It’s just one village in a row of many, as one passes through this charming valley full of hazelnut orchards. A dead end no one would ever visit, save for some special reason. After a few kilometres we have to stop at a police checkpoint. A friendly officer asks for our passports and checks them carefully. One of his colleagues curiously asks where we are heading to. “Kuşköy,” I say, immediately improvising a whistled melody. The policemen chuckle with comprehension while wishing us a nice trip.
Kuşköy is one of many rather isolated and idiosyncratic examples throughout the world where people developed alternative languages for communication over long distances, where calling to each other wouldn’t make sense anymore. Think about the opposing slopes of a valley or a dense forest.
“Hey Ahmet, lunch is ready. Leave the hazelnuts for a moment and come home!”
“Yes, wait for me, I’ll be there soon.”
Sounds like prehistoric WhatsApp? Well, in fact it is. But the conversation above isn’t texted, nor is it called. It’s whistled. And the people that master this language are as fluent in whistling as they are in speaking and understanding their mother tongue.
Kuşköy (Turkey): the whistling village
Whistled languages are found all over the globe. From Europe (in Greece and in France), to Turkey (Kuşköy), the Canary Islands (La Gomera), all over Africa, Middle and South America, South-East Asia and New Guinea. The whistled languages are based on their respective spoken ‘parent’ language, as they are built up following the latter’s melodic and rhythmic contours and featuring the same amount of syllables. Some whistled languages especially favour the tone, others rhythm, and some both aspects of the reference language. No wonder Kuşköy means ‘village of the birds’, and the language itself is called kuş dili, bird language.
It’s a rather rainy day in Kuşköy. Most inhabitants hide inside their homes, so there’s no whistling to discover. The people we meet are not able to understand any other language but Turkish, and probably kuş dili. Apparently there are still reasons, other than the rain, for the whistling to stay silent today. A handful of men are smoking a bong on a terrace by the side of the road. Some are tapping their mobile phones. I suspect they are sending Whatsapp messages. Maybe to the other side of the valley, or to family far away in Europe.
We keep the impression and hidden secret of this green valley unlike any other and return to the coastal highway along the Black Sea, whistling goodbye to the friendly policemen at the end of the road.
Overlander’s tip: Kuşköy and Trabzon surroundings
While the ‘birds’ at Kuşköy are mostly silent, consider visiting the spectacularly situated Sümela monastery in the Altindere National Park south of Trabzon.