Turkish authorities have cancelled a festival celebrating the national drink, raki, because of complaints by Islamic groups, causing anger among secular Turks.
The annual World raki festival had been scheduled to take place on 12-13 December in the city of Adana. But the provincial governor axed the event after Islamic associations denounced it as a disgrace.
“It’s not possible for us to allow something like this,” Mustafa Büyük told the Hürriyet newspaper on Thursday. “We don’t want people to drink alcohol and we can not tolerate its promotion.”
The raki street festival is popular with tourists and attracts about 20,000 fans of the aniseed-flavoured liquor.
Last week several groups, including regional branches of Turkey’s top religious body, Diyanet, called for the festival to be cancelled. One critic said it was a “way of seducing people to drink alcohol”.
However the Adana mayor, Hüseyin Sözlü, a member of the Nationalist Movement party, described the decision as an attack on individual freedoms in the traditionally secular Muslim country.
More than 4,600 people have signed an online petition calling on the government to overturn the ban, while a rival petition demanding the festival be cancelled has attracted about 800 supporters on Change.org.
“If you prevent people from partying, it means you are directly interfering in their private life,” protested a prominent commentator, Deniz Zeyrek, on CNN-Turk television.
Opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have long voiced fears of an Islamisation of society under his rule, which has placed a greater emphasis on religion.
In 2013, the parliament passed legislation curbing alcohol sales and advertising, as well as increasing taxes on beer, wine and spirits – the toughest such measures in the republic’s nine-decade history.
Erdoğan, a devout Muslim who does not drink or smoke, defended the law and encouraged people to drink ayran, a non-alcoholic beverage made from yoghurt, instead of raki.
The festival ban follows the recent deaths of 28 people who consumed bootleg versions of raki, in what appears to be the country’s worst bout of alcohol poisoning.
