20,000 attend wedding in Diyarbakir, Turkey

What could bring tens of thousands of people together for a wedding in southern Turkey's Kurdish province of Diyarbakir? A very big family.


“President [Erdogan] suggests [to have] 3-4 children. But ours are 30-40," bragged one family member of patriarch Hamo Agha.

Agha has 4 wives, 56 children and more than 250 grandchildren.

“When my father controlled the village, we were small in number. Many of them got married. Now 36-37 of them are married," he said.

Turkey's Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, Justice and Development Party officials, and local administrators attended.


Agha was asked if he knows all his grandchildren.

"They are about 200. How can I recognize them?" he replied.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has encouraged families to have more children in the country of more than 80 million that has a population growth of about 0.52 percent.