The Laz

One day, Cemal calls Temel from New York to tell his friend, "You must come and work over here! There's so much money here you'll be sweeping it off the streets!" So, Temel flies to New York and when he steps out of the airport he notices a $100 bill. Without picking it up, he continues on, saying to himself, "I just had such a long flight, I'm tired, and I don't want to start work just yet."

With such jokes, the Laz are often stereotyped as amusingly stupid. Because the name Temel is like the John of this ethnic minority from the Black Sea region, jokes almost always feature this gullible character. When I first heard these jokes, which run from the silly:

Temel is drinking too much. To show him the harm, his friends throw a worm into his glass of whiskey. When the worm dies, one of his friends says, "Look Temel, what can you learn from that?"Temel looks up blearily. "You should drink whiskey if you have worms in your body," he says.

to the sexual:

In a state of high anxiety, Temel telephones the doctor. He can hardly get the words out, "Doctor, doctor...Our baby just swallowed a condom! Come quickly!" The doctor drops everything and hurriedly readies his instrument case. As he starts running out the door, the phone rings again. Once more it's Temel, but his voice is relaxed and cheerful as he says, "You can take it easy doctor. All's well. You won't have to come. We found another one!"

to the sexist (Western for religiously conservative):

Temel's teacher told the class to rewrite the following sentence using different words but retaining the meaning: "The young girl opened the window without her mother's permission, looked outside, and smiled." As the teacher watched his students thoughtfully scribbling on their paper, he noticed Temel just sitting there doing nothing. "Why aren't you writing?" the teacher asked. Temel replied, "But teacher, I've finished." The teacher looked at his paper and read merely one word: whore.

...I thought it might be irreverent discrimination. But now I realize it's more like a nicer Polish joke in the States. Irreverent at least, but considering the people around me don't know any Laz personally, it's hard for them to have the opportunity to discriminate.

However, while it's perhaps easy to laugh them off, organizations like the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, don't let the government off so easily. They accuse the government of squashing minority rights in an effort to "Turkify" the republic. One such technique is to restrict their access to the media. Only 5 minority languages are allowed to be broadcast on Turkish television, and the Laz language, which has only recently been recorded in written form, is not one of them. One recent example of this, according to freemuse.org, is when a well-known Laz musician, Birol Topaloglu, was invited and then not allowed to perform on a TV musical special.

The Laz are considered to have a rich musical tradition, a style that features the keremche, a long thin fiddle played upright, and the tulum, a bagpipe. By this description, perhaps you're thinking Scottish Bluegrass. Um, I don't know what that is exactly, but that's definitely not the Laz sound. Check it out for yourself and learn a little more here.

Paradoxically to the irreverence, it is said that the Laz are sharp businessmen and used to fiercely command respect as great and terrible warriors. Lonely Planet also says the Laz, dressed in black, were handpicked by Ataturk to be his personal bodyguards. If anyone can offer any more information regarding this info, please post a comment. I'm open-sourcing this paragraph. The only thing I have found was a reference to a Mohammed Laz-Oglu, picked by an Egyptian ruler to protect the throne while the latter was out of town conquering places.

As for other stereotypes, the Laz are said to have big noses, cook a million recipes with hamsi, Black Sea anchovies, dance wildly, and speak with a bizarre accent. Although, they are the butt of jokes, the best ones are supposedly created and told by the Laz themselves. My only personal experience with the Laz was as follows, which I'll italicize because it might as well be my own Temel joke:

Last Sunday, Eda and I were riding the ski-lift up Uludag mountain, when suddenly we saw a cell phone sliding down the steep slope. We mused over the misfortune of someone in a lift in front of us. Suddenly, a man flat on his back with a pained look on his face flew down under us. Seemingly to follow them both was a brown wallet. And not long after that another man. As we continued riding we saw two men below watching their companions' journey down the mountain. As they were speaking and I was laughing, Eda told me their accent wasn't typical Turkish. "What was it?" I asked, still amusingly confused at the sequence of events.

"Laz," she replied.