Day Fourteen: The Day Of Ruins. Ephesus And After Ephesus. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day fourteen of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We woke up that morning with headaches, thirsty, feeling like we had just passed through a strange dream where we were honorary citizens of a fairyland where the days were not days and if you ate the food you would loose all ambition and memory….

We checked out of the resort hotel, ripped off the orange wristbands, and then drove fifteen kilometers to the ruins of Ephesus.

Once a city of 250,000 people, one of twelve cities in Ionian League, one of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation, its Temple Of Artemis one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Ephesus was a great city of antiquity.  Now the great theater is in shambles.  The houses of the citzens are buried in the undistinguished earth.  Only a single pillar of the fantastic temple remains.

Between the parking lot and the ticket office a dusty road was lined with shops selling over-priced trinkets and food.  A man called in the diaphragm-forced monotonous call of street-hawkers “Cold water ice cream fresh orange juice” over and over without ever stopping for breath.  Lines of tourists were pouring out of the site, feeling the late morning heat.  It was hot.  We tried to find shade where we could.

The entrance of Ephesus will be familiar to anyone who has visited a Roman ruin.  There were milestones, grave stele, sarcophagi with chunks taken out of them like they’d been gnawing, and the unmatched ancient detritus of an old city—mantles, columns, capitals, bricks and the like, made into semi-organized piles for the archaeologists to sift through at some point in the future.

As my friends looked at the informational plaques in front of a small collection of Roman milestones, I studied the other tourists.  Most were down the path, out of the ruins.  They looked drained and tired, done with the ancient ruins behind them, done with grave stele and informational plaques, done with the sun, waving brochures in front of their faces to cool themselves, marching on, their only hope the tour bus waiting in the parking lot and maybe a ridiculously-priced fresh orange juice from the man in the tourist bazaar to give them a little refreshment.  Is this what we travel for, I wondered?  To limp back to our hotel rooms with empty faces and cameras full of photos?  I saw nobody who could be mistaken for happiness.  I saw no sense of epiphany.—No openness in people’s eyes.  No excitement or curiosity or wonder.  I just saw faces sweaty, red and bloated from the heat.

I remembered seeing a tour group motto: ‘Create Your Best Memories.’  And maybe that’s what we were doing at Ephesus.—We were making memories.  It didn’t matter that now we were hot, tired, and uninspired.  I didn’t matter that at the moment we felt like a piece of wrinkled laundry hanging on a clothesline in the hot sun.  It mattered that we had seen the lost grandeur of a once-bustling city, and held that image in our minds, and that later in the comfort of a dinner party we could tell our friends about it.

Ahead of us on the path was the huge amphitheater, the rows of seats stretching high up the hill.  This was one of the biggest ampitheaters in the ancient world, able to seat 44,000 people.  Now a smattering of sight-seers climbed the rows.  A blue crane framed it, part of the structure covered in scaffolding and mesh.

We went into the theater and my friends fanned out with their cameras drawn, looking for a memorable image,  But the only thing I felt was the profound and rising heat.  I hid in a small shadowy corridor, fanning myself with my hat, watching the other people crawling around in the sun.

The acoustics of the theater are still great, and as we prepared to leave for the next monument, a Korean tour group gathered in the center of what had once been a stage and like that all at once they started to sing.  Their voices were humble and beautiful, carrying clearly up to the others on the higher seats.  “Saranghe,” the song repeated.  “I love you.”

And then it was out of the shade to be returned again to the sweaty sun.  The path was lined with mantles with lines of dentals and egg-and-darts.  Clay plumbing eased its way out of the dry dirt.  Around us was history.  I looked for shade.

The biggest symbol of Ephesus today is the great Library of Celsus, whose magnificent facade faced the east so that early-rising students repairing there to study could make use of the light of the morning sun.  As the rest of the sun-worn tourists meandered up the stairs, I found a pocket of shadow in a depression next to an old wall.  There I crouched and appreciated the library.  Eight columns decorated with almost every effect available to the Roman mason made up the first floor.  Four statues of toga-clad women stood between each pair of columns, representing the virtues, looking out with Roman stoicism at the melting mass of sight-seers below them.  It was wonderful.  I didn’t have to use my imagination to wonder at how the library had once looked.  It had looked like this, with people craning their heads to look at the top—only it was in a bit better repair.

Once we had inscribed enough memories to feel satisfied, we walked to the Terraced Houses, which required the purchase of an extra ticket.

It was worth it, and not just because the complex was covered with a roof that kept the sun off us for long enough that we could feel human again.  The Terraced Houses are a well-excavated stretch pf the rich part of town.  The first house we look at a reconstructed pericourt—an interior courtyard—with a basin, a broken aedicula, the walls hung with plaster stained ochre and yellow, bits of cracked marble tile arranged on boards put on stacked blue milk crates.  Archeologists here are sifting through 120,000 jig-sawed shards of marble floor, trying to piece the court back together again.  A cat prowled its way across the floor—off-limits to humans—looked up at us, and meowed.

The marble wall of the next pericourt had been completed, and it is stunning.  We walked up the terraces, beneath the clear plexiglass walkway mosaics clear in white and black.  On the walls of the houses were stunning frescos in white, maroon and orange, with a drooping vine providing a splash of green.  Heads with lank hair and gaping mouths, ribbons in curls and whorls.  Birds surrounded by flowers, a cupid, a posed Apollo, a room of the nine muses where each panel had a different muse, the paint still fresh after two thousand years.  Two thousand years of burial.  Two thousand years since the artist’s brush touched the wall.  Two thousand years since those rooms were background for human life.

This was a different view of Roman life than the one you could usually see from the monuments and graves.  This was a personal Rome, a Rome of pleasures and daily life and dinner parties.  Staring up at a fine mosaic of a lion and a calf’s head, I could imagine people walking over it, talking about some important Roman thing, nodding, coming to agreement.  In my imagination I filled the rooms with people bathing, playing sleeping, welcoming visitors, arguing, laughing, dreaming.  Some of the walls had been scratched with graffiti from Roman times.  Names, poems, declarations of love.  I wondered what ruins our civilization might lead, and whether future generations would faithfully preserve the scrawls we left on bathroom walls.

When we left the Terraced Houses, the heat was even fuller, and we made our wilted way up the steep climb of the Curestes Street, ignoring the temples and columns that lined our way.  At the top I waited in the shade of a fig tree while my friends looked around the upper half of the city by themselves.  I was too hot, too tired, my head full of too many dreams to look at any more ruins.

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Then the rest of the day was full of driving.  Ephesus was the last big tourist site of our trip, and we felt too tired, too broken to glut ourselves on Pergamon or Troy, both of which lie further north.  We talked, but we really wanted to sleep.  We drove, but we really wanted to go home.  The next day we would board a car ferry and go back to Istanbul, to the city in whose wonders we had worked and slept.  But we weren’t sad.  We had seen beauty, we had seen Turkey, and it was time to be ourselves again, to lay on our couches, open up our books, and forget about the wonders of the past.

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The next day, on the way to the car ferry, we saw the first signs that we were nearing the great metropolis where we made our home.  A Starbucks in an off-road strip mall.  The first Starbucks of the whole trip.  We pulled in and got lattes.  We were back home.


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Day Twelve: Sunburned Myth: Pamukkale and Aphrodisias. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day tweleve of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

The olive-planted hills rolled on, behind them the far-away jagged mountains.  The landscape looked mythical—the kind that Heracles and Odysseus might have romped around in before there were cars, and roads, and helpful signs to guide the wayward tourist to photo-worthy sites.  Against a hill in the distance we could see our destination:  a huge slope of white, as white as snow, seemingly cut into the rock.  This was Pamukkale—Cotton Castle in Turkish.  Behind the white, crowning the top of the hill were the ruins of a Roman city.

We parked the car and walked towards the entrance.  We could hear people, but the cicadas and the crickets susurrating in the summer heat were louder.  Ducks led ducklings padding across a pond in a park at the bottom of the hill.  And above us was that startling band of pure white.

We slipped off our shoes before walking up Pamukkale—you have to go barefoot.  The sun was hotter than it should have been, reflecting off the white cliffs.  The limestone was wet with cool water, which eased the heat a little.

I took off my sunglasses just to see how things looked.  The white was too white.  A thousand times whiter than the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper.  A whiteness so pure it made me squint and pull away.

Man-made pools staggered up the hill in ascending plateaus, the water the majestic blue usually only seen in advertisements for beach hotels.  In the folds of the rock, the white was sometimes tinted a subtle pink.  On the higher ridges, stalactites and stalagmites of limestone met to make hungrily grinning mouths.

“Seeing natural phenomena like this, it’s not surprising why people need to invent gods,” my friend said.

And seeing it, so strange, so different, so unexpected, you need to think of an explanation for it.  Eternal curses against the landscape itself, the anger of Zeus, ancient aliens.  The accepted explanation is that the springwater is supersaturated with carbon dioxide and limestone, and as the water bubbles over the mountains, it forms dribbles of stone called travertines.  It’s true enough.  But it doesn’t explain the wonder.

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A head-scarfed mother led a half-naked toddler by the hand while he splashed in the pool, her other hand holding her skirt up, the hem brushing the surface of the water.  Next to her, a pair of Russians, bejeweled and bikinied, poured water over their big breasts, and then indolently laid face down in healing clay.  A large-bellied Italian stood in front of his wife’s camcorder and lustily narrated the scene behind him.  A line of Chinese made their way up the hill like ants, in street clothes, holding their shoes at their sides, a tour guide barking liked a provincial official.  We played around in one of the lower pools, slapping the jelly-like white sediment over our bodies and observing the other tourists.

But I was impatient where I should have relaxed.  While my friends enjoying the feeling of the warm water and the majesty of the scenery, laying on their backs, staring at the sky, I was hunched forward with my hands around my knees, wondering whether the higher pools were any better.  Were we just wasting our time?  Was the really amazing stuff just a little ahead?

I  left my friends and climbed alone to the higher pool.  It was the same as the lower pool where my friends were.  I looked over at them below me.  And then I looked above me as the parade of tourists continued, a tutti-frutti splatter of swimsuits and skin.

The heat was incredible. The light was magnified by the limestone and the sun glinting off the waters.  I could feel my skin burn and crack.

At the top, a waterfall pushed over the edge of the hill, and person after person lined up next to it to snap photos.  No one stood under it, though.  I cut in line and made funny faces while reveling in the warm water.

After climbing Pamukkale, we made it to the ruins if the Ancient Roman city of Hierapolis.  A tourist trap has been planted here.  A broad pavilion, called Antique Pools, welcomes the sunburned tourists to buy overpriced ice creams and coffees.  There was a booth where for 30 lira you could get a video of you and a friend flying on a magic carpet through the tourists sites of Turkey.  In the pool itself—which you have to pay to enter—people lounge on the Roman columns, fallen, broken, and submerged in the water.

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On the way from Pamukkale to Kusadasi, we took a small detour to visit Aphrodisias, one of the best preserved Roman cities on earth.  The place was completely silent.  Besides the attendant who sold us our tickets, we could see nobody.  For a moment, it was easy to believe that there was no noise at all, and that the place had been untouched for thousands of years.  But after a moment, I realized that I simply couldn’t hear the noise of people.  The cicadas were wild.  The birds sang.  The grass sashayed in the hot wind.

The entrance was lined with the detritus of archeology:  emptied sarcophagi decorated with funereal scenes, mantles from the tops of walls, grave stele.  Iconoclasts and demon-wary Christians have defaced most of them, snapping off the noses of the carved figures, rubbing away the faces, scrawling protective crosses in the rock.

A stack of marble mantles stood in the shade of the building with as much ceremony of out-of-use deck chairs.  They are decorated with faces, still expressive, their eyes still happy and lecherous, their cheeks still full or hollowed, their expressions knowing and arch, gluttonous, pedantic.  Between them run garlands of stone fruits.  These mantles are stacked three high and four deep.  A lazy brown cat wandered in between them, looked up at us, and gave a lazy meow.

We descended some steps to the Sebasteion, the temple to the cult of the Divine Emperors.  High friezes, triple porticos, a courtyard, all stood reconstructed in the empty summer heat.  Only a tenth of the building stands.  Looking at it, I tried to imagine what it was like when it once was real.

We moved on to the Temple of Aphrodite, the city’s patron god.  A gate remained, towering as high as a small hotel, proud and marble and white in the sun.  In another stretch of the Temple, tumbled marble columns scarred by fire lay in the vine-choked ground.  In 500 AD the temple was converted into a church, and people prayed here until the Seljuk Turks came around 1200 AD and emptied the city.

The city is vast.  It is amazing.  It is stunning to think of the labor which once raised these stones, and the lives which once pulsed through these streets.

The tops of my feet had been so sunburned that they looked like plums.  My arms felt like they’d been turned into Brendan Jerky.  My girlfriend forgot to put on sunscreen at all and so she teeters on uncertain legs, her whole bare back red, sweaty, asking for water.  We are dusty and travel worn.

But the city is also boring and hot.  The ruins are just ruins, and it takes a bit of mental effort for me to see the wonder in the bricks and the marble porticos, effort that I don’t have after twelve days of travel, and after the sun reflected off the limestone, and after the driving, and after the beauty I have already seen.

We hurried through the ruins, past the theater and the agora, past the Hadrianic Baths where archeologists labored in the heat.  Then we circled around to the entrance and retired to the museum which—pleasure of all pleasures!—was air conditioned.  It was only there, once we were comfortable, that we could appreciate how sun-baked, dehydrated, over-traveled, and tired we had become.

The museum was filled with the artifacts of Aphrodisias that were too fine to leave out in the open air and the unshaded sun.  There were statues, friezes, monuments, and coins, the broken pieces fit together, the scenes explained with helpful informational plaques.  Where the items have been badly damaged, they provide small helpful drawings that show how the site would have looked like when it was whole.

Most of these fine antiquities blur together, passing by, undistinguished even by their age.  We have seen so much already.  But some touch me.  I wonder why.  It is not by virtue of their superior craftsmanship.  I can hardly tell what separates a good statue from a great statue.  Some works of art just touch me, and make me curious again when for whole museums I have been bored.

Here it is two statues of boxers that excite my attention.  Their strong arms and chests rippled with tough-toned muscles.  They hold themselves with the proud and beaten posture of someone who has fought with their whole heart against defeat.  But time has defeated them, when no opponent could.  One is missing its forearm, his shin is broken, his face has been cracked in three pieces, and is only half-recovered.  His bald head and empty eyes make him look like a man losing his power, surprised at how quickly he became so old.  The other boxer suffered from a shattered leg, a lost neck, and a head cleaved in two.  They stare across each other, silent.

In a hot side-room of the museum, the friezes of the Sebasteion have been restored and put up on pedestals.  There are dozens of them, showing emperors and gods.  One frieze depicts Day, Hemena, a cloak rising behind her head, lifted by a gust of wind symbolizing the epiphany of the gods.  Her face has been gouged away and her hand snapped off her body.  Beside her stands the god of the Waters, Oceanus, also throwing a cloak to the wind behind his head.  His features have been dulled by rain.  But these two friezes are lonely.  When they stood up on the porticos of the Sebasteion, Day would have been paired with Night, together representing the eternity of the Roman Order.  Oceanus would have been paired with the earth, and show how the Roman Empire commanded the lands and the seas.  But now these two great symbols stand lonely and broken, symbolizing only the eventual victory of time.

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We felt broken.  We felt tired.  We limped out of Aphrodisias to our car.  Then we drove up winding mountain roads, feeling more broken and more tired as the sun sets over the mountains, as we pass through more kilometers of mythological landscape.  We passed over the top of a mountain road to find the Agean Sea spread out before us.

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There we improbably checked into an all-inclusive beachside resort to wash the salt off our bodies and sleep the sun out of our minds with an all-you-can drink bar and an army of holiday makers.  Tomorrow it’s going to get weird.

Day Six: Gobekli Tepe To Gaziantep, The Old To The New. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day six of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We turned off the Urfa highway and suddenly the modern parade of gas stations and stores fell away, revealing a landscape of mud-brick huts, lavender-scarfed peasants, green irrigated farmland, with the hard dry roll of unimproved hills in the background.  The asphalt quickly turned to dirt and rocks.  Barefoot children played in the fields while their mothers worked in the heat.

This could have been almost anywhere in the plains surrounding Urfa.  And in some ways it felt like it could have been any time, too.  Peasant children had probably been playing in these fields for thousands of years, ignoring the tides of kings and princes who had claimed the Urfa plain.

The car clattered up hills, and soon the village shrunk in the background.  Our poor over-worked compact car, stuffed with five full-grown humans and their baggage, struggled.  Soon the winding hill leveled out, and the road bulged into a parking lot.

We stepped out onto a high, wind-blown hill.  Here was Gobekli Tepe—the oldest temple on earth, built over 11,000 years old.

We were met with a middle aged man named Veyal Yildiz, whose family has farmed Gobekli Tepe for generations.  Our Turkish friend spoke with him a while, and we were worried that we would not be allowed inside—Gobekli Tepe is no museum, but a working archeological site where the ruins of dead civilization are day by day being pulled from the earth.  After five minutes of greetings, where are you froms, and what is your names, Yildiz gave a nod and led us to the excavations.

Twenty circle-shaped structures have been discovered under Gobekli Tepe’s dry soil, and four have been excavated.  Large sculpted limestone monoliths three meters high poke from the dry ground, most of them shaped like a pot-bellied T.  They are arranged in circles, with two pillars standing in the center of the circles.  Many of the pillars are decorated with carvings eked out of the rock with flint tools. 

A stone circle, older than bread.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

This site is older than Babylon, older than Stonehenge, older perhaps than agriculture itself.  The people who made it were probably hunter-gatherers who had not yet resigned themselves to settled life and government.  Somehow they dragged the eight-ton slabs of rock up from the quarry a hundred meters away, and then shaped the rock, with only hand-made flint tools.

A path ringed its way around the four open excavations.  Veydal pointed out the interesting carvings.  Here are lizards, foxes, sheep, donkeys, snakes, and boars; nets, pelts of animals, and birds.  On a number of the T-shaped rocks, hands clasped around the front of the spines, and at the sides, you could make out the crooks of bent arms.

At first the rocks just looked like rocks.  But slowly the monoliths took on human characteristics.  The tops of the Ts become the nods of massive heads.  The hands clasping the spines of the T seemed to be resting on bellies, the foxes around the base were pelts covering the privates.  Here, Veyal pointed to two monoliths standing next to each other.  “They think that this one is a man, and this one is a woman.”

We walked to the very top of Gobekli Tepe and sat down to rest in the heat.  A wish tree hung with scraps of plastic bags shaded us from the heavy sun, and four graves piled with loose stones shared the shade with us.  We looked out across the dry landscape, and I thought about the people who built this mound.  No one knows who they were.  No one knows what language they spoke.  No one knows why they spent so much time dragging stones up a mountain.

Only five percent of the whole 22-acre site has been excavated.  Klaus Schmidt, the site’s devoted archeologist, thinks that even after fifty years of work we will still only know the vaguest outlines of this huge temple.

We were the only people there.  We saw no cars.  No tour buses.  Veydal said that about five people a day come here, to Gobekli Tepe, the oldest sacred place on earth.

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A new black-asphalt three-lane toll road took us from Urfa to Gaziantep, the third largest city in Turkey.  As we dove into the city we encountered the worst traffic we’ve seen since Istanbul.  Every one of the million citizens of Gaziantep seemed to push their way through Istasyon Caddesi, Gaziantep’s pulsing artery of traffic and trouble, the cars merging and honking and swerving before suddenly stopping to let pedestrians hurry across the road.

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Our GPS told us to take a left down a road clogged with construction.  We circled around, looking for another route, but this too was blocked with earth moving machines and torn-up cobblestones.  We parked the car at a random parking lot and lugged our bags through the busy streets, reluctantly taking a room at the first hotel that we saw.  Our room was decorated in the style of a 1970s-era Turkish pimp, and the air heavy with the stale smell of cigarettes.

There were sights to see, of course.  Why else would we come?  The old archeology museum stood proud and ignored across the street from the sports stadium.  The museum was had once boasted some of the finest mosaics in the world, but these had been moved to the new museum, so now it was a lonesome place, with emptied, echoing spaces, informational plaques whose corresponding objects were missing, plaster marks on the polished floor.

Gaziantep is arguably one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth.  People first settled here in the third millennium B.C., and since then they have been trading, eating, marrying and dying, leaving behind the litter of their life which was then unearthed, identified, and set under glass for display.  We looked at the old cut-stone sarcophagi, the piles of old coins, the grave stele, the old glass-ware, the broken potsherds, the marble heads.

A lonely corridor was lined with grave stele from a half-dozen passed civilizations.  The rocks showed gods and warriors who had not been celebrated or worshipped for thousands of years.  Carved into the rock, their features worn by rain and the indifference of time, they eat, drink, banquet, fight, hold emblems and pieces of food and weapons, cups, trinkets and grapes.  Sometimes I caught a particularly fine detail—a eye that lifted with joy, a hand delicately holding a trident.

Kings enjoying themselves.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

But nobody else was at the museum.  I was a little indignant.  The stadium next door is busy with men eating kebabs and talking about sports, but here, where the monuments of history stand, there is silence. 

But then again, why should people care about the past, when the past is dead and they are alive?  Like the figures on the stele, they too must fight and drink and feast and die.  When the stele and the statues in the museum stood alive in the open air, they were not monuments, they were pieces of daily life.  The people of their time appreciated them with the same lazy eyes with which we now look at billboards and street signs.  So why should the musty virtue of antiquity make these cracked slabs of rock suddenly worthy?  Why should I expect people to turn their backs on the fun of their lives to look at dusty rubble?

After the old museum, we went to the new museum a twenty minute walk away.  We plodded along the tramway, passed under the train station, and skirted the slightly sketchy neighborhood around the train station.  Then out of the obscurity of the low-rent apartments, the mass of the museum imposed itself, huge and white, not yet even a year old.

Most of the mosaics had been rescued from Zeguma.  Zeguma was a Greek city perched on a crossing of the Euphrates river.  It became rich with trade, and over the centuries its citizens became rich, built their villas and their fountains, and laid their houses with mosaics of startling beauty.  Their patron god was Fortuna, the goddess of luck, and so the wheel of fortune repeats itself along the border of mosaic after mosaic, a tumbling interlocking circle.  Zeguma was taken by Rome and the city grew even more.  But the wheel of fortune turned, Rome became weak, and in the third century Zeguma was overrun by the Sassanid Empire, burned, its greatness lost.  People lived there, but they lived in the shadow of a great city, people unable even to remember the distant greatness of their ancestors.

The Wheel Of Fortune.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The city wallowed in obscurity until the 1990s when archeologists discovered the city’s well preserved frescoes and mosaics.  But the careful excavation of the archaeologists was slow—faster were the antiquity traffickers who ravaged the new discoveries before they could be preserved.

Fortune was still crueler to Zeguma, the city who had once worshipped her.  A new dam was built, and the city was set to be flooded.  An international consortium of archaeologists flocked to the city to rescue what artifacts they could, finding seals and statues, lifting frescoes and tiles—but when the dam was finally opened over three tenths of the city was submerged and destroyed.

Those mosaics that had been salvaged were moved here, to the new museum in Gaziantep, and they stun the visitor with their incredble craftsmanship.  They show the strange gods of Asia Minor in all their glory and folly.  Oceanus and Tethys pose, swimming with dragons and snakes.  Europa is eternally being dragged off with Zeus the bull.  Eros and Psyche sit on a couch, and Aphrodite is birthed from a clam-shell.  These fine works were once on the floors of dining rooms and bedrooms, stepped on by the sandals of visitors, submerged with fountain water.  Now they were on the wall of a museum, to be admired.

Oceanus and Tethys pose.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

We see these gods marring, posing, eating and arguing.  Eros and Psyche sit on a couch and the expressions on their faces look like they are sitting at home and they can’t exactly decide what to watch on TV.  Eros has his hand lightly on Psyche’s back, and Psyche has her left hand open imploringly, like she’s just about to suggest that they put on a rerun of Olympus’ Got Talent.

They are like us.  And I imagine that the long-dead city of Zeguma must have once been a lot like the city of Gaziantep:  bustling, commercial, and hot; the citizen’s lives rich with traffic and trouble, the people only sometimes pausing to admire the work of their mosaics and fountains and frescos.  And then they move on to the real beauty of their daily lives.

The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

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