In the Yenice village of Gümüşhane, local people – young and old alike – have been playing snow volleyball on the weekend every winter for 30 years. Fashioning a net from wooden poles and straw bale rope, the "Swashbucklers of the Snow" ("Karın Efeleri" in Turkish) are always ready for a good match.
Home to the tradition of snow volleyball for decades, the people of the village are divided into two teams depending on age. After working together to clear the snow, the villagers are ready to face off, with the losing team obligated to offer tea to the villagers.
The older players far outplay their young rivals, and the lively matches often leave behind interesting patterns in the persistent snow nearby.
Stating that they keep the tradition alive by inviting young people living outside the village to Yenice, 62-year-old Şinasi Durdu said, "We ask the young people living in Gümüşhane to visit every weekend, and we continue the tradition. We will be happy if they preserve the tradition for future generations."
"When we get up every morning, we clean the snow from the front of the houses, roads and barns with shovels and continue our lives. We spend our time playing football, volleyball, inter-village matches and hosting guests," he told Ihlas News Agency (IHA).
Meanwhile, the mukhtar of Yenice Village, Bayram Durdu, stated that they were waiting for their rivals from Gümüşhane. "We used to watch them play in our childhood. There was no place for us to play. As we grew up, we started playing, too," he said.
"It really is a nice tradition to play against the villagers from Gümüşhane. I hope it will continue in the future. We create our pole with our own means; we make our net with rope ... since we don't have any equipment, we make it ourselves and play like that," Durdu said, pointing out that local people between the ages of 7 to 77 play snow volleyball.
Durdu said: "We will continue this tradition. If anyone wants to play, they can come to Gümüşhane and play with us here."
The people of Gümüşhane are known for their success and passion in volleyball. There is also a girls' team that regularly plays volleyball on a field they set up with their own means in their spare time, in the Kirazlık village of the Torul district, located at an altitude of 2,229 meters (7,312 feet) above sea level. The video of the highland girls, known by the public as the "Sultans of the Highland," has been watched millions of times.