Days Seven And Eight: Roads. The Decapitated Gods Of Mount Nemrut. More Roads. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

These are days seven and eight of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

The narrow road cut through the crests and troughs of the rising shadow-filled mountains, and our car bravely made its way forward.  A half-moon hung in the sky, softening the sky's broad darkness.  We were tired, and quiet mostly.  It was three in the morning, and we had been traveling together for exactly a week.

We didn’t know whether we were going the right way or not.  We hadn’t seen a sign for a dozen kilometers or so, and the road looked too obscure, too uncertain.  A white panel van passed us, speeding up the winding road.  “That’s a tour bus,” I said, straightening up in my seat with rising hope.  “We’re going the right way.”

“It’s not a tour,” our navigator snapped.  “Tours couldn’t have vans that small.  It wouldn’t be efficient.”

Maybe we were getting a little grumpy.  We had woken up too early.  We had been in the compact car for too long.  The silence came over us, and kilometers sped beneath us.

And then in the East the darkness changed.  A thin band of orange broke against the horizon, dropping off into blue, which smeared into the nighttime black.  It was the first touches of morning light.  We were racing against it.

By four thirty in the morning we parked on a steep parking lot filled with tourist vans.  The night was cold and windy.  My only pair of trousers had ripped back in Mardin, so I was wearing nothing more than salmon-colored shorts and a thin T-shirt.  I had failed to have the foresight to wear shoes instead of sandals.

In front of us was a mountain peak, a darker imposition against the moony night.  This was Mount Nemrut, one of the most famous sights in Turkey.

Hints of sunrise.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

We walked up.  It felt good to walk.  Walking kept us warm.  The path was steep and pebbly, and we could see almost nothing in the morning darkness besides the growing band of light to the East, and the dim outlines of the rolling hills beneath us, and the dark shape of the peak to the left of us.  It was beautiful, but we were tired, and maybe too tired and too cold to appreciate the beauty.  We said little to each other.  We passed by other tourists who were puffing their way up the mountain, pausing for breath against a pile of stones.  One group, bundled warm in blankets and coats, looked at my T-shirt and short and could do nothing but laug.

By five we made it to the Eastern Platform of Mount Nemrut, and the first light of the day was spilling out against the stone peak.  The heads of decapitated gods stood before us, each as tall as a man.  The heads of five men—gods and kings—were flanked by an eagle and a lion.  They all looked out towards the morning empty eyes.  On the rise of the hill behind them stood the five bodies of these heads, indistinct blurs in the morning darkness.

Heads, before the dawn.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

Mount Nemrut is the mausoleum of Antiochus the first of Commagene who lived in the first century BC.  Antiochus’ small kingdom was a mixture of Persian, Greek and Armenian cultures that had torn its independence after the Roman Empire defeated the Seleucids.  Antiochus, whose full name was Antiochos, a just, eminent god, friend of Romans and friend of Greeks, declared himself a god, and planned that after his death his body should be moved away from the people and closer to the gods.  He chose Mount Nemrut.  Here he established a group of priests who would celebrate his birthday and his coronation once a month, for all eternity.

The heads depict Greek-looking kings with Persian hats.  There is Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes; Zeus-Oromasdes; the king Antiochus himself, god-like a pround; Heracles-Artagnes-Ares, a queen, and Tyche-Fortuna herself.  Sometime after Commagene’s inevitable fall, once the birthdays and coronations were forgotten, these heads were broken off and tumbled down to the terrace below.  They were only rediscovered in the 1880s, when a German Engineer found them while looking for transport routes for the Ottoman Empire.

The heads slowly became illuminated by the rising morning light.  The shadows deepened their features.  The stones became more alive.  You could now see the curls of their beard, the arrogance in their eyebrows, the peak of the eagle’s beak, the fierceness of the lion’s eyes.

On the terrace a motley of people jabbered at each other.  Everyone snapped pictures, and posed for pictures, and clucked at each other about how funny the pictures looked, and crowded around the good vantages for photos.

We moved onto the Eastern pedestal to look out across the mountains, still dark with nioght.  There we had a moment of repose, and pulled the blanket up around us against the cold.  The light on the horizon became thicker, and now you could just make out the swell of red that would become the sun.

As the light grew, slate-colored lakes started to shimmer in the valleys below us.  Then all at once it was bright enough that I could actually see the pages of my notebook.  Seven vans pulled up to a special access parking lot below us, and they disgorged a pilgrimage of tourists who climb up the steep path, just in time for the sunrise.

Then the salmon-colored light swelled over the mountain.  Sunrise was coming.  The crowd silenced.

Like that—in a moment—it was day.  The sun peeked over the ridge of the mountain before it resolutely lifted itself up out of its mountain bed.  More photos were snapped.  A man posed for a novelty shot where it looked like he was holding the sun between two pinched fingers.  But despite all that, it was beautiful, and for a moment I felt a sympathy with the other tourists.  We were all feeling this beauty.

Sunrise.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

And then the tourists evaporated, like morning dew.  We walked around the peak of the mountain, suddenly alone again, admiring the stone heads in the cool morning light.  Then we walked around the peak to look at the Western Platform where another set of decapitated heads faced the setting sun.

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This, for eight hours.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

Then it was days of driving.  We drove from Gaziantep to Adiyaman, and then to Mount Nemrut.  Then we wound our way back, retracing our steps, heading West to the dream-like province of Cappadocia.

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Again, it was a day of Turkish road travel.  We passed a car with its passenger seat packed full of sheep.  A minaret sprouted from a boxy factory.  Road workers hid from the heat in the small shade of tree planted on the median strip of the road.

As we moved west, the earth rose to become a rolling Medeterranian farmland of olives and grapes, before peaking to become a series of craggy, pine-lush peaks.  The setting sun hit a splatter of clouds, marking the edges of the clouds white.

Then all at once the hills fall away into a stone-littered scraggly mud-splattered expanse rising with rocks and dust.  Ahead of us lay mountains, dark and broad.  We were leaving the East, with its rough brilliance, into the more popular tourist-areas of central Turkey.

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In the style of Maximum Fun’s Jordan Ranks America, we ranked Eastern Turkey.

Standing tall at number five is “Hello, money!” the two words known to every single barefoot child you may happen to run across.

Making a strong debut at number four, it’s goats.  They’re cute, their shaggy, they seem to be content where they go, they make great cheese.  The consensus is:  goats are great.  Why don’t we have more goats?  Can we get some pet goats or what?

An old favorite retains spot number three.  You guessed it, it’s the shalwar, the Turkish farmer’s M.C. Hammer pants.  Baggy, with a crotch that dips past the ankle, nothing says “fashion” like these centuries-old trousers.

A surprise at number two!  It’s horrible drivers!  Passing you at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour as you make a blind turn down a mountain road!  Demonstrating fantastic feats of steering-wheel acrobatics on roundabouts!  Honking while you’re stopped at a red light!  The drivers of Eastern Turkey will give you the ride of your life!

Taking the top spot at number one it’s Kebabs.  Lunch and dinner, why would you want to eat anything else?  These flame roasted skewers of meat can be angelically good or give you food poisoning.  But one things’ for sure:  it’s the only thing on the menu!


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Day Three: Scavenger Hunts For Car-Bound Tourists. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

This is day three of The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We drove.  We drove.  We drove.

We left Erzurum at eight thirty in the morning, bellies half-full from a soup breakfast and heads half-rested from our lumpy hotel pillows.  We hopping into our little car and drove.  Through the rolling mountains we drove.  We drove through the grasslands waving in the wind.  We climbed hills and skirted valleys, passing through market towns and farmland, dusty villages of a single building and military bases clinging to mountain faces.

We stumbled into Mardin at eight in the evening.  We had been driving for the whole day.  We grumbled at each other, hungry and testy, with aching backs and strained tempers, taking the first hotel we saw.  It had been twelve hours of driving—maybe more—and at the end of it I almost forgot anything had happened.  As I thought about it more, I could only make up a collage of disconnected images, but I could make no story out of them, nor could I impose any sense. 

I had thought that yesterday had been empty.  Today was empty, truly empty.  We often saw no cars at all for half an hour or so.  We would pass lumbering trucks overloaded with bags of cement.

As soon as we left Erzurum the landscape became as green as a cartoon lawn.  Teepees dotted the hills—the homes of cowherds who followed their stock along the plateau.  But the greenery soon turned sun-light yellow, and the heat came.

As our small car put-putted its way south, the cows on the side of the road turned to sheep, and then the sheep turned to goats, until finally the goats became small children, who pushed to the shoulder of the road, holding out plastic bags of sour plums to the passing motorists.

I remember a heap of burning garbage on the side of the road, clung with black birds.  A small puppy sat contentedly in the heat, looking playfully at the birds like that pile of garbage and those birds were the whole world.

For a few kilometers the road was a confusion of donkeys inching their way up the shoulder.  There were cars, but no people.  “Who on earth is herding these things?”  Three donkeys lay in pile of dust, the sun beating down on them.  “Are they dead?”  The one nearest to the road reared its head up lazily, flicked back its ears in annoyance, and then laid down again.  “Are they dying?”  “Are they napping?”  

After eight hours we stopped in the metropolis of Diyarbakir.  While my friends took pictures of the huge citadel, the mosques, and the guileless street-children who followed us through picturesque-tumbledown alleyways, I remained grumpy.  “Hello!  Hello!  Hello!”  The children called after us.  I crossed my arms over my chest and reminded everyone that it was probably time to go.

But my memories didn’t seem enough—not enough for twelve hours.  And really, a lot of the time stretched on in a bare wasteland.  Five grown humans sealed into a compact car whose radio doesn’t work.  We ran out of jokes.  We developed headaches.  We grew testy with each other.

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For those of you considering a drive from Erzurum to Mardin in a day—don’t.  Or at least get a big car.  You might save yourself a mental breakdown by playing Anatolian Road Warrior Scavenger Hunt.  The rules are simple.  Each object can only be found once.  Spotted objects earn you anywhere from one to five points.  At the end of the day the person with the most points earns a free dinner.

1 point:

More than 10 cows.

An overloaded truck.

A farming vehicle driving through a town.

A car passing itself.  (The “Self Pass.”)

A two-minareted mosque.

2 points:

More than 10 sheep.

Two meat restaurants next to one another.

A woman doing farmwork by the roadside.

A car passing another car that is passing.  (The legendary “Double Pass.”)

A vegetable seller.

3 points:

A person running.

An idle road worker.

A driver standing up.

A Mercedes.

A car properly using its turn signal.

4 points:

A person reading a book.

Improbable child!

A car with fur seats.

A person with blonde hair.

A man peeing in public.

5 points:

Dogs having sex.

Another group of people taking a photo of something.

Guns.

A woman driver.

Another foreigner.

Enjoy!


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Day Two: A Lesson In Turkish Automotive Adventure. Afterwards, Erzurum. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

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

The road south from Trabzon climbed slowly onto Anatolian plateau, and as the day wore on we drove up loftier and loftier mountains, plunging further and further east.

We discovered that the number one Turkish road-trip pass-time is overtaking other cars.  Two lanes?  One lane?  Dirt road dusty with construction?  Turkish drivers think all these places are great for passing by motorists languishing at the speed limit.  Inevitably every few minutes we would suddenly be passed by a clutch of cars which would veer into the oncoming traffic.  This happened everywhere we drove:  in cities, on long straight highways, on blind curves hugging the sides of mountains.

At first, these incidents were scary.  Our driver would brace herself and grip the wheel testily.  Us passengers would hurl opprobrium at the passing car.  “Why is he passing us?”  “Turkish death wish.”

But after three straight hours of driving an absurd humor crept into the incautious bravery of the Turkish driver.  Once while driving down a wide mountain highway we were passed by an impatient driver who himself was passed while passing us by an even more impatient driver.  This was a thing of beauty.  A rare "Double Pass."  Of course, a few bends in the mountain later we saw both cars stuck in a clog of traffic, only ten meters ahead of us for all their automotive bravery.

The art of Turkish overtaking reached its most fantastic hight when we saw a motorbike puttering its way up the side of the mountain, its left turn signal on, meandering suddenly into the left-hand lane even though there were no other cars on the road.  “Look guys,” our resident snark pointed out, “this guy’s passing himself.  It's a Self Pass.”

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Then the beauty of the changing scenery quieted us.  We had mounted the Anatolian Plateau, an otherworldly dry scrubland stretching restlessly in every direction.  Slabs of rock jutted out of the pasture at odd angles, as if there had been some great ancient war that had torn up the earth.  The sky was bigger, prouder, full of huge castle-like clouds.  The light looked different.  It was clear, and sharpened things.

For long stretches of the well-paved highway we saw no other cars, and for a while we could be imagine that civilization was very far away from us.  But Turkey is one of the oldest civilized landscapes on earth, and the road threaded its way through numerous small villages, like beads strung on a bracelet.  A little before noon we stopped in one to pick up nuts and cherries for our lunch, and outside a local bakery we gawked at a wheelbarrow stacked with burning logs for charcoal.

Later we passed through a dust-grey town, the perfect setting for an Anatolian wild west film.  In the other lane we saw a thin horse pulling a beaten-up cart  On our right a seven-year old boy diligently changed the tyre of an eight wheeler, while his father gummed at the filter of a cigarette and admired his work.

But too quickly, the loneliness of the vast landscape returned, and it was back to the rolling hills and the scrubland and the feeling that we were far away from everything.  The only hint that we were nearing something big were the handful of billboards chucked along the roadside.  One was for a bank.  “ATM!—30km!”

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Erzurum is an ancient town perched more a mile above sea level like an eagle on a high rock.  As we pushed our way into the crazy traffic trying to find a hotel, we became worried.  The streets seemed a little too pot-holed, a little too crammed with cars, the driving a little too intemperate, the people a little too interested in us and our small car.  We drove the wrong way up a one-way street, argued about directions, finally found our hotel, and parked, struggling out of our seats with half-shaking legs and testy humor.  We heard a passing child remark in wonder.  “Tourists!”

The history of Erzurum is one of conquest.  First settled by the Armenians, it fell under the sway of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century and was quickly renamed after the Emperor Theodosius.  The city was reinforced, and strengthened to become one of the bastions that Rome held against the Persian Empire.  And for the next two thousand years, the tides of history have pushed ambitious empires over Erzurum.  The Persians, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, the Russians.  Each has come, only to leave again while Erzurum remains in its lofty rock, proud and slow.

We found our hotel.  The proprietor was kneeling on a prayer mat in the lobby, and slowly straightened himself up to meet us.  He was very old, with white stubble on his face, no teeth, and the striking intelligent eyes of a much younger man.  Our Turkish friend negotiated with him, and the old man refused to lower the price of our rooms by a single lira.  Weary with travel, we checked in, dropped off our bags, and made a hurried search for toilet paper before gathering ourselves for one last jot of tourism.

Somewhat refreshed, we drove into the nearby city center to look at the historical sites before the light died.  Our first stop was the Çifte Minareli Medrese, the Twin Minaret Madrasa, a strikingly strong red-brick building raised in 1271.  We found the Madrasa—so emblematic of Erzurum that it’s on the Wikipedia page—closed for renovation, covered in scaffolding and sheets of green mesh tarp that fluttered in the cool mountain wind.

Rebuffed, we crossed the street to the Three Kumbats—medieval octagonal tombs topped with steep conical roofs that look a little bit like hats.  One of the roofs had grass sprouting in the grout between the bricks, looking like a bad hair transplant.  The Kumbats were built sometime between the 13th and 14th Centuries, but who built them and why is unknown.

We discovered a young man sprawled napping on the curb of the leftmost Kumbat, in bright red shoes, jeans and a red shirt, his arm thrown up over his eyes to block out the high afternoon sun.  He stirred as we gawked at him, shifted his arm a little to give us a surly look, and then returned to sleep.

The doors of the Kumbats were all locked, but we could look inside through the barred windows.  Nothing.  Any sarcophagi that had once rested here had been removed sometime in the past eight hundred years, leaving nothing but bare stone and shade.

But they were still remarkable, because they were so solid, and so old.  As we made our way around the Kubats and settled into an appreciative silence, I imagined the workers who placed the stones there a thousand years before us, and I wondered what they were thinking of as they worked, and of how when they stretched themselves up and wiped the sweat off their foreheads, they looked to the same background of high rain-washed mountains as we looked.

The third and final cultural event of the day was the nearby citadel, a vast building of heavy stone overlooking the city and the plain below it from where the passing generations of Empire had looked out onto world.  We circled it, looking for an entrance.  It was shut.  The citadel had closed a quarter of an hour before.

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Our humor had thinned.  At the citadel a group of dirty-faced children had swaggered up to us, cornering a straggling member of our group shouting “Money!  Money!  Money!” with threat and anger.  Our jokes had lost their laughter.  We checked out a mosque built in 1179 and tried to appreciate the ancient domed roofs and the quadruple arches, but we were just playing the role of tourists without actually enjoying what we saw.  We all sat sat on the rug at the front of the mosque and waited.  We were hungry, but we hadn’t exactly realized that we were hungry, so we lingered in a half-exhausted pile before coming to the inevitable conclusion that it was time to eat.

Erzurum is famous for Cag Kebab, a spit-roast lamb dish that might very well be the ancestor of the ubiquitous doner.  Two restaurants claim to have invented the kebab.  We went to one, Gel-Gor Kebab, a bright clean building near the city center.

Once we were seated we craned our heads around us, looking for a waiter to present us with a menu.  No menus came, but soon a waiter efficiently whisked plates of salad and thin bread onto the table.  A moment later another waiter offered us skewers of slow-roasted lamb.  We ate one skewer, two, and then three, gorging ourselves on the grease and hot pepper paste, eventually falling into contended food comas where time seemed to have no meaning, and our tiredness seemed to have no meaning, and the hassle of the traffic had no meaning, and all there was that mattered was the pleasant bluges in our bellies.  We had passed through the mild discomforts of travel into a painless nirvana of gluttony, our pain gone.


Soon our dirty plates were removed and we were asked if we wanted dessert.  Yes please. Dessert was Kadayıf Dolması, another local delicacy that is nest of deep-fried pasta soaked in syrup, stuffed with chopped walnuts.  The texture, the taste, the sublimity of Kadayıf Dolması is impossible to describe.  Maybe it's like the Turkish dessert version of a perfect sushi roll:  an infinitely subtle combination of simple falvors.  After polishing off two of these each, we gazed at each other in a contended stupor.

Now that the dusk was coming, the city seemed easier than it had when we had first struggled in.  The roads had cleared themselves of cars, and silence had fallen on the terraced streets and the quiet houses.  We pulled open the curtains of our hotel room and looked out on the skyline, and below us the ancient plains, and we know that we had accomplished something that day.  We had struggled, and we had enjoyed it.


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.