Yes Mustafa, There IS a Santa Claus – Demre, Turkey

By: Campbell Smith

Yes Mustafa, There IS a Santa Claus
Demre, Turkey

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
A ram’s ball in a yoghurt sauce.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but Santa Claus doesn’t live in the North Pole. Despite what your parents told you, he doesn’t wake up in the morning and slip a heavy red coat over his ample, ham-and-turkey nourished frame. He doesn’t step out of his log cabin into a crisp Arctic morn and trudge through knee-deep snow to some workshop in a grove of Norsca-green pines. Where Santa lives, virgin-white snowflakes do not fall from the sky, and the air carries neither the soft footfalls of reindeer nor the welcoming wafts of fruit puddings on the rise. Where Santa lives, the walls are streaked with diesel fumes and you start to sweat before breakfast. Santa, you see, lives in Demre.

Demre lies in the south-western corner of the transcontinental oblong that is Turkey. In that part of the world, the Mediterranean is the colour of flawless emeralds and the craggy coastline is studded with charming Homeric villages. Demre is not one of those villages, having been cleverly located just far enough inland to block pesky sea views and shield the populace from any breath of wind that might otherwise have relieved the heat.

Fifteen centuries ago, Demre was known as Myra, and the Bishop of Myra was an earnest chap of growing reputation called Nicholas. Nicholas rather excelled in his job, fighting paganism and winning the respect of his flock by providing from his own pocket marriage dowries for poor young girls. He once famously restored to life three children who had been chopped up by the local publican and left to sit in a tub of brine.

He was so good, in fact, that after his death he was beatified and went from being plain old dead ex-Bishop Nicholas to Saint Nicholas. The Saint Nicholas, a.k.a. Santa Claus. Consider the implications.

Santa doesn’t, nor has he ever lived in the North Pole. In fact, the real St Nick would have thought the world was flat and that heretical notions like Poles were the Devil’s own work. As hard as it might be, we must face the truth about Christmas: Santa is a Demre boy and everything we know about December 25 must be urgently revised.

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Two diesel fumes,
And a ram’s ball in a yoghurt sauce.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t wear a red fur-lined suit. The notion of a red-and-white Father Christmas was actually devised by Coca-Cola’s New York agency for a series of advertisements in 1931. In other words, the cherished Santa of our childhoods is nothing more than an obese logo. The Demre Santa (or TDS for short) would surely appoint a local agency, who would advise a wardrobe more in keeping with the indigenous male fashion sense, which at the time of writing was happily residing in the Adelaide summer of 1979. Brown Permacrease slacks, polyester shirt with flared collar straight from Greg Brady’s wardrobe and a style of brown moccasins so popular in the town that I suspected laces to be illegal. The Clausic scalp would be slicked with Brylcream, the upper lip pelted with a luxuriant black moustache and complemented by a shadow around the jowls more nine-thirty than five o’clock.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t dash through snow. The last time a flake fell in those parts, woolly mammoths roamed the Muza Caddesi and Turkey was still attached to Idaho. On the day that I arrived, it was a humidity-free forty degrees Celsius, a hot, moistureless oxygen that seared the lining of my unacclimatised Western lungs.

If you really wanted to replicate the atmosphere of a Demre Christmas at home, you’d put away your sprigs of holly and aerosol cans of artificial snow. You’d close all the windows and doors then slap the central heating on high for a week, and celebrate the Season in a two-inch wetsuit. For added authenticity, you might lightly coat all surfaces with fine white dust and have some sort of diesel engine pump its exhaust into your living room.

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Three Turkish carpets,
Two diesel fumes,
And a ram’s ball in a yoghurt sauce.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t drive a sleigh. It has been calculated that in order to deliver all the presents to all the good children in the world on Christmas Eve, Team Santa would have to travel at an average speed of 3.6 million miles per hour; the only local vehicle capable of traveling consistently at such speeds is a Kamel Koc bus. The company tries to distract its passengers by employing on-board waiters who ply you with treats on the half-hour, but no amount of industrial-strength sweet coffee or splashes of lemon cologne from a giant bottle will alter the fact that all points between A and B are rushing past your window at approximately Mach 3.

Kamel Koc drivers seem to be remunerated on a bonus system based on the number of hours they beat the timetable by. Red lights are treated as suggestions, and an alarming amount of faith is placed in the signs reading Allah Korusun (Allah Protect us) that are splashed in big letters on the back of every bus. Yes, The Demre Santa would drive a Kamel Koc bus, and he would only overtake on blind corners.

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Four apple teas,
Three Turkish carpets,
Two diesel fumes,
And a ram’s ball in a yoghurt sauce.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t ask you what you wanted for Christmas. The whole idea of simply asking for what you want and then getting it is abhorrent to Turks. Turks haggle.

Thus, when approaching TDS in a department store with your wish list, don’t be so vulgar as to actually come out with it. Accept his offer of apple tea and spend a few minutes in small talk; favourite topics include soccer and the price of Massey Ferguson tractors in your country. When the conversation naturally comes around to business, it’s best to come out with an offer that’s a little higher than what you’re prepared to settle for. For example, if what you really want is a bicycle, start by asking for a Maserati. At this point, there will be a bout of histrionics during which he’ll slap his palms and complain about the soaring input costs of elves. You may then be ejected from the store, only to be invited back in and offered another apple tea and a pair of roller skates. Continue this process until you approach consensual ground. TDS may try and distract you by offering to sell you a carpet (’It has been in my family for generations’), but hold firm.

(Mind you, it’s not as if you have any say in what you get anyway. During my visit, the only industry in Demre appeared to be the manufacturing of ceramic Greek demi-gods sporting enormous erections and grins that stretch from ear to ear. However, you could always haggle for your choice of colours.)

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Five packs of smokes,
Four apple teas,
Three Turkish carpets,
Two diesel fumes,
And a ram’s ball in a yoghurt sauce.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t live well. Aside from the all-meat diet and a wicked caffeine habit, he would also chain smoke. The locals believe the lung to be Evil and that it must be punished. He’d smoke with the channeled passion of the prizefighter: no talking, no eye contact, feet slightly apart, staring at a spot on the ground five yards in front of him, every sinew of his being focussed on the task of extracting as much nicotine as quickly as possible. Mathematicians reckon that Santa would visit about 1000 homes per second over the course of Christmas Eve; by my estimation that gives him enough time to smoke three or four cigarettes at each one. So forget the plate of biscuits and a glass of milk at the bottom of the chimney; if you really want to curry favour with the Gifting One, leave six shots of raki and a carton of Marlboros.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t have reindeer. The locals are enthusiastic carnivores, and anything remotely deer-like would have long ago been made into Donner kebabs. Given that TDS wouldn’t waste good food by using it to drag his bus around, there is little doubt that his favoured beast of burden would be the mule. You can see them all over the district, here not pulling a fruit cart, there not dragging a plough. Enterprising locals charge tourists a dollar to sit on them and not be taken around the sights. When the mules of Demre are not not doing things, they are left in fields to their own devices, the most popular of which is standing still. And instead of Rudolph, Prancer and Dancer, you would have Stubborn, Intransigent and Un-Cooperative and the children could amuse themselves on Christmas Eve by watching TDS on their roof swearing and hitting their unmoving backsides with a big stick in a futile attempt to get to the next house.

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Six crying Kiwis,
Five packs of smokes,
Four apple teas,
Three Turkish carpets,
Two diesel fumes,
And a ram’s ball in a yoghurt sauce.

The Demre Santa wouldn’t go to New Zealand. Just a hundred metres or so from his old church, near where the tour buses park, there is a giant bronze sculpture of St Nick standing on a painted globe. A closer inspection of said globe reveals that while all the major continents and Australia are well represented, there is only a blue stretch of ocean where the Land of the Long White Cloud should be. No Auckland, no Christchurch, no All Blacks, nothing.

Whether by executive decision or cartographical oversight, the plain fact is that in the brave new Christmas of The Demre Santa, New Zealand simply doesn’t exist. So there seems little point in Kiwi kids wasting their time being good; little Zinzan and little Jonah could find a cure for cancer and it still wouldn’t tempt the Big Man to slip down their chimney. Not only can Santa not see them when they’re sleeping, he can’t even see them when they’re awake and looking up at the sky at a mule-driven bus full of cigarette butts and well-endowed ceramic gods on its way to somewhere infinitely more interesting.