http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~pf/travel/turkey.diary.3 (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
Diary of a Foreigner Living in Turkey (Part 3) July 26, 1994.
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| Seker BayramI (12 - 15 March 1994) |
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For Seker BayramI (Sugar Feast in English, "eid-al-fitr" in Ara-
bic, i.e. the Islamic holiday at the end of "ramazan" ("ramadan"
in Arabic), the fasting month), I drove with Andrew to the
Mediterranean Sea ("akdeniz" in Turkish: the White Sea). Here's
an account of what we saw, and of what we did and thought.
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Saturday 12 March 1994
The road
In Ankara, it is still cold as we leave in the early morning,
heading south towards Konya (the city of Mevlana and the "Whir-
ling Dervishes", also see my first Diary). For the "bayramlar",
all of Turkey is traveling to see their relatives or to relax at
some resort, so traffic tends to be rather dense, except that
trucks are (normally!) not allowed to circulate. But it isn't
too bad on the Konya road, as most people head west to istanbul,
respectively south-west to Antalya, Marmaris, Bodrum, izmir, etc.
So we just have to pay attention to the comparatively small
trickle of cars heading south-east to Adana, Cappadocia, or
"lesser" resorts on the eastern Mediterranean. After Konya, we
even virtually have the road to ourselves, as we head south
straight across the "Toros DaGlarI" (Taurus Mountains) in order
to check them out for future trips. These mountains are indeed
as spectacular as every guidebook or friend told us so far, so we
decide to be back there some day for hiking purposes. The road
winds up and down the slopes, the higher parts being snow-
covered, and we advance painstakingly slowly, but have the time
to admire the place. Eventually, around lunch-time, we "fly"
down the final slope to Manavgat, on the Mediterranean.
We turn east, towards Alanya, our first objective. But hunger
compels us to stop earlier. Unfortunately, as for the rest of
this trip, and as during every "bayram", tracking down an open
"lokanta" (restaurant) is a major feat: virtually the whole econ-
omy grinds to a halt, as everybody is supposed to be
staying/eating with their relatives, rather than wasting energy
on visiting places. The few open "bakkallar" (groceries) and
"lokantalar" can usually be found in bigger villages, or near
summer-resorts, but the choice will be very restricted. Eventu-
ally, after numerous halts for asking around, we do find an open
"lokanta" (probably run by some greedy people, but why care when
you are hungry?), which everybody else roaming around seems to
have found. A filling basic meal later, we drive the remaining
stretch to Alanya, where finding a dirt-cheap pension is a cake-
walk at this time of the year.
Alanya
So we have the whole afternoon to see this beautiful city, which
isn't yet overrun this season by German package tourists.
Indeed, many of the locals seem to be complaining about this, so
they bask in the sunlight and enjoy the last few weeks before the
big tide of the Deutsch-Mark economy takes over. The harbor is
very nice, and features one of Turkey's main postcard-shots (also
depicted on the 250,000TL bank-note): the massive "KIzIl Kule"
(red tower) built in the 13th century by the Seldjuk Turks.
There is a small ethnographic museum inside, and the view from
its 33m-high top is quite beguiling. A small overgrown path
leads from there along the sea-side ramparts to a superbly well-
preserved boat-yard of the same era. From there, we head
straight up the hill towards the citadel that dominates the city.
There is no real path, it's just across the thickets, sometimes
past old decaying Ottoman wooden houses, and finally we reach an
asphalt road near the top. Life seems to have stood still
here: it's village life at a stone-throw from the city-center,
and people live simply here and in defiant mockery of the greedy
life down there. The old mosque is closed, and the "imam" no-
where in sight, so we continue our crawl up to the main part of
the impressive fortifications. We'd only have 15' left for the
visit, so we skip it, and wait for the sunset near a wall
overhanging the cliff and Cleopatra's Beach (she's said to have
sun-bathed there, while flirting with Marc Antony, who "gave" her
Alanya, so that her workers could deforest the surrounding hills
to rebuild her navy).
Conning the con-artist
After a "dolmuS"-ride back to the city-center, it's "baklava ve
Cay" time (time for a snack and tea at a pastry-shop, my favorite
pastime in Turkey). So we enter the nearest "pastane" (also see
my second "Diary") and gorge ourselves on, well, gorgeously
sweet pastry (it's the Sugar Feast after all, so nobody feels
guilty). As tables become scarce, two middle-aged Turks ask us
whether they can share our table. Sure! Overhearing our discus-
sion in English, one of them stirs, and asks us in perfect En-
glish where we are from. Aaah, so we really are no f*cking (sic)
Germans (1st hint)! It turns out that Ali was a professional
sailor and lived for many years in Australia. Hocam (literally
"my teacher", his nickname for his younger cousin) doesn't speak
English, and is moonlighting as a taxi-driver. Ali is slightly
tipsy from beer, but apparently for good reasons: his clan ex-
tended to 532 members (how precise!, 2nd hint) a few hours ago,
as one of his daughters (among 9 children) delivered her first
baby-boy in istanbul, so he's celebrating his becoming a grand-
father (for the second time).
A few rounds of "Cay" later, it's dinner-time, and Ali invites us
to have dinner at a fish-farm of his clan in the immediate
hinterland of Alanya. A few "Sure, why not?" glances between An-
drew and me later, Hocam drives us all (taxi-meter not running)
to that place. Common-sense dictates us to memorize every twist
and turn of the road, so that we find our way back, just in case.
Ali explains us that he's half-Azeri, half Kurdish, and that his
clan has been moved in the early 1930s from Kurdistan to Alanya.
He doesn't seem to bear Ataturk or Turkey any grudges, though, on
the contrary, and his clan is obviously prospering. He asks us
where we work in Turkey, and after our telling him, he exclaims
that his youngest son just finished Prep School at Bilkent with
high honors, and even got a medal from the late President Turgut
Ozal. We should definitely meet his son, once back. So we ask
for his name and department, but somehow Ali doesn't want to give
these easy details (3rd hint). Eventually he decides that his
son will enter the Faculty of Engineering: fat luck, I tell him,
because I teach there, and Ali visibly winces (4th hint) at his
bad guess. As we enter the clan's area, Ali instructs Hocam to
stop at every passersby to wish a nice "bayram", and to show us
that he is indeed known by everybody here (nice show, Ali!).
The fish-farm is totally deserted (the clan is obviously cele-
brating their "bayram" somewhere else?!). But somebody *is*
there, and must now pose as cook for the next few hours. After
designating the fish we want from the pool, and after preferring
wine over beer (the very best family-wine, though somehow served
from sealed Turasan [the best winery in Cappadocia] bottles, 5th
hint), we are alone with Hocam, while Ali helps the "cook" in
preparing a salad (with only the freshest produce from the clan's
gardens!). Hocam starts the oven for some heat, and lays the
table for us. Eventually, they dish up a decent dinner, though
only for Andrew and I. While we eat, and finish off almost two
bottles of white wine, Ali, Hocam, and the "cook" each nurse
several bottles of Efes beer.
Only Ali speaks English, and Hocam looks terribly bored. Somehow
we wish our Turkish was better, so that Hocam could tell us which
way we are going. But it's all fun, and perfectly safe and inno-
cent so far, so why worry? As the evening advances, and the al-
cohol level in our vessels increases, Ali's stories become more
and more outrageous.
He grabs a "saz" (a Turkish string instrument) from the wall, and
plays a few inspired songs. Our clear favorite is the "Kilim
Song", his own composition, which he supposedly sang in Monte
Carlo while on a Kurdish cultural delegation received by French
President Francois Mitterrand (yes!, 6th hint). He translates
the lyrics of this ode to the kilim and the women/girls who weave
them. But the late President Turgut Ozal (himself of Kurdish
origins!) apparently didn't like the political under-tone of
Ali's song, so Ali had to spend 10 days in jail for it (7th
hint). Come on, good old boy, your nose is soon going to grow
through the window! But the buzzword is finally out!
Next come the stories of his sexual heroics [partly censored
here!] in the harbors all around this world. His description of
Dahab on the Egyptian Sinai peninsula is very accurate though;
that's where he seduced a Belgian girl (like most Turks, he can't
tell Luxembourg and Belgium apart: referring to your home-country
is a classical strategy; 8th hint, especially as he seems con-
vinced that Belgian French is the most beautiful-sounding version
of all French dialects: oh well?!), right under the eyes of her
hapless boyfriend. Many conquests later (including the promise
that when we go to Alanya's bars later tonight, many women, even
married ones, will fall around his neck trying to lure him into
their beds, as he's known to be the best lover in the area!), he
admits that the very best and most beautiful woman in the world
is nevertheless his (Kurdish) wife, and he almost moves us to
tears with his heart-rendering account of her goodness and for-
giveness.
Then comes the confession that he's in fact incredibly rich, but
that money ain't important, so he is never showing it (off-the-
rack clothing, unshaven, etc). But his son (the one at Bilkent's
Prep School) didn't want it that way, and asked him for a car so
that he could show off on Bilkent's campus, where all these ou-
trageously rich daughters parade around in search of wealthy hus-
bands. So Ali didn't buy his (still unnamed) son only one car,
but three cars, including a Ferrari (9th hint)! Part of the
wealth comes from a chain of 97 (yeah, this fascination for pre-
cise numbers!) carpet-stores managed by the now 532 (how the hell
did he remember that figure?) members of his clan all around Tur-
key (make that 10 hints). We still don't bite the bait, though.
Willing to keep our promise of treating him to some beer in town
after he has treated us to dinner, we ask Hocam to drive us back
to Alanya. Hocam is immensely relieved at this opportunity, and
speeds away as soon as he drops us in front of the Manhattan Bar.
Surprisingly, none of the women at the bar even bothers to look
at Ali... Three rounds of beer later, we "miraculously" get back
to talking about carpets, and this time we deliberately walk into
the trap. "Yeah, of course we are interested in some fine *old*
kilims. [...] So none of your 97 stores has such ones, they only
run these junky, flashy, machine-woven tourist kilims? Too bad.
[...] Aaah, but one of your friends has a few rare old pieces!
We should definitely have a look at them!".
So off we are, after a phone call to the friend so that he open
his store at this ungodly hour. Hey, but let's pick up a bottle
of "rakI" (the Turkish answer to the French "pastis" or the Greek
"ouzo") at a still-open grocery on the way (on Andrew's tab).
The store owner looks like a "dinci" (religious man) and refuses
to share the "rakI". He lets Ali display his kilims, and sits at
his desk, chain-smoking and vaguely hoping for a good deal. Ali
shows us a lot of crappy kilims, and Andrew doesn't hesitate to
tell him that we want to see *real* ones. By then, the "Cember
sakkal" (round-bearded) owner understands that no sale to naive
tourists is in sight, and he turns supremely bored. Ali is
desperate to spot some finer kilims, but (experienced) Andrew one
by one rejects all proposals on the grounds of knot density, ar-
tificial coloring, non-existent colors in nature, tourist-motives
that are not conform to Islam, bad quality wool (if at all), etc.
Sensing trouble, I don't touch the "rakI" and observe the stand-
off between Ali and Andrew. Ali even takes a lighter to burn
some of the fringes of a kilim to show us that it *is* wool (it
would burn slowly), and empties a full ashtray onto a kilim to
rub the ash into a kilim to show us that they *are* natural
colors (they would not disappear), all this to the slight dismay
of the wincing store-owner who knows that no liras are going to
change hands tonight. Eventually, as the show becomes pathetic,
we head out and sincerely apologize to the owner for the wake-up
and mess. On the sidewalk, we decide the game is over, and
"wealthy" Ali begs us for 300,000TL so that he can ride home in a
taxi (which amount of course would take him much further). As we
decline, he gives up and walks into the opposite direction as we
started walking, not before saying that it was all fine until we
started talking about kilims. True! After having found out
where we are with respect to our pension, we stagger back and di-
agnostic the events: he's obviously a con-artist, but probably
didn't mean to try and con us into a carpet-sale until very late
in the evening. He definitely deserves a Guiness-book entry for
MPC (most-patient con-man)!
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Sunday 13 March 1994
Aspendos
Next morning, after a cold shower in the hot-water-during-24hrs
bathroom, we drive west along the coast, past Manavgat again, to
Aspendos. This ancient site features the best-preserved Roman
theater of Asia Minor, and is in fact virtually intact! Built by
Zenon, it offers 15,000 seats, features a rare stage-wall, and
the acoustics is excellent. Behind the theater are the scrawling
ruins of the city proper, with a basilica, a nymphaeum, an odeon,
etc, and last, but not least, a superb aqueduct.
We continue our trip west, and have a very late lunch at some
gas-station on our way to Antalya. Then a quick look (we make it
there too late to actually enter the site) at Perge, another Pam-
phylian town that was successively conquered by Alexander the
Great, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and finally the
Turks. An impressive stadium is outside the range of a paid
visit, so we have a look at that one in the 15' before they close
down the whole area.
Eventually, we set out for the remaining few kilometers to An-
talya, where we find a dirt-cheap pension in an restored Ottoman
house of the "Kale ici" (inside the old fortress).
Antalya
It's dinner time, but we don't settle at any of the tacky tourist
restaurants in the Kale ici or at the harbor. Instead, we find a
friendly cafeteria-like open-air affair somewhere further into
the city. A pleasant meal later, we stroll through town, and
have some "baklava" in a "pastane", before entering a bar for
some more night-life. The place is very crowded, and we are vir-
tually the only foreigners inside. A local band plays an in-
teresting mix of Turkish, arabesk, and western music, and every-
body is generally having a good time.
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Monday 14 March 1994
We have breakfast at a "Cayhane" in the park facing the Antalya
bay. It's a superbly beautiful bay, guarded by the snow-covered
peaks of the Bey DaGlarI mountains: here you can ski in the morn-
ing and swim in the afternoon. Then we do a daylight stroll
through the Kale ici, a UNESCO-protected monument, where virtual-
ly all the old Ottoman houses have been restored and transformed
into pensions.
Termessos
Eventually, we set out, driving up the mountain behind Antalya,
heading towards Termessos, an ancient Lykian town interestingly
constructed on top of a mountain. This spared its people a con-
quest by Alexander the Great, who didn't even waste his time and
men on trying to take this impregnable city. But then nature
conquered them: an earthquake destroyed most of their city, and
forced them to leave it. And that's how we find it: overgrown by
trees and bushes, with ruins lying around "in romantic disorder",
as Andrew's guidebook puts it. A trail is laid out for the visi-
tors so that they can visit the most important leftovers:
cisterns, aqueducts, gymnasium, odeon, and even a theater in this
eagle's nest. But there is much more to it, and we spend the
whole afternoon climbing around a site that seems to be the Turk-
ish answer to the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. A distin-
guishing feature of the Lykians compared to the Greeks and Romans
is their tombs: huge stone sarcophagi are literally all over the
place, often dispersed down the slopes by the earthquake, and all
broken up by grave-robbers. The site coordinator must be a pret-
ty humorous person: in front of some pile of stones, sign #18
says "One of the many unidentified buildings" (sic).
Finally, our stomachs tell us that we forgot to have lunch, so we
stroll back to the car and drive down the mountain frantically
looking for a "lokanta". Eventually, after a much-needed Pepsi
at a grocery, and an amiable chat with the grocer while perched
on Pepsi crates, we find an open "lokanta" near the gas-stations
at the main road from Antalya to Burdur. They have an interest-
ing grill-it-yourself concept there: you just buy your salad,
drinks, and raw meat (by the weight), and then prepare it your-
self on a grill!
So, a few hundred grams of meat later, we drive back to Antalya,
and on south along the Lykian coast, towards Kemer.
Camyuva/Kemer
This night, we need not search for a pension, as we have the keys
for a private summer residence of some wealthy Austrian baron
(who knows a German in istanbul, whose girlfriend teaches at
Bilkent, whom we know). So we set up quarters there, and have a
quick look at the deserted village of Camyuva. As nothing seems
to be open, we drive the few miles down the road to Kemer, an ar-
tificial resort stomped out for German package-tourists. But
it's only March, so even Kemer is pretty empty. We find a nice
cafeteria, where some local politician entertains part of his po-
tential electorate for the upcoming local elections. Then on to
a cozy bar, which is virtually entirely occupied by a group of
high-school kids from izmir. The solo musician at the keyboards
doesn't know how to react to his audience: whenever he plays
Western music (too often), people sit down and talk; but whenev-
er he throws in a few Turkish/Arabesk songs (fresh off the
charts), everybody just goes crazy, especially the girls who
start dancing on the tables! And, boy!, in case you didn't know,
Turkish girls sure know how to dance with their hands and how to
sway their hips...
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Tuesday 15 March 1994
Olympos
When I wake up in the morning, it suffices to reach through the
window to grasp an orange from a tree (they have so many oranges
here that they are probably a public good)! As we leave the
house, a suspicious neighbor shows up and asks us whether we know
the baron. So we recite the standard story to which we had been
carefully coached by Maureen, and indeed it lightens up his face
and we may even fill the car with oranges!
After breakfast at a roadside cafe, we continue driving south
along the Lykian coast. It's supremely beautiful here, and the
lush pine tree forests make us "high" on the green color (Anato-
lia is a study in brown during the winter). Eventually, we turn
left, down a steep side-road, and then left again onto a dirt-
road across a bucolic countryside. The road crosses a small
river quite a few times, and at one point we help a Turkish cou-
ple pull their car out of the river (you have to cross it swift-
ly, because of the soft bed). Then we reach the back entrance to
the Olympos site, yet another set of ancient ruins (there are
10,000 years of history under virtually every stone in Turkey).
The archaeology per se is only for experts, but the site is ex-
ceptional: it stretches along the river to the Mediterranean,
where the superb sandy beach seems miraculously still untouched
by mass tourism. We take a swim (although the water is not ex-
actly warm at this time of the year) and crawl through the over-
grown ruins as well as up a hill for a better overview. This is
a very romantic place, and certainly a good candidate for a re-
turn some day: there are some nice hiking opportunities here, in-
cluding a walk to the "chimaera", a set of perpetual flames.
The road
It's Tuesday afternoon, and we both have to teach tomorrow morn-
ing, in distant Ankara, so we'd better get out of here (too
bad...). After yet another super-late lunch, at a roadside cafe
near Antalya, we head up north through the mountains towards
Afyon. This time we get the full shock of a "bayram" traffic:
everybody seems to be trying to kill themselves (and us!), espe-
cially the obnoxious drivers from istanbul. Somehow we manage to
escape a few inescapable close calls with reckless drivers.
After a quick dinner-stop at a very big gas station (almost a
city) near Afyon, we find that somebody has washed my dusty car!
Thank you, Turkey, for being so considerate! Eventually, we do
reach Ankara.
This is the end of a great weekend.
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Sincerely,
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\O/
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Pierre Flener ||-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-/\+-+-||
(pf@bilkent.edu.tr) ||===================\=\===||
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