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.
Friday, May 26, 2006
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.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Life's short and then you die - but life goes on
That's the way I feel after all the ruins and things we've seen recently. People think they're building for eternity, but eventually the plants and the critters take over anyway.
We spent a couple of days last week in Pamukkale, Aphrodisias, and places like that around Denizli in southwestern Anatolia. Although we thought we'd be going to Denizli by train and getting around by bus, we ended up driving (I still find it hard getting up at a decent hour in the morning). That turned out to be a good thing because it allowed us to stop when we felt like it and explore back roads - always worth doing.
The first unscheduled stop was in the ancient city of Tire about an hour southeast of Izmir. To get there we drove through the market garden area of Izmir, even passing a couple of artichoke fields but missing our chance to get a picture of these oversized thistles. Tire goes back several thousand years, but most of its oldest buildings are "just" 5 or 6 hundred years old.The "new mosque" dates from the 18th century and is particularly lovely.
We had lunch in Tire outside a restaurant in a park above the city, then continued through the valley of the Küçük Menderes, takıng off cross-country at an appropriate point to get to the Büyük Menderes valley. The Menderes River was known as the Meander in antiquity and lives up to its name, wandering back and forth across its fertile flood plain. The mountains we went through are the same sort as we had in the Kootenays (mica schist with quartz intrusıons), and I kept looking at them and saying "There's gold in them-thar hills." Not surprisingly the main city of the area is Aydın, which means gold. We went through vıllages that surely haven't changed much in the past few centuries (except for the satellite dishes), and past men and women working near-vertical fields with oxen pulling ancient ploughs. That's surely the only way they could cultivate land like that.
The area between Aydın and Denizli is a major cotton-growing area, producing the world's best quality cotton because it's still picked by very skillful hands and not machines. But the industry is suffering from cheaper Chinese and Indian competition. One of the cotton spinning mills was bought by an Indian company recently and physically moved to India.
We got to Pamukkale by evening and settled into a pleasant pension - the Allgau - run by a woman who was born in Germany but moved to the area as a teenager when her parents went back to their home village. She's a lovely person, does everything at the place and speaks English fluently. She's the reason we'd be happy to stay there again.
Pamukkale (cotton castle) is an amazing sight. From a distance it looks like a white gash across the hillside. Close up you can see it's a huge travertime (a form of calcium carbonate) deposit laid down over millennia by thermal springs. In Hellenistic and Roman times there was a huge city - Hierapolis - above the springs where people came for rest and healing. Until recently there were modern hotels among the ruins and people came from all over, especially eastern Europe, to bathe in the mineral pools. They were damaging the site so badly that the government closed and removed the hotels and people can swim only in artificial pools at the bottom of the hill. There's some grumbling about that, but it was a good move because those deposits are a world treasure.
We prowled around Pamukkale and Hierapolis for most of a day, then explored the village Karahayıt to the north, where the thermal deposits are red and black. Next time that might be the place we stay, Lonely Planet to the contrary. It seems quiet and friendly and very pretty.
The next day on our way home we prowled through more ruins. Laodicea first, one of the churches mentioned in Revelation. That's where the futility of building for eternity began to hit home. Exploration and excavation are barely underway. A major commercial center of the Greco-Roman world is now a huge deserted hillside. And Colossae confirmed that in a really big way. All that's left is a barren mound. The people St. Paul wrote to are buried somewhere under there, as are many, many thousands of years of others. Life's short, and then you die...
Everyone said we shouldn't miss Aphrosisias, so we didn't. It is indeed a fine archaeological site, Greco-Roman again, the home of a sculpture school so full of magnificent carvings. But we're close to experiencing ruin burnout. One theatre is pretty much like another. Each one is amazing, but they're all so much the same. What we'd like is something like Barkerville or Williamsburg, where you can see and talk to people living as they did in ancient times. The ruin of an ancient theatre would come to life if you could see people rehearsing and setting up to stage a play there; the ruin of a tavern would come to life if you could try some wine made the ancient way... Maybe it would take too much time and money to do something like that, but it would be a huge attraction.
So we drove back down the Büyük Menderes valley to Selçuk next to Ephesus and found the Basilica of St. John, which we'd missed on our last visit. That was a place I liked very much. It was built in early Byzantine times where St. John is supposed to have written his gospel, on a hill overlooking Ephesus. His supposed grave is under where the high altar would have been. Pope Paul VI celebrated mass there in the 1960's, and it felt to me like a holy place. I'm glad we got there.
It was a beautiful trip. This is the time of year to travel in Turkey, while the weather is still cool and everything is green and flowering - and there are no tourists! If you don't have kids to hold you back and restrict your travels to July and August, why wouldn't you come now? The locals say the weather changes from rainy winter to sunny summer on April 15, and it certainly did this year. So if you've been thinking of coming to Turkey, don't wait for summer - do it now!
We're going to Bergama again in a few minutes to buy some rugs from the co-operative there (they say 90% of the money goes to the women who make the rugs, and I hope they're right). Then it's off to Ankara for our godson Timur's confirmation this Sunday and the rest of the week exploring the east (God and the PKK permitting). Back for a weekend, then we're going to the Phyrigian Valley to see some more ruins. Begüm comes back soon, and we hope to do Cappadocia and the south with her. And then we go home :-(
Stay tuned for further adventures.
We spent a couple of days last week in Pamukkale, Aphrodisias, and places like that around Denizli in southwestern Anatolia. Although we thought we'd be going to Denizli by train and getting around by bus, we ended up driving (I still find it hard getting up at a decent hour in the morning). That turned out to be a good thing because it allowed us to stop when we felt like it and explore back roads - always worth doing.
The first unscheduled stop was in the ancient city of Tire about an hour southeast of Izmir. To get there we drove through the market garden area of Izmir, even passing a couple of artichoke fields but missing our chance to get a picture of these oversized thistles. Tire goes back several thousand years, but most of its oldest buildings are "just" 5 or 6 hundred years old.The "new mosque" dates from the 18th century and is particularly lovely.We had lunch in Tire outside a restaurant in a park above the city, then continued through the valley of the Küçük Menderes, takıng off cross-country at an appropriate point to get to the Büyük Menderes valley. The Menderes River was known as the Meander in antiquity and lives up to its name, wandering back and forth across its fertile flood plain. The mountains we went through are the same sort as we had in the Kootenays (mica schist with quartz intrusıons), and I kept looking at them and saying "There's gold in them-thar hills." Not surprisingly the main city of the area is Aydın, which means gold. We went through vıllages that surely haven't changed much in the past few centuries (except for the satellite dishes), and past men and women working near-vertical fields with oxen pulling ancient ploughs. That's surely the only way they could cultivate land like that.
The area between Aydın and Denizli is a major cotton-growing area, producing the world's best quality cotton because it's still picked by very skillful hands and not machines. But the industry is suffering from cheaper Chinese and Indian competition. One of the cotton spinning mills was bought by an Indian company recently and physically moved to India.
We got to Pamukkale by evening and settled into a pleasant pension - the Allgau - run by a woman who was born in Germany but moved to the area as a teenager when her parents went back to their home village. She's a lovely person, does everything at the place and speaks English fluently. She's the reason we'd be happy to stay there again.
Pamukkale (cotton castle) is an amazing sight. From a distance it looks like a white gash across the hillside. Close up you can see it's a huge travertime (a form of calcium carbonate) deposit laid down over millennia by thermal springs. In Hellenistic and Roman times there was a huge city - Hierapolis - above the springs where people came for rest and healing. Until recently there were modern hotels among the ruins and people came from all over, especially eastern Europe, to bathe in the mineral pools. They were damaging the site so badly that the government closed and removed the hotels and people can swim only in artificial pools at the bottom of the hill. There's some grumbling about that, but it was a good move because those deposits are a world treasure.
We prowled around Pamukkale and Hierapolis for most of a day, then explored the village Karahayıt to the north, where the thermal deposits are red and black. Next time that might be the place we stay, Lonely Planet to the contrary. It seems quiet and friendly and very pretty.
The next day on our way home we prowled through more ruins. Laodicea first, one of the churches mentioned in Revelation. That's where the futility of building for eternity began to hit home. Exploration and excavation are barely underway. A major commercial center of the Greco-Roman world is now a huge deserted hillside. And Colossae confirmed that in a really big way. All that's left is a barren mound. The people St. Paul wrote to are buried somewhere under there, as are many, many thousands of years of others. Life's short, and then you die...
Everyone said we shouldn't miss Aphrosisias, so we didn't. It is indeed a fine archaeological site, Greco-Roman again, the home of a sculpture school so full of magnificent carvings. But we're close to experiencing ruin burnout. One theatre is pretty much like another. Each one is amazing, but they're all so much the same. What we'd like is something like Barkerville or Williamsburg, where you can see and talk to people living as they did in ancient times. The ruin of an ancient theatre would come to life if you could see people rehearsing and setting up to stage a play there; the ruin of a tavern would come to life if you could try some wine made the ancient way... Maybe it would take too much time and money to do something like that, but it would be a huge attraction.
So we drove back down the Büyük Menderes valley to Selçuk next to Ephesus and found the Basilica of St. John, which we'd missed on our last visit. That was a place I liked very much. It was built in early Byzantine times where St. John is supposed to have written his gospel, on a hill overlooking Ephesus. His supposed grave is under where the high altar would have been. Pope Paul VI celebrated mass there in the 1960's, and it felt to me like a holy place. I'm glad we got there.
It was a beautiful trip. This is the time of year to travel in Turkey, while the weather is still cool and everything is green and flowering - and there are no tourists! If you don't have kids to hold you back and restrict your travels to July and August, why wouldn't you come now? The locals say the weather changes from rainy winter to sunny summer on April 15, and it certainly did this year. So if you've been thinking of coming to Turkey, don't wait for summer - do it now!
We're going to Bergama again in a few minutes to buy some rugs from the co-operative there (they say 90% of the money goes to the women who make the rugs, and I hope they're right). Then it's off to Ankara for our godson Timur's confirmation this Sunday and the rest of the week exploring the east (God and the PKK permitting). Back for a weekend, then we're going to the Phyrigian Valley to see some more ruins. Begüm comes back soon, and we hope to do Cappadocia and the south with her. And then we go home :-(
Stay tuned for further adventures.
Monday, April 24, 2006
I'm still around
Really I am. But that daughter of ours pointed me to a couple of web sites and I've been far too absorbed with them to do my blogging.
The dangerous sites are Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com) and LibraryThing (www.librarything.com). My clipmarks are at http://clipmarks.com/clipper/MomLes. Play with these sites at your peril.
However, I've uploaded some new photos to Flickr, and maybe later today I'll finish adding comments to them.
Just a thought: If you've ever considered coming to Turkey, do it in late April. The weather is utterly perfect (the rains are over and past, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land). The trees are full of migrating birds, and the hills are covered with flowers. And there are no tourists! Come now if you ever come.
The dangerous sites are Clipmarks (www.clipmarks.com) and LibraryThing (www.librarything.com). My clipmarks are at http://clipmarks.com/clipper/MomLes. Play with these sites at your peril.
However, I've uploaded some new photos to Flickr, and maybe later today I'll finish adding comments to them.
Just a thought: If you've ever considered coming to Turkey, do it in late April. The weather is utterly perfect (the rains are over and past, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land). The trees are full of migrating birds, and the hills are covered with flowers. And there are no tourists! Come now if you ever come.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
An afternoon at St. Mary's
This Saturday evening we're going to hold the Easter Vigil at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Bornova, so Monday Bülent and I went there to clean up and see what we need. As usual, there was a little more vandalism to the church. It really isn't anything personal or anti-Christian; it's just that the poor building doesn't have anyone around most of the time and is vulnerable to the attentions of people who like to hear the sound of breaking glass.
It's kinda discouraging trying to keep this church going. It was built in the late 1850s by the Whitall family, one of the English families attached to the Levant Co. in Izmir. At that time the company had the monopoly on the opium trade and was thriving. When it became possible for more than just a few privileged European companies to trade out of Turkey, their fortunes declined, and it's just a memory here. There are still a few families descended from the Levantines - families with 300 years of history in Turkey, whose members are still citizens of England or France or Italy. This church is part of that history.
We try to hold services once a month here at 5 p.m. on the third Saturday of the month. Sometimes no one comes - it's hard to get the word out among the scattered members of the old community. If possible, the members of the other church of the chaplaincy, St. John's, will turn up, especially the Turkish members who want to support our work and preserve the history of the place. This Saturday there should be lots of people. The Vigil service is very special, and we have (as we should) several adults to be baptized.
Bülent, Shadi and I had a picnic lunch on the steps of the church. While we were eating some of the kids from the high school next door were staring at us. When Bülent went over to see what they wanted they asked him, "How did you get in?" He said, "I have the key." So they asked if they could come and see the place after school. And they did.
We had maybe a dozen teenagers - 16 or 17 years old, I think - looking around and asking questions. They were interested in it both as a church and as a historical site. I begged them to think of it as their own, and to keep an eye on it to try to stop the vandalism. I think they will, having seen the beautiful inside.
I'm very grateful the attacks have concentrated just on the plain glass (except for the stained glass crucifixion scene behind the altar, where Christ has a hole in a most unfortunate place). There is some wonderful stained glass there done by one of England's most famous artists.
The grounds are a little wild, not getting all that much attention. That's fine with me. There are some wonderful flowers growing wild in the grass and nettles: irises, freesia, poppies, and other things I can't identify. Later, when the rain stops and the heat comes, the grass and flowers will die and we'll have a big clean-up job, but now things should be allowed to run riot.
There's a war memorial at St. Mary's in memory of three of the sons of Bornova who died in the Great War. Two fought in the French army, and one was a British airman. Ironically Turkey was on the other side, but these men never fought against Turks, and their homeland (did they think of Turkey that way?) is generous in honouring anyone who acted with courage - witness its care for the Anzac graves in Gelibolu (Gallipoli).
It's kinda discouraging trying to keep this church going. It was built in the late 1850s by the Whitall family, one of the English families attached to the Levant Co. in Izmir. At that time the company had the monopoly on the opium trade and was thriving. When it became possible for more than just a few privileged European companies to trade out of Turkey, their fortunes declined, and it's just a memory here. There are still a few families descended from the Levantines - families with 300 years of history in Turkey, whose members are still citizens of England or France or Italy. This church is part of that history.
We try to hold services once a month here at 5 p.m. on the third Saturday of the month. Sometimes no one comes - it's hard to get the word out among the scattered members of the old community. If possible, the members of the other church of the chaplaincy, St. John's, will turn up, especially the Turkish members who want to support our work and preserve the history of the place. This Saturday there should be lots of people. The Vigil service is very special, and we have (as we should) several adults to be baptized.
Bülent, Shadi and I had a picnic lunch on the steps of the church. While we were eating some of the kids from the high school next door were staring at us. When Bülent went over to see what they wanted they asked him, "How did you get in?" He said, "I have the key." So they asked if they could come and see the place after school. And they did.
We had maybe a dozen teenagers - 16 or 17 years old, I think - looking around and asking questions. They were interested in it both as a church and as a historical site. I begged them to think of it as their own, and to keep an eye on it to try to stop the vandalism. I think they will, having seen the beautiful inside.
I'm very grateful the attacks have concentrated just on the plain glass (except for the stained glass crucifixion scene behind the altar, where Christ has a hole in a most unfortunate place). There is some wonderful stained glass there done by one of England's most famous artists.
The grounds are a little wild, not getting all that much attention. That's fine with me. There are some wonderful flowers growing wild in the grass and nettles: irises, freesia, poppies, and other things I can't identify. Later, when the rain stops and the heat comes, the grass and flowers will die and we'll have a big clean-up job, but now things should be allowed to run riot.
There's a war memorial at St. Mary's in memory of three of the sons of Bornova who died in the Great War. Two fought in the French army, and one was a British airman. Ironically Turkey was on the other side, but these men never fought against Turks, and their homeland (did they think of Turkey that way?) is generous in honouring anyone who acted with courage - witness its care for the Anzac graves in Gelibolu (Gallipoli).
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