It’s not clear who started the rumors. Likely a local hotelier looking to boost tourism numbers during the dead season. I should have known, many Turkish tourism operators are right down there with the Egyptians when it comes to scams.
But the sheer scale of this. The media hype it generated. The government officials who went on the record calling for calm, fearing religious backlash. It was as audacious as it was cynical.
Cashing-in on a misreading of the Mayan prophecy – that the world would on December 21, 2012 – a small Turkish town became linked to the End of Days.
Doomsday cultists were turning up in droves, reportedly; 60,000 people were expected and hotels were fully booked, room rates ballooning.
The rumors reportedly originated when a group of doomsday cultists, the “Blue Energy Group”, claimed the town, Sirince, was one of two places globally to be unaffected by a vague cataclysmic event – inferred due to the end of the Mayan long-calendar. The catastrophic event would possibly involve a non-existent planet, Nibiru, plummeting into earth and obliterating basically everybody.
The thing is: the Blue Energy Group does not seem to exist and similarly, the expected 60,000 visitors, did not materialize.
“I have sold three t-shirts,” said a local man in a stall, who declined to give his name out of sheer embarrassment, as December 21 rolled around. “What will I do with all these shirts?”
He had hundreds of apocalypse-themed t-shirts specially produced for the day.
Sirince sits amid spectacular hills up a winding road in the Aegean hinterland. It was an Ottoman-era Greek settlement, but, following the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange, became inhabited by Turks.
It was once a land of figs, before disaster struck in the early 1990s. A neighbouring district began producing fruit at industrial levels, undercutting Sirince’s fig growers. The village, home to 600 persons, became a typical dying agricultural town.
Its wooden framed houses – white with red-tiled roofs and smoke wafting out of their stone chimneys – perch on terraces, linked by a maze of cobbled streets. It certainly is spectacular: A good place to see out the end of days. Incidentally, it is also a good base for visiting the nearby ancient Greek ruins of Ephesus.
In the early 2000s, the town’s tourism industry flourished. To Sevan Nisanyan, a boutique hotel owner and etymologist, things began to “get out of hand” culminating in exploitation of the doomsday myth.
“It’s an interesting case study in both mass media and popular mythology,” said Nisanyan.
The rumours grew for days. Tom Cruise was in town. As were Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Sirince would be spared because of the “positive energy” generated by Mary Magdalene’s nearby burial site.
Come doomsday, the media showed up en-masse, searching desperately for the doomsday cultists. I am guilty of this. There was a crazy man wearing an eye patch claiming to be the Messiah. A lot of people wearing yellow alien hats replete with two antennae. But look as I did, there were no doomsday cultists.
“This is not good,” said Ufuk Yakut, a manager at a local wine store. “It’s not as bad as it could be.”
His winery produced around 10,000 bottles of wine, The Doomsday Vintage. While thousands of people did visit Sirince, numbers were much, much less than expected, and he had moved little of his stock.
The town hosts two old churches, fallen to disrepair. Young evangelical Americans stood handing out the bible while pontificating on the second coming of Christ. Yet still no sign of the Mayan doomsday cultists.
Then, a young man showed up – early evening – wearing baggy, Aladdin-style pants. His blonde hair in dreadlocks. He carried a rucksack, worn and filthy. Could this be it, finally? He was quickly swamped, television cameras poked in his face in an increasingly vicious scrum mixing both media and tourists.
The poor guy was just looking for somewhere to pitch his tent and smoke a reefer as the sun went down.
Fires were set in steel drums as music pumped out of speakers, skewers of meat roasting above hot coals.
Journalists wandered aimlessly along the cobbled streets, like something from a Zombie apocalypse – a vague and lost look in their eyes.
There was little for it. I visited a handful of wine stalls, sampling everything. Then, as my free wine lifeline hit bottom, I bought a bottle of white and popped the cork – the Doomsday Vintage – and began to revel.