Things Turkish that you probably shouldn’t try without a lot of practice, faith or bravado

1. At your next dinner party, pass around helpings of raw minced beef while explaining that you have actually ‘cooked’ the stuff by kneading and beating and adding a lot of spices to it over the past eight hours. If anyone asks, call it çiğ kőfte and invite them to eat up.
2. Singe off your ear and nose hair, and that odd wild eyebrow, with a butane lighter cranked up to its brilliantly full four-inch flame.
3. Allow the conscientious editor in you to tell that very forlorn but tense-looking uniformed dude carrying the AK-40-something howitzer at the gate of any of the many sandbagged and razor-wired military barracks across eastern and southern Turkey that someone's made a spelling mistake in their KEEP OUT poster.
4. Cross a four-lane Istanbul main drag at 4 p.m. with two toddlers in one hand, six shopping bags in the other, and a headscarf wrapped with such care that you’ve lost pretty well all of your peripheral vision.
5. Build your house on a cliff-side with prime views over the river valley below, a major fault line beneath the basement, a front yard desired for centuries by one invading army after another, and a government that’s about to sink the whole works under the lake that’s rising behind the new hydro dam upstream.
6. Say ‘yes’ to anyone who uses any combination of the words ‘have you seen this mosque before’, ‘tea’, invite’, ‘shop’, ‘no obligation’ or ‘carpets’ in the same sentence.
7. Pay (and stand waiting for change from) your dolmus driver as he picks up time speeding along cliff-side switchback roads (the sea waiting hungrily 300 metres below), never hesitating to take that new cell call, fingers of one hand rummaging through his wallet for what must be some desperately-needed document, reaching across the dash with his other hand for his cigarettes and lighter, but most of all enjoying listening to the whiskery guy one row back describing how tasty his olives will be this year.
8. Get yourself up a minaret at 4:30 a.m., switch on the mic, and belt out “Get Up, Stand Up” across the rooftops.
9. Wait til it’s dark, then carry two bags of toilet paper, each about two metres square, one on your front, one on your back, up an unlit, steep cobblestone laneway thick with honking, insecure Turkish male drivers, the rain pelting down on each slick stone.

Father Turk

For the past few days the country has been awash in Turkey’s flag and great banners of Mustafa Kemal, the man seen as Turkey's founder. We’ve just come through Republic Day, commemorating the founding of modern Turkey in 1923.

When we asked what happens on Republic Day, people seemed not to have given it much thought, then told us that school children will have a holiday. When we say we thought we heard a parade band warming up, they agree, Oh yes, that too.

Maybe someone in Turkey takes this seriously – some colonels in Ankara? – but not the folks we talked to.

All these extra banners of Mustafa Kemal (he named himself Atatűrk, Father Turk) remind just how ubiquitous his image is, any old day, across the country. Photos in households, pensions, offices, bus terminals, banknotes, stamps, everywhere: glaring at you eye to eye like some Houdini; looking off, visionary-like, into the distance and surely seeing your future; in a pinstriped suit, the necessary cigarette in hand, looking like your trusty banker; the older, stern, wise father with the receding hairline and eyes and mouth you probably don’t want to cross.

Then there are the statues in the square of every self-respecting city: the man riding majestic steads, the martial father in military garb leading the ‘fight for independence’, the man looking towards the hills, seeing your future again. But that’s hardly the beginning; there are still the Atatűrk main streets, Atatűrk squares, Atatűrk schools and universities, Atatűrk on the bills, everything Atatűrk.

We read that every school child is told and can repeat the agreed story of Father Turk and the founding of Turkey, that Turks are ‘devoted’ to the man. And yet the two of three times we are given the summary version of his role in Turkey’s history, the story is told quickly, rote-like, with about as much interest as that shown for Republic Day.

Although I making a wild guess here, I suspect there are about as many Turks, deep in their gut, who give two hoots about Father Turk as find the daily calls to prayer really grating. It could be a handful, it could be millions. In any case, the numbers may be moot because it’s seen as highly offensive (even illegal) in Turkey to show anything but respect for the Father.

Mustafa Kemal himself is characterized by many historians as an enlightened despot (what does this mean?), even an historically necessary one, and then compared favorably with other despots of his time, like Stalin.

What especially catches my attention about the man is his program of creating an exclusive, monolithic sense of ‘Turkishness’ against which all other cultural identities inside Turkey (such as being a Kurd or Greek) were seen as illegitimate, even antagonistic and threatening to the state. It wasn’t long before Greece and Turkey were cleansing their countries of the other’s peoples, and a people like the Kurds were seen as having no cultural rights at all, something they have always refused to accept.

The Atatűrk who’s staring off into the distance appears to be looking West, not East – choosing the Roman alphabet over Arab script, outlawing the Ottoman (‘backwards’) fez, separating the state and Islam (still deeply contentious), instituting universal suffrage, decreeing that Turks take surnames (no one had needed such things), and much, much more.

‘Turkey’ as a diverse multitude still feels like it faces both east and west, which is perhaps for the good in today’s world, although it also feels like the key levers of public manipulation (and imprisonment and assassination) are still bound up with demands to choose sides between the convenient abstractions of East or West or Turkey.

A footnote: I've also come across a few photos that raise the age-old question of what 'great' men like Mustafa would do (say, in place of his 'everyone's gotta be a Turk' idea) if he'd only had a few more opportunities to just goof around ... like having a swing or playing X's and O's.

You can't even buy a carrot

It’s happened far more than once. When we (especially Betty) attempt to buy a single carrot, apple, pear or a couple of plums from a market seller, we get quizzical, disbelieving looks.

Are you asking me what this orange thing is? What carrot is called in Turkish? How much carrots cost? No, I want to buy a carrot, this carrot, one carrot only. What, you can’t be serious woman. But how much is it? On it goes, back and forth. Then, more often than not, Betty gets handed the carrot and told, with a smile, that it’s hers. She offers some change. No – no money needed. It’s yours, it’s yours. But I want to buy it, pay for it. No problem, with a smile. Another offer of change, another smile, then perhaps something like Get lost lady, although we never understand this part.

So we say our Turkish thanks, and just as quickly the seller has turned to a real customer … or is already saying to the woman selling in the next stall: Wow, did you see that. A carrot, one lousy carrot. And she wanted to pay me for it, poor woman. How cheap does she think I am!

Bursa mosque blues

They have come to pray

• Sitting in a corner of Bursa’s huge Ulu Cami (mosque), I look through a forest of thick square pillars, ivory blended with simple grey and brown design work, rising and spreading and joining across the twenty domes high above. A continuous red carpet of many individual, human-size prayer mats forms a colourful calm surface across the floor, each mat’s patterns a reminder of the importance of heart, intellect, body and Allah.
• In the distance, two men facing the mihrab, the direction of Mecca, stand, then kneel and bend foreheads to the mat, then stand, then bend and kneel, again and again. Many others, women and men, have also come to pray, and Turkish visitors and one or two busload tour groups wander the cami, snapping photos of one another … but it is these two men I watch from a distance as they stand and bend and kneel and stand in a column of light that pools red across the carpet around them. What longing have they brought? What discontent? What need to be assured? What else? A nonbeliever, I still find myself deeply moved by these singular, small human figures, as if somehow we could even bring something in common to this place … maybe our mortal, lonely single-bodiedness, so impossible to finally ease.
• Remembering them now, I remember the fragment of a dream: several others are praying in pools of light, at the edge of which wheels of pieces of Turkish trash – water bottles, plastic sheeting, milk cartons – are transformed into a wheel of beautiful tiles of ivory, turquoise and blue that toss and float and fall, fountain-like, around the devout.

Bursa: the mod marketplace

• Our half-hour bus journey into big city Bursa takes us past vast shopping malls, big box stores (nationals and multinationals, like Ikea) and US fast food joints. I begin to wonder what will happen to the older city centre covered bazaars with their multitudes of tiny independent shops and stalls.
• But this afternoon Bursa’s sprawling bazaar was busy enough, its food market busier still. We walk through a series of beautifully restored hans and caravanseris with their Ottoman sandstone-coloured and red brick walls and arches, now all linked with industrial steel and plexiglass overhead covers, which we appreciate given the cool rain we are now having.
• But this is not a bazaar as we experienced them in the east. Everything here is gussied up: the laneways are promenades, there’s no peels, butts and trash, the light too is consistently bright, florescent, industrialized, you can see everything but everything is flat and colours untrue. Here up-market clothing and wedding dress stores have moved in alongside the older gold and jewelry dealers, silk shops, and what seems like hundreds of shoe stores with their same 20-30 shiny models. Crowds gather around piles of freshly unpacked overcoats, sweaters, and even toques – there’s fresh snow on the hills just above the city.
• The rougher, grittier trades, like the blacksmiths and tinsmiths, with their coal-fire forges, cacophony of hammering and blackened hands and faces, all so integral to the older bazaars, are nowhere to be seen or heard.
• We are made especially aware of this in our search for hand-forged kebab skewers which we’ve watched being made in the midst of the eastern bazaars. Here they are nowhere to be found; we can’t even find the usual alleyway of metalworkers. Yet remarkably, when we ask the kebab sellers and even gold and shoe dealers, someone is always nearby who can say precisely where we can find our skewers – more remarkable still because the Bursa tinsmiths are at the furthest edges of the furthest han, beyond the market really (if one can really be ‘beyond’ a market in a Turkish town), well off on their own among a ragtag assortment of furniture, appliance and plumbing shops. But there they are, our skewers, the last eight sitting, somewhat incidentally, in a dusty piece of stovepipe.
• Once a Roman spa centre (and still said to have some 3,000 thermal baths), Bursa became capital of the grand Ottoman empire which spread across the Middle East into Europe, Africa and Asia. Today the city is an industrial centre, producing cars and textiles and processed foods. The box stores and malls lay in wait for the growing suburbanized, car-driving middleclass that seems to be physically engulfing this and many city cores. And yet for all the signs of an excited consumerism, we have been told several times in the past week, and twice today by an engineer and a university graduate, that ‘things are not good in Turkey now’, that jobs are very hard to find.
• A footnote on most of the cities we have passed through: Most seem to have at least doubled their population since the guidebook we use was researched some five years ago. It’s a growth – in main part the result of huge migrations from east to west and country to city – that is most visible to our busing eyes in the ugly tenement building sprawl – freshly painted block units, cement skeletons, foundations – that seems alive and lurching up the nearby hillsides.

Ephesus: Ruins of Empire 2

• Memories: the crowds, the beauty of the Roman elite’s terrace houses and sculptured possessions, the monumentalism. Places like this – like Hierapolis, like Ankor Wat – keep making me wonder how created beauty can sit so comfortably in a society whose foundations are also the warrior life , slavery and conquest.
• Let’s get the crowds out of the way, which is to say we moved (uncomfortably) amidst a thronging anthill of cruise ship and bus tour groups, maybe some members of the ‘Italy, Greece and Turkey in two weeks’ clubs, noisy grating chatter, obsessive picture taking of one another in front of every piece of marble, noticeably high levels of disinterest among many: one woman twangs to another about a friend of her son who’s been drafted to some varsity basketball team, two men are exchanging notes on medications. Ah … what the Greek and Romans have to compete with.
• The area near Ephesus might have been settled for some 6,000 or so years, so long ago that the sea, which now sits about 10 kms away across a silted plain, once came to the foot of the hills where the Greeks, then the Romans built a city and port. Through all this, until the arrival of Christians, the area was a centre of worship of the Mother Goddess: the Anatolian Cybele, the Greek’s Artemis, the Roman’s Diana.
• Although today layer upon layer of buildings lay in various states of ruin, the result of recurrent earthquakes across this region, the Roman Ephesus was once a city of some 250,000 people, the centre spectacularly grand and grandiose: a great theatre (seating 25,000); the agora; temples with more beautiful friezes; a gymnasium area complete with playing field, exercise rooms, baths, swimming pool and toilets; monumental gates and (by today’s standards) an almost equally monumental public latrine; sophisticated water and sewage systems, and public walls and streets covered in marble or tile mosaics of flora, birds and other creatures, and colourful geometric patterns. Then there’s the Library of Celsus (said to hold 12,000 scrolls in carefully controlled atmospheric conditions), the two-storey façade now reconstructed in its spectacular glory.
• But of special beauty are the interiors of the elite’s terraced houses: the fine mosaic floors, exquisite frescoes (laurels, birds, philosophers, goddesses and gods), pools and floor-based central heating. Pleasing and sumptuous.
• The fine museum in nearby Selçuk, where we stay, is filled with even more preserved artifacts from Ephesus, mostly associated with the elite or from public buildings.
- Many sculptured renderings of Eros as a youth and adult, including the delightful infant riding a dolphin.
- The statuesque, fecund Cybele/Artemis, with her chest of 30 or so small breasts, her neck and gown covered in fine detail with bees, grapes, garlands, scorpions, crabs and embracing lovers.
- Many friezes, recovered from gladiator tombs, of the boys in training or combat, feet standing on animal and human victims, muscular arms lopping off the head of an opponent (a sneer on the lips).
- Beautiful Aphrodite carrying a large oyster shell resting on her abdomen.
- A small effigy of Priapus, his erect penis almost as large as the man himself (a postcard image that is available across tourist Turkey).
- A gigantic bust, plus forearm and fist, of Emperor Domitian, the thick, Churchillian neck and jaw of a man who was – and perhaps likes to be seen as – a bully, a fit model for Fascism and other gangster isms of our time.
• Puzzling over these remains, like those at Hieropolis, makes me return again to the jarring, unreconciled presence here of such beauty and such barbarism … not what is touted as the beauty of the monumental buildings, plazas and columned streets, but rather the beauty, even tenderness, of the painted and sculpted birds, whispering lovers, Eros and Aphrodite. Part of terrible whole here are the philosopher’s images and the delicate birds on the household walls of the elite, whose privilege is founded on conquest, slavery, domination, feeling always nearby the jutting, bullying jaw of Domitian.
• As I once did at Ankor Wat, I think of those who quarried and hauled and raised high the great stones that support and decorate all this monumentalism, those who set the water and sewer mains, those who fed the mistress and cleaned the master’s rooms.
• Odd that we wonder at and celebrate in ship loads the warriors and bullies of antiquity in the form of the collapsed, stony remains of conquest and privilege. The grand buildings, the martial scenes of violence and conquest. Faced with all this we seem to go dumb, and are well-supported by tourist literature and guides who tell the stories of the remains, which are the stories of the elites, as if they are the only ones to tell. The idealized, laundered (we might say today) past now presented as ‘history’, a ‘wonder of the world’, ‘our shared civilized past’ I heard one guide pronounce. And all the people ‘disappeared’ from this touristic, civilized past? Those whose stories we don’t hear and can’t even imagine or ask about, so naturalized are the official stories. Those we don’t see in the ‘beautiful’ friezes, hear about in these stories of empire? Where are these people?
• The glorious streets mosaics, the delicate, inviting beauty of Aphrodite’s hips, the turn of that bird’s colourful head, every-so-small tile after tile: undeniable, unqualified beauty that also so easily seduces us into forgetfulness.

Hierapolis: Ruins of Empire1

• Walking among the ruins of Hierapolis, once a Greek spa centre because of its thermal springs, then a Roman and Byzantine city and Selçuk fortress. As beautiful as it was, and as much a pleasure centre, the area is also prone to earthquakes which have repeatedly leveled buildings, no matter how mighty. At one point, in 1334, people packed up and left after an especially large quake.
• Today, scattered over west-facing hillsides and a plateau are the remains of a Roman theatre (a good example with ongoing restoration work), gymnasium, temples, a massive agora (public plaza, market and houses), colonnaded streets with great archways at both ends, baths (which the Byzantines turned into a church), an ingenious olive press and grand public latrine once finely decorated with marble columns and friezes rising around the still necessary squat holes.
• Across the hillside at the edge of this historic health centre is a large necropolis – some 1,200 tombs, which makes you wonder about the cures on offer – used by the elites of shifting empires who built tumuli, sarcophagi and house-shaped tombs, the latter with roofs made from huge solid slabs of cut stone. Most are slowly sinking into the earth under their immense weight, although a lone unusual one still rises square from white limestone, capped with a delicate, upwardly curved winged roof
• The central attraction of Hierapolis has been its healing thermal waters and, today for the tourist industry, the curious effect – like melting snow and ice – of the movement of these waters down the hillside to form white limestone travertine terraces, pools and falls. In fact when the ancient city remains were rediscovered in modern times, they were buried under trees and earth as well as layers of limestone. Nowadays, many busloads of tourists are brought in daily to have a quick walk over the travertines and agora, and take a dip in the thermal pool (once, they are told, a ‘sacred pool’), now conveniently littered with pieces of broken columns and finely-crafted pediments, and surrounded by cafes and knick-knack shops.
• Today, in the off-season, it is easy to move around mostly on our own, following hillside paths between the far-flung ruins, feeling a little of the reflective quiet one needs for such places … to consider the body-breaking labour that these monumental stone arches and columns represent; the friezes of gladiators in training for the performances and battles to come; imperial-feeling power images of lions jaws clenching the necks of weaker beasts; the frieze death masks of ghastly horror, now made even more ghastly by the twists and gaps created by weather-worn, moss-covered stone … but also to experience the stunning beauty of Hellenistic and Roman stories – heroes and heroines, dancers, musicians, lovers, new mothers – carved so finely into the frieze work of the amphitheatre, temples and other public buildings ….some of the latter intact, but now mostly strewn around us in pieces, grass and dust and moss between them, the massive cut stones of the two still-standing arches pressing towards their centre and from there to earth, gravity holding them in place and promising collapse at any moment.
• At midday we create our own spa, resting on and against marble columns on a hillside beyond where most people walk, looking over the tomb houses and agora, with our bread, cheese, olives, cucumbers, hazelnut spread, honey, apples and pears.
• A footnote. It is a commonplace in travel writing to have fun with the near misses of translated tourist literature and public signage. I’ve resisted so far, but here are two happy examples from a tourist booklet on Hierapolis. The purpose of the olive press? To “crash olives.” And this description of the power of an earthquake, perhaps in the spirit of Jane Austen: “the canal departed from the church wall because of a fault.”

Walking the Lycian Way

· For the first morning we climb from Ovacik (Betty says it’s actually Ova Chick) up some 500 metres along the edges of coastal mountains that face the Mediterranean where Turkey’s coast begins to turn north towards the Aegean. Our route is along rough forest roads and ancient mule and donkey pathways, sometimes slightly improved by recent human activity, sometimes fit exclusively for goats, always demanding choices step by step, and long pauses to catch our breath and wonder at the expanding watery and coastal expanses beneath and beyond us.
· No one knows how old these animal and human pathways are. Some will be have been used for a few thousand of years at least, likely much longer. Today, trekking literature speaks of ‘the Lycian Way’ comprising a network of singular tracks mostly along the coastline of the Lycian Peninsula. In fact ancient Lycian tracks crisscross with a multitude of even older and some newer pathways, some discernible, some lost, created as settlement and herding pastures moved about between seasons and as frequent earthquakes and avalanches reshaped the mountain sides.
· Until recently these paths were the villagers’ link to the larger world – Hassan, the 35 or so year old owner of George’s Pension where we spend the first night, remembers these days from his youth. Today a paved and dirt road link some of these same villages with market and tourist towns, and local buses visit several times a day. I sense, as the path crosses this road and we glimpse a passing Mercedes with men in suits, that someone somewhere is already discussing how to turn the sandy bays and overlooking hillsides into plots of private property on which timeshares can be built.
· A footnote: the path has been waymarked with periodic and very helpful red and white stripes painted on rocks. We’re told that when this step was taken, pension, restaurant and shop owners in one village similarly waymarked every laneway to their businesses, thus creating a kind of anti-map to everywhere and nowhere.
· Today our way takes us through pine forests, then ever lower bushes as we gain altitude. Higher up, many areas are rock-strewn – and yet surprisingly small, delicate cream, mauve and yellow flowering plants appear out of the sand and between crevices. Oleander trees blossom pink and white, tiny mauve and pink cyclamen cling to the ochre sand beneath our feet. Butterflies flutter around us – and will all day and tomorrow. Here and there mountain springs have been caught in cisterns for wayfarers and livestock. Towering above us, at almost 2,000 metres (with snow until April) is Baga Dağ, Father Mountain, part of which came crashing down in the 1950s, burying several dwellings and leaving a vast field thick with building block boulders out of which scattered pines now rise. Higher still, paragliders drift in the airstreams like red, orange and white albatrosses.
· The sun burns hotter as we reach each hilcrest and south-facing hillsides. We begin to run our hands along – and lean against – remarkably cool, north-facing outcrops, refreshing to the touch. Later we stop for a bread and cheese lunch in a dry stream bed, sitting under pines between these same cooling stones, absolute silence around us.
· This rare quiet. Some delightful bird songs. The bees humming. The silence of butterflies. Sometimes, far, far away, a human voice or two carries along this silence and though the natural acoustics of mountain sides and valleys. The gentle audible quiet of the world before machines, before electricity, before the atom … among the many, many ways in which the creaturely human must have felt more immediately immersed in, at home in the world. These hills and shorelines and valleys and tracks as ‘home’.
· The people here, living in small villages and homesteads, are gardeners, herders and beekeepers – especially, in recent years, the latter. On many created and natural terraces, we pass sets of 80, 100, 120 hives, our surroundings alive with humming. Here and there beekeepers work over their hives, each clothed in the latest safety ware, tent camps or small trucks not far away, emptying hives and collecting honey in five gallon cans or, in one case, a small tanker trailer on wheels. Beekeeping (the bees work the pine trees and plentiful flowering trees and bushes) has taken off in this region as the price of honey has risen globally and as Turkey’s own appetite for honey continues apace. How this sharp growth and increasing industrialization of an ancient culture (including the use of chemicals and additives to boost production, we are told) is being driven and funded, and who is profiting, we don’t yet know. Regardless, we are told it is changing many things – work, income, consumption, local production and monopolies – and that the changes are very recent.
· We walk among terraced plots of vegetables, olives, grapes, and tree fruits watered by nearby springs. An elderly man passes with a thin pole, several times his height, over this shoulder, a sack of olives in hand, and a welcoming smile and Turkish greeting. The ancient way. Later we pass a house where several people sit chatting and laughing on a grapevine covered terrace, two cows eating outside their main floor stable immediately below. Again the ancient way.
· When we arrive at our day’s destination, Faralya, and Hassan’s George’s Pension (named after his father’s nickname), several women are making grape juice (pekmez) for the fall and winter. One stuffs woven sacks with grape bunches; another stands in a short wooden trough, galoshes on feet, pushing down on the sacks, juice pouring into a large below; a third, watching over three cauldrons of boiling juice fired with piles of brush, tests the brew with a large ladle, then begins to spoon off the ready mix. All this happens amidst lively conversation, jokes and laughter … more grapes, more pressing, more juice, more boiling … until, an hour or so before sunset, no more baskets of grapes in sight, all the buckets, scoops, cauldrons, trough and baskets are washed down, backs are straightened, sighs are shared, and tea appears.
· We won’t quickly forget the vistas from Hassan’s. The pension sits on a cliffedge promontory likely some 300 metres over narrow and deep Butterfly Valley, which itself opens to the sea. The right kind of earth tremor would surely send everything here crashing down to the water’s edge. (Turks, like Indonesians and Californians, thumb their noses at the earth’s great shifting, rubbing crusts – despite plentiful evidence of what can happen in a moment.)
· We eat on a terrace backed on one side by the whitewashed mud brick house in which Hassan grew up, the original wood lintel beam still supporting stones over the door. We learn that Hassan has recently married, that he and his wife moved into a new house filled with modern furniture, just beyond the garden, but that at meal and other social times, the extended family sits on carpets in a circle around food or tea, the furniture mostly untouched. In any case, family members spend much of their day outside in the gardens, or on the terrace or up in the hills. The furniture gets lonelier by the day. Below this new house is a modern spring-fed pool, which we happily soak our trekked-out feet in after watching the grape-pressing process. The mingling, sometimes so unreconciled, and perhaps happily so, of old and new possibilities and expectations.
· By the time we rise on the second day, the women are already at work pressing and boiling more grape juice – and they’ve made our breakfast as well: the usual tomatoes, cucumber, feta, yoghurt, honey, melon and bread, but today all so fresh and tasty.
· We say our goodbyes, even though we want to stay forever, and begin another ascent up through the pines and oleanders. At one point I stop to take photos of several honey gatherers, get too close and am swarmed by bees who chase me as I run back to the pathway and Betty who is then in the swarm, both of us flailing away, both getting bitten before we make our escape. (How many times do the honey gatherers witness this folly in a year?)
· By late midday, as we begin some 20 kms along to reach our final destination, Kabak village, we hear the sounds of singing voices, of zurmas, a traditional oboe, and the beating of davuls, drums. We have been told that there’s a wedding in the village this weekend and we’re probably hearing the band (two as it turns out) rehearsing or welcoming guests. As we continue below the village to a nearby beach, we pass a yoga retreat camp, sleepy droning new age electronica murmuring through the pines. Later, a herd of goats is chased down from the mountain past where we lay on sarongs under thatched shelters on the beach, the lead goat’s bell a signal far up the hill. There’s maybe a dozen people scattered along the sand, the turquoise water clear like a spring.
· When we climb back uphill to the village to catch our bus home, wedding guests are gathering quickly. Cars arrive down the dirt track from who knows where. Families, everyone walking, is moving in one direction. They’ll be no one at home in the village tonight. Both bands are in full fervor, urged on by – and urging on – two men, then two more who are dancing. Then, just as our bus arrives, a couple who must be the bride and groom are driven up, she in bright red, he in a black suit. The musicians and dancers surround the car and clap the couple into the party. When we ask whether this indeed is the bride and groom, we are immediately taken by the elbow and invited to the wedding. Come! Come! Without a moment’s hestitation. But we have to take the dolmus back to Fethiye, we say. Dolmus? You need help with the right dolmus to Fethiye. One person keeps inviting us into the party. Others, it seems, are figuring out our dolmus/bus ‘problem’. A chaos of generosity, misunderstanding, a beckoning party that we will never be part of again and a bus about to leave. With many thanks and lingering regret, we step on the bus … the band members are taking a break, one wiping sweat from his brow and giving me a wave goodbye as I we step into our bus which soon weaves between more arriving cars and villagers, moving out along the cliffside dirt track where the lure of the wedding is soon being pushed aside by white-knuckle attention to a bus and driver that will need to defy gravity and, perhaps, earth tremors.

Kayaking over temple ruins

Sea kayaking today to offshore islands with Greek, Roman, and early Byzantine ruins scattered amongst ruins of Lycian village and burial sites, some of the latter sitting just under the sea as a result of earthquakes. I hadn’t imagined kayaking over marble streets, sitting rooms, sarcophogai.
The mainland here is at least as rocky as the western highlands of Scotland, and that’s saying something. As in the highlands, the ruins are often hardly distinguishable from the outcroppings. A few goat herds search for grass between the sharp edged crags. In the lower valleys, the stones seem to have been cleared or leveled, and acres upon acres of plastic-covered greenhouses erected, each filled with tomatoes, cucumbers and flowers to be shipped north and exported into Europe. We have been told (we can’t say for certain yet but it sounds likely) that the crop s are heavily supplemented with various chemicals to increase production.
Kaş was a fishing town not long ago, nestled in a deep natural harbor. Today, especially this time of year, it remains small and relaxed but is mostly given over to pensions, tour outfits offering ‘outdoor’ adventure options, and a handful of ‘property manager’ dealing in the sprawl of new apartments rising up the hills from the village. The breezes here are warm, the sea is turquoise and clear, the food is tasty at Mama’s and the beer is cold.
Dreams: - The night of our kayak trip, and the night following, I have a dream set in craggy ruins like those we have paddled amongst. Arcades, staircases into the sky and sea, arches. We are rehearsing, then performing, a play in which I seem to have a very brief but critical speaking role. Perhaps I’m a servant or doorman or porter or messenger of some kind. One scene repeats itself in a loop: I’m to wake and say something ever so brief and urgent to “Desdemona” but cannot remember what I am to say, or say the wrong thing or have myself fallen into a deep sleep from I simply can’t awake … finally, I seem to recollect, panicking and yelling the necessary message, but perhaps too late.

Into the land of microshorts and Orgasmus

We have descended from Konya and places east to Antalya and the Mediterranean … from the arid central and eastern steppes, down through mountains covered in pines and junipers rising miraculously from rocky rubble, down further into tiered cultivated valleys, then down further to a fertile coastal plain with large market gardens and acres of greenhouses (vegetables and fruit all year for nearby cities, sesame and pomegranate harvesting right now), then the coast itself, here lined with resort towns and the mega hotels of industrialized tourism.

All this is startling, but more surprising still is the overall social-cultural scene here in Antalya compared to where we’ve been for several weeks. Women most obviously signal the change. Shrouded and often simply not seen relaxing in public space in the east, women here walk the streets at ease and sometimes with lovers. Here men and women strangers might sit side-by-side in buses while many of their eastern counterparts, with the quick eye and practical finesse of bus drivers, wouldn’t consider this. Here the rare head scarf brushes past many heads of bobbing hair, the odd tightly-buttoned, neck-to-ankle coat might be felt on the arms and legs of the many women in sleeveless tops, tight slacks, miniskirts or even a pair of bum-clenching microshorts. Sidewalk pide shops complete with an expeditionary force of U.S. fast food outlets.

Once a fishing port, now cruise ship day tourists pass through laneways lined with curio shops. A seller steps out in my path and offers a pretty good Guten Tag! then, because that hasn’t worked, he just as quickly get out a Gooday mate, howayadoin’ in passable Aussie. Billboards in a couple towns along the coast, admittedly entirely given over entirely to European tourists, sport large bar billboards promoting best-selling drinks like Orgasmus and Sex on the Beach. Ah, I can hear the imams up north and down east! I myself begin to imagine a bitter piece of writing about soul parasites, maybe something called “Everyone has to be a Westener.”

Konya notes

· We visit the pilgrimmage home of Rumi adherents: the leader Mevlana’s burial place. The rooms are full of tombs and auspicious religious artifacts like pieces of hair, a teapot, shoes, a book. Adherents stand in deep prayer, many in tears. What longing or misery do they bring here? Then a man appears out of the shadows, smoothly beginning a much-rehearsed pitch describing what we are looking at, his chatter oblivious to the weeping couple beside us, the pitch ending with an offer to show us around – for only a very small charge. This too feels Turkish (but perhaps not at all entirely Turkish): this acceptance of turning the most natural, personal or profound things – a waterfall, a sacred burial place, a beach, a filthy public toilet – into a ‘small charge’.
· Down the street from where we stay is another place you can stay … called “Hotel Nil.”
· I stumble upon a renovation site: once an old medresse, another time a courtyard full of tombs. Glorious blue ceramic work remains over the arches. Dusty workers mix mortar, re-wire dark corners. I like the energy here ... and the mix of stacked artefacts, fragments of ancient beauty, and dust. In the midst of all this three or four men, supervisors of some sort in ties and jackets, stand around sipping tea, smoking. One of them is especially interested in historical renovations. He enjoys explaining the project here, my interest in it, and where I've been, and the talk itself. He wants to pick all this up tomorrow: Will you come back. We’ll have çay and talk about these things some more. “These things” were my photos from Golbeki Tepe and eastern Turkey ruins, places he had never been but seemed genuinely interested in. He keeps calling the others in ties: Do you know this place? One fellow is fascinated with a carvd fox-like animal crawling down a piece of Golbeki Tepe stone work: You still find those in the hills there, he tells us. I'm conscious of standing around talking with the men in ties while the men in dust work on ... but, still, I could easily have returned the next day to have tea andlearn more about this project.

9000 year old Çatahőyük: an unfortified city

To the well-known Çatahőyük archaeological site today on the plains south of Konya.

I’ve been following in a small way the research on this site for few reasons. It is thought to be the oldest ‘city’ settlement of its size unearthed anywhere (inhabited some 9,000 years ago); it was never fortified for almost 2,000 years (suggesting a long period with a high degree of safety and absence of a fighting class); there is some evidence to suggest interesting combinations of gender role differentiation alongside possibly high levels of gender equality; and some special significance given to a mother/female figure/goddess.

When you approach this site across a vast plain, you see two mounds rising slightly above the horizon, now with large shelters setting over the two main excavation sites, as well as other buildings. Here lived some 3,500 to 8,000 people alongside the Carşamba River (which still runs nearby) and surrounded by an abundant flood plain – a source of reeds for mats and baskets, fish, water birds and birds eggs, and good clay for bricks. Hills rise on the near horizon which would have been forested with juniper and oak, the timbers found in the house roofs. The people here seemed to both raise crops and hunt and gather.

Houses, more than 150, were built windowless and almost wall to wall, without lanes or paths. Each one had a roof-opening through which a ladder reached to the rooftop – in fact a kind of plaza of rooftops where, in addition to spaces beyond the dwellings, community life would have taken place. It appears that after about 80 years of use, a house was filled in and built over, thus one reason for the gradually raising of the town mound over the centuries.

Among the many found artifacts is a fine obsidian mirror, a flint dagger with a finely carved bone handle in the shape of a curled snake, and various pots and implements (including a clay spice shaker, which by this model haven’t changed in 9,000 years). Small figurines have also been found: some of a heavy-bodied and breasted female, some phallic figurines, and many animal figurines. A number of house walls include paintings, many of human figures hunting and gathering. One unusual painting – of a series of blocks over which another figure sits – has been variously interpreted, including one theory that it is a diagram or kind of map of the community with a volcano (one was nearby) sitting over top.

Walking up the slope of the second mound, the river lined green not far off, the plain now irrigated and acres of sugar beets and industrialized beef farms, I remembered my experience of walking up a similarly situated hill at Wanuskewin First Nations north of Saskatoon. At the summit of that walk I sat quietly with a friend in a circular space, the prairie sloping down all around us in a wide full circle like the fall of a great flaring skirt. I had a strong sensation at that moment of the full roundedness of the earth, of being perched ever so small on its edge and of somehow being in some centre of earth life, then thinking of the First Nations people who hunted, gathered, told stories, felt passion, held ceremonies here for 6,000, even 20 or so thousand years … and the near-genocide against them that took place in a mere 30 or so years ... and this ever-so-tranquil centre, away from all the modern day centres, that wise people have unearthed, preserved and brought back to life, as others are doing in Çatahőyük.

Çatahőyük makes me wonder about the paths and tracks people move, and where why they settle – both the forms of ‘home’ where abundance is close by because it is and because the creatures who call these places home know how to help make where they are abundant. Wise people. And no fortresses, towers or fortifications in what became a region (and world) of these things. I like to imagine that that image on the house wall is a celebration of this place experienced as a lived place, home, our world, here.

Today, in the midst of the industrialized farms near Çatahőyük are the villages of farm labourers and small farmers (and perhaps many who are both). The houses and animal dwellings are mud brick, many of the roof timbers covered in mud, human and animal spaces hardly distinguishable, pieces of the latest farm machinery here and there. In fact one worker at the dig site comments on the similarity of the construction of the 9,000 year old buildings she is unearthering and those she and her neighbours live in today.

A number of the workers, to their own surprise it seems, make similar comments that connect the ancient past and present. Astonishing, especially in our time with its illusion of such rapid change, to stand in the midst of crafts and techniques that seem to still work well 9,000 years on.

Walking the Ilhara Valley with the Melendiz sisters

Walked the 14 km Ilhara Gorge trail today along the quick flowing Melendiz River, poplars and willow-like trees near the water, 90-degree red and tan sandstone cliffs rising on both sides not far away, great pieces of collapsed cliffside between us and the walls. Along much of the way, about a third of the way up the cliffs, are communities of doorways, windows, tunnel entrances, the narrowest of rock cut pathways, dovecotes. For centuries, this was once home to herders, monks and gatherers. Likely a safe-feeling and certainly a contained world. Interspersed with these communities are cave churches and a monastery, many with ceilings covered in Christian frescos. Two we entered contained tall decorated columns, just as you would find in most Byzantine churches.
Although people have moved to small nearby villages, we still pass small groups or singular souls picking grapes and squash, tending cows or inspecting tomato plots. Always a bubbling of voices wherever a group works.
About half way we pick up three friendly female dogs, or they pick us up. We quickly learn that they know the way very well. It might seem that it’s hard to get lost at the foot of a deep narrow gorge, but in this case, especially where the rock face has collapsed or the cliff comes to the water’s edge or many paths crisscross and meander, the best way forward is often unclear – but only to us, not the dogs. Yes their nimble habits take us to some scary places, and sometimes when we don’t follow, they suddenly appear far off and often ahead, sniffing about, putting in time until we catch up, sometimes seeming to shrug with a ‘we told you so’ look, sometimes heading off for an extra run. It’s only when we arrive at the end of the trail near our pension, that we are told that these three smell out walkers at whatever end of the trail they’re sniffing about, tag along to the other end and then hang out until more people who smell like walkers appear, then do the return trip. Back and forth, picking up a meal where they can, taking only a little attention for a thank-you. The four-legged Melendiz sisters – we’ll remember you when we think of the Ilhara Valley.
Thanks Muhsin for bringing us breakfast at the pension in Selime (where we walked the Ilhara Valley) and showing us around (in sandals and as agile as a goat) the cave monastery up the cliffside from the pension. May you one day realize your life-dreams, whether it is being a guide (as you said, smiling – did we understand each other?) or whatever else you wish. Twelve, thirteen is a good time to dream.

Posts and pictures

• Tonight I've uploaded a series of posts, none with photos - yet. I hope to include some of these soon and post a new photo album from the past couple of weeks.
• You might also notice that early post are now archived - but they are still viewable if you click on "Older posts."
• Because I made five or so posts tonight, some of these might already be archived. Just click on "Older posts" to see these.

Days in Gőreme (Cappadocia)

• The side roads are often the most interesting. We’ve spent the day looking at the ceiling frescoes of 4th to 11th century Christian cave churches near Gőreme, certainly stunningly beautiful in their way. But what I remember above all this evening are two other moments:
• Making our way back to Gőreme, we see two retired aged men off in a rough, flat, dusty field picking … something. We decide to head across the field to find out. It’s grapes from low bushes they’ve been tending. They’ll make wine, a widespread practice in the area, and maybe store extra grapes into the winter, both white and ‘black’, beneath their floorboards. They cut off and hand us a bunch, encouraging us to try them. And yes, they’re sweet, cool in the late afternoon, and delicious. Before we wish them well, we’re carrying off yet another bunch, tomorrow’s lunch.
• A little further along down our dusty road, a tractor and colourfully painted wagon appears with several village women and youths. Everyone’s in a good mood, talking and laughing, they’re excited, anticipating something they’ll enjoy. They pull into a small field thick with squash, some the size of watermelon, some like grapefruit – then jump down and begin throwing the produce into the wagon. We then remember seeing several women early this morning cracking open the same type of quash, expertly extracting and saving the seeds (they’ll be dried and sold as snacks: ‘chick-chicks’?), then throwing the cracked husks into a quickly mounting pile. Up in the field, the women welcome Betty’s offer off help, one showing her how to snap off the dried vine from each squash with her foot and heave them up into the wagon. Together, the women and the youths and children, its quick work and not long before we’re waving goodbye, hardly a word understood between us, apart from merhaba, hello, and hoşçakal, goodbye.
• A footnote to the squash picking. In a cobbled stone yard covered in these same drying squash seeds, men and women appear one day with a tractor, thresher, short brooms and many sacks. For hours into the dark mid-evening, the women bend low, sweeping and sweeping the seeds into sacks which are then emptied in the thresher, the chaff blowing across the square, down lanes and up to our balcony, the cleaner seeds gathered in sacks eventually to be hauled away. No matter how late they work, the work is not done. The next day they return, sweeping and sweeping as if they must collect every seed! Then the brooms and bags and other tools are all gathered, small scraps up picked up here and there, and off they go, as if all this had never happend.
• The land forms in this area are unusual and for eons have invited humans to use the earth in unique ways to respond to their needs. The landscape is arid, sandy, full of gorges,pinnacles, curvaceous ivory and dusty rose coloured cliff walls of soft volcanic ash. Once volcanoes blanketed the region with ash which solidified into an easily eroding material called tuff, which is overlain in many places by harder volcanic rock. As this hard cap erodes and fissures open, cave and capped columns start to form (generally called ‘fairy chimneys’ – they’ve always been called this, we are told, but it maybe be just as possible that it was a now forgotten marketing idea in the early days of tourism here). In fact, depending on the stage of erosion, they appear like fantastic mushrooms, gigantic phalluses or inverted cones reaching some 40 metres.
• For many centuries the soft tuff and it natural caves have been used to create dwellings, dovecotes and churches, all of which are seen as you walk through nearby gorges. In fact whole underground communities were once created, sometimes with five to eight stories deep of living quarters, storage, stables, ventilation systems, churches, wells and great stone wheels that could seal entranceways in case of danger. How permanently people (all early Christians) lived in these, or whether mostly in times of attack is unclear to us. Today some people still living in dwellings built into the tuff cones and cliff faces, with hydro lines running from the stone, often a car parked somewhere close by, and a satellite dish sprouting from the top. Tourism – and its plentiful here – has led to the creation of hotels with actual and contrived cave rooms (like the Flintstone Hotel), big sellers but reportedly often musty, airless and dark.
• Today we walked for several hours through one gorge, from Gőreme where we are staying to a nearby town. Nothing is signposted, beyond the start, and the gorges are full of side canyons and deadends, We likely explored most by happenstance, finally meeting a guide who showed us our way (he and several walkers the only people we met), and reaching our destination in about four rather than two hours. But there is nothing like walking to have you feeling, internally, the nature of the land, its heat, its ups and down and turns, its broader shapes and ancient shaping, the textures of what it’s made from. Sometimes we followed cool, almost dry streambeds or moved through natural tunnels, sometimes we crossed or climbed basalt crests, then suddenly (many times over) we found ourselves in small hidden apple orchards with brilliant red fruit (oh yes, several got into our packs) and grape vines with sweet dark purple fruit. Finally our destination, the hilltop village of Üçhisar, an enclave of French tourism set alongside Cappadocian village life – a fringed scarf for Betty bought from a woman making these in her cave-cum-brick house, a plate of pide and a drink, then the bus home. A good day.
• A memorable day wandering in and between cave churches with their spectacular frescoes near Gőreme. The churches themselves are most unusual. Cut into the soft tuff and built as part of a community and monastery complex from the 4thC on, the churches imitate Byzantium architectural styles – vaulted ceilings, columns, atriums, transverse naves – complete with features that, inside the cave, have no practical function. Inside many, the complete ceilings and upper walls are covered with frescoes mostly depicting well known key scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Many of the figures follow stereotypes of the time. It is other elements that get my attention, like the attention to drape – the folds and shadows and flow – of cloaks and dresses down the bodies whose major skeletal elements (shoulders, hips, knees) are felt visible through the clothing.
• Many of the animals – donkeys, sheep, goats,cows, horses (Cappadocia means ‘land of the well bed horses’) – are energetic and sometimes comical in their angularity, facial expressiveness and unmistakably (and curiously) direct stares back to the viewer.
  Then there’s the colourful detailing on the fabric and shoes and stocking of the wealthy, like the three wise men, how painters have taken advantage of the curved surfaces to add movement and energy to the human interaction, the references to ordinary life (like the polled coracles on water), Grabriel again floating, flying across the domes, the exceptional but remarkable individuation in the eyes and cheeks and nose of one women whispering to another, the combinations of gold, scarlet, burgundy, indigo and brilliant blue paints, the latter apparently created from rare azurite.
• A day later I find myself marveling at the glorious expressiveness in the details and colours and flowing movement of all this colourful picture-making, story-telling, sense of celebration deep inside these dim earthen caves with their tiny doors and openings surrounded outside by the dusty, demanding earth that yet, with care, issues the reddest of apples and the sweetest grapes.

Gaziantep: baklava, mosaics and raki drunks

• We’ve been looking at Roman tile mosaics (floors and pool bottoms) recovered from sites in the region before they were lost under the GAP hydro dam lakes. Scenes from classical mythology –with glorious colouring and textures and flows motions, especially in the depictions of clothing fabrics – gowns, scarfs – but also in the birds and dolphins. Imagine these on shallow pool bottoms, the slightest breeze over the surface and the figures ripple, flow, come alive.
• Gaziantep is known for the best baklava in the country and we’ve been taste-testing with approval, Betty especially enjoying the chocolate kind. Also delicious in these parts: fresh fruit drinks (or in Betty’s case, a chocolate-hazelnut shake), and iskender with fresh pita on the bottom, then yoghurt, slivers of chicken and a tasty tomato-based sauce – with a cold beer if you’re lucky to be in a cafe that sells beer in these parts.
• Most women in the southeast are covered head to toe in several layers, usually topped by an ankle-length buttoned overcoat, and scarves over head and a pinafore like piece of scarf around the neck … and not infrequently a babe in arms and a youngster or two in hand. This cannot be comfortable, especially in 26-30 degree days, or the 45 degrees a few weeks ago that people still talk about. Meanwhile, the men walk around in shirtsleeves and slacks, often the older men in well worn sports jackets.
• Sound cacophony again. Repeatedly honk, honk, honks of six or eight city buses stopped in thick traffic going nowhere. Tinsmith and coppersmith hammers drum metal on anvils just down the bazaar laneways. Youthful simit (rounds of sesame seed covered bread) and chai sellers shouting their wares. Restaurants touts struggle to call above the din. Cellphone chatter comes and goes and comes constantly …. Is it possible to be asphyxiated by the absence of livable sound? I began to feel so.
• The journey’s prize for brazenness so far. We are overcharged by about 20% at a café overlooking beautiful Golbesi. I check the menu, do the math, a manager comes, agrees, seemingly all apologies, scolds the waiter (we can’t tell the fake from the genuine in any of this) and brings the correct change. Then, as we get up to leave, the waiter with the creative math reappears and asks for my pen. We think he wants to write his regrets, but no, he tries out the pen, then asks for it, almost demands it as his right, pointing to his penless pocket. We laugh, telling him to ask his manager for one, more theatrics of the ‘I’m penniless, it’s easy for you to give me this pen’ kind. We try to work up our most scornful looks and leave.
• For two nights now, the three a.m. raki drunks have gathered in the lane around the sidewalk charcoal kebab grill beneath our window. Last night they barked and whined over their cellphones. Tonight they’re in black suits, white shirttails flapping. Penguins on raki. Maybe they’ve spent the day wanting to bark back at orders and insults and now here they are, especially Baldinghead, yelling, finger-pointing, shoving, picking up a chair and smashing it against the pavement. Friends hold Baldinghead and another man apart, and finally the barking penguins stumble down the street … but no, here’s another insult or two yelled up the laneway and they’re back for a return engagement. The cops arrive, shoot the breeze and leave. A wit amongst the penguins gets a big laugh all round. A second has almost lost his pants. Baldinghead snags some fruit from the kebab man’s stand and is then throttled by two bystanders til the goods are pulled from his pocket and everyone starts howling again. They just can’t get enough … but that’s enough for us. I dig out my earplugs.

Sanfiurfa:

• Back lanes. More children brandishing shiny toy guns and real (and hefty) knives. They know the power of what they hold and the gestures that go with such weapons. Harmless theatrics that fell like they’re running along the edge of cold-hearted threats. A gray-haired man appears at a window and sends them off. They’re scurrying is that of nervous children.
• We've been out all day with Yusuf, a guide-driver, driving and walking to 6000 to 9000 year old dwelling sites along the Turkey-Syrian border and just north of Sanliurfa. The people here are Arabs and Kurds and, we are told, many are very poor. Along the way, we visit rocky fortress ruins, towns (some with underground houses), caravanseris. Astonishing places one after the other.
• Along the way, the landscape shifts between a moonscape of arid rock-stewn hills and large irrigated tracts of cotton, cereals, fruits, nuts and olives. The water is the result of the controversial dam and flooding projects, the same set of projects that has already flooded ancient dwelling areas and threatens places like Hasankeyf. Crossing these now fertile fields, we are told by our guide that otherwise impoverished poor people are happy to now have work planting and harvesting crops – but of course we don’t know what’s happening here, what people’s experiences are.
• The fortress ruins and beehive houses of old Harran, the ruins of a spice and slave trade kervansaray at Han-el-Ba’rűr, underground dwellings at Suab (banned by the government from habitation 60 years ago we are told, although I followed a woman and infant home and was invited into lived in underground chamber ), a moon and sun cult site at Soğmater, Syriac inscriptions across the rock surface, the sun goddess herself still peering across the arid hills. Harran, thought to be continuously inhabited for 6,000 years, referred to in Genesis, once a prosperous trading town and centre of worship of moon god Sin, later a Roman centre of learning, then home to a Crusader fortress, a Byzantine and Arab culture centre as well, finally sacked by the Mongols in the 13thC, then mostly leveled by an earthquake. Today red stone and tan marble fortress ruins sit scattered on an artificial tumulus, sometimes dwarfing the village of traditional beehive shaped homes (many still lived in, satellite dish sprouting from the red hives) and modern cottage houses. The Arabs and Kurds here, traditional herders, now mostly work as day labourers in the cotton and cereal fields wherever irrigation has become available. Yusuf says they are happy with this new life. We want second opinions.
• (A little snippet of that came on the fly today, October 8th, following protests (on the second anniversary of PKK opposition leader Abdullah Ocalan's detention) in southeastern Turkey where we’ve just been. The BBC site has this: The PKK's current tactics are to follow Ocalan's lead in pressing for moderate concessions to Turkey's Kurdish community. The BBC's Chris Morris in Istanbul says the main problem the authorities face is that two years after Ocalan's capture they have done nothing to fulfil their promise of improving economic conditions in the south-east of the country.
• A lasting memory: - I ask an Arab girl, perhaps 10 or 11, the way back through the hives to our car. She obliges, tagging along and urging me to buy, as other children have done on the tumulus, a simple beaded decoration she carries. Her approach is gentle, her voice soft. Her 20 or so English words, offered like a liturgy, are used up in a moment. Within a beehive I’ve fallen for her completely and she likely knows it. I ask to clarify where the car might be and then turns us into another lane. She and I hang behind the others, I try to reason as gently as her that her decoration is indeed very nice but that I don’t want it, I tell her that she has a beautiful smile (which I truly mean, trying to be convincing, to connect, by touching her shoulder), even if (or perhaps especially because) her easy smile is framed in a head of stiff dry, dusty, even filthy sun-bleached hair … all this, absurdly, in English. Was she imagining that she was making progress, which she was. When the others are gone, I give her the lira she’s wanted for the decoration, telling to keep the curio itself. She beams, gives a quick affirmative yelp, then turns and hops and skips away, looking over her shoulder once and twice more, smiling, waving. Whatever has happened, we’re both happier for it.
• Another lingering memory: - Yusuf has been breaking into song over the day. He’s not forthcoming about the meaning of the verses, but his voice is all energy, wonderful. Then once – as we are deep inside a cavernous, now unused marble quarry, soaring shadowy walls and arches of dusty rose, ivory, cream and browns stretching above and beneath us – Yusuf’s powerful voice suddenly bursts across the quarry, resounding from wall to wall to wall, calling, coaxing, urging, I’m not sure which, but sounding passionate, lyrical, urgent, primal and glorious.
• Gobekli Tepe. This is an archaeological site I have especially wanted to reach - which we did at sunset. Gobekli Tepe: navel or belly of the mountain, sitting atop the highest point of land as far as the eye can see, some 9,000 years old and claimed to be the oldest site of ceremonies so far discovered anywhere. Walking around the site you see unearthed circles of t-shaped pillars arranged around even larger pillars, some five metres high, each decorated, at a closer look, with exquisite images of stork-like birds, wild boars, a lion in full relief creeping down the edge of one pillar, wolf-like creatures and other animals.
• Another day, back in Sanliurfa, late afternoon, standing high atop the citadel or kale overlooking the city. Betty and I have been counting the minarets, some 45 to 65, when prayers break out, a kind of pandemonium of praises reverberating all around us and off into the hot, hazy horizon from Gobekli Tepe to the Mesopotamian plains.
• Immediately below us, down the cliffside, stretches Golbasi, a series of mosques, caves, rose gardens and arcaded rectangular pools, restful and beautiful, where pilgrims come to pray at Islamic prophet Abraham/Ibrahim’s cave. The story we read is worth re-telling. Ibrahim was in Urfa destroying pagan gods when Nimrod, the local Assyrian king, took offence and had him immolated on a funeral pyre. Seeing this, God turned the fire into water and the hot coals into fish. Ibrahim himself was then hurled off the cliff (where we have been listening to the 40-60 calls to prayer) into a bed of roses – likely badly scratched but smelling good. It’s the cave where he then hung out that people come to pray, as well as watch and feed the sacred carp (the fiery coals) swimming in the pools and along the connecting channels.

Hasankeyf

· For centuries people here have used the hollows in the high sandstone cliffs to built safe dwellings. Today, we are told, only two families live in this fashion, the rest living in an adjoining town where houses are constructed from bricks made from the same golden and tan sandstone.
· The setting is dramatic and ancient feeling. The village and caves sit on a sharply rising hill and cliffside overlooking and running away in deep rocky valleys from the Tigris River. Along the river, the cliff, perhaps some 200 metres high, seems to be sliced off vertically as if it were a great block of amber cheese. On its highest point, above the dwellings and towering over the river are the remains of an early 15thC fortress and Byzantine church.
· In the midday heat we climb up one valley, then up the hillside nearest the river, peering into the empty dwellings, many of which have been enlarged with mud brick walls curving out from the rock face. Inside are hollowed out chambers and alcoves, bedrooms and storage for food and household goods. Later we have lunch sitting on kilim pillows in one of many makeshift platform restaurants (cardak, leafy room shelter) standing over the Tigris, small grills being used to barbeque fish and lamb, salads and water coming from coolers.
· The future here is uncertain. Plans have been well underway to flood the wide, deep valley that’s home to Hasankeyf and many other villages, all part of huge irrigation and hydro projects across southeastern Turkey. The mayor has been leading an international campaign against the flooding of his town and the ancient cave homes, and recently international financiers have backed off. The government, however, seems determined to go ahead, regardless.

Saddle makers and fresh figs

· We are on a hillside overlooking the vast, now irrigated and fertile plains of Mesopotamia, midway between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, walking through the shadowy lanes of the old bazaar. I’ll especially remember the saddle and harness makers working in the smokey stone alcoves of the 500 year old han. The saddles and harnesses are for pack donkeys used to bring goods to the bazaar, but likely for other donkeys and horses we see in the region to herd sheep and cattle and to pull carts. Leather and metal pieces hang from the alcove’s blackened ceiling. Layers of felt, colourful carpeting and heavy yarns are piled all around, Two men work methodically with long heavy needles, building the saddle layer upon layer over its wood frame, as others have likely done in these same han alcoves for centuries.
· Elsewhere, olives fresh and cured. Fresh tasty figs. Sacks of various grains, including bulgur of course. Wall of children’s school backpacks with Spiderman, racing car and blonde party girl images. Further along, round green and gold blocks (like cheddar) of scented olive oil soap.
· The beautifully detailed filigree work in the tan sandstone at each mosque along our walk up and down the cobbled lanes and steps of Mardin. Children and young women go out of their way to help us find a particular mosque or old house in this maze of lanes set deep within stone walls and buildings. Such willingness feels unusual to us. Is it a matter of habitual learned courtesy, especially towards visitors and elders? Pride of place? We don’t know. But it comes quickly and is offered unconditionally in Mardin.

First days in Kurdish Diyanbakir

· We are staying in the “old city” – surrounded by a six kilometer long, 20 metre thick stonewall (enough to contain many rooms) running about 15 metres high – within which is a dense, crowded, frantically busy mix of shops of every kind, hotels, offices, markets and mosques. The first day we walk much of the wall, sometimes inside, sometimes out, sometimes on narrow footpaths on top, although my session of vertigo up there quickly makes me return to terra firma quickly. Begging urchins meet us with hands out, ‘money’ on their lips. In some areas, thick ruins of hovels cling to the outer wall. It’s in one of these areas, where I’ve gone in search of some lion reliefs on an outer wall tower, that a group of small boys approach, led by the tallest (perhaps eight or nine) with a mangy dog on leash, the whole gang asking for money and the tallest (self-conscious machismo, dramatic eyes and voice) threatening to set his dog on me, a dog far more interested in the garbage nearby. It was all like pretend gangsterism, all the more comical because guidebooks caution against walking along the walls alone because of real thieving gangs.
· In search of the small town bus ‘station’, we find ourselves in an open market with mounds of cabbages and cantaloupe each the size of very large watermelons (and the watermelons are exceptionally large in these parts), the usual displays of pomegranates and peppers, but also an area where men bring in chickens to be throttled and plucked. Three arrived per sack, heads sticking out through their own holes. Other carts were laden with live chickens. Nearby, two men squat in a puddle of feathers, plucking away. When I asked to take some photos, one of those ‘Turkish’ moments seemed to erupt: – excited conversation from every direction, posing and posing again, then more discussion and I’m urged to mail the photo, which I agree to do (I already have a long list of addresses from other days and other photos). Then someone is found who can write the name and address, which itself sparks another burst of comments. When I re-write the address, checking word by word, eight or ten men watching carefully, each offering opinions … then suddenly it’s all over. A circle of quieter conversation closes again around the chicken carts and pluckers … apart from one man who has been leading many of these exchanges, and who now beckons me aside and asks for his own photo to be taken, striking a very self-consciously master pose. No talk of address. He seems to want the special attention and to just see the result on the screen. Satisfied , I guess, he goes about his day.
· It’s time stop referring to crowded Turkish city neighbourhoods and the frantic whirl of sounds, people, voices, colours, smells. This is ‘normal’, as one Turk said today.
· A word that takes me back to Istanbul: I read today that the great flat round hot stone on which you lay with others in the hamams is called a ‘gőbektasi’, literally: navel stone.

Snow, rubbish and lots of kindness

· Traveling south, we rise quickly into the forested mountains along twisting roads, until the snow we have seen above is right along the crags and road margins beside us. Snow! Two summits we reach and cross. More snow. Then the descent still south into increasingly rolling arid hills (many under grain cultivation) and deep fertile river valleys, on towards Erzurum.
· Further south we pass great herds of dark brown long-haired sheep tended by herders and their brightly saddled donkeys and horses. Yurt-like tent encampments are here and there along the valley near water.
· The Erzurum-Diyanbakir bus is smaller, about 20 passengers, the atmosphere more convivial, a little tribe of us, we the only ones from outside the region. Along the way we pick up herdsmen and women, taking them to the next encampment or town. Everyone (we’re likely all from some city or town) has good look at these unfamiliar faces and differently dressed and smelling strangers. The bus assistant is carefully attentive, ensuring seats and drop-offs where needed. We think we hear chickens clucking and a sheep kicking somewhere in the rear of the bus, but we aren’t sure.
· Rubbish. Everywhere. Especially of the plastic kind. I imagine a morning when enough Turks set out to market or work or backgammon and find themselves struggling through such great drifts of rubbish that enough will say: Enough! The roads and highways of Turkey are littered with plastic bottles and bags, many blowing across the nearest margins and fields, snagged on weeds and brush. Villages and cities everywhere seem to dump garbage over the nearest hillside or into the closest hollow. Garbage flows down from villages edges to the roadside, or from roadsides down along the margin, or gets piled at road or yard ends. One long-haul bus driver and assistant routinely tossed garbage out the window of the moving bus. Although litter cans dot the city sidewalks, it’s not unusual to see people drop plastic water bottles and fast food packaging where they stand. Turkey can build mega-hydro dams and flood massive valleys and whole villages, but it can’t yet reduce or manage its garbage.
· Another example of the attentive and quickly proffered kindliness we’ve received. As we approach Diyanbakir in the dark, a city of some 750,000 people although no one knows (and a dense warren of 2,000-and-more-year-old streets and laneways), the assistant wants to know where each person needs to disembark. We stymie him with our lack of Turkish, but then curious, concerned passengers jump in, excited exchanges ensue, what sounds like many suggestions and much advice. A man with some English clarifies the name of our hotel, then another burst of conversation up and down the bus. We can only speculate: ‘Take them to that bus stop.’ ‘No forget it, drop them at the otogar (bus depot) outside town.’ What kind of thing is that? We need to help get them right to their hotel.’ Eventually we are told (by the sincere looking fellow with some English) to follow another passenger when he gets off, which we do, following him (packs on our backs) across an intersection whirling with traffic, down another street, then hopping on a city bus with him, us asking about fare and him arranging with the driver that no fare is needed (or too much of a damn nuisance to even consider). Then our man, just before he jumps off the bus, arranges to hand us off to a another city bus passenger (clearly a stranger to him) who has agreed to show us where to get off for our hotel – which we does, getting of himself and leading the way a further half a block … at which point he smiles and vanishes, as have all the others as we shout back our thank-you’s in broken Turkish and Kurdish.

How did they do that: Sumela Monastery

· We have come further east along the Black Sea to the port of Trabzon from which we want to visit the Sumela Monastery. Said to date from the 6thC and one of many Byzantine-era monasteries built high in the hills south of Trabzon, it remained an active Greek Orthodox monastery until the early 20thC.
· We set out by bus in the early morning, climbing steeply into forested hills, then up through the narrow Altindere River gorge where we begin to see snow-capped mountains not far above. It seems that whichever way you see the monastery from a distance – from the cliffside along the valley as we did, or from above as one photo reveals – the impression is of an impossibly constructed set of buildings: a façade of several-storey buildings, as well as an aqueduct, somehow glued to a high 90 degree rock face so large that the buildings, by no means small, appear like miniatures from a distance. We stare wide-eyed on the first look. It invites disbelieve, a sense of the marvelous. The precipitous location is all about safety, security.
· As we climb up and in behind the façade, we find ourselves overlooking a small plaza set into a great open hollow or grotto on the Cliffside. Here there are various buildings including the main chapel with 9th to 19thC frescoes on its exterior and inner walls and ceiling, many defaced but many elements still intact. I find my eye not much interested in the main iconographic figures, including a Black Virgin, but enjoying far more what might have been considered the sideshow: olives on branches, blossoming flowers, two rearing, snorting horses (with fighting riders), the beaded sleeves and graying hair of a woman holding a candle, flying angel-people looking blessed out as they float about, another group of music-making angels, a fine beaded decanter. I like to imagine the painters’ attention to those lively olives, branches and leaves and those beaded sleeves and that woman’s pulled back graying hair … the attachment of those naturalistic details and figures and some dimension of the sensibility that guided them to mortal, creaturely life at the edges of all that immortality and lesson-teaching.
· Later we walk down a steep switched back forested path to the valley floor where we find a quiet table beside the river and pull out (as is often our routine) a lunch of bread, cheese, olives and cucumber pieced together from our abundant pension breakfasts. High above through the vines and pine trees, the monastery clings to the cliffside in defiance of gravity.

Moving east: Safranbolu and Amasya

We have been staying in two enchanting ancient-feeling towns: Safranbolu and Amasya (really a city with old and new together), both east of Istanbul and just south of the Black Sea.

I am also posting albums of a few images from here and a delayed album of photos from Istanbul.
· Safronbolu: the old market area of the now larger city is one of many UNESCO World Heritage sites, mainly known for its 19thC Ottoman houses or konaks: winter homes for wealthy tradesmen and artisans who moved back and forth between the sheltered deep valley setting of the market area and the higher breezier hills for the summer. For some, tTrade and money have been plentiful here. The merchants houses, now being restored (we stay in such a house, in the family for many generations and now being restored with government and international funds) , are wood frame and adobe-type walls (mud, straw, gravel) finished on the exterior in whitewash and dark stained wood, the upper floor reaching wider than the lower, braced with carved wood brackets or corbels, dark wood shutters on the many windows.
· Inside, divans or sediris, doubling for sitting and sleeping and covered in colourful embroidered runners and kilims, run along the walls under the windows. More colourful and copious kilims, along with wide pillows, are spread everywhere across the broad beamed floors. The rooms are filled with narrow bright beams of sunlight glancing off the kilims golds, scarlets and blues. On some walls are small turban-shaped niches for storing preserves. One room has a typical double-doored cupboard with revolving shelves opening in two different rooms. Small closet doors conceal and open up into bathrooms (water closets?), plaster fireplaces sit under yasmaks or conical hoods.
· Safranbolu has been along a main trade route from the south and east running towards the Black Sea. Thus the high-walled 17thC Cinci Han, now a hotel but originally something like a hotel, with small sleeping rooms, offices, craftsmen areas, and hamam , stables and a mosque built around a large courtyard for trading and socializing. Imagine camel caravans arriving outside, the sounds of accommodation and trade being arranged, the guttural voices resounding aroun d the steamy hamam, voices in the gaslight over meals, perhaps talking of distant centres, silk, spices ….
· Today the old bazaar area of Safranbolu is covered in rambling grapevines running over the narrowest of cobbled streets and lanes. Many of the shops sell trinkets and sweets (including locally produced Turkish delight and halva) for the tourist bus crowds. (In the new part of the city, and after many misunderstandings across Turkish and English, we are graciously shown through a small factory in the main city producing these local specialities.)
· If you ever have to chose between visiting Safranbolu or Amasya, choose the latter. You’ll visit (and, like us, stay in) one of the restored Ottoman houses, but Amasya easily combines the old with a modern living city – as well as a spectacular setting, ancient cliffside Pontic tombs, 13th, 14th and 15thC mosques of every shape and feature. Amasya astonishes for its setting deep within a very narrow river valley (the badly polluted Yeşilirmal River) with high limestone cliffs rising abruptly and running east-west on both sides of the city. Curling along and up the cliff-face are the remaining walls of a fortress first built by the Hittites and used and expanded by waves of conquerors since. On the cliff, improbably but true, stands a self-sustaining Ottoman citadel complex that would have put any Scottish castle builders to shame, and half way up the cliffs are Pontic burial caves which we clamber up to high above Amasya.
· We spend the first night in a sloppily renovated Ottoman house (the Emin Efendi Pansiyon, don’t go) that hang with others over the river bank. In the morning, a tree laden with ripe red and pink pomegranates greets us outside our window. Since then we have stayed in the gloriously renovated 18thC Armenian mansion, the Ilk Pansiyon. The colourful sediris described earlier, closeted bathrooms, kilims everywhere, worn and faded red curtains with bright white lacey blinds underneath, a high recessed carved and inlaid wood ceiling, perhaps in walnut and linden, with floral and geometric designs, the low bed whose ‘headboard’ is an ancient trunks that invite you to dream the places they have been, the lives they have been attached to. More and more well-used implements, appliances and knick-knacks here and there like the dusty camel saddle, well-used baby cradles, a fascinating brass coal heater, old samovars hardly different (apart from the tarnish) from the bright copper and silver ones we seen in the metalworkers laneway in town. Off the inner courtyard, where I’ve sat down to write some notes, a broadly smiling gap-toothed woman hangs the laundry, a kitten is curled asleep in the sun the next chair. The woman whose name I will learn, was anxious that we take our shoes off before we first entered the house but, now reassured , seems pleased to have residents, we being the only ones in the mansion these nights! · Amasya is home to Strabo, traveler and geographer and in the 18thC a centre of Islamic learning. We wandered through what was once a 14thC hospital-asylum where musical and speech therapies were used, although what appear to be medical teaching illustrations also suggest some dramatic mechanical invasions into the brain (today, as if one tradition continues, the building houses a music and fine arts facility). Later we walk along the edges of the crumbling Tas Han (another trading post and hostelry) where today metalworkers have workshops under its walls, producing everything from very strong and utilitarian hay forks to gorgeously decorated copper, silver and brass samovars. Throughout each day, wedding processions of cars parade through the streets led usually by a pick-up truck on the back of which is a man beating a drum or davul, another playing strident reedy-sounding melodies on a zurna or shawn, and a third film the car following, with the bridal couple we guess. In the chilly late afternoon, families, lovers and friends stroll the Yeşilirmal River, ignoring the filthy green rushing water as the sun turns the white cliffs and overhanging houses gold, then bronze. We’ve stayed longer than we planned … a dreamy, welcoming place.
· In the morning, on the way to our bus, I stop to admire a remarkable homespun samovar sitting on the corner sidewalk: tin plate pot, kindling and long-used hatchet nearby, steam rising from a rusted stove pipe reaching several feet up out of the samovar. Soon the owner approaches, smiles and offers to pour me a cup of tea, which I accept. Pictures are taken, payment is offered and turned down, and I leave offering thanks and hand on heart instead. One of many kindly gestures, so courteously offered, that we have experienced each day in Turkey – like the youths who jump off our bus late one night and guide us to our hotel (urging ‘Come on, come on’), or the women who interprets food dishes in the Amasya food court or the people who give directions in Ankara’s vast bus depot.
· Moments later a curious little drama (my word of course). A man in well-worn clothes lifts a large grate up from the sidewalk, then disappears like a clown into the sidewalk itself. Was it something in the tea, some early morning hallucination? Just as abruptly, as in a movie, he rises up from the sidewalk, carrying, as it turns out, the elements of a shoeshine set-up which he takes into a small shaded plaza nearby. The standard brass richly decorated shoeshine apparatus, like a golden bird about to take flight (of course it will have its own unique name when I find it) , a large umbrella, stool, a couple boxes of brushes and cloths and other supplies, all methodically set up as we wait for our bus. It turns out that the hole into which he keeps disappearing and re-appearing leads down steps into a basement room under the travel store over top … altogether one of those comic dramas that fill one’s travel days and reveal how little one knows and sees of what is happening in one’s surrounding.
· Read today that the great flat round hot stone on which you lay with others in the hamams is called a ‘gőbektasi’, literally: navel stone.
· Kindness: during a brief bathroom break on the Samsun-Trabzon run, the bus’ tea server and all-round people organizer-helper signals me into a nearby bakery and asks the baker to cut off two broad slices of still warm bread from a large dome-shaped loaf whose surface is decorated with fine braids of bread. Both baker and busman urge me to receive this with broad, open smiles, as if they might say: This is the best bread you’ll find anywhere and we hope you enjoy it. (And it was delicious.)
· Along the way east ... Sellers scramble onto the bus before we leave Ankara, one selling tiny wooden (or were they plastic spoons), another pens and wallets. The remarkably rapid fire so familiar ‘pitch’ they gave, given so many times, no effort (I imagine) to persuade in tone, they must have been appealing directly to functional merits … just finished and off they go as the engines begin. ... The many book stalls in Ankara bus station (itself the size of a major airport). Danielle Steel to E.M. Forster and much else, the latest reads in translation. Interestingly, several titles by Kafka as well as a recent illustrated volume about Kafka called SelfMadeHero.