From Black Sea to Rhine, Turkey's whirling kolbasti dancers dazzle

Jul 23, 2009, 4:03 GMT

Istanbul - It is Sunday afternoon in Istanbul's student district of Kadikoy, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. At the docks where ferries link it to the city's European side, and in sight of century-old Haydarpasha Station, the starting point of the legendary Baghdad Railway, families are picnicking, couples are strolling and knots of young people are hanging out on the quay's walls.

Suddenly, loud music shatters the relaxed atmosphere. Several young men start dancing to fast Turkish rhythms booming from giant loudspeaker boxes in the open boot of their car. Within minutes, a crowd gathers around them.

One after another, people emerge from the crowd to dance along. Three young men split off from the growing group of dancers, then excitedly trip back toward the middle. Now the show really starts. They stamp on the ground at a terrific tempo and wildly wave their arms. They circle each other as if in a boxing ring, draw nearer and then apart again.

The dance - at first glance somewhat similar to breakdance - has captivated Turkish youths both inside and outside Turkey for months. Kolbasti is its name. Howling enthusiastically, the spectators cheer on the ever faster dancers, who, whirling left and right around their own axis as if made of rubber, hardly seem to touch the ground.

Kolbasti was created in the 1930s in the seaport of Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of north-eastern Turkey. Loosely translated, 'kolbasti' means 'caught red-handed by the police.' According to legend, the name derives from nightly police patrols of the city to round up drunks, who made up a song with the lyrics: 'They came, they caught us, they beat us' (in Turkish: 'Geldiler, bastilar, vurdular').

These words are now part of all kolbasti songs, which are normally accompanied by the baglama, a stringed instrument used in Turkish folk music.

The origin of the dance's swinging movements and energetic gesticulations is also the stuff of legend. As one legend has it, the Black Sea fishermen always used to dance for fun after a day's work, imitating the typical movements of their trade - casting a net, for example, or the wriggling of the fish they caught.

For Sener Karaosmanoglu, a student at Trabzon's Karadeniz Technical University, kolbasti reflects the hot-tempered nature of the city's inhabitants. 'They're very impatient, quick to anger and awfully fast talkers,' traits expressed by kolbasti's tempo and aggressiveness, he says.

'Kolbasti never disappeared from Trabzon. It's always been part of local culture. What's new, though, is that people from outside our region have taken to the dance.'

The reason, as Karaosmanoglu sees it, is simple: 'Kolbasti is fast, different and fun.' In his view, two things helped spread kolbasti quickly: his university's dance group, which was the first to present kolbasti professionally on television, and the nationally popular football club Trabzonspor, whose trademark is a kolbasti victory dance.

The dancing youths in Kadikoy also explain their enthusiasm for kolbasti with football and their Black Sea heritage. 'I come from Trabzon and am a Trabzonspor fan, so I also love kolbasti,' says a boy of about 17.

A girl the same age chimes in: 'Kolbasti is different from other traditional dances. It's really fast and acrobatic. That's why it's so much fun.'

The dance has become part of Turkish youth subculture from the Black Sea all the way to the Rhine, as evidenced by the kolbasti clips on the video-sharing website YouTube. Many of the clips are uploaded from Germany, typically from members of the country's large population of ethnic Turks.

In one internet forum, someone writing under a Turkish pseudonym from the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate says, 'Without Kolbasti, my life on the street would be totally boring. Kolbasti is simply abnormally fantastic.'