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 Eleven: Konya. Rumi. Peace. Tourism. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

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

As we drove into Konya, the old capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, a broad avenue led us into the center of the city.  The conical top of a turquoise tower pierced the modern skyline.  This was the mausoleum of the sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, called Mevlana in Turkish, and Rumi in English—or ‘the guy from Rum.’  Because of him, for the past eight hundred years the city of Konya has been a sacred place where people have come to find the true nature of reality and the love of god.

Konya was first settled by the Hitties, and like the rest of Asia Minor it has been sacked and settled by waves of war.  The name Konya itself is a Turkification of the Greek’s Ikonion.  The Greeks thought that Perseus defeated the native population with an icon of the Gorgon’s head, making it safe for them to settle.

The main attraction of Konya is the Mausoleum of Mevlana, or Rumi.  Rumi was a thirteenth century Persian poet.  Fleeing the mongol tide that was pressing up against his home in Persia, Rumi’s family swung down to the Gulf on the pilgrimage of Haj, before going north east to settle in the safety of Rum.  Here Rumi studied, thought, prayed and wrote thousands of pages of fine poems about love and god.  His poetry touched people in a way that words rarely do.  In 2007 Rumi was declared the most popular poet in America—this Persian-speaking Muslim who lived in a Turkish-ruled city named after the Byzantine Empire which had named itself after Rome.

After Rumi’s death, his followers turned his poems and philosophy into a religious order known as Mevlana.  Mevlana’s most conspicuous right was the Sema Ceremony, where adherents would fast and then whirl themselves into a confusion, the fabric of their broad skirts fanning out, one hand held up towards god, the other held down to earth.  But the Mevlana were more than just a picturesque dance.  Neophytes would put themselves through a grueling thousand-and-one days of service at Konya before they became dervishes in their own right, cleaning, cooking, fasting, praying and studying.  The Mevlana became a force in the Ottoman Empire for seven hundred years after Rumi’s death.  Dervish societies popped up everywhere the Ottoman Empire was, and the hypnotic whir of the Sema ceremony continued.

Except when Ataturk created the Turkish Republic, he put an end to the Mevlana, closing the doors of the dervish halls, confiscating the treasuries of the ancient foundations, banning the ancient ceremonies and devotions.  Rumi’s tomb was secularized and turned into the museum it is today.

And despite the sublimity of the architecture, and the holiness of the relics held there, Mevlana’s tomb is a museum, not a place of living religion.  The line for tickets was confused—more like a child’s crayon scrawl than a line—while the single ticket seller on duty contended with a mess of tourists pressing against his window, holding out bills, shouting in Turkish.

When we finally were able to exchange our lira for tickets, we walked through the turnstiles to a garden.  There, a 14th Century tomb of one of Rumi’s followers stood with crumbling walls and the flash of striking turquoise tiles.  We followed paths cutting through gardens planted with rose bushes, and then passed into the large marble courtyard surrounding Rumi’s tomb itself.  In the center of the courtyard was a marble fountain bubbling with water, at which people bent down to wash their hands, feet and faces.  A sign hanging on it said that it was built in 1512 and then restored three times since then.

We slipped blue plastic shoe condoms over our feet and went into the tomb itself.  The first room was small, but it was decorated with framed Arabic calligraphy extolling the virtues of study and divine devotion.  Some pieces done in gold leaf on actual gilded tree-leafs, the veins and stems turned to metal.

And then the main room, a broad hallway that turned around itself like a boxy U.  It was busy.  Busy with students, pilgrims, and tourists.  Busy with prayer, and curiosity, and boredom.  Alongside the walls were stone sarcophagi of religious teachers topped with green turbans, and people clustered around these, their hands open to the sky in prayer.

At the far end of the hallway was a crowd, surprisingly quiet for so many people.  They were at the tomb of Rumi himself.

The sarcophagus was tall as a man, huge, covered in an age-darkened brocade embroidered with golden Koranic verses.  On top of the sarcophagus were two large turquoise turbans.  Behind it was an amazing tile wall, in blue, red, green and gold, whirling with calligraphic snippets of the Korea, Persian-looking fruit trees, and hypnotic shapes.  Next to this was a rank of display cases, holding Rumi’s shoulder strap, his finely pressed high-collared cloak, and three of his plain brown felt hats, all supposedly eight hundred years old.

In the next room was a collection of objects meant to inspire the veneration of the pilgrim.  There was an illuminated genealogy of Ali, gilded Korans with footnotes and glosses snaking in the margins at angles to the text.  A series of silk rugs hung along the far wall.  One was from the 16th Century, and the calligraphy on it bragged that it was made near the tomb of Ali, whose power was so great that 100 Alexanders should bow to him.  There were reliquaries containing beard hairs of the prophet, and grains of rice on which the name of god had been written.  A compass pointed to the direction of the Kaaba.  A Koran the size of my thumb nail was displayed next to a Koran the size of a child’s bike.

Some of the people crowding the hall were in the throes of religion.  They swayed back and forth on the balls of their feet.  Their cheeks were wet with weeping.  They pressed their hands to their faces, stunned at the intensity of their own feeling, and then lifted their hands again to heaven, to pray once more.

But other people were just there, passing through the rooms because they were tourists and that’s what they did.  A blonde in heels with a headscarf just thrown over her head laughed on her cel phone, half-heartedly glancing at the illuminated manuscripts.

Outside the Mausoleum, the cels where dervishes once accomplished their devotions have been filled with representative objects and informational plaques.  A pair of tongs hung on the wall.  These were carried in the dervish’s belt, used to let shopkeepers know the dervish deserved a fair price without bargaining.  There were ornately decorated horns, which the traveling dervish would blow to announce his arrival in a new city.  There were hats and robes, axes and books and musical instruments.  In the rooms closer to the kitchen, mannequins had been positioned to stand in for the dervishes who had once lived there.  Here was an old bearded man studying.  Here a young man cooked.  Here another man prayed.

Everywhere we went we had to fight against the crowds.  People gibbered, they yelled, joked, took pictures posing in front of the holy books, the tour guides held up flags and waved them to get people’s attention.  It was strange to think that Rumi’s contemplative poetic philosophy, which hoped to peel back the illusions of the bustling world, should fall like this to the beautiful venalities of tourism.

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When Rumi was alive he wrote poems.  He wrote about his worries and his joys, his friends and his thoughts.  But there was something special in the way that Rumi saw the world and in the felicity with which he expressed himself.  All he did was scribe words on paper.  But these words have lived on far longer than his body, being translated and retranslated and published and read and studied.  They have survived not only because they are beautiful, but because they have something true in them.  And this truth has helped people see through the fog of their petty daily worries, to the broader beauties of god and love.

But so why is it here at Rumi’s tomb where generations of pilgrims have bent their heads in supplications, all I can see are the tired herds of tourism?  Why is it that there are no quiet places to sit and wonder?  Why is it that there is no truth, no matter how many informational plaques are posted next to the priceless relics?

But it is a museum only.  It celebrates things that once were.  It can no longer be new.

And truth must always be new.  Only something new can us out of our daily blindness to appreciate the unusual reality of the world around us.  Only something new can stir beauty in our eyes.  And to be new, it must be different, striking, dangerous, and a little sick.  Rumi’s tomb is old.  The relics are covered in dust.  The books are hidden under glass.

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On the way back to our car we passed by a craft shop.  In the window felt dervishes hung from agate wind chimes, turning in the breeze, ringing softly.  The walls were busy with necklaces, scarves and painted glass.  My girlfriend insisted on stopping.  The owner was devotedly sewing a small patch of fabric, and gently looked up from his work to offer us tea.  I said we had to get going.  He insisted, and we sat, appreciating the colorful rush of his shop.  “When I was a boy,” he explained, “I always loved colors.  And my mother would complain.  What are you doing always looking at colors?  Why are you obsessed with colors?  But now, you see, I have filled my shop with colors.” On the walls were depictions of dervishes spinning, the Kaaba black and imposing, a peacock, and they were beautiful.  We drank our tea, talked, and were happy.

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Again we drove.  We drove to Pammukale where we stayed at a thermal spa and rested in the warm limestone waters, trying to forget everything, surrounded by Russian, Asian and Turkish tourists, who also settled themselves into the pools, wincing at first at the heat, and then closing their eyes.  The fountains spilled warm water over us, the sides dripping with stone.


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Day Ten: Beneath Cappadocia. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

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


In the shallow part of the late morning we pulled out of our hotel, setting out for the deeper parts of Cappadocia.  The cities fell away, and the English road signs, the tour groups, the restaurants, the ATV rentals were all replaced by irrigated farmland.

Time passed like it does on long drives.

“Slow down,” the guy in the passenger seat said all of a sudden.

“What is it?” the driver asked.  There were no other cars on the road.

“Slow down!” again, with more insistence, pointing ahead of us.

And then we saw it.  A huge flock of sheep taking up both lanes of the otherwise empty road.  We pulled over.  Bringing up the front of the flock was a sheep dog, its tongue happily lolling out of its mouth.  The sheep followed, their bells ringing with every trot, the full udders of the momma sheep swaying back and forth.  Th shepherd brought up the rear, with his crook hitting the asphalt step by step.  Following him was a second sheep dog, more dutifully drooping its muzzle to the ground, ready to urge on stragglers.

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We descended into the underground city of Kaymakli, a complex cut eight floors deep into the soft volcanic rock.  Once it could have been home to over three thousand people.  Now the upper levels of this subterranean metropolis are used by locals for storage—a honeycombed ancient attic.  A portion of the city has been made safe for tourists.  The walls have been strung with lights, the sloping steps have been reinforced with concrete and steel, and almost every turn has been marked with helpful signs.

As soon as we went inside the heat of the day lifted, and we could smell damp stone.  The hand-carved walls were uneven, branching off to various rooms like the arms of a tree.  The corridors narrowed as they went deeper, until in some places you had to bend over to pass through them, or fall onto your hands and knees.  Hollowed out into the soft rock were storage rooms, wine presses, a church, living rooms, graves, and a metallurgist.

Deeper into the city, we marveled at a huge ventilation shaft.  It was about the size of a comfortable chair, and the left side of it was dotted with hand-and-footholds climbing all the way down.  We turned the flashlight into to the darkness, but the light got lost in the depths.  We had no idea how deep the shaft went, or how high.

And it stunned us to think that all of these sloping passageways and huge stone caverns were carved by people.  That someone had not only climbed this vertiginous ventilation shaft but excavated it from the living stone.  Ancient Christians had done the majority of the work here, retreating to the caves as a defense against persecution.  But the Christians had only expanded and improved on cave structures which had existed long before them, going as far back as the Hittites.  The caves were safe.  They were a good place to hide from the shifting tides of empire.

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Our next stop was the gorge of Ihlara, a broad tree-filled gash in the rock whose sides were speckled with windows and rooms that once were the seclusion of early Christians.  Around eighty thousand people once lived here in lonesome safety, in four thousand houses carved into the sides of the rock, praying at over a hundred churches.

As we walked to the ticket office a large crowd of high-school girls burst through of the turnstiles.  The first group was dressed modestly in headscarfs, clucking softly to themselves.  One girl stopped at the gift shop and put on a cowboy hat over her hijab, laughing to her friends.  The next wave of young women were dressed in western fashion—in camisoles, skinny jeans and shorts.  I think they were from the same school, but they looked like they came from two different worlds.

We paid for our tickets and made our way down the three hundred steps to the bottom of the gorge.  The whole sky was cloudy.  The wind tasted of cloud, the far-off mountains behind us were capped by clouds, and the clear sunny heat we were used to was dulled by clouds.

We visited the Agacalti Church, which was caved into the cliff wall in the eleventh century, propped up with four arches, and decorated with a small dome.  The walls were frescoed in white and orange paint, with the robes of the prophets drawn out in turquoise.  Jesus loomed above us in the main dome, holding a blessing with one hand and a book in the other, surrounded by winged spirits who were perpetually dragging the resurrected messiah up to heaven.  None of the figures had pupils in their eyes, and so they stare, empty, forlorn down onto us.  The church showed its age.  The paint was chipped in places, a passageway had fallen, the lower parts of the wall had been scratched with crude graffiti.

We followed the steps further down to the bottom, a long line of tourists ahead of us and behind.  But when we reached the gorge the other tourists turned left to a nearby church, and we continued forwards, crossing the fast-flowing river.  After a few minutes we could no longer hear the noise of the tour groups.  Around us was the solitude of rocks and trees, of dust and bugs, the burble of water and the empty noise of wilderness.

We climbed up to another church carved into the farther cliff-face.  This one was less well-preserved, more isolated, less protected.  Three entrances with finely carved archways led into a darkened interior, the ceiling drooping with cobwebs.  Passing the weak flashlight against the walls we could make out the remains of the white and orange paint that had once brightened the walls.  A greek cross on a pillar.  Geometric patterns crawling along a ceiling.  As we went deeper into the ruin, the daylight was swallowed by the shadows, and we found the side-rooms and the small passageways completely dark.  The flashlight tried in vain to illuminate these big empty rooms, and we stopped on the threshold, peering inside, wondering what had once been there, trying to imagine what the church might have looked like back when it was filled with the noise of living.

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On our way out of Cappadocia we passed by another fairy chimney site.  We stopped the car at an overlook and took pictures of the rock which fell like folds of fabric in an art-student’s texture study, honeycombed with floors, walls, windows, and doors.

It was amazing, but we had been looking at amazing things now for ten straight days, and in the late afternoon with four hours of driving ahead of us, we only enjoyed the scene briefly.  We quickly folded ourselves back into the car, passed by a parking lot full of tourist buses, empty besides their drivers, who lay idle in their driver’s seats, either napping the afternoon away or texting, ignoring the ponderous photo-worthy spires rising into the air above them.  They, too, were tired of beauty.  We drove onwards to Konya, where we would spend the night.

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Day Nine: The Mysteries of Cappadocia, Unanswered and Beautiful. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

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

In the early morning, the sky of Goreme is filled with the busy twitters of waking birds and the far-off hoots of sleepy owls.  Across the road from our hotel, an old woman eased her way out onto the terrace of her house, where she plucked cucumbers from the green burst of her garden.  A hot air balloon slowly lowered itself through the blue sky.  In an hour, the other tourists would come out of their rooms and sit down for breakfast, but for the moment I was alone, savoring the silence and the view of this strange city, too beautiful for words, too beautiful to even be a real city.

In the East, we felt like we were the last tourists on earth.  Children gawked at us, waiters asked us curiously where we were from and then frowned when we said ‘America’, the English was halting and uneasy.  But Goreme, in the ancient province of Cappadocia, was a tourist Disneyland.  We were helpfully provided with English signs, English-speaking shopkeepers, internet cafes, car rentals, knick-knack shops, and bars presenting authentic all-you-can-drink ‘Turkish Nights’ complete with belly dancing.  

Normal turkish life was absent, or at least hidden.  There were no dolmuses, not small bufes with rotisseries of doner turning in the heat, no cram schools for the kids.  I would like to say that I was disappointed to have everything around me be so safe and so accommodating, but after a week of adventure, it was a small relief to have a place where I felt like I belonged.

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Goreme is famous for its fairy chimneys, large protuberances of rock erupting from the earth ten or fifteen stories into the air.  They look like hundreds of giant fingers, reaching up from the gorge of Goreme.  The rock is made of soft volcanic tuff, and over thousands of years people have carved houses and churches and cities into the stone.  Because of this, these bizarre towers of rock are often crowned with windows and pigeon holes, doors and stairs, that make them look alien and wonderful.

We drove towards the city of Urgup, passing by farmland rich with apricot trees, pumpkin and melon patches, grape vines, and wildflowers.  We parked on the side of the road next to Devrent Valley, a forest of fairy chimneys.  The powdery white paths that climbed the side of the valley were dotted with tourists.  They looked like ants scrambling up a pile of sugar.

We followed the tourists.  The fairy chimneys rose around us, strange, curious, like nothing we had ever seen before, like nothing we could explain.  Some were thin, some were thick.  Some looked like mushrooms with fat steps and tiny hats.  Some were stubby cones.  Some looked like perky breasts with tiny nipples, others looked like snaking phalluses.

After lunch we headed on another hike, this time in Pasabagi, a burst of roof-shaped fairy chimneys surrounded by a broad plateau.  A group of older Korean tourists were herded past an old church cut into the rock.  A band of Japanese tourists in fedoras, sports coats, man purses, bluetooth headsets and space shoes looked like they have been dropped in the canyon straight from a better future, gazing about themselves in every possible direction pointing camcorders and cameras.

We ducked into the church, behind the mass of Koreans.  The walls were scored with carvings, blackened with the soot of fires and candles, inlaid with alcoves, fountains, settings, and foot-and-hand holds that lead up to a second floor.  It looked like a Flintstones house.

Then we wandered up the snaking trail, going higher, getting farther away from the tourists, gaining a better view on the amazing landscape, and I tried to describe the things that I was seeing.  But I had no names for them, no way to put into words the odd collection of the pillars of earth except that they were different, picturesque, otherworldly, novel.  How did these things even happen?  I didn’t know.  They were as likely the work of a bored artist, sketching out an alien landscape as they were a product of the geologic forces that accounted for such everyday things as lakes and mountains.

And then all at once I didn’t care to solve the mystery of what created the fairy chimneys.  They were beautiful, and I was silenced by their beauty.

It just felt good to be walking in the kind sun, away from the city, out of the car, going out of earshot of the babble of languages.  After the boredom of yesterday’s ten-hour drive, our hike returned us to the realer world of walking and sweat.

We were silent.  But this was not the grumpy silence that had overcome us before.  We were silent because our lips were dumb to the pleasure of our legs and feet and skin as they walked surely over the uncertain ground.  And so what use did words have?  I didn’t want to understand how the fairy chimneys were formed, or who had carved out those rooms of rocks, or the history of invasion and conquest that scoured the landscape.  I just wanted to walk and look.

We made it to the topmost point and looked out for a moment.  Then we walked gingerly down the loose slope.

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We ate dinner at the Top Deck Cafe, a year-old restaurant of stupendous hospitality and warmth—the best dining experience I’ve had in a whole year and a half of living in Turkey.  As we stood outside the restaurant, looking over the simple menu, the owner and chef Mustafa Ciftci swept us into the kitchen, where he showed us all the food that was on offer that day.  There were succulent lamb chops, chicken soup, mezze—Turkish appetizers—and vegetables.  Mustafa’s wife Zaida worked in the kitchen, while the couple’s two daughters provided us with menus and brought us to our seats on the floor along the wall.

The restaurant was a traditional Goreme house, a cave carved into the solid rock.  The eldest daughter, took our orders, and soon our small low-lying table was spread with a beautiful mezze plate of rice-stuffed vine leaves, home-made humous, chicken salad, eggplant, and a half-dozen other dips, spreads and nibbles, which we tucked into hurriedly, hungry from travel and the hike.

Soon our main dishes came.  I got the lamb chops.  The meat was so soft that when I picked up a bone the flesh simply fell off onto the plate.  The couple sitting next to us from New Zealand said it was the best lamb they’d ever had.  And they were from New Zealand, where there are more sheep than people.

As we ate, a conversation bubbled amongst the tables around us.  In the far corner an American man and a Turkish-American woman who were spending three weeks exploring all of turkey.  Next to our cushions were the Kiwis, who were sleepily full.  They were taking a year off everything to go see what they could of the world.  At the table to my left sat an older Dutch couple who were about to brave the wonders of the east.  We swapped stories of traveling Turkey, and jokes, and advice, and the restaurant was noisy with good-natured laughter.  The restaurant had the sort of conviviality you always want when you’re traveling.  Everyone was kind and happy, willing to talk and to chuckle.  And it had all happened so naturally.

When the meal was done the younger daughter brought us tea and the guestbook to sign.  The book was thick with compliments in dozens of languages, sentences upon sentences, pages upon pages.  It was amazing that the place had been open for only a year, and received this much good-will.  I picked up the pen, but for the second time that day my words failed me.  I couldn’t say anything.  The meal had been fantastic, the conversation friendly, the atmosphere open.  But I couldn’t write.  I couldn’t spoil the magic of that dinner by putting it into words.  So I wrote only a sentence, and passed the book on.  We drank our after-dinner teas and prepared to head to bed.

As we left, passing by the kitchen which stood next to the front door, we stopped to pay our compliments to Mustafa and Zaida.  We ended up standing there, chatting to the whole Ciftci family—mother and father and two daughters—until past ten at night.

“This cave is actually where I was born,” Mustafa told us, pointing to the far right corner of the dining room.  “There.”

The Ciftcis treated us like old family friends.  We showed them how to get English books on their iPads but soon ended up playing the Baby Monkey (Going Backwards On A Pig) App.  Our conversation fluttered with little tangents and jokes and digressions.  And for a moment it didn’t feel like we were in a restaurant where we had paid for the pleasure of eating, but at our friend’s house, chatting in the sleepy time after dinner.  We left reluctantly, pulled to our beds by tiredness and the promise of another full day.


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

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

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!


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

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

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...

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

Day Five: Urfa, A City Of Pilgrims, A City Of People. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

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

We woke up in Urfa, the heat already rising, and gorged ourselves on a huge Turkish breakfast with three kinds of cheese, roast peppers, katmer—a delicious sweet green pancake—honey, eggs with Turkish sausage, olives, cool kaymak, tomatoes, cucumbers, french fries, and a basket of bread that the dutiful waiters insisted on refilling again and again.  We started to talk, but our tired conversation was overcome by the TV, which played a selection of the most manufactured US pop, and soon we just ate, and craned our heads around to gaze gap-mouthed at the latest Keisha video.

The city if Urfa is a palimpsest of names and histories stretching back over a eleven thousand years.  In 1984 the city was renamed Sanliurfa—Glorious Urfa—in honor of its tenacity in the Turkish War of Independence.  Urfa itself was named after the biblical city of Ur, Islamic scholars believing that this was legendary settlement where the prophet Abraham once lived.  Before that, Urfa was called as Edessa, a bustling metropolis of the Byzantine Empire.

After breakfast we headed outside, but the heat, even this early in the morning,  burdened our shoulders like a real weight.

We walked through the busy, broad streets, passing medieval towers, remarkable mosques, women dressed in purple headscarves with noses pierced with gold.  An old man in droop-crotched shalwar pants putted his motorbike up the sidewalk at a little more than walking pace.  We stopped in a shop hanging with dried peppers and eggplant husks, selling three different kinds of famous Urfa hot pepper in three qualities—’Home’, ‘Lux’ and ‘Extra’.  The city gave us too much to look at, and too much to think about, so that we walked around like people half-asleep, snapping photos of this oriental scene and that one.  It is hard to recognize Urfa’s monuments, bazaar and people as real living things, and not merely touristic photo opportunities.

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Close to the bazaar is the sacred quarter of the city, a lawny tree-shaded expanse of marble courtyards, mosques, fountains and benches, filled with families and pilgrims.  The people here were conservative looking.  There was hardly any bare-headed women.  Many men were dressed traditionally, in saggy shalwars and bright lavender head-wraps.

Urfa is a city of pilgrimage.  According to Islamic tradition, Urfa is the birthplace of the profit Abraham, and this scared complex full of indolent tourists presses up against the cave in which he was supposed to be born.  There are two small doors entering this holy site, one for men and one for women, and a tired security guard sits in between them, dealing with questions and donations.

After taking off my shoes and ducking through the entrance to the sacred cave, I walked into a small room crowded with feet and shoulders.  At the front of the room a thick plexiglass barrier covered the dim grotto—the place of the birth of the prophet Abraham.  Children and old men washed their hands in the sink in the right corner, and then hold their palms face up in prayer.  The room smelled lightly of feet.  I tried to sidle up to the window so I could get a better view of the green-painted stone platform that stood in the grotto, but I was worried that I was getting in someone’s way, and interrupting the seriousness of the prayers, so I left.

Outside I stood a moment in the heat, waiting for my friends to finish their explorations, watching the kids dip their feet into the fountain.

“Well, that was boring,” someone says before we walk off to our next site.

In the shade of the mosque abutting the shrine, two men laid asleep or ill, their coats thrown up over their heads against the sun, their feet bare and black with callouses.

We wandered two minutes or so from the Cave of Abraham before we made it to the Sacred Fish Pool.  Tradition says that the cruel king Nimrod tried to catapult Abraham into a burning pyre.  But God turned the fire to water, and the coals to fish and landed safely Abraham into a rose bush, so accordingly Urfa’s scared quarter is decorated with a large rectangular pool full of holy fish.  We took tea beside the fish pond.  Young men pushed boats to the fountain in the center of the pool, propped a ladder against it, and climbed on top of it, unwinding a long green hose with which they cleaned.

Cleaning the fountain.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The water was a soft green, and well-fed happy looking carp bobbed their heads out of the water.  Urfa’s heavy sun was mottled through the trees, and the wind blowing over the water gave a freshness that eased the heat.  The carp would crowd around the edge of the pool, waiting for the tourists to throw them a handful of fish food, opening and closing their yellow-lipped, toothless mouths.  A pudgy fish food seller had positioned himself under an umbrella, carefully measuring brown pellets from a hessian bag at his feet into small metal tea saucers and plastic baggies.  He had the radio on, that softly blared with the latest international pop.  Keisha came on and he subtly tapped his foot, while his mustachioed face kept the same hard mercantile expression.

I walked around the pool, looking at the carp.  Then I saw a knot of fish, jostling and nervous.  In the center I could see the pale white gash of flesh.  The fish were fighting over a fish corpse, tearing at its scales before dragging it to the bottom of the pool where it disappeared.

Fish!  Sacred fish!  Photo by Jenna Staff.

The Urfa citadel stood atop the hill, looking over the scared gardens.  We had to climb it.  According to the informational plaque that stood in front of the ticket office, the citadel was first built in 9500 BC, but it was more likely erected first in the time of the Roman Empire.  Each new ruler of Urfa renovated the citadel, adding monuments and improvements to the old edifice of strong rock, so that the place now stands as a patchwork of stones and arches of different ages.  Two tall Corinthian columns topped it, beautiful and strange, like a set goalposts for some massive invisible football game in the sky.

Urfa.  Photo by Jenna Staff.

Once we reached the top of the citadel, the whole city was laid out in front of us like the spread of food at a hotel buffet.  The watered healthy green of the trees in the sacred gardens sprouted in tufts, the glinting metal domes of the new mosques in the distance, the clouds clutched against the horizon, and the burst of new development around the city’s edges high and glassy.  Behind us was what looked to be a slum, a crumbling mess of concrete shanties propped together with rotting wood and tarps.  A mother led her child out of a dark doorway and took down a piece of washing from a clothesline, ignoring the ancient castle in whose shadow she lived.

We walked back to the hotel by way of the maze-like bazaar, checking the prices on trinkets that might serve as good presents for the folks back home.  The stalls were busy with shops of every kind, gold, tea, shirts, cups, plates, bags of cheap tobacco as yellow as bread, folk crafts, fabrics.  And the winding passageways were cluttered with people as varied as the goods:  peasants from the surrounding countryside, rich conservative tourists in fashionable hijabs, and us, the short-clad, picture snapping sun-burnt barbarians.  Two women in headscarfs budged their way through the crowd, each shouldering huge rolls of thick grey foam as big as a donkey.

In the bazaar we met a hustling sixth-grade shopkeeper who, like the majority of men in the city is named Ibrahim, after the prophet Abraham.  He was short for sixth grade, and when he relaxed he looked like one of my students during the break between classes.  But then his eyes would glint with the penetrating canny of a businessman.  His English was simple yet confident in a way that suggested he learned things very quickly.  We tried to bargain, but Ibrahim just smiled, and his prices were fair, so we all bought a little thing from him—a Turkish coffee pot, a sugar dish.

I interviewed  him in a combination of my haltering Turkish and his English.  His favorite school subject was Math.  He liked Ben 10.  I could easily imagine him then as one of my own students back in Istanbul, his life a clamor of schoolwork and friends and breaks between classes.  But as we were talking an urchin sidled up to Ibrahim’s store and started to finger some of his goods.  Ibrahim’s boy’s face hardened.  He barked.  The urchin cringed and melted back into the crowd.  Once the threat was gone, the child in his eyes came back.

We got him to pose in his shop.  “Be a businessman,” I said.  He set his face as hard as he could, crossing his arms over his chest.  He was proud of his shop, of his stock of goods.

By then the heat of the day was up.  We splashed around in the hotel pool until the evening.

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Harran is a small village nine miles north of the Syrian border, a good half an hour drive from Urfa down a straight new road lined with rich green farmland.  We turned down a smaller road, following first the signs for Harran, and once we found Harran, we followed the signs for ‘Tourist Center,’ keeping a look-out for the touristic sites we’d read about in the guidebooks.

But Harran is not a museum.  Harran will only reveal itself slowly.  Harran is a living village, where people work, marry, have children, and try to live the same as they had for centuries.  The new addition of tourists drawn by the city’s distinctive beehive mud huts will not change that.

We stopped and asked a man for directions.  Directions where?  Directions to Harran.  To the mud huts.  To the sites that we had to see.  He smiled curiously.  We were there, he explained.  We nervously regarded the mud-colored huts and the rank of cheap eateries on the roadside.  Could this be it?  I thought of turning back around, returning to the safety of our hotel.  The man still stood helpfully at our open window, and after a moment he offered to find us a guide.  We don’t need a guide, we decided, and the man shrugged, pointing down a dirt road.  There’s where you can go if you want to see the village, he said.

Our car rumbled over the uneven, potholed dirt road.  Around us were dozens of those hand-made mud-brick huts crowned with kumbats—large distinctive domes found in only three other places on earth.  These huts have become symbols of Urfa.  But we felt uneasy.  This was no museum we were driving into.  This was life.  Women were slowly walking home from the fields.  Children were playing bare-feet in the dirt behind their houses.  And through it all clambered a dusty, small blue car filled with foreigners snapping pictures out their windows of this very authentic village life.  A trio of dirty young children ran barefoot in the plume of dust we left behind, jumping with exuberance.

We returned to the main road and parked.  Long-haired goats chewed on something in the muddy embankment.  “I guess this is it,” one of us said.  We ventured up a dirt road to look around and we were quickly met by a class-room’s worth of small children, sullenly selling good-luck charms.  We tried our best to ignore them, but they followed a few steps behind us, polite and silent.  A small girl with huge eyes not more than seven years old had a baby tied to her back with a blue handkerchief, and the handkerchief would sometimes slip, so she would foist it up again.  She wasn’t trying to sell anything to us, or to ask us for money.  She, like us, was looking.

We have interrupted these people’s lives and we don’t want to interrupt them any more.  We turn back, get the number of the tour guide from a food truck, and wait by the car while the children orbit us with a quiet curiosity.

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A man led us past a honey-colored tumbling stone castle and into the heart of Harran.  The castle was first built by the Hitties who established there a temple to Sin, the goddess of the moon.  When the Romans replaced the Hitties, they converted the temple into a church.  When the Umayyads took the castle from the Romans, they made the church into a caravansary.  Now the castle stands empty and crumbling, a monument to nothing, while children play in its shadow.

We parked next to a large mud hut with eighteen kumbats rising into the late afternoon sky.  This was Harran House, a traditional hut made to satisfy the curiosity of tourists.  Outside camels, cows, horses, goats and chickens mingled with tea-drinking men.

We were introduced to our young guide Eyup.  We walked a little up a grassy hill towards the crumbling foundations of a once-large building, a huge crumbling tower rising beside it.  Eyup told us that these was the remains of the world’s first university, amd there—he pointed to the far corner of the ruins—was a the library, a legend of the world, which  drew scholars from across the world to study alchemy, religion, and astronomy.  The tall tower, still standing, its top broken like a cut reed—that was once a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory.  One of the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh was unearthed over there, by that hill.  It was here that the Roman Emperor Crassus was defeated by the Parthians, and had molten gold poured down his throat.

We climbed a mound that rose beside the ruins, where weather-worn stone walls were being scraped out of the earth, the ancient bricks the same color as the falling light.  Beneath this hill, Eyup told us, lie the ruins of eight successive civilizations.  It is strange, I think, looking at the ghostly shape of the excavated old city, how bricks look pretty much the same over the whole span of human history.  They look exactly like bricks.

This done, we returned to Harran House.  We went inside the first kumbat where Eyup dressed us up in traditional clothes and we posed for pictures.

The inside of the house looked much bigger from the inside than it did on the outside.  The walls were hung with mementos.  In the kitchen it was cups, lamps, and a goat skin used to make the traditional Turkish yogurt drink Ayran.  The man’s salon was covered in old rugs and pillows.  The marriage room decorated with tapestries, a trousseau and a wedding dress hung on the wall.  “The house is hot in the winter, and cool in the summer,” Eyup told us proudly.

After that we rested in the declining light, drinking tea and talking.  We asked Eyup about himself.  He is in high school.  He has 14 brothers and sisters.  He speaks Arabic, Turkish and English.  He learned English from speaking with tourists, and he dazzles us with the snatches of Italian and French he’s picked up from other passing travellers.

Before it felt like we were trespassers into Harran’s daily life, but now, we are guests, sipping tea, letting the night rise around us.  People have been drinking tea here, I think, since the silk road wound its way up from China and first brought packets of tea to Europe.  The sunset bulged, the color of rose-petal jam, blowing the fresh night wind over the landscape.  The sun burned the sky orange and purple, flooding the day’s last light over the nearby ruins.  Here, I thought, we had seen something more than ruins, more than a citadel, more than the legendary birthplace of Abraham.  In Harran we were welcomed to look at a glimpse of real life.  It was not the remarkable and preserved touristic life of travel brochures, but a real life that like the ruins of Harran, had been built atop the past.


The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

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