Disappearing history

My Google alert on Turkey picked up this article the other day, talking about the house in İzmir that might be the home of the 17th-century Jewish "false messiah" Shabbatai Tzvi. The address it mentions, "920 Agora Girisi", doesn't exist, but there's a 920 Sokak beside the ancient Greco-Roman Agora, so we went there to look. This picture shows what we found.

The ancient brick-and-stone house seems to have had a modern cement block wing added. The wall you can see at the right marks the edge of the Agora excavations. The whole block to the west of the Agora seems to be being cleared, maybe for expanded excavations, or maybe because the whole area is an eyesore begging to be torn down.

But it doesn't have to be that way. On our travels this year we've spent lots of good tourist dollars in restored medieval cities. It's all the rage to fix up your old neighbourhoods and offer tourists places to stay in atmospheric pensions. To some extent Antalya in the south of Turkey has done that, too. But not İzmir. Here the oldest, most history-filled part of town is collapsing about the ears of the Kurds and Gypsies who are the only ones desperate and brave enough to live there. And any tourist who may stray into the Agora is in danger of being attacked by hordes of pestering children and pickpockets. No wonder the tourist books say there's nothing to see in İzmir.

I wish there was some far-sighted generous benefactor here who would restore this incredibly beautiful and historically valuable part of town before it's all lost. Anyone have a spare couple of million lira lying around they'd like to invest in a city's past and future?

This just in (June 9)
This story tells us that Izmir plans to renovate the areas from the ancient castle of Kadifekale through the Agora to the Kemeraltı market. Good work, guys!

The Sahara drops in

Last Saturday it rained in Izmir. Big deal, you might say, except there wasn't any rain last winter and western Anatolia is experiencing a drought. So the rain was very welcome, especially since we were just starting to recover from our exhausting travel and were happy to have an excuse to stay home and veg. But when Ron went out in the late afternoon to forage for some sustenance he noticed that everything was covered with mud, and the kids playing football in the street were actually playing something closer to ice hockey, slipping and sliding all over the place.

Nothing unusual, we thought. It's been so dry here that the air is full of dust and the rain is washing it out.

But the next morning when I went out to hang up the laundry I discovered the shoes I'd left on the terrace were full of mud, and everything was covered with reddish clay. So were the cars parked on the street. By the time we went to church the men were out scrubbing off their cars and the women were sloshing off their balconies with pails of water and brooms.

At church we learned that we'd experienced the south wind that blows in straight from the Sahara loaded with fine sand and silt. It happens regularly and is one reason Izmir's streets are so dusty. The only comparable experience we'd ever had was when we lived in Kincardine on Lake Huron's east shore, and the wind blew the topsoil from eastern Michigan onto us.

It's supposed to rain today, too, and if it does I'll be out with our super-sized squeegee trying to get the muck off the terraces. But I suspect that the sun has baked it on and we may have to learn to like the nice new reddish colour.

Home in Izmir

Well, we made it. We're back in our comfy apartment in Izmir - have been for three days, actually. It really does feel like home. We'd gotten things quite nicely set up before we left, and "the girls" - our former roommate Shadi, and her new roommate Elisabetta - made some improvements after we left. So the only things we miss here that we had back in Canmore are a microwave and English-language television - and our family, of course, but I wouldn't call them things!

I'm surprised, too, at how much Turkish we remember. We'll never be able to read the complete works of Orhan Pamuk, the great Nobel Prize-winning author, but we've still got the basics. It's nice to know our old memory cells work sometimes.

Izmir is looking much the same, or maybe a little better. Some of the half-finished cement hulks have been completed and look rather spiffy. The Konak overpass is done and seems effective. There are a couple of flashy new buildings downtown. Some of the steps outside our apartment building have been fixed, and there's a new coat of whitewash on the lower walls. Generally things look a little cleaner, a bit more prosperous. That fits with what we saw in Portugal and Spain, too - clean streets, and construction everywhere.

We dropped in to our local pide salonu Saturday night and were recognized immediately. Handshakes all round, and the woman who brought us our food called me ablacım - dear older sister. That felt good. Our neighbours and the local merchants have been welcoming, too. Veggie seller: "We haven't seen you for a long time. Where have you been?" Pharmacist, leaving his customers and coming out of his shop to shake our hands: "When did you get back?" Neighbour across the street, leaning over his balcony: "Welcome! It's good to see you again!" And big hugs from Emine hanım and her daughter Güller downstairs. It feels good to belong.

We went to church on Sunday and were pleased to see most of the old familiar friends and some new ones. There's a magnificent new organist, and a young American soprano who's studyıng opera at the local conservatory (the best in Europe, she says). The place seems full of life, and Father Ron looks contented.

We're rediscovering the things we missed: fresh real yogurt, salça (sun-dried tomato paste), drying laundry in the hot sun and having the whites look white again, taking an inexpensive cruise on the harbour ferries, the beautiful faces of the other subway passengers showing traces of the scattered origins of their ancestors, the young men greeting each other with kisses.

It's good to be home.