Five trips to Turkey and a path I did not expect

Five trips to Turkey and a path I did not expect

For many years I lived quite detached from the world. I had my home, my job, my people and routines that repeated from one week to the next without me asking many questions. I was not unhappy. I simply did not look further, and since I did not look, I did not miss anything either.

But there was something I had kept for a long time, almost in secret: I wanted to go to Cappadocia. I could not say when it started. Maybe a photo, maybe a documentary I watched without paying much attention. The truth is that the image stayed with me and came back now and then, the way wishes do when you do not dare to take them seriously. For years it was only that, a dream that moved nothing.

The first time

Until one day I stopped imagining it and bought the ticket.

I remember the feeling when I got off the plane: the different air, the signs I could not understand, the sound of a language that seemed both hard and musical. I walked around with my eyes wide open, trying not to miss anything. For the first time in a long while I felt small in front of something, and it did not scare me. It made me want to keep going.

And then I reached Cappadocia.

There are places you have seen so many times in photos that you think they cannot surprise you. Cappadocia surprised me anyway. Those rock formations that look handmade, the valleys that change colour with the hour, the silence of early morning. I remember standing still looking at the landscape and thinking that I had waited half my life for that moment. I was moved and could not help it. It was not only the place: it was realising that dreams sometimes come true if you move.

The adhan

But what really changed me was not something I saw. It was something I heard.

The first time I heard the adhan, the call to prayer, I was walking down the street. One voice began from a mosque, then another further away, then another, until it seemed the whole city was answering at once. I stopped. I did not know what they were saying, but I felt something in my chest that I could not explain.

During that trip I began to wait for it. Five times a day. In the morning, when it was still dark, I would wake up and stay in bed listening. In the afternoon, if I was on a terrace or out walking, I would stop. The city went on with its life, but for those minutes something fell into place. And I, who had gone years without stopping to listen to almost anything, found myself listening with my whole body.

I did not understand it yet. I only knew that the sound brought me calm, and that when I went home I missed it.

Going back, and back again

I have been back to Turkey five times.

Someone who has not lived something like this may think it is too much, that there are many other countries to see. I understand. But there are places you do not visit only once. Each trip taught me something different, and I was not the same person each time I arrived either. On the first trips I looked like a tourist. Later I began to look differently: I noticed the people, how they greeted each other, how they invited you for tea without knowing you, the way they cared for the elderly. I started learning Turkish so I would not be left out of conversations. I wanted to understand, not just to see.

And on every trip, the adhan was still there, waiting for me.

What I had been told

Years went by before I understood what that sound had begun to stir in me.

I discovered that Islam was my path. I did not experience it as a decision made overnight, but as something that had been growing quietly for a long time. I feel it as a call: Allah was calling me, and one day I stopped resisting and answered.

What surprised me most was realising that Islam was not what I had been told. What I knew came from headlines, from prejudice, from phrases repeated without anyone checking them. When I really came closer, when I asked, read and listened, I found something else.

It was not easy for everyone. In my family there was misunderstanding, and to some extent there still is. It hurt, and I will not say it did not. But I also understand the fear behind it, because I would have felt something similar if I had not lived what I lived. I can only hope that in time they will see what I see every day when I look in the mirror: that I have not stopped being me. That I am, in fact, more myself than ever.

Today I am happy. Calmer, more at peace.

Languages as doors

I have always been curious to understand others from the inside, and languages have been my way of doing it. I have studied Chinese and Turkish, and now I am learning Moroccan dialect, Darija. Every new language is like a key. It does not only open a language: it opens the way people laugh, bless and say goodbye. When someone hears you trying to speak their language, even badly, they look at you differently.

Fez

When I travelled to Morocco and arrived in Fez, it happened to me again.

Entering the medina was like stepping into another time. Streets so narrow you can almost touch the walls with both arms, the smell of spices, leather and fresh bread, the voices of the sellers, the loaded donkeys making their way through. I got lost more than once, and I did not mind. And again, above everything, the adhan, now with another accent, in another city, but calling me just the same.

I fell in love with Fez, just as I had fallen in love with Turkey.

Looking back

Now, when I think of that woman who lived detached from the world, I find it hard to recognise myself. Not because she was worse than the woman I am now, but because she did not know everything that was waiting for her. It all started with a small dream, going to Cappadocia. That dream opened a door, and behind it there were many more: a country, a language, a faith, another city, another way of being in the world.

If someone asked me what I learned, I would say: to listen. And that sometimes what changes us most is not what we look for, but what finds us along the way.