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.”