· 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.
· 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment