Remote and poor, Tunceli has all the ingredients of a typical, conservative eastern Turkish town. Except that Tunceli is anything but typical.
The women do not wear headscarves. The central mosque lies empty, even on Fridays. Dominated by a medley of Marxists, communists and socialists - political groups marginal elsewhere in Turkey - local politics has a cold war feel about it.
The key to Tunceli's oddness lies in the identity of its people. Like about 20 per cent of Turks, they are not Sunni Muslims but Alevi, members of a sect distantly related to Shi'ism.
Not that their place of worship on the town's outskirts in any way resembles the mosques of neighbouring Shi'ite Iran.
Men, women and children attend the Thursday meeting at the cemevi together. There is music and stylised circular dancing. The ceremony ends with the religious leader, in tears, describing the Imam Hussein's death at the hands of the Sunni Caliph.
Onlookers sob, and a woman hands out handkerchiefs.
Persecuted under the Ottoman Empire, most Alevis remain loyal to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's secularist revolution of the 1920s. But they have long had doubts about the nature of Turkish secularism, and those doubts are beginning to be converted into action.