People living in Turkey`s eastern Black Sea region, along with their traditions, unique lifestyle and uncommonly practical solutions for life, mostly take us into either deep thinking or hilarious laughter.
Achieving the impossible requires an extraordinary self-transcending intelligence. Wit and stubbornness combined with creativity inavitabily make these local people perform extrtaordinary things.
Metin Akinci (56) is bored from the city life and cannot resist the temptetion of moving back to the village of his childhood. One day, Metin leaves his two adult children and the wife behind and decides to settle in the village of a thousand metres high of Çamlıhemşin. Almost all of the houses in the village where his father and grandfather live are old and deserted. Metin, being a nature lover, is against cutting trees and distruction of nature. The nearest drive to the house is several hours away, but yet, Metin does not want a driveway nearby. He prefers taking a risk and constructs a telpher line from his house to the main highway.
Bilal Atasoy (86) living in Rize`s Gündoğdu borough, in order to avoid the floods in the region, makes his house of wood and mounts it on the cliff. The single roomed wooden house hanging on the rocks gets enlarged from day to day so Bilal keeps enjoying his steady happy life up in the air.
Black sea people make extraordinary things not only on personal but also on communal level. They have uncommon life style and sense of entertainment. Every year there are Sis dağı (Fog mountain) Festivities where people walk along a long way, gether and dance the horon. Dancing the horon can take such a long time where people get into trance for hours. Dancing the horon in this region is in fact socializing as cultural communication.
Also, the tough geography of the Black sea forced the people of Giresun`s Kuşköyü (Bird village) to use the whistle as a tool of communication.
In Rize`s Tunca borough driving a wooden car is a tradition that turned into a competiton (Folmulaz) as such that made the people create and compete with their own wooden cars.
Thus, the Black Sea people despite the harsh natural conditions in this tough region with their unique creativity and practical solutions bring a different meaning to life.