Qualla: Turmi

Turmi: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a Monday morning, the road into Turmi fills with people who have walked since before dawn. Women balance grain and tobacco on their heads, their hair worked into ochre-red ringlets stiffened with butter and clay. Men lean on the long staffs that double as stools out on the grazing lands. They are mostly Hamar, the people of this corner of southwestern Ethiopia, and they have come to the weekly market that gives this small town its rhythm. Turmi is barely more than a scatter of buildings around a junction at 925 metres above the savanna, a thousand-odd residents in the largest settlement of Hamar woreda. But on market day it becomes the social heart of the surrounding hills, the place where news travels and deals are struck under the acacias.

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Image: Bernard Gagnon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Turmi: Monday at the Market

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Turmi market is not staged for outsiders. It is a working exchange, the kind that has knit pastoral economies together for generations. Among the sorghum and the coffee husks, you find incised gourds, hollowed and scored with fine geometric patterns, which Hamar women carry a...

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Image: Bernard Gagnon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Turmi: Becoming a Man Across the Backs of Bulls

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Turmi is best known for a ceremony the Hamar call ukuli bula, the bull jumping. When a young man is ready to cross from boyhood into adulthood, his family lines up a row of cattle, often ten or more, flank to flank. He must run naked across their backs four times or more without ...

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Image: Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Turmi: The Gathering of the Herders

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. In January 2005, Turmi hosted something larger than itself. Roughly 200 pastoralists, government officials, and representatives from United Nations and donor organizations gathered here from 23 countries across four continents, in what was billed as the largest meeting of its kin...

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Image: Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Turmi: A Town Between Worlds

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Turmi sits on the edge of change. The wider Omo Valley has drawn growing numbers of travelers, and with them have come cameras, payments for photographs, and the slow commercial reshaping of cultural life. The Hamar navigate this with their own agency, choosing what to share and ...

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Image: Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0