To save his face, the Turk lost his head.
This is the Barese saying representing the moral of the story of the Testa del Turco (Turk’s head), a marble head with a turban and moustache attached to the architrave of a building close to Piazza LXII Marinai.
In the thirty years during which Bari was an Arab emirate, the Turkish man tried to convert all citizens to Islam but failed to succeed.
When he decided to challenge the locally feared Morte Epifania (“befana of death”, a folkloristic ghost) to show his supremacy, she chopped his head off, and it got stuck to the building. Restoration done to make all traces of the Turk’s spirit disappear had little use: one night, the man, and his head, returned on the architrave of the building for good.
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