Ankara and the east

"Oh no, not another Roman theatre." You can tell you need to get out of the Aegean region when that's your reaction to a bunch of ruins. So we did.

Bronze-age stag
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

Our friend Timur was being confirmed in the Anglican church in Ankara the last Sunday of April. That was our excuse. Ron put on his travel agent hat again and arranged a couple of tours to make the trip even more worth doing.

As usual, there's too much for a blog, but I'll try to put down the highlights at least.

Saturday, April 29.
Arrived in Ankara about noon and got settled into the hotel. It was in Ulus, an older downtown district that reminded me a lot of the part of Izmir we live in - decrepit. We headed out for a walk in the general direction of the Archaeological Museum.

We strayed through the traditional market, encountering several displays of quite unusual meats. The whole area really felt like Izmir but less cosmopolitan, more provincial. Almost all of the women were covered and several wore head-to-toe coverings. And we noticed, looking for some excellent wines that are produced around Ankara, that there was no place to buy alcoholic beverages.

We had our introduction to the museum, a quick couple-of-hour pass through. We were surrounded by classes of elementary school students, and then a couple of hundred naval cadets came through. The government expects that at least some students from every school in the country will visit Ankara every year, and every military trainee in the area starts off with a tour of Ankara's main sights. We had a pleasant chat with some of the navy types, and lots of the kids wanted to test their English on us.

Exhausted, we made our way home and had a vigorous nap. We awoke to the sound of cheers echoing up and down the street - crowds of men in the coffee houses and beer halls in the neighbourhood watching a couple of big football games on TV. We hadn't had supper yet, so we decided to join them.

I'd never been in a birahane- beer hall - before, at least not in Turkey. They're male territory. But I wanted my dinner and a beer to go with it, and I wanted to see the football, so in I went. The hosts were very gracious. It was a family-run place, and the teen-aged son of the family waited on us. Soon his father and mother came over to greet us and shook hands with us both, partly, I think, to make it clear that I was welcome. The food was excellent, the beer was our usual favourite Efes lager - as good as Kokanee - and the right team won, so it was a good evening.

Sunday we headed off to church. The Anglican church is on the British embassy grounds, and you need to pass through a security system and leave your passport with the guards before they'll let you in - quite different from our church in Izmir on a busy street corner. I met the suffragan bishop of the Anglican Diocese in Europe, Bıshop David; and Fr. Geoffrey, the archdeacon of our area; and Engin, a Turkish man who was minister of his own independent church in Istanbul, has been trained recently at Wycliffe College in Toronto, and hopes to move his congregation over to the Anglican church.

Timur and eight others of all ages and origins were confirmed in a fine service. We had lunch with him in a revolving restaurant, walked to a nearby mall to meet his daughter, and felt like we'd had a day in any major first-world city.

Monday, May 1 we moved back 3000 years into Hittite times. Our guide and his driver picked us up at our hotel and drove us three hours east to the village of Boğazkale and the nearby ruins of Hattuşaş, capital of the early Hittite empire. Awesome, and a refreshing change from amphıtheatres. Anatolia is so old. It poured rain some of the time and we picked up impressive clods of clay on our shoes, but that didn't matter. We saw Hittite stuff; that was what counted.

Tuesday our guide picked us up again and took us around Ankara. First stop was the museum again, where he pointed out things that we hadn't known or noticed on our own quick tour. He sensitized me to the variety of ways the mother goddess turns up in ancient symbols - lions and leopards are her special beasts - and the gradual appearance of the sky god, symbolızed by the bull or stag, who first partnered her and then supplanted her (but not really, even now).
Then we had the mandatory trip to the Anıt Kabir, Atatürk's mausoleum. I was surprised at how interesting it was, and how huge. Our guide treated it with the respect I would give to the most holy of holies. Atatürk was a friend of his grandparents, so I could understand that, but most other people were in awe as well. (I think Atatürk was a remarkable man, but I get uneasy when he seems to be worshipped.) It was a most impressive monument and gives you a sense of the importance of that great man to Turkey.
Finally we had a quick run through a fairly dismal ethnographic museum. We'd asked for it, expecting something as good as Izmir's. It wasn't.
We hadn't managed to get to the Kale, the ancient castle on the central hill, so after we got back to the hotel and rested up a bit we grabbed a taxi and went up there for dinner. There are lots of decent-looking restaurants there; we chose the first likely-looking place and enjoyed an excellent meal with pleasant Turkish music from a trio on folk instruments. Definitely worth doing.
Verdict on Ankara (mine, at least): okay, but it sure doesn't feel like the capital city of a world power. I'm glad we chose to live in Izmir.

Wednesday, May 3
Back to the Ankara airport - a truly dismal place; good thing they're building a new one - to go to Van. We were met there by Şükrü, our guide for the next 4 days, and Ahmet, our driver. Dumped off our luggage at our hotel in Van, grabbed some lunch (delicious; I have a new favourite Turkish food: ali nazik kebabı. Looks simple enough to make; I will try it soon). Then we got into the car and drove to the south end of Lake Van (passing a couple of road signs pointing to Iran, which was only a few km away) for a short boat trip to the island of Akdamar, where there is a 10th-century stone Armenian church with quite wonderful reliefs of Biblical scenes.
Back to Van again to walk up to the top of the ancient kale, started by the Urartians and used by various forces since then. From the top of the hill you have a view of what's left of the old city of Van, destroyed by Ottoman forces at the end of WW I - the Armenians and Russians were working together to establish an independent Armenia until the Russians got distracted by a civil war, leaving the Armenians to fight it out on their own. There's not much left of the old city except some bumps in the grass and a couple of mosques.
On the way down we were accompanied by one of the inevitable little boys who hang around asking for money. But Şükrü got him sidetracked into picking up garbage, with a bit of help from the rest of us. By the time we got down he had a couple of bags full and a couple of coins from his new friends. Maybe that will start a new trend among tourist-bugging brats?

Thursday
Back into the car to drive southwest through Kurdish country to Mesopotamia. The only signs we saw of military presence were the roadblocks we encountered a few times. It seemed to me that they were more interested in checking trucks for gasoline smuggled from Iran, which is a huge business in the area. Anyway, with our experienced guide and driver we felt completly secure.

From the relatively modern (i.e. Roman) city of Bitlis on down to the Tigris we followed a scenic river gorge, as beautiful as the Fraser River gorge if you keep your eyes focussed at least 5 metres above the water level. From there on down it's garbage. Bitlis, and everyone else downstream, seems to dump its garbage into the river and the trees are festooned with plastic bags and other filth. And women wash their clothes in the river, and children play in it, and people drink from it. If anyone reads this who has any power in Turkey, please do something about the garbage! It is beyond disgusting!

We had a quick look from the walls of Diyarbakır, vast and ancient; and a look at a mosque that used to be a really old (2nd century?) Christian church marking the place where St. Thomas began the conversion of the area on his way to India. That was special. Diyarbakır is on the Tigris River and so marks the eastern boundary of Mesopotamia.

More driving until we got to Şanlıiurfa, where we stayed in the best hotel we've had in the last year: the Edessa (that was the old name of the city). I wish we'd had a week in Urfa. It reeks with history and is quite beautiful. It's full of sites linked to the Islamic legends about Ibrahim (Abraham) - stories I'd never heard. This site summarizes them a bit. Urfa is called the "city of prophets" because so many others are tied in with it as well - Job, for instance. It was also a major centre for the early Christian faith, and later many Islamic scholars lived and worked in the area.

We explored Urfa's market a bit on Thursday evening, climbed the Kale and visited Abraham's birthplace on Friday morning, and then drove down to Harran, just north of the Syrian border. Another place I wish we'd had days to explore, or maybe months to soak up the atmosphere in. It was the birthplace of the Biblical Leah and Rachel. We saw the Kale, met some kids - got a couple of (I don't know what to call them) dangly good-luck things and a photo in exchange for some candy (Şükrü's good idea), and visited one of the ingenious beehive houses. The people here are ethnically Arabs but culturally unique. They're nominally Muslim, but the facial tatoos on some of the women show that moon-worship isn't dead yet.

Back into the car through land that's yielding three crops a year now thanks to irrigation, and up to the water's source, the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates. I used to think irrigation was a bad idea. Having seen it make a difference to the lives of people who no longer need to struggle for a subsistence living from the land and now earn real money, I think I've changed my mind.

We spent the night in the worst hotel we've experienced recently, the Bardakçı in Kahta. It's recommended by Lonely Planet (won't be next issue, though) and had been fine the last time our guide was there, but it has certainly fallen on hard times recently. We were the only guests. Hot water appeared not to be an option. Mutter, mutter, mutter.

So we got up far too early on Saturday morning after sleeping badly in a smoky room, didn't have a shower to improve our moods, and drove to Mt. Nemrut through stunningly beautiful countryside. This was the peak experience of the whole week and one of the great ones of the last year.

We drove to the start of the trail along a terrifyingly slippery muddy track to find the place shrouded in dense fog. We had a glass of tea at the shop at the bottom of the trail, hoping the weather would clear, but to no avail. So out we trudged into the wind and fog and cold, climbing 300 metres to the east terrace.

In the mid-first century BC a small-time king of the Commagenes, Antiochus Epiphanes, decided he was the saviour who would unify the world's religions, ensuring deification for himself. He erected two sets of immense statues of the gods shared by the Greco-Roman world and the Persians and placed his statue among them. He was buried in a tumulus above them, at the very top of the mountain, thereby increasing the height of the mountain 75 metres or so. His kingdom lasted a few years after his death before succumbing to the Romans. By the time the statues were discovered by a German road engineer in the mid-19th century earthquakes had broken the heads off the bodies and generally wrecked the place.

The heads are sitting upright at the base of the statues now, making for quite an eerie effect if you come upon them in the fog as we did (funny how all Turkey's tourism posters show them against a brilliantly blue sky). There are two terraces of them, on the east and west sides of the mountain. They are awesome. Even in that utterly miserable weather I would not have missed them for anything. I'm sure they're wonderful on a sunny day, but the struggle to get there and the misery getting back down the path soaked through the skin into our very guts made them even more special. Go there. See them.

Back down to the dump in Kahta to change into dirty but dry clothes (still no hot water for a warming shower). Then to Gaziantep, our last stop.

There are two things you must experience in Gaziantep, Ron had learned: baklava and the mosaic museum. His sources are right. If the mosaics and the baklava aren't the best in the world I'd like to see where they're better. Between Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep the countryside is dotted with pistachio orchards. They must use the entire crop in their baklava. Ohhhh.... And the mosaics, rescued from a Roman resort town (I think) that was about to be submerged for an irrigatıon project, are so subtle in their shading and beautifully preserved - worth a detour from Istanbul, I think.

It was a day of real highs and lows, though. Ron discovered he and his wallet had parted company sometime between changing clothes in Kahta and having lunch in Gaziantep. No great harm done - he had almost no cash, and no one had used his credit cards by the time he reported their loss - but a big nuisance. Almost all better now, though. MasterCard got a new card to him within 36 hours - very impressive, we thought.

My thoughts on the southeast: don't miss it. Travel with a good guide (our guide was from Yuki Tours) unless you love driving among crazy people and feel really secure in Turkish - the accent is so different there we felt like we were hearing another language entirely. And allow more than a few days to see the place. It's worth it.