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 ren
ovated 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.
· 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 ren
ovated 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.
