Ciyar Axşamı (Innards Night) aka The Day All the Cows and Sheep Joined Their Chicken Friends

The last day before the wedding was time to finish preparing all the food for the wedding … which meant killing 3 cows and several sheep, cutting up and cooking the chickens from the day before, and over at my aunt’s house (which I didn’t see) preparing several different kinds of salads and these sort of meat crepes. We also received some massive deliveries: all the drinks for the wedding, a huge refrigerated truck to store the meat, a GIGANTIC block of butter, etc.  While I could give more details about the food prep, I think you get the idea: tons of food, lots of butchering, lots of people working.

I don’t know if you can tell how big this thing of chicken is, but it took two people to carry it and they were still really struggling – so it was pretty big!  I’ll spare you the photos of the killings from that day…

Just some of the drinks that were dropped off that day.  All the boxes are vodka for the men.

The other delivery that we got that day was a bunch of tables, benches, and dishes because the night before the wedding there is a pre-wedding party at your house called Ciyar Axşamı (there isn’t a direct translation that I know for ciyar but ağ ciyar is lungs and qara ciyar is liver so I translate it as general innards) where basically the idea is to eat all the innards of the animals that you killed for the meat at the wedding.  At about 7 o’clock, the groom’s family and our close friend’s/relatives (at least those who weren’t already here working) arrived at our house.  They brought a sheep with them as a gift with a pretty red bow tied around its neck.  It was brought back to the butchering area in the garden and one of my favorite moments of the night was that I was on our steps, about to go outside or something, when all the sudden I see this sheep streaking out of our yard and into the road with several young men sprinting after it.  It somehow escaped from them in the garden and managed to make it through the whole party to freedom…until it was caught in the street again. 

I couldn’t capture the whole party because the men’s tables were in the garden, but you can get a sense of how big this party was.

Once everyone was seated, we served them up some kabobs of various organs (there were no seats open for us, the immediate family, but I wasn’t really disappointed because that meant I didn’t have to explain why I wasn’t interested in eating heart kabobs – although I hear that’s the best of the organs because it’s a muscle so it’s like meat) and then the dancing started.  We also had hired a musician come (he was a sort of DJ and keyboard player, so an all-in-one band) so he was all set up with huge speakers to blast out our eardrums, as Azeris love to do.  My village, Qədrili, is known for being the village that dances and let me tell you, we proved it that night!  We threw a pretty good dance party, if I do say so myself!  My host mom said that we needed to open up the first dance so Nuranə, Gülnar, and I started it all off and then made sure that we danced the whole time (the next day people were all asking me where I learned to dance like that, which I thought was a fairly silly question since obviously I learned here in Azerbaijan as they know that we don’t dance like they do). 

The dance floor

There is also a new tradition that has come to the village from Baku which is to do henna on the bride the night before the wedding (when I was living near Baku for training my host mother there went to a henna night before a wedding so I knew that they did it).  The groom’s family brought the henna in one of their xonças (basically a platter/basket all wrapped up in pretty plastic, etc) and so they brought it out midway through the party.  First they put some on Raminə’s feet, then Raminə played some games with it with her girlfriends (I think it was sort of to see who would be married next or something), then they wrote her and Etibar’s (her fiancé) initials inside her palms and did a pretty design on her hands.  Afterwards it was sort of a free for all where all the girls were getting henna done and they insisted on doing some on my hand so I also got a really nice design done. 

My henna just after it was done, waiting for it to dry

The party lasted until about 11:30 at which point our neighbor, Hüsəyn müəllim, helped us to kick out all the guests so that we could clean up (a big project in and of itself) and get some rest before the big day!