So we've been back in Canada for a week now. Almost time to get used to the place again. And the culture shock isn't too great yet. Of course, we've been pretty sheltered by our loving family so far; just wait until we try to make it on our own.
We left Istanbul early in the morning of the 8th, flying Lufthansa to Munich and then London, and Air Canada to Ottawa. Lufthansa disappointed me for the first time. We arrived ready to check in two hours in advance, as instructed, but there were agents only for first and business class. The rest of us waited 45 minutes or so. They gave us a decrepit rattletrap of a plane that made it somehow to Munich. The flight to London wasn't bad, except for the dry roll and lonely piece of cheese that passed for lunch on that flight. Heathrow insisted on putting us all through a security check again - less thorough than the one at Munich that I think even picked up the metal in my fillings. Took close to an hour to get through that one, which made me glad Ron had timed our flights so perfectly. Air Canada was a blessed relief : good plane, good food, attentive attendants. So we made it to Ottawa in time for Evan to pick us up on his way home from work.
The first thing I noticed was how handsome and fit our kid looked in his suit and tie. You really can dress him up and take him places. And then I noticed how pleasant the air in Ottawa smells, and how green everything was, and how smooth and clean the roads were, and how everyone stopped for red lights. Only in Canada, you say. How nice to be home.
We loved staying with Evan and Anna in their comfy home. But Monday we headed south to Toronto, picked up a car, met our friends Bob & Eunice on their way to Toronto and our way to London, and had dinner in London with our friend Royce. Back to Toronto the next day to check in with my friend Patricia and her gorgeous new four-year-old son who was born in Haiti - what a healthy child in every way! Lunch the next day with Don, then off to Calgary.
So now we're in Ron's brother Earl's house in northwest Calgary, far too full from much delicous food and warmed by the company of more family. It's cold and rainy outside (and I left most of my cool-weather clothes back in Izmir), but we don't mind being here at all.
At the moment we're still enjoying cool, clean, affluent Canada a great deal. I don't know when the longing for chaos will set in; I assume we're going to get homesick sometime soon. For now all I miss is Turkish toilets and yogurt. And my friends back in Izmir, of course. I'll let you know if that changes.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Monday, June 05, 2006
A sermon for Pentecost
Given at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Izmir, June 4
In my old parish we used to have an elderly Englishwoman named Freda. Freda didn't have much formal education, but she was wise and faithful and often quite funny. I loved to hear her read in her cockney accent; she often cast new light on the scriptures with her fresh point of view.
One Pentecost it was her turn to read. She got to the Acts reading and, although I know she'd done her homework; she always did, the list of countries and nationalities threw her. “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of a whole lot of other places” she said. And most of us thought that was really quite good enough.
Over the last year my Ron and I have been to an awful lot of the places those first hearers of the Holy Spirit came from: Parthia, near Lake Van; Media, the home of the Kurds; Mesopotamia, between Diyarbakır and Gaziantep; Cappadocia; Pontus – the Karadeniz; Phyrigia, near Eskişehir; and Pamphyllia, near Şanlıurfa; not to mention Asia, the whole rest of Anatolia. I'd had no real understanding until this year exactly how important Anatolia was in the history of Christianity. There were just these names in the New Testament that I mentally translated as “a whole lot of other places.”
So this year has been quite instructive. And one thing has struck me in particular: except for Smyrna – our city of Izmir – there's hardly a trace of the Christian church left in those places where it began its life.
I think the place where that knowledge really hit was the mound that's what's left of Colossae. That's all it is – a hill, with a poppy field on its side. And Laodicea, just down the road – just a few ruins.
But you know what? That's all right. Because the Christian church is more than buildings, more even than scattered communities of believers. The Christian church is bigger and stronger and stranger than any of us can imagine.
The Church was born that day in Jerusalem when faithful people from all over the known world heard Jesus' followers telling the story of Christ's life and death and resurrection. And the most amazing thing: they all understood. They heard it told in ways that made sense to them. Jesus' friends found themselves speaking in languages and in ways they'd never used before, and it worked.
That was the first time the Holy Spirit went public. She'd been at work for untold ages before, of course, since the very beginning of the universe: breathing order into chaos, life into dry bones, words into prophets' mouths. But finally she burst into the world in a huge way, kicking reluctant disciples out of their comfy upper room into the streets, and creating a whole new way for God to be present in the world.
And she hasn't stopped. Every time we get comfortable in our safe, predictable ways of doing things she gets to work again. Every time we hit a dead end in our ways of being the Body of Christ in the world, look out, here she comes.
And so I'm not sad that Christianity is not in control in this country anymore. We had our chance and we blew it. Constantine co-opted our faith and made it a route to power. But that's not what Christianity is about. It's about love; it's about the little ones who are the ones who really matter to God. It's about not getting comfortable in our pews or in our daily lives.
So the Christian church got it wrong when it sided with the powerful ones of this world. But that's okay. The Spirit isn't finished with us yet. There's still a church, and there always will be a church. It's just not always going to look the same, that's all. The church here is very different from what it was in Byzantine times, but it's still the Body of Christ, still one of the ways God acts in our world. And it will keep on doing that in one way or another until the Kingdom comes.
The Holy Spirit can do some unusual things. I'm sure that's what pushed me to be ordained; it's also, I think, what pushed me to come here. It works within us and among us to strengthen us and give us the courage to do things we'd never dream of doing.
This is the last time I'm going to be with you for awhile. But no matter how far apart we are, we'll still be together in this strange and wounded miracle, the Church. And I hope before too long we'll be together in the same city again. So until then, thanks for your goodness and kindness to me, thanks for the help you've given me to understand this wonderful country – and Görüşürüz!
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Farewell tour
The end is getting near. In a few days we'll be boarding a bus for Istanbul, visiting our dear friends, the Şamlı family, and finally jumping on a plane for Canada. Part of me is really longing for familiar food, familiar language and familiar friends, but there's a big part of me that's going to miss this place terribly.
There's still a lot of Turkey we haven't seen. Last week and a bit of the week before we tried to make up for that failure and show our Turkish daughter Begüm some things she hadn't seen yet. We did a lightning tour of south-central Turkey.
We started off in Cappadocia, which we'd seen briefly at the end of March in preparation for the solar eclipse - but Begüm had never been there. We repeated much of the tour we'd done before, walking through familiar moonscapes that astonished her. We stayed in an even nicer place than before, the Gamirasu Cave Hotel. If you needed a reason to visit Turkey you have one now. This is my lifetime favourite hotel. Nice people, great food, amazing scenery, and rooms - not all in caves, but some - that are clean and appropriately decorated. At dinner our first night a local man was playing an oud or some similar instrument, and eventually a Turkish woman at another table got up and began dancing with the host. (Turks are the world's best dancers, IMNSHO).
The last morning we got up in time to be picked up at 4:05 a.m. for our balloon ride. Oh my goodness! We had a long wait while they dealt with some tourists getting a short trip as their package tour, but finally we headed off in a minibus for the launch site. The 15 or so of us who had paid for a longer trip were to fly in balloons piloted by the owners, a Swedish man and a New Zealander woman who have been handling balloons for more than 20 years each. The wind was coming from an unusual direction, so we took off from a small parking lot to the east of the main wonders of Cappadocia. We drifted over valleys and ruins we'd toured on foot the days before, seeing things from an entirely different point of view. We travelled above the highway and the main street of Göreme, waving at women hanging out laundry and men enjoying their morning coffee. Finally we came down in an unused field, being caught and held by the company's contingent of strong men who then became exterior decorators, covering our basket with flowers and preparing a morning cocktail of cherry juice and champagne.
It was a great experience. Don't miss it.
We drove - or I drove - to Konya after that, with a side trip to try to find Tuz Gölü, Turkey's second-biggest lake, which is so salty that crystals precipitate out of the water. We drove and drove along a road that the map said would lead us to the lake. Finally we came to a fence and a gate and a young man making welcoming gestures. Turns out that the lake has been sold to a private company, a salt manufacturer. Tuz Gölü has always supplied a large proportion of the salt Turkey uses; now it's privately manufactured. The young man was a tour guide hired by the company for the summer. He got into our car and drove with us to a place where we could get a good look at the lake.
We wanted to go to Konya for two reasons: Çatal Höyük and Mevlana's shrine. We got to both of them. I'd first read about Çatal Höyük in Scientific American in the early 60s, when they were discovering the earliest (at that time) traces of agriculture and city life there. We saw many artifacts and wall paintings from Çatal Höyük at the Ankara museum and were really looking forward to it.
There's not much there now but a couple of grassy hills and a building or two covering excavations in progress. Really it's just another hill like millions that dot the Turkish landscape; it must have been pure luck that led the first archaeologist to dig there. Perhaps if someone else digs someplace else they'll find someplace even older. But it still thrills me to look at walls put in place 9000 years ago, and see (in the Ankara museum) carbonized knitting preserved by a fire. One of the buildings had a painting on its wall that looks like a map of the city, and in the distance there's an erupting volcano. You can see exactly the same mountain today, but it's covered with snow at this time of year. That place was one of the highlights.
Mevlana's shrine was another. Mevlana (Rumi) was a great Muslim mystic and poet, the founder of the Sufi order. His shrine is a place of prayer and peace, and it felt holy. He was a great man whose faith transcended labels, and I felt deeply moved to be in his presence.
I think we all liked Konya, which surprised us, since it's supposed to be one of the most conservative and narrow-minded cities in Turkey. Not that we could see.
From there we drove to Antalya on the Mediterranean via Isparta, hoping to see the fields of roses that are said to be harvested at this time of year to make perfumes and things. Alas, they told us the season was late, and I saw only one field full of single-petalled roses, the oldest and most perfumed sort.
So we got to Antalya, me driving and Ron navigating - the reverse of the usual situation, although I'm not sure it would have been any easier if I had been navigating, given the quality of Lonely Planet's maps. We circled the downtown for what seemed like hours trying to find the entrance to the ancient castle, where we were supposed to be staying. We finally had to enlist the help of a taxi driver. So we got to a pleasant pension with a pair of doves nesting behind the shutter of our bathroom window, and we spent a couple of days experiencing the tourist hub of Turkey's south coast. Very ancient and very pretty.
And then we moved on to Olympos, west and south along the coast, where we stayed at the Turkmen Tree Houses. This was our chance to kick back and do nothing, really have a holiday. We must have been among the oldest people there, but it didn't matter. The beer was good and the beach was great. We went to see the Chimaera our first night. This is a fire that emerges from the rocks of a nearby mountain in several dozen places. The ancients thought it was a monster encased in rock; modern science says it's methane gas that spontaneously ignites. Whatever, it was worth the hour-long climb in the dark and the equally harrowing descent.
The next day Begüm tried out sea kayaking for the first time while Ron and I did absolutely nothing - wonderful!
And the next morning we drove to the airport and came home.
Now we're sorting through stuff deciding what we need to take home and what we can leave here for when we come back next spring. It's hot and sunny in Izmir, no rain any more, and the spring flowers are beginning to realize life's tough after all. I'm beginning to enjoy our klima for its cooling properties - what a wonderful invention that thing is. Probably the next time I write we'll be back in Canada!
There's still a lot of Turkey we haven't seen. Last week and a bit of the week before we tried to make up for that failure and show our Turkish daughter Begüm some things she hadn't seen yet. We did a lightning tour of south-central Turkey.
We started off in Cappadocia, which we'd seen briefly at the end of March in preparation for the solar eclipse - but Begüm had never been there. We repeated much of the tour we'd done before, walking through familiar moonscapes that astonished her. We stayed in an even nicer place than before, the Gamirasu Cave Hotel. If you needed a reason to visit Turkey you have one now. This is my lifetime favourite hotel. Nice people, great food, amazing scenery, and rooms - not all in caves, but some - that are clean and appropriately decorated. At dinner our first night a local man was playing an oud or some similar instrument, and eventually a Turkish woman at another table got up and began dancing with the host. (Turks are the world's best dancers, IMNSHO).
The last morning we got up in time to be picked up at 4:05 a.m. for our balloon ride. Oh my goodness! We had a long wait while they dealt with some tourists getting a short trip as their package tour, but finally we headed off in a minibus for the launch site. The 15 or so of us who had paid for a longer trip were to fly in balloons piloted by the owners, a Swedish man and a New Zealander woman who have been handling balloons for more than 20 years each. The wind was coming from an unusual direction, so we took off from a small parking lot to the east of the main wonders of Cappadocia. We drifted over valleys and ruins we'd toured on foot the days before, seeing things from an entirely different point of view. We travelled above the highway and the main street of Göreme, waving at women hanging out laundry and men enjoying their morning coffee. Finally we came down in an unused field, being caught and held by the company's contingent of strong men who then became exterior decorators, covering our basket with flowers and preparing a morning cocktail of cherry juice and champagne.
It was a great experience. Don't miss it.
We drove - or I drove - to Konya after that, with a side trip to try to find Tuz Gölü, Turkey's second-biggest lake, which is so salty that crystals precipitate out of the water. We drove and drove along a road that the map said would lead us to the lake. Finally we came to a fence and a gate and a young man making welcoming gestures. Turns out that the lake has been sold to a private company, a salt manufacturer. Tuz Gölü has always supplied a large proportion of the salt Turkey uses; now it's privately manufactured. The young man was a tour guide hired by the company for the summer. He got into our car and drove with us to a place where we could get a good look at the lake.
We wanted to go to Konya for two reasons: Çatal Höyük and Mevlana's shrine. We got to both of them. I'd first read about Çatal Höyük in Scientific American in the early 60s, when they were discovering the earliest (at that time) traces of agriculture and city life there. We saw many artifacts and wall paintings from Çatal Höyük at the Ankara museum and were really looking forward to it.
There's not much there now but a couple of grassy hills and a building or two covering excavations in progress. Really it's just another hill like millions that dot the Turkish landscape; it must have been pure luck that led the first archaeologist to dig there. Perhaps if someone else digs someplace else they'll find someplace even older. But it still thrills me to look at walls put in place 9000 years ago, and see (in the Ankara museum) carbonized knitting preserved by a fire. One of the buildings had a painting on its wall that looks like a map of the city, and in the distance there's an erupting volcano. You can see exactly the same mountain today, but it's covered with snow at this time of year. That place was one of the highlights.
Mevlana's shrine was another. Mevlana (Rumi) was a great Muslim mystic and poet, the founder of the Sufi order. His shrine is a place of prayer and peace, and it felt holy. He was a great man whose faith transcended labels, and I felt deeply moved to be in his presence.
I think we all liked Konya, which surprised us, since it's supposed to be one of the most conservative and narrow-minded cities in Turkey. Not that we could see.
From there we drove to Antalya on the Mediterranean via Isparta, hoping to see the fields of roses that are said to be harvested at this time of year to make perfumes and things. Alas, they told us the season was late, and I saw only one field full of single-petalled roses, the oldest and most perfumed sort.
So we got to Antalya, me driving and Ron navigating - the reverse of the usual situation, although I'm not sure it would have been any easier if I had been navigating, given the quality of Lonely Planet's maps. We circled the downtown for what seemed like hours trying to find the entrance to the ancient castle, where we were supposed to be staying. We finally had to enlist the help of a taxi driver. So we got to a pleasant pension with a pair of doves nesting behind the shutter of our bathroom window, and we spent a couple of days experiencing the tourist hub of Turkey's south coast. Very ancient and very pretty.
And then we moved on to Olympos, west and south along the coast, where we stayed at the Turkmen Tree Houses. This was our chance to kick back and do nothing, really have a holiday. We must have been among the oldest people there, but it didn't matter. The beer was good and the beach was great. We went to see the Chimaera our first night. This is a fire that emerges from the rocks of a nearby mountain in several dozen places. The ancients thought it was a monster encased in rock; modern science says it's methane gas that spontaneously ignites. Whatever, it was worth the hour-long climb in the dark and the equally harrowing descent.
The next day Begüm tried out sea kayaking for the first time while Ron and I did absolutely nothing - wonderful!
And the next morning we drove to the airport and came home.
Now we're sorting through stuff deciding what we need to take home and what we can leave here for when we come back next spring. It's hot and sunny in Izmir, no rain any more, and the spring flowers are beginning to realize life's tough after all. I'm beginning to enjoy our klima for its cooling properties - what a wonderful invention that thing is. Probably the next time I write we'll be back in Canada!
Friday, May 26, 2006
On the road
Just a quick note from an internet cafe in Antalya to let you know we're alive and very well. We're in the middle of our farewell tour of Turkey with Begüm. We started off back in Cappadocia, touring places we saw at the end of March and doing a balloon flight as well. Wow! There will be pictures on Flickr when I get home and upload them. We stayed in an amazing cave hotel beside a river near a small village. The villagers had lived in caves in the cliffs across the river from the hotel, which felt like a former monastery. Unfortunately the cliff rocks started falling into the river, so the villagers moved into houses on the hill above. The hotel seems solid, though. One of the many good things about the place: we heard our first nightingale. Non-stop waterfalls of music all night. I didn't want dawn to come.
Then we drove - or I did, since Ron still doesn't have his replacement licence - to Konya, home of the Sufi mystic Mevlana (Rumi). I achieved a lifetime dream when we visited the remains of Çatal Höyük, a neolithic village where the earliest traces of grain cultivation have been found. Also traces of knitting.
More to come - the rest of the gang wants to leave. Check back later for more.
Then we drove - or I did, since Ron still doesn't have his replacement licence - to Konya, home of the Sufi mystic Mevlana (Rumi). I achieved a lifetime dream when we visited the remains of Çatal Höyük, a neolithic village where the earliest traces of grain cultivation have been found. Also traces of knitting.
More to come - the rest of the gang wants to leave. Check back later for more.
Friday, May 19, 2006
A picture I didn't take
Today is a holiday in Turkey - Ataturk's birthday, which is known as national youth and sport day. The kids have the day off school. I was looking over the edge of our rooftop terrace this morning watching our 8-year-old downstairs neighbour Mustafa playing football with his friends (they're pretty good) in front of our building when I saw another kid coming down the street. He was about the same age, but he was pushing a huge bin on wheels half-full of recyclable stuff he'd picked out of the garbage bins along the street. As he stopped outside our building and sorted through our waste the kids went on playing. And I wished I had my camera, and then was glad I didn't.
This is still a country of contrasts. Our neighbours aren't rich, but they can send their kids to school and give them time to play with their friends. Not all kids are that lucky.
This is still a country of contrasts. Our neighbours aren't rich, but they can send their kids to school and give them time to play with their friends. Not all kids are that lucky.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Skype anyone?
We are just discovering Skype, the Internet telephone program. If any of you use it, get in touch. Our Skype name is Turkladians.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
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.
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.
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.
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