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by Catherine Harper
In 1993, I spent three months over the summer in Turkey. This wasn't an intentional pilgrimage. An acquaintance had extra tickets; I spoke a language, Kazakh, that had about the same relationship to Turkish that Chaucer's English has to ours. I hadn't traveled much. I went.
A month and a half later, I climbed over the wall into the Basilica of Saint John a few minutes before sunset. The site was closed for the evening, but the ruined walls provided easy access, and the method of entry seemed appropriate in light of my ambivalent feelings toward Saint John. The basilica is the highest point in the modern town outside of the ancient city of Ephesus, and from it I could see one of the oldest mosques in the country, the one standing pillar of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and around it all a hazy green-gold fertile valley caught in the pink and orange of the sunset. An Uzi-toting guard tried unsuccessfully to roust me and the pack of rural women and their children who had traveled to Ephesus together on holiday and who were my accidental companions that evening. The women surrounded him, talking loudly and gesturing and leaving the guard looking aggrieved, overwhelmed and at last in retreat.... And the group of us turned back to the valley, and its warmer, drier bounty, and I had some glimmering of an understanding of why goddesses have been so important to that land.
I wish I could explain Turkey. Even if I had a book to fill, even if I spent much more of my life living there, breathing the air and eating the food, I suspect I could not. When I think of my experiences of Turkey, I think of layers and layers of history, jumbled together, and the kaleidoscope that is modern Turkey's culture and people. It's the kind of place where walking down a street you can pass the entrance to a Roman era catacomb, hear eight languages, be the recipient of three offers of marriage and one pinch to your behind, pass a group of software developers out celebrating a product release and wander into a truly fabulous restaurant in a restored Ottoman building. If you want a staid, well organized, manicured and carefully laid-out presentation of history, go to Greece. In Turkey, the past and the present not only rub shoulders but stay up all night drinking together. I'd go back in a New York second.
Three months, and I never made it to Troy. I never made it to the Neolithic sites with their (possible) goddess figures. I never took a Turkish bath or saw the Black Sea. Obviously, I have a lot of unfinished business in Turkey. And it was a very busy three months.
But if you go...
Well, first, park any expectation you might have of Turkey being an Islamic country along the lines of Saudi Arabia at the airport you depart from, and leave them there. Turkey is about as secular as the United States, except more extreme in both liberal and conservative positions. You'll see women draped in black from head to toe, and women wearing hip-hugging miniskirts and halter tops. (When it comes to dress, I'd advocate moderation. Plain blouses and tea-length skirts let me fade into the background, where shorts and tank tops seemed to leave a glowing sign reading "Tourist" over my head. And don't even think of wearing a veil -- the wearing or not wearing of veils is highly political. Fascinating, and much more highly nuanced than many people expect... but Westerners aren't expected by anyone to veil themselves, and as a visitor you just don't want to go there.) You'll hear the ezins call the faithful to prayer five times a day -- some of the most beautiful music I heard in Turkey were those calls -- and you'll see 15-year-olds order beer in the local McDonald's, and never mind what Muhammad said about alcoholic beverages. Turkey changed my awareness of religion in many ways, most of them fairly subtle. I learned a lot about what it means for Christianity to be the commonly accepted default religion by the many little shocks my system felt in its absence. There's a scope in Turkey, covering the prehistoric, the classical and even a variety of flavors of monotheism, that creates a different perspective.
But back to your trip...
Get yourself a guide book, a phrase book, a map or two, and after you've spent a day or two in Istanbul (not that a day or two is sufficient, but you can always come back later) head out by bus. Find a pension when you arrive -- every bus station will be teeming with people eager to direct you to the one owned and operated by their brother and law, even at 2 in the morning. Travel light, and wear good shoes.
Take a bus to Pammukale -- in fact, take busses everywhere, and find lodging at a pension when you arrive. On the bus to Pammukale, watch ahead on the way, and you'll see the side of a mountain that looks like it has been slopped over with white paint. When you get closer, you'll start being able the see that this white is a stepping-stone series of calcium pools, a natural formation from a hot spring above. The pools are shallow, mostly, quite warm near the top and fairly cool near the base. The topmost pool at the source of the springs was held sacred, and now you can swim in the pool, in hot, strangely thick water, among fallen columns and bits of statuary... in the enclosed courtyard of a hotel.
From there, find a shuttle to Aphrodisias. If you're lucky, your shuttle driver will have nephews and nieces who have set up a fig stand at the side of the road, the girls weaving little baskets of palm fronds for the figs, the boys hawking the fruit at the roadside. Eat your fruit and throw the peels out the window. In fact, within the boundaries of a certain consideration for your health, eat everything. Eat dinner from stands on the street -- pick a stand that's doing a brisk business, so that the meat won't have been there for too long, but try it. Try the roasted corn that's sold in carts. Take a dictionary to a restaurant and test your luck. Even go into a McDonald's, not something that I'd normally recommend, to see how good a grilled chicken sandwich can be with really quality raw ingredients. And for heaven's sake, even though every travel book will tell you not to, eat the fresh fruit, eat the salads, oh my God, the very worst thing about coming back from Turkey is that everything you eat here will taste like cardboard. In Turkey, the food is fabulous.
But on to Aphrodisias...
Aphrodisias is a city dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite. But you guessed that part. To me, this site epitomized the differences between visiting archeological sites in Turkey as compared to anywhere else I've ever been. The first thing that struck me was that even in the middle of summer, even in the middle of the tourist season, there were only a few people. Sometimes, as I climbed through the ruins, I would see no one else. Nowhere did I see more than a handful of people.
There's a quietness and informality to this site. You wander along dirt paths between ruined walls, baths, an amphitheater, and down quiet streets. The site doesn't feel particularly marketed; it doesn't have the kind of under-glass feeling I'd come to expect of major archaeological sites. (As it happens, at one point I met the man who discovered the site. He did so when his driver got lost taking him to photograph a new dam, and he found himself in a town full of houses made of scavenged Roman-era stonework.) More than once, I accidentally wandered into areas that were still being excavated. The boundaries weren't clearly marked, and the workmen were resting, drinking juice in the shade during the hottest part of the day. Once, they waved me over to show off their latest finds.
I can't say all archaeological sites in Turkey are presented as sparely as Aphrodisias. There's no particular shortage in Turkey of willingness to capitalize upon the tourist industry. I can only say that I'm very glad to have missed the sound and light presentation of Haghia Sophia, for all that I could spend many more days perusing its insides. I bought my share of cheap postcards from 8-year-old street sellers. Not to mention two cookbooks, a double boiler teapot and a collection of clay whistles from the kids' adult counterparts. I was heckled at the grand bazaar and served tea and flirted with by numerous carpet merchants who gloried in their own clichéd reputation.
But Turkey isn't a museum; it isn't a place you go to tour history. In Turkey, the present is explosive and crazy, going in a million directions all at once, and history is only part of the backdrop.
After Aphrodisias... go to Istanbul. Go to the Black Sea. Find yourself a quiet seaside town along the Aegean, the kind of place without any resorts or modern hotels, the kind of place where Turkish citizens have their summer homes, and stay there a week or two, until you have a favorite restaurant and a preferred baker and have made friends with the old woman who sells white cheese for breakfast at the Tuesday market. Have lunch one day in Asia, and then take the ferry across the Bosphorus and have dinner in Europe. Open your guide book, select a place on the map, and go.
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