the day’s scenes to the photographs and postcards he would later find and collect. The holiday therefore becomes more than an account of religious practice: it is one of the remembered urban occasions through which he gathers images of Istanbul’s everyday life. The narrative places the family’s detached participation beside Çetin Efendi’s account of devotion, and the scale of the public ritual beside the private act of looking and remembering. Its central meaning remains the willingness to surrender what is precious without calculating a return, a principle articulated by the chauffeur and preserved in Kemal’s memory of the day.