So if you’ve been following along with my blog you know that I’ve talked a lot about the Turkmen wedding process. As I mentioned previously (in case you forget) I’ve been privileged to see the dating, engagement, and now wedding process and ceremonies first hand because my host brother just got married. Today I’m going to talk about the 5 celebrations that go along with the wedding. First off I want to apologize, I miss spoke in my last post about the engagement, the Turkmen name for the ceremony where the boys family fulfills the dowry is called the “Halat” not the “At Guluk” as I previously mentioned. The 5 ceremonies last over 3 days and take place in various locations. We’ll start from the beginning and go from there, fair warning this will be a long post as there are a lot of traditions for all of the ceremonies, but I promise you it’s all very interesting! So let’s get it started!
Day 1 At Guluk
The first ceremony that takes place at the groom’s house is a prayer celebration on the first day of the wedding. It’s where the groom’s family sacrifices a goat to Allah and shares it with their family, friends, and neighbors. The guests will all come with some sort of a gift for the bride and groom and will also give a congratulatory gift to his mother and father and they will congratulate everyone. For the mother they will usually bring material for a new dress or a headscarf and for the father they will bring a prayer hat (takeya) or a new shirt. The bride and groom will usually receive a new blanket, scarves, or some baby clothes in hopes that they will soon have children. The blankets, scarves, and clothes are then tied onto a long post that stretches across the room (see picture below). The scarves will be used the next day to tie onto the windows of cars for a different ceremony. The name “At Guluk” literally means “horse’s ear” and it symbolizes in traditional times when the family would tie scarves to the ears of horses and process to the girl’s home to take her away, a ceremony that happens on day 2. After everyone gives their gifts they all eat traditional prayer food of dograma, which is essentially goat meat, bread, and onions boiled in a very oily soup. Finally, after lunch everyone gets ready for the bride’s wedding in the evening and the groom, his sisters, and his mother go to the girl’s house to get her for the official wedding service with the Mullah (Muslim priest).
The official ceremony is very small and I actually wasn’t able to attend it, it’s only for the bride, groom, and one or two witnesses. After that ceremony though they are officially married in the eyes of God.
Night 1 Brides Wedding Reception
Turkmen really like to party for their wedding receptions so there are always two wedding receptions. The first reception is the Bride’s reception and it is usually more modern and very similar to our wedding receptions. In the Ashgabat area it’s usually held at a restaurant in the city. The bride wears a puffy western styled white dress and the groom a suit. The guests are generally segregated into groups and the groups take turns giving toasts of congratulations to the couple. My oldest sister for example gave a toast for all of the guests who were there for my brother. The bride’s family, friends, and parent’s colleagues also give toasts. After each toast is given that group is allowed to dance, if your group didn’t toast and you’re not a guest of the bride you should not dance. The evening mostly proceeds like that, but there are a few pauses in the dancing for traditions. For example they cut the cake, the bride and groom have their first dance, and the throw the bouquet to the unmarried girls. There is also one Turkmen Traditional dance that the bride and groom perform called the Lizingka. During the Lizingka the bride and groom take turns showing off their fancy footwork before the come together and dance together.
Day 2 Gelinjek
The next day has the most interesting and traditional ceremony: the “Gelinjek” or “Taking of the bride”. During this ceremony the groom’s family will take the bride from her home and take her to the groom’s home where she will live. Everyone meets at the groom’s house and dances outside with a three-piece band consisting of a drum, an accordion, and a clarinet, that has been hired to go around with the group. After the dancing everyone comes together for a prayer ceremony and then they divide into cars that have been decorated with scarves on side mirrors and outside the windows (these scarves are actually pretty important for when they are driving because it let’s them drive crazy without getting pulled over). Then the groups take off and drive like maniacs to the bride’s house swerving in and out of lanes, speeding up really fast and then slowing down really fast, and honking horns like crazy. Now, as a passenger from a western country this process is terrifying because there are no seatbelts in Turkmen cars, most of them come from Russia or Dubai and the seatbelts have been cut out. I was fortunately with a very good driver, my brother-in-law, but that still didn’t take away the fear.
After many “Hail Mary’s” on the road we finally arrived safely at the bride’s house. Now the groom rides in a very nicely decorated car, which is the main car in the procession, he however is not allowed at the girl’s house and must wait on the side of the road for our family to take his wife. When we got to the bride’s house we danced again to the band and all of the bride’s aunts were standing outside of the front door guarding it. They started to say, “No, we won’t let you take her!” This is a very traditional process. The men from our family must beg them and bribe them with money until they finally agree and let us open the door. The bride and her mother meanwhile are sitting inside and crying because the bride will be leaving home. The groom’s mother goes in and comforts her and tells her that everything will be ok and finally the bride emerges from the house wearing a large coat, metal armor, and a “kejebe” coat with a white curtain to symbolize the traditional camel basket seat that the bride would ride on to the groom’s house. The whole outfit weighs 36 kilograms or 80 pounds! She has to walk the rest of the day in this heavy, awkward outfit for the rest of the procession. Imagine having a 3rd grader on your head (not your shoulders) for about 3 hours, obviously she needed some help to walk. She knelt down outside and again her aunts said that we were not allowed to take her and our men had to pay them more money. Finally they relented and our family celebrated by throwing little toys, coins, and paper money into the air and the Gelin was taken away.
After we picked up the bride we picked up the groom and again took off like bats out of hell in the cars. Again after many Hail Mary’s we arrived at a famous statue in Ashgabat to take wedding pictures. Everyone in the procession took turns posing with the bride and groom in front of the monument. After the pictures it was time to go home.
When we back at our house there were a few more ceremonies that needed to take place. First the bride was cleansed with holy burning grasses and had a large Allahjan with a blue eye attached to it hung around her curtain. An Allahjan is a rope that is woven out of camel hair and yarn, the camel hair and blue eye are considered holy and protect the wearer from the “Evil Eye” (a common custom for Muslims). After blessing the bride she was led inside the house where she again knelt and had her hand dipped into a pile of flour and a bowl of goat fat to symbolize that she will always be taken care of in the new family. Then she was led to her new bedroom where the another woman was knelling. This woman was the last woman to be married into the family and it was her time to give her place to the new bride. Before she gave up her place though my host mom had to give her a new piece of material to make a new dress. Then the “old” bride and the new bride changed places, like a changing of the guard. My new sister-in-law will have that place until another woman marries into our family (the next eldest boy is 3 so she’ll be there a while, but the last woman was apparently there for 10 years). After the changing of the guard, as I like to call it the new bride was again blessed by our family and friends and finally left alone to rest and get out of her extremely heavy and hot outfit. Thus the Gelinjek was concluded!
Night 2 The Groom’s Wedding Reception
The Groom’s reception is typically more traditional and occasionally is also held at a restaurant, but often times in the village at his family’s house. Ours was at our house and in my opinion village weddings are more fun than restaurant weddings because literally everyone from the neighborhood can come, eat and drink as much as they want, dance and go crazy, and not have to worry about driving home drunk. It honestly felt like a huge block party because the entire street was shut down with two big semi-truck trailers one that held the bride and groom’s table and one for the singer and his band.
For the Groom’s wedding the bride wears a white or red traditional silk dress and a crown. She also has a scarf to cover her mouth during the ceremony. The groom wears a suit again, or in my brother’s case a tux. They process into the yard from the house with sparklers, what was adorable about our wedding was that my niece Enesh and my little cousin Atajan processed in in front of my brother and sister-in-law. It was adorable because Enesh (2 ½) was wearing an adorable yellow dress (made by our new sister-in-law) and Atajan (4) was wearing little tux with a bow tie, it was an adorable hopeful portrayal of the future.
Then much like at the Bride’s reception, different groups took turns congratulating the bride and groom and dancing. I also gave a toast where I toasted in both Turkmen and in English; everyone was impressed with my mad language skills. As the evening wound down there was one last tradition to be preformed to test to see how good of a wife the new bride would be. My brother’s friends gave him a dong, a long coat that older men wear, and a talpak, a sheep skin hat, and tied a rope around his waist in a tight-knot. The bride had to untie the rope belt from him, if she could she would be a good wife: strong and hard working. After she was successful she gave the rope to my brother and he proceeded to beat his friends away because they were threatening to interrupt their first night together. Being the good protecting husband that he is my brother successfully beat off his friends and they didn’t have any interruptions on their honeymoon. Thus closing the Groom’s wedding reception.
Day 3 Bash Salmek
The last tradition for Turkmen wedding ceremonies takes place the day after the wedding night it’s called the “Bash Salmek” or “Pretend Fight”. First off, someone needs to check to make sure that the new bride was pure before the wedding night so someone must check the sheets that the couple slept on, this is performed by the groom’s eldest married sister. If for some reason the bride was not a virgin the family could take her back to her family in shame and sadly this does happen, but not with our family. After her virginity was confirmed she bride is taken outside for my favorite tradition in Turkmen culture: The fight between the girls and women! The bride comes out again in her hood and curtain and knells on a carpet outside the house. All of our female relatives and neighbors come over to participate in the fight for the new bride between the girls and married women. The girls form a wall around the bride and start taunting the married women saying that they can’t take her and make her a women, they won’t let her go! The women obviously don’t take the taunting very well and they start to fight with the girls and try to break through the wall to get the new bride. Sometimes this can get very intense with a lot of pushing and hair pulling, but ours was pretty low key, the girls didn’t stand a chance against some of our older and bigger women.
After the pushing fight between the girls and women the men hold a wrestling contest for the women and girls. The women will actually wrestle against the girls one on one for a prize of 50,000 manat (roughly $3)! I don’t think I can explain accurately in words just how awesome and hilarious this is, but the women essentially throw one another around until one of them falls over. My personal favorite was the match between the two dayzas (older married women) because it was literally like a sumo match!
Thus, the wedding ceremonies and traditions come to an end, but there is still one more thing left for me to write about in this process that I will have for you next time. Thanks again for reading and I hope you enjoyed about the Turkmen marriage process! Until next time, sog bol!
