Maybe you know already that the meat-product called “pastrami” in the West is known as pastırma
in Turkish; or basdırma
in other Turkic languages like Azerbaijani or Crimean Tatar. We inherited both the word and the food via Ottoman Turkish, but the Ottomans themselves had learned that meat-preservation technique from their Central Asian ancestors (or maybe from the Mongol hordes descended from them).1
The word basdırma
is a verbal noun: the verb basmak
means “to press”, and -dır
makes it causative (basdırmak
“to let or make press”). A literal English translation of basdırma
would be something like “pressings”.
A thousand years and more ago, steppe-tribes made bastırma
by transporting meat in their saddlebags, where it would be pressed and dried by the weight of the rider. It’s hard to bring your herds with you when you’re raiding, and if you do kill an animal you need some way of preserving the meat when you’re on the move. This dried meat fueled some long journeys - the grasslands covering the Eurasian heartland extend for 8000 km or 5000 miles, leading from Manchuria in the east to the Danube river in the west. At its height, the Great Mongol Nation of Genghis Khan controlled the whole steppe from horse-back, linking the Pacific to the Mediterranean in the largest contiguous Empire the world has known.
In modern Turkish, bas-
seems to cover all the different uses of “press” in English. Baskı Altında
is a drop-in translation for the old Bowie song-title “Under Pressure”; kan basıncı
is one way to say “blood pressure”,2 and basın toplantısı
is a “press conference”.
There are other, more idiomatic uses too. You could write a poignant little tale just using some of these senses of basmak
: to “suppress” or “oppress”; to raid (a village); to be weighed down by distress (sıkıntı basmış
); to be blanketed with smoke (duman basmış
); to be overgrown with weeds (ot basmış
). In this same vein is the very spookiest of the most ancient uses of basmak
: in the Old Turkic language of the Göktürk steppe-tribes, the sky doesn’t “fall” at the end of the world - it presses.
Looking at pictures of the Eurasian Steppe, I can easily imagine a type of agoraphobic madness that could overtake a solitary traveller. The Blue Sky above and the Dark Earth below are all there is, in every direction, for thousands of miles. I imagine this vertigo-inducing sameness as an inspiration for the pre-Islamic Turkic religions, which treated the Eternal Blue Sky as divine head of the pantheon of gods and spirits in all things. The idea that one day, Sky-Tengri might “press” down on the earth and end it all, seems to have been a commonly held fear.
Here’s an example, as inscribed on the stone monument to Kültegin, the legendary conquering prince who apparently lived and died on the Mongolian steppe around AD 684–731. The first lines of the following3 are written in the runes of the Old Turkic alphabet (remember to read from right to left), which is romanised4 in the second lines. Finally, translations into modern Turkish5 and English6 are given:
𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰜 : 𐰆𐰍𐰔 : 𐰋𐰏𐰠𐰼𐰃 : 𐰉𐰆𐰑𐰣 : 𐰾𐰓𐰭 : 𐰇𐰔𐰀 : 𐱅𐰭𐰼𐰃 : 𐰉𐰽𐰢𐰽𐰺 : 𐰽𐰺𐰀 : 𐰘𐰃𐰼 : 𐱅𐰠𐰤𐰢𐰾𐰼 : 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰜 : 𐰉𐰆𐰑𐰣 : 𐰠𐰭𐰤 : 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰇𐰭𐰤 : 𐰚𐰢 : 𐰺𐱃𐱃𐰃 : 𐰆𐰑𐰀𐰲𐰃 : 𐰼𐱅𐰃
TÜRK : OGuZ : BeGLeRİ : BODuN : eŞiDiŊ : ÜZE : TeŊRİ : BaSMaSaR : aSRA : YİR : TeLiNMeSeR : TÜRK : BODuN : iLiŊiN : TÖRÜŊiN : KiM : aRTaTI : UDAÇI : eRTİ
Türk Oğuz beğleri, boyları, işitin : Üstte Tanrı basmasa, altta yer delinmese, Türk boyları, ilini, töreni kim bozup yıkacak idi?
Turkish Oğuz lords and tribes, listen: If the Sky Above has not collapsed, and the Earth Below has not been torn open, who could destroy the Turkish tribes, provinces and ceremonies?
A couple of notes on my translation:
The verb in ÜZE : TeŊRİ : BaSMaSaR (“If the Sky Above has not collapsed”) is today’s subject
basmak
; the collapsing sky “presses” down.Or, given the idiomatic phrases
duman/sis basmak
, maybe it snuggles down like a blanket of fog, which sounds like a very comfortable apocalypse.I’ve reported the fate of the Earth Below as being “torn open”, but in fact the verb
delinmek
(“to be pierced”) implies a thin hole:delinme
is the modern word for a puncture in your car tire. I’ve used “torn open” instead, because having the Earth popped like a balloon sounds a bit silly. An alternative translation of aSRA : YİR : TeLiNMeSeR might be “if the Earth Below has not been fatally wounded”; that is, suffering the type of puncture made by a spear or an arrow.
The runic message above, being so inspirational regarding the indestructibility of the Turkic peoples, is often quoted in Turkish popular culture. See this scene from the TV series Alparslan: Büyük Selcuklu (Youtube link), where the hero Alparslan is celebrating the capture of a dangerous enemy by gloating just a little:
“Üstte mavi gök basmadıkça, altta yağız yer çökmedikçe kelleni gövdenden ayıracağım” dedim sana.
Üstte mavi gök basmadı, altta yağız yer çökmedi. Vakit geldi!I said to you: “unless the Blue Sky above collapses, and the Dark Earth below falls away, I will separate your head from your body”.
The Blue Sky above hasn’t collapsed, and the Dark Earth below hasn’t fallen away. The time has come!
Here’s those last two lines read by Barış Arduç as Alparslan:
There’s another very unsettling use of basmak
; a whole set of vocabulary to do with Albası
, or “press-demons”. These malevolent little critters were blamed for the phenomenon now known as sleep paralysis, which they supposedly caused by pressing on a sleeping persons chest as in the famous painting above.
Although I’ve never experienced it myself, sleep paralysis is a very real and terrifying thing. During REM sleep, your access to the controls for moving your own body is temporarily revoked. This stops you acting out your dreams, and possibly injuring yourself or a bed-partner. Sometimes, though, its possible to wake up before the ability to move is restored, leaving you conscious but entirely paralysed.
The sensation of having no conscious control over your breathing sets off major alarms in your brain, similar to the terror induced by drowning or water-boarding. Since you are possibly still in a dream-state, it’s quite common to hallucinate a physical cause for your difficulty in breathing, such as having an entity crouching on your chest.
This entity is the Albası
.
Because the experience of sleep paralysis, although rare, is universally human, many cultures still keep the ancient legends of the “press-demons” and know them by their names. Our English word “nightmare” comes from the press-demon known as “Mara” to the Old Norse and Germanic peoples; her name lives on in other nightmare-words like mardröm
(Swedish) and Nachtmahr
(German). The Slavic peoples also knew her well; she is mora
to the Serbs, Croats, Poles and Slovaks; můra
to the Czechs, and кики́мора
(kikímora)7 to the Russians.
While the etymology of the name “Mara” is debated, in many other languages the nightmare-demons are named directly for their action of pressing on people’s chests. The Finns know the Painajainen
, the Sami tell tales of the Deattán
; both of these names come from the linguistic root of “press” in their own languages. The Romans had the Incubus
(from incubō
“to lie upon”).8 I’m sure there are many more examples.
In modern Turkish there are a few words for a nightmare: more commonly used is kâbus
, which comes from the Arabic root ك ب س
(k-b-s) related to pressing and squeezing. A second Turkish word for a nightmare is karabasan
(“the dark one who presses”).
Karabasan
is just one of the many words for the Albası
; another name in the pantheon of the press-demons. As with Mara
above, the demon is often described as female, with names such as Alkız
or Alkarısı
. The alternative spelling of Albız
survives in modern popular culture - here’s an example from my usual source: ATV’s Kuruluş: Osman (Youtube link).9
If you want to practice your listening & comprehension of growled, archaic Turkish threats, then here is the audio:
Erlik Han gazabını sundu. Albızlar ruhlarını kemirecek!
Behold the wrath of Erlik Han [Turkic god of the underworld]. Demons will gnaw at your souls!
This post is approaching the length where Gmail trims it short and makes you click through. I, however, am incapable of being brief; not when there is even darker, bloodier Pressing to be done. Onward to the Red Death!
So we know that bas-
means “press”; what about the al-
part of Albası
? There are two meanings to sort through here.
The original meaning of al-
is to do with deception, betrayal and cheating, precisely as in the modern verb aldatmak
. This meaning puts the “demon” in “press-demon”.10
The second meaning is al renkli
- “red coloured”. Somewhere along the way, perhaps because the red theme is so emotive, this second meaning of al-
took over. The meaning of Alkarısı
went from “The Demon Wife” to “The Red Wife”; but it’s one of the nastier afflictions she was believed responsible for that really brings home the link to blood. This is the sickness suffered by pregnant women and new mothers, known as albastı
.
Let’s quickly run through the vocabulary before we get to the gory descriptions of perinatal disease. If the demon is called albası
, then the disease albastı
literally means “demon-struck” or “demon-pressed”. The victim is referred to as albasan
, or the very ominous albastar
: the “demon-bearer”.11
Here then, is the strange and disturbing description of the demon-sickness albastı
, as translated from the TDV’s Encyclopedia of Islam:12
The
Alkarısı
takes two forms in the folk tales. The first form is harmless; it enjoys riding horses borrowed from stables at night, returning them exhausted with neatly braided manes. Someone who noticed this happening could trap theAlkarısı
by spreading black gum, pitch, etc. on the horse's back. It is rumoured that the captured demon could be enslaved by sticking a needle or awl into its body, trapping it in human form and binding it into your service. A house with a captiveAlkarı
is called anocak
(“hearth”), and the people belonging to those houses are calledocaklı
; It is believed that the otherAlkari
stay away from the hearths, the people of the hearths and the places where their belongings are kept.It is said that the second form of
Alkarısı
haunts women who have just given birth and their newborn children, and that it likes to eat women's kidneys, hearts and livers. This causes the sickness known asalbasti
oralbasma
, symptoms of which are muscle tension, severe pain, seeing the surrounding objects as red (“çevredeki eşyayı kırmızı görme
”), fainting, delirium and foaming at the mouth. Legend has it that if a woman is left alone without certain precautions during the first forty days after giving birth, theAlkarısı
sits on her chest, then rips out her organs and tries to dip them in water; if it is not noticed and precautions are not taken at this point, the woman will die. When the patient begins to bleed, it is understood that theAlkarı
has seized her, and the liver, kidney and heart of the woman must be taken away from the demon immediately, without allowing it to dip them in water; if this is achieved and the demon is scared away, the bleeding stops and the patient is saved from death.
Obviously, the taking of organs must be happening in the spirit world in order to not instantly result in death, and the return of said organs must be accomplished by a spirit healer or shaman of some type. Interestingly, you can still visit an Albastı Ocak
to receive spirit healing or relief from demons to this day; according to this paper there is still a working Hearth in the Yahnikapan neighborhood of the central district of Eskişehir, and no doubt many more around Türkiye.
The Encyclopedia of Islam, as well as the TDK dictionary, both suggest that Purpureal Fever would be the modern medical interpretation of albastı
-sickness. I’m not convinced though, as that disease is said to be a more modern infection that was spread through maternity hospitals by arrogant doctors who refused to wash their hands in between patients.13 No, I think there is another disease that much better fits the symptoms described above; the clue is in some of the “precautions” to be taken around childbirth, namely the use of red ribbons or red headscarves (yazma
).
According to this review from the WHO, “The colour red had an ancient and persistent association with smallpox, and was supposed to promote recovery”. The Wikipedia page on the 疱瘡神 (Hōsōkami; “Smallpox Devil”) of Japan has further examples of the “Red Treatment” in different countries, all the way through to Europe of the 1930’s.
It’s not just any smallpox infection I’m thinking of here, though. Hemorrhagic smallpox was a particularly nasty subtype whose victims tended to die suddenly and early, bleeding from multiple orifices, before the characteristic smallpox pustules even appeared. Importantly, pregnant women were much more likely to contract the hemorrhagic subtype than the general population. This is probably because the female immune system is seriously remodeled during pregnancy, to stop immune attack on the fetus which is effectively foreign to the mother’s immune system. Just as in some otherwise healthy people who happen to have a severe immune response to Covid-19, hemorrhagic smallpox had symptoms we now associate with a cytokine cascade, in particular a truly awful syndrome called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). Bleeding throughout the skin and the eyes (could this cause you to “see surrounding objects as red”?), simultaneous bleeding and abnormal clotting from mucus membranes and multiple orifices, and of course, frequently lethal effects on the unborn child… it sure sounds a lot like “When the patient begins to bleed, it is understood that the Alkarı
has seized her […]”.
Blood was its Avator and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.
Edgar Allen Poe - The Masque of the Red Death
In case all this talk has summoned Alkarısı
, we had better drive it away. Here is an appropriate incantation, as reportedly used by the Bashkurt tribes of Russia:14
Whence thou came from,
There thou should go
Go thou to rich breasts
Go thou to a light feather bed
Go thou to a stormy flood
Go thou and perish!
There is no place here for thee,
Whence thou came from,
There thou should go!
Turkish Wikipedia names the Huns specifically here as earliest recorded pastrami-eaters, as apparently documented by Ammianus of Antioch in AD 353-378. Cited reference (which I haven’t read): Georg Weber, Alfred Baldamus (1923): Lehr- und Handbuch der Weltgeschichte , II. skin. (German).
The other way to say “blood pressure” is with the French loan-word tansiyon
.
The Old Turkish transcription comes from this most excellent site, which I have only just discovered. The site I used previously is only available via internet archive, and probably pre-dates the Unicode implementation of the Old Turkic runes.
As above, this is copied from turkbitig.com. A nicely informative transliteration, with the implied vowels added in superscript.
Again, the Modern Turkish translation is turkbitig.com's work
The English translation is based on Google’s, but modified by me.
Yes, if you watched The Witcher on Netflix, you’ve seen Henry Cavill fight a very insectoid version of the kikimora (Youtube link).
Nowadays, the legend of the Incubus is mostly retold as “one who lies upon in order to have sex with”. However, the original meaning of incubō
includes the sense of “lie upon as a hen lies upon her eggs”; hence: “incubate”. This sense seems a lot closer to the actions of the press-demons.
Kuruluş: Osman 141. Bölüm; timestamp 25:50
See also “Satan the Great Deceiver”, snakes in gardens handing out fruit, and the like.
I did a Google search on “Albastar” because I thought it would be a good name for a Metal band; instead, I found ads for a company called “Alba Star” who make fishing rods.
My translation here is a fairly liberal polishing up of Google’s effort and fixing its errors. There is some ambiguity in those long sentences though; for example it’s not completely clear to me from whose hands the organs must be taken: the woman’s or the demon’s. Context might suggest the latter, but Google prefers the former.
To quote Wikipedia on Ignaz Semmelweis, the discoverer of disinfecting your hands in between patients: “Publication of his findings was not well received by the medical profession. The idea conflicted both with the existing medical concepts and with the image doctors had of themselves. The scorn and ridicule of doctors was so extreme that Semmelweis moved from Vienna and, following a breakdown, was eventually committed to a mental asylum, where he died.”
Source: Dallos, Edina (2019). "Albasty: A Female Demon of Turkic Peoples" (PDF). Acta Ethnographica Hungarica. Akadémiai Kiadó. 64 (2): 413–423. Via Wikipedia.
Also, depending on the region, either a cool sherbet in red color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohusa_%C5%9Eerbeti or a warm chai-like beverage called "kaynar" https://www.adanagastronomi.com/drinks.html. They both contain a good amount of cloves and cinnamon so maybe those ingredients are a folk remedy for hemorrhagic smallpox? Also strangely the cool version is served in cooler climates and the hot version in warmer climates, which I'd expect the opposite. It's also said to help with lactation.