They sit quietly, knees hugged to their chests, on the porch of their whitewashed one-storey house. Then, one by one, the five young adults shuffle away. They grasp at the stone steps with calloused palms, bottoms high in the air, and descend on all fours.
On level ground they continue to move with ease, swinging fluidly across the wasted earth that surrounds their home, without once drawing themselves upright. This is how they walk — like animals, unlike people — and this is why they remain outcasts in their remote Turkish village, where the children taunt them and throw stones and some fearful neighbours look upon them as an affront to Allah.
Resit Ulas and his wife Hatice, both in their sixties, have produced 19 children, three of whom are now dead. About eight of them — including the five quadrupedal children — live at home, although sons and daughters come and go throughout the year, depending on whether seasonal work can be had in the coastal resorts that lie an hour’s drive from their Kurdish village. Closer to home, the sons do agricultural work and the daughters toil in the cotton fields.
It is a basic life that rewards manual labour with a few liras here and there; together with subsistence farming on the small patch of land that surrounds their spartan home, the poorly educated family just about get by. There are a few grandchildren too; all walk normally.
Resit, 65, a thick orange scarf wound round his head and wearing heavy, loose black trousers with a traditional low crotch, slumps on a bench at the bus station in Kirikhan, the nearest town, to which he has travelled with one of his cousins, Veysel, to do some errands. His heavily lined, weather-darkened face bears an unchanging sullen expression but his voice is animated as he recounts his family’s troubles.
After three healthy children came a series of babies who never walked. “They crawled OK, but when they reached the age when they should have started walking they showed no sign of trying,” Resit sighs. “They just kept crawling. That’s when we realised that something was wrong.”
Three daughters — Safiye, 37, Senem, 25, and Emosh, 20 — and one son, 29-year-old Huseyin, can walk only on all fours and cannot stay upright. They use their palms as heels, keeping the fingers splayed and raised from the ground. Hacer, 32, also walks on all fours but not exclusively, sometimes pulling herself up on two legs and stepping forward unsteadily.
Poignantly, Hacer reveals that she would love to be able to walk on two legs because “I could go to dances and find a husband”.
“I spent years taking them to doctors all over the region but nobody could do anything,” says their father. “It is something we have had to learn to live with and it is very hard. People come and go. They say they are going to help but none of it changes the basic facts.”
Wiry, shaven-headed Huseyin is a more frustrated and disturbed character than his plump, smiling sisters. Occasionally he lets out a grunt or scream; he is a figure of fun among the local children, who throw stones and call him names before running away. But according to one member of the family, Huseyin can be a pest. Mehmet Hanifi Ulas says: “I told (Resit) he must do something about Huseyin. He can be a nuisance and some women have complained. He has even been known to bite. I told him, ‘You had better chain him up’.”
Huseyin, who can travel for several kilometres on his hands and feet, makes a few liras by gathering plastic bottles and cans from the village environs, which are bagged and occasionally collected by a recycling agency.
The siblings eat from a tray of communal food, which in summer is laid on the porch of their small whitewashed house. At nightfall they are coaxed inside, where they sit against the wall and watch music and chat shows on satellite television. Sometimes they look fascinated and react, sometimes they appear bored, but nobody claims to know what they think. Occasionally they joke among themselves and administer playful punches. At night, like other local families, they sleep on the floor: one room for the men, one for the women.
Their mother washes and dresses them and attends to their personal care. “Their situation is heartbreaking. It’s one thing for a mother to help a two-year-old to go to the toilet but here the eldest is nearly 40 — and there are so many of them,” says Osman Gelici, who has known the family for 25 years.
Hatice fought off a suggestion by relatives that she should send her children to an orphanage, but has confided her feelings of guilt to a relative: “I brought these children into the world like this. It’s not their fault,” she said. “I have devoted myself to them now. They are my responsibility until they die.” Hatice hardly utters a word in the forthcoming BBC Two documentary about the siblings (The Family That Walks on All Fours, March 17, 9pm) but when she does, her deep love for her children is evident: “They are my insides, my lungs, my liver.”
Resit regards all his children as gifts from Allah, with his handicapped sons and daughters sent as a test of fortitude. He worries about what will happen to them when he dies but is sustained by his faith — a devout Muslim, he prays in a white-walled room with colourful blankets piled high in one corner, a kilim on the wall, and two blue plastic chairs.
According to the region’s governor the family has received 2,500 liras, plus help with food and clothing, in the past year. Resit also has a small state pension. He grows wheat in low-rent fields on the once volcanic land near his home, selling the crop to traders, but for several years wheat prices have been depressed. He once opened a grocery store but had to compete with a more established shop and could not make ends meet. His abandoned shack now stands empty, the word bakkal — grocer — scrawled in childish black script above the locked door. “I don’t know what else to do to survive,” he almost cries. “My children have eaten up my entire fortune.”
“When I first met them ten years ago with the local governor, we were just so sad,” says a local journalist, Vasi Kose. “We returned soon after with a lorryload of food.”
Kose says that although officials still help the family, their goodwill has withered in response to Resit’s perceived lack of gratitude. He has even been accused of exploiting his children, although nobody in the area doubts the veracity of the siblings’ condition. “I don’t fully understand this evolution theory but the family is not sophisticated enough to sustain a hoax for decades,” says Kose. “People have known these children to walk on all fours all their lives.”
The siblings have been using the parallel bars and walking frames left behind by visiting scientists, who also brought in a local physiotherapist. Resit, however, remains resigned. “They use the equipment sometimes. The British doctors think they can be cured, but I don’t,” he sighs. “They are too old now. If we had known such doctors when they were young, maybe.”
