Dinner of Herbs

Carla Grissman, an American whose cosmopolitan life had already seen her living in Morocco, Paris and Jerusalem, spent the better part of a year in the '60s living in a farming hamlet in remote Anatolia, some 250 kilometres east of Ankara. The hospitality, the friendship and the way in which the inhabitants of Uzak Köy accepted her into their community left a deep impression, and were remembered and treasured in a private memoir. Not for some forty years was it published, and yet it is one of the most honest, clear-sighted and affectionate portraits of rural Turkey, testimony to Proverbs 15:17, 'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than feasting on a fattened ox where hatred also dwells'.