İSTANBUL TO TRABZON, THE BLACK SEA COAST

Sept. 24, 2000
Hotel Gold, Samsun, Türkiye

We were a bit worse for wear on our last day in İstanbul. Deanna was hungover and I was developing a migraine from all the carbon monoxide. Türkiye had terrible air pollution, from cigarettes as much as from motor vehicles. We got up late and met Onur at 11:00 to return the car. We had a cup of tea with him and then Deanna went to the internet café while I did some other errands. By this time, we knew everyone in the neighborhood and no one was trying to sell us carpets, anymore.

We had lunch in the Indian restaurant after purchasing our plane tickets to Samsun (about $80.) The food was very good and we had a gorgeous Circassian waiter. We went back to the room to pack and nap. Rather late, we got up and went back to the neighborhood kebap place where we had a good, long conversation with Fuat, the manager, about restaurants in America.

During the afternoon, we visited a used bookshop selling books in English. The fellow minding the shop, Serdar, was studying English idioms. We spent an amusing hour defining expressions for him and often acted them out in what devolved into a game of charades that had us all in stitches. It was the highlight of the day.

After dinner, we paid our hotel bill and went upstairs to finish packing and go to sleep. My headache was getting pretty bad by that point.

The next morning, we had to get up at 5:00 to get to the airport on time. Refik came up and helped us carry our bags down. He was sleepy and made us tea while we waited for the shuttle. The shuttle cost us a mere 2 million lire each (as opposed to 14 million for a cab), but we were packed in like sardines. They dropped us off at the international terminal and we had to drag our bags all the way across to the domestic terminal.

View of Samsun from Hotel Gold

The flight was uneventful and we arrived in Samsun by 9:30. The Samsun airport turned out to be quite a way from the town and it cost us 20 million lire for a taxi. We had a reservation at an expensive hotel because they were the only ones who could speak English over the telephone. We decided to try the recommended cheap hotel, first. We got a room at the Hotel Gold with no problem and saved ourselves the difference between 35 million lire and 16 million lire. The hotel was quite nice, although only the night manager spoke English. One woman on the day shift spoke German and the day manager was very helpful and nice, even if he spoke only Turkish. We showed him our Turkish cheat sheet and he, in turn, showed us his English one. We all laughed.

Samsun was a modern city and appeared to be affluent. The main industry was tobacco. No one in Samsun tried to sell us carpets. Very few people spoke English. We learned more Turkish in one day than we had in a week in İstanbul.

People were very friendly and curious about us. Deanna’s shoe broke and we asked a cab driver (by pointing) where we could find a cobbler. He couldn’t explain, so he walked us a couple of blocks to a street corner where an old man in a prayer cap was mending shoes. He spoke no English, but was glad to see us and sent out for tea to serve us while he fixed the shoe. The bill came to about 75 cents.

I had a full-blown migraine, by this point, but I think the cobbler’s tea cured me. I had tried to sleep it off, but there was a jackhammer going beneath our window and, since Deanna absolutely refused to shut a window, it was too loud to sleep much.

We visited the museum in Samsun. It had a lovely Roman mosaic and some beautiful gold ornaments. I bought a postcard of the gold laurel wreath (full-sized) that they had on display. We walked for awhile, but it started to rain so we came back. We ate roast chicken with rice, salad, bread, water, and dessert for a combined total of less than $5. Earlier, we had beer, which was half to one third the price in İstanbul. Despite the inconvenience of having to cope in Turkish, I was glad to be out of tourist land. I was beginning to feel drained by all the people trying to take my money. In Samsun, people just tried to make us welcome. There was not such a competetive atmosphere.

Sept. 26, 2000
Hotel Horon, Trabzon, Türkiye

Yesterday, we got up and ate breakfast. The breakfast at Hotel Gold was exactly the same as the one at Hotel Park. We packed up and left our luggage in the lobby while we went out to do errands.

We wanted to buy some 3” x 5” cards to use to make Turkish flashcards. We went into the stationery store next to the hotel, but they had no idea what we were talking about. The clerk ended up giving us a small notepad out of her purse.

Next, we went back to our cobbler so that Deanna could get another pair of shoes fixed. He laughed and told his other customers how we had been there the day before.   He charged her 250K lire or about 37.5 cents to fix her shoe.

Our next stop was the ATM and then we headed back to the hotel where we sat and conversed in German with the owner’s wife while she peeled okra. We chatted with her until it was time to go to the bus station and then the desk clerk dragged our bags over there for us. We waited at the bus office for half an hour or so and then got on the service bus that took us to the otogar (bus station, usually on the outskirts of town) where we boarded the bus to Trabzon. Turkish buses are very nice. They have comfortable seats with foot rests and tray tables. The steward came around with drinks and snacks just like on an airplane.

Our route to Trabzon took us along the Black Sea through such towns as Ünye, Ordu, and Giresun. The seacoast was rocky and lovely, although very dirty in some spots. There were mountains along the other side of the road, completely covered in a jungle of green. It rained a lot in that part of the world. Trabzon was called the Seattle of Türkiye.  They appeared to be growing melons, corn, hazelnuts, and firewood, along with a tall narrow plant that we could not identify. (We later learned it was tobacco.) Ünye was a very pretty town with brightly colored buildings. From west of Giresun to Trabzon they were widening the two-lane highway by building a seawall and filling behind it. It was a huge undertaking, but was sorely needed. The bus and truck traffic made driving a slow process on the two-lane road. The drivers were not as fanatical as in Mexico, although they did pass on blind curves from time to time. In 350 kilometers, we came across only two overturned vehicles and no roadside shrines.

Trabzon was a fairly modern city and the part near the port could have been any beach town in the United States. Ataturk Alani, where our hotel was located, was older. Most of the buildings in Türkiye were four or five stories and the upper stories usually appeared to have been added later. The most prevalent construction method was to build a kind of post and beam frame out of reinforced concrete. The open areas were then filled in with hollow, clay blocks, which always seemed to be broken. Nicer buildings were plastered or tiled on the outside, but many were only faced on the front. They looked like they would crumble in an earthquake.

Turkish stairways were a source of wonder to me. They were invariably of a circular or winding variety. If you looked at the underside of them, they were smoothly plastered and betrayed no sign of supporting members. In partially finished buildings, the stairways often hung there, gracefully curving through nothingness. It had to be the land of flying carpets! I eventually learned that they were constructed of concrete and re-bar. Although the exact process remained a mystery.

We stayed in the Hotel Horon. It was a fancy hotel and we paid $50/night. Hotels could be as cheap as $7 a night, but they were frequented by Russian prostitutes and, as Deanna was also blonde, we decided to choose one of the nicer ones. For $50 in Trabzon, we got a shower curtain, minibar, and air conditioning. The breakfast was quite elaborate and included such western delights as pancakes (cold, with green onions), cornflakes, and orange juice. It was a nice break from bread with goat cheese and a hard boiled egg.

The plumbing was typically Turkish in design, although nicer than usual. Turkish plumbing all seemed to be designed with one aim in mind – to maximize splattering. All sink faucets were more than a foot above the sink, which was great if you wanted to wash your hair in the sink or fill a liter bottle with water, but lousy if you wanted to brush your teeth without taking a bath. There was no such thing as an enclosed shower in Türkiye. The water merely fell on the floor. If you were lucky, the floor sloped towards the drain. If not, you went through a lot of towels. If you had a drippy shower head, you were likely to walk around with a wet spot in the middle of your back. Turkish toilets looked normal enough, but they didn’t behave in quite the same way as western toilets. When you flushed, a great cascade of water flowed through the bowl, but almost all of it flowed back out again, leaving a good, dry surface to promote the adhesion of solid matter. Each toilet was equipped with a strategically placed nozzle on the rear of the rim which, with a twist of a knob, delivered a jet of water that missed anything important, including the solid matter stuck to the bowl. We encountered several regional variations of this design, including the toilet tank mounted high on the wall, blocking the window so it could not open and/or employing a chain so short that anyone under 5’6” could not flush. We also encounted the doesn’t quite seal and runs all night version. This model was also available in select American hotels.

Sept. 26, 2000
Hotel Horon, Trabzon, Türkiye

The Market in Trabzon

After breakfast, we wemt for a walk through the market. It was beginning to rain, so we got a couple of cold drinks and headed back to our room. When we arrived, three old ladies in hot pink gingham chadors were cleaning our room. We sat on the fire escape to sip our drinks while they finished. One could not criticize the housekeeping in the hotel. They scrubbed everything, including climbing out on the fourth story windowsill to clean the outside of the windows.

When they were done, we did laundry and then went out for lunch in a tavük (chicken) burger place that seemed to serve only spit roasted chicken wrapped in pita. Deanna did not want the bread. The best she could do was to get chicken on a plate with bread on the side. She was feeling a bit sick from all the cigarette smoke. We went back to the Derya Restaurant, where we had had dessert the night before, so she could have a bowl of soup. It had begun to rain hard, so we came back to study the Turkish flashcards I made on the bus, the previous day, and relax.

Sept. 27, 2000
Hotel Horon, Trabzon, Türkiye

We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, last night. We originally just went up for a drink but we ate so many mezes that we made dinner out of them. The grilled liver was especially good. There was a talented band playing and they played Stand By Your Man for us. We pleased them by singing along.

It rained, again, today. We got up late and didn’t leave the hotel until noon. Then we spent three hours in an internet café.

We ate lahmacun (Turkish pizza) in a large restaurant on Taksim Square. They shooed us upstairs into the ladies’ dining room. Only single men were allowed to eat downstairs. It was better up there, anyway, as no one was smoking.

The Aya Sofia Muzesi

We finished lunch around 16:00 and by then it had stopped raining. We grabbed a taxi and made a dash for the Aya Sofia Muzesi, 4km west of town. The Aya Sofia was first a church, then a mosque, later a military depot and hospital during WWII, and is now a museum. It was originally built in 1238 and the bell tower was added around 1461. It sits on a terrace overlooking the sea, on the site of an old pagan temple. Restoration began in 1957. The frescoes had been painted and plastered over during the mosque period. Most of them had been lost, but the ones in the entry hall were well preserved and quite colorful.

Bell Tower at the Aya Sofia

They gave one an idea of what the others must have looked like. There was a ruin on the north side which may have been a baptismal font, but no one knew for sure. There were also fragments from the pagan temple.

Our cab had waited for us, so he took us back to Taksim Square where we walked around for a bit and then headed for the tour company, hoping to get tickets for a tour of Sumela Monastery the next day. The tour company had closed up for the winter, but the fellow there gave us a brochure in fabulously bad English and told us where to catch a dolmuş (combi.) We wandered down the hill through the Russian section to the port. We saw a few “Natashas” but they weren’t working too hard as it was still early. We walked back up the hill and bought a bottle of raki. Then we went back to the hotel and drank, played cards, and watched the Olympics for a few hours. About 21:00, we went out for dinner. We ate chicken and eggplant with rice at a place called the Volkan. It was tasty. Then we came back to the hotel. We hoped for good weather, the next day, for our trip to Sumela.

The Coast in Trabzon

Sept. 28, 2000
Hotel Horon, Trabzon, Türkiye

We got up fairly early and set off to find a dolmuş for Sumela. We found a dolmuş and waited an hour or so for it to fill but no one else came along. We bargained with the driver and he agreed to take us for 17 million lire instead of the usual 20 million.

Fresco at Sumela

Sumela in the Distance

We drove along the road to Erzurum for about 29km and then turned off on the road to Sumela. We wound along a narrow road, concrete at first and then dirt, for another 16km, following the course of a fast moving stream. We paused a few times to take photos of the monastery from afar and to enjoy a waterfall. Eventually, we came to a small parking area where we left the dolmuş and climbed a steep path for about 300 meters up to the monastery. The original church was built into the overhanging rock in the 4th century. Some of the frescoes date back to the 9th century but they are sadly damaged by graffiti. Most of the remaining frescoes were done in the 19th century. The monastery grew over time and assumed its current form during the 19th century. It was abandoned in 1923 after the Greek Orthodox inhabitants finally accepted that Greece would never retake Sumela. Sumela is built ino an overhanging cliff face, far above the valley floor. It is so high up that it is often obscured by clouds. We were in and out of the cloud on our visit.

Sumela Monastery

The monastery was undergoing extensive restoration. A stone cutter was fashioning the caps for walls, using an electric saw and a chisel. Absent floors and roofs were also being replaced and scaffolding covered the site. We stayed for an hour or so and then were driven out by five busloads of teenagers. In Türkiye, education is only compulsory between the ages of 7 and 12. This group, who looked to be about 16, was composed of more than 80% boys. Türkiye was not THAT modern, it seemed.

Sumela Close Up

Some of the Frescoes at Sumela

Stonecutter at Work

We returned by about 13:30 and went to buy tickets for the next day’s bus to Erzurum. We ate lunch in a restaurant on the square. Deanna took some Dristan (purchased for a mere 664K lire - $1) and, when we came back to the hotel to use the john, she fell asleep and slept all afternoon. Lunch had not agreed with me and I was glad to stay home and read.