WHIRLING DERVISHES AND RUINS – KONYA AND ANTALYA

Oct. 24, 2000
Sema Hotel, Konya,Türkiye

Genghis came to get us in the morning, which wasn’t the plan but was very welcome. We went down and bought tickets for the 8:00 bus to Konya and then drank tea until it came. We took a shuttle bus to Nevşehir and then switched to a bus to Konya. The ride was only about two and a half hours, but it was pretty dull. We drove across grassland and sugar beet fields all the way. It was snowing a little in places but not sticking.

When we got to Konya, our bus was met by the usual collection of taxi drivers, tour operators, and carpet salesmen. We tried to shake them off because we needed to use the WC and check on bus schedules to Antalya. Two men followed us into the bus station, but we lost one when we headed for the bayan (women’s restroom.) Deanna left me with the baggage and the remaining guy and I did my best to discourage him while she was gone. Since he refused to leave, I got the bus schedule out of him and then left him to Deanna while I went to the WC. He was still there when I came back, so we followed him to the hotel he suggested. His name was Ahmed. He took us to the Hotel Sema on the minibus, which was quite a savings, as it was a long ride. The hotel was okay, so we decided to stay. We ate lunch in the hotel restaurant and then Ahmed took us to meet his friend, Sami, who was an English professor at the university and had a translating business. Sami was a tall, charming man who spoke good English.

Rumi's Tomb

After visiting with Sami, we went to the Mevlâna Museum, the former lodge of the whirling dervishes. The museum houses many tombs, including the immense tomb of Rumi, the famous 13th century Sufi mystic poet. The museum, itself. is a beautiful piece of Seljuk architecture and sports a fluted tower covered in bright blue Seljuk tile. The interior surrounding Rumi’s tomb is very ornate and beautiful, as well. After the Mevlâna Museum, we walked over to the Koyunoğlu Museum but it was closed. I was feeling very ill, so I went back to the hotel and Deanna went over to Sami’s office to use his computer.

I slept for about three hours while Deanna worked on her email, helped Sami translate a contract, and attended his English class. I met them about 19:30 and we went upstairs to have dinner in the restaurant operated by the dervishes. We had dinner with Ahmed and Jonathan, a Canadian we had met at the museum, and were joined for tea by Sami, his carpet selling neighbor, and the singer from the dervish band. I didn’t feel well, so just had a bowl of yogurt soup. There was a good band playing Turkish music.

After dinner, we went downstairs to see the dervish dancing. The band played alone, at first. Then, during the second number, the dervishes entered and bowed to each other and the image of Rumi on the wall. They whirled for two movements and then redonned their black robes and bowed some more during the final piece. The music was very hypnotic and our singer friend was very talented. The dervishes whirled rather slowly. The hems of their white robes were weighted so that they sailed outward, perfectly. They whirled with their eyes closed, their right palms turned upward and the left palms turned down. It was less athletic than I had expected, but very interesting.

After the dancing, I looked at a few rugs but the carpets in Konya, though very cheap, were not of the same quality as the ones we had been seeing and I was too sick to be impressed. We came home and I went to bed.

I slept late the next morning and didn’t intend to get up until it was time to head for the bus to Antalya at 13:30.  I was very ill while we were in Konya and may have lost an entire day.  One thing I remember clearly, although I can't figure out when it happened, is that we ate an amazing meal of firin kebap, chunks of lamb slow cooked in the oven until they melted in your mouth.  Firin kebap is the signature dish of Konya and I have never tasted better lamb, before or since.

Oct. 24, 2000
White Garden Pensiyon, Antalya, Türkiye

The Taurus Mountains

Today, we took the bus 349 kilometers to Antalya via Akseki. We crossed some more grass-covered hills and then climbed over the Taurus mountains and dropped down to the sea. The mountains started out with pine trees and got progressively rockier as we climbed. The last few kilometers before the pass were covered in snow. There was much less snow and fewer trees on the other side of the pass. We descended toward the Mediterranean and then followed the coastline to Antalya. Unfortunately, it was too dark to see much.

From the otogar, we took a service bus to Kaleiçi, but could not get a cab to take us the short distance to the pension. A man from another pension gave us a ride and tried to get us to switch, but he was nice when we refused and wouldn’t take any money for the ride.

Hadrian's Gate

We dropped our stuff at the hotel and went out in search of food. I would have killed for a burger at McDonald’s but of course I was overruled because, when Deanna wanted meat, my needs were not considered. We went to the Sefran Restaurant where I had a bowl of tomato soup and an awful pizza and Deanna had a huge mixed grill, all of which she managed to devour.

We walked back via a different route and passed through the very impressive Hadrian’s Gate. Our pension was in the old part of Antalya near the marina. The streets were narrow and winding and it looked like a great place to explore.

Oct. 25, 2000
White Garden Pensiyon, Antalya, Türkiye

The Taurus Mountains from Antalya

Deanna showed no sign of stirring, in the morning, so I got up around 7:45, ate a wonderful breakfast
including fruit and an omelet, and went for a walk. I wandered over to look at the Özman Pansiyon, but didn’t find it as nice as ours. Then I walked down to the cliff overlooking the sea. Antalya sits on a wide bay with rugged mountains behind it. The view of the mountains across the bay, which we could see from our window, was stunning. It was so nice to be near the water, again, and to feel warm air during the day.

View from the Hıdırlık Kulesi

I dragged Deanna out of bed at 9:15 so that she could call Jeanne to arrange to have her vitamins sent. Unfortunately, Fed-Ex said they couldn’t deliver before Monday (It was Wednesday.) and there was a problem with customs. It would also cost over $100 to send them. Deanna refused to accept it, but I didn’t think there was any way that she was going to get those vitamins without going back to Paris.

Entrance to the Roman Harbor

Antalya was a great place. There were a lot of
German tourists, there. Many people spoke German and a lot of prices were in deutschmarks. I took Deanna back down to the Hıdırlık Kulesi, where I had been, earlier. It is a fourteen meter high tower which dated to the first century and may have been used as a lighthouse. From there, we started around the edge of Kaleiçi and down into the Roman harbor, which is now full of excursion boats. The harbor was easily the most beautiful I had seen. It was surrounded by Roman towers and crenelated walls. The mostly wooden boats moored there, now, looked a little antique, themselves. We walked around the harbor, checking out the various excursions and talking to captains. Eventually, we met a nice, young, Kurdish man named Bayram who had a power boat. He took people out on day trips and we arranged to go with him the next day. He introduced us to his friend, Marat, who had a gulet, but wasn’t interested in taking us. He, in turn, called someone else and fixed us up with a three-day gulet trip to Kaş. In Kaş, we would try to get another boat to Marmaris, or at least Fetiye, where we could change boats, again. We stayed and chatted witht them for awhile and then we headed off to see the sights.

Antalya's Roman Harbor

Yivli Minare

We visited the Yivli Minare, a thirteenth century
Seljuk monument and all its related buildings. We looked at the Ataturk statue in Cumhuriyet Square, the art gallery, and lots of shops. By that time, I was starving, since it was 14:00 and I had eaten breakfast at 8:30, but Deanna had to keep stopping to take video or look at earrings. Finally, I dragged her to McDonald’s where I ordered American food in Turkish. The food wasn’t great, but it was nice to eat something familiar. We had intended to go to the museum, but we spent the whole afternoon shopping for sandals and gold earrings for Deanna. She finally did buy some sandals. Both of us had longer feet than most Turkish women, which made it hard to buy shoes. We also bought more video tapes and disposable cameras.

About 18:00, we stopped for a beer in a café overlooking the harbor and stayed to watch the sun set. Later, we ate dinner in a very good Chinese restaurant. We had wonton soup, egg rolls, rice, spicy eggplant, and garlic squid. Deanna complained that we didn’t have enough meat. I thought it was the best meal we had had since the Indian food in İstanbul. After dinner, we wandered around Kaleiçi for a little and then came back to our room.

Oct. 27, 2000

White Garden Pensiyon, Antalya, Türkiye

High-Rises Lining the Bay in Antalya

We didn’t have to be anywhere until 10:45, yesterday, so I let myself sleep in to try to shake my cough. We walked over to the boat and then ran up to the ATM to get some money while Bayram tried to rustle up some more passengers. We had a light load since five people had backed out at the last minute. There weren’t any takers. So we shoved off around 11:30. We headed west across the bay and got a nice view of all the high rises along the cliffs and ten kilometer beach and a quick look at the yacht marina on the west side of the bay. It had good breakwaters, but wasn’t as sheltered as the Roman harbor.

A ways past the marina, we anchored in the lee of Red Island. The island wasn’t very interesting in itself. It was steep and rocky, without a beach or much in the way of ruins. It did make a nice anchorage, though. We stopped there for a couple of hours and I lay in the sun on the foredeck, trying to bake the cough out of my lungs. I think it helped because I coughed less, that night, and felt a bit better the next day. Bayram and his brother cooked us a lunch of salad, bread, spaghetti, and fried trout. It was the best pasta I’d had in Türkiye and even the fish was tasty.

Gulet at Anchor

After lunch, we went further west to some sea caves and anchored there for awhile, but no one on our boat was brave enough to go swimming. I stuck my foot in the water and it was definitely swimming pool temperature. From there, we headed back across the bay to the harbor and returned about 17:30. There was a Belgian fellow name José with us who fished all day, but he only caught a couple of very small fish.

After we came back, we had a beer and watched the sun set after I ran into the post office and managed to buy stamps and carry on quite a conversation with the clerk, all in Turkish. After our beer, we spent nearly three hours at the internet café and then took a long walk across town to a restaurant call Urfa Paşa Sofrasi that came highly recommended, but wasn’t all that great. We got a little turned around in the dark back streets on the way home and accidentally discovered a short cut that I was sure we could never find again.

Oct, 27, 2000
White Garden Pensiyon, Antalya, Türkiye

The Upper Düden Falls

Bayram met us at our hotel, this morning, at 9:00. The first place he took us was the upper Düden
waterfalls. The falls are in a lovely park, ten kilometers inland from where the river falls into the sea. The park was very nicely designed, with small rivulets beside all of the paths. We walked down to the grotto at the bottom of the falls which were about forty feet high. There was a restaurant on the bank of the river, there. We crossed the river and then climbed up behind the falls. It was a very pretty spot.

Behind Düden Falls

From the Düden falls, we drove east fifteen kilometers to Perge.

Perge Stadium

Perge was founded by Greek colonists after the Trojan war. There is a theater and a long, U-shaped stadium outside the walls. I could almost see the chariots racing, there. The first gate you come to is the Roman gate. Inside of that, is the Hellenistic gate, once flanked by the ruins of two

The Roman Gate at Perge

round towers. There were the ruins of extensive baths and we could see how the water was heated and distributed.  We picked our way around the ruins for at least an hour and a half. There were women peddling their wares along the length of the long, collonaded street along the remains of the agora.

The Agora at Perge

We didn’t buy anything from them but fell prey to the peddlars near the WC. We bought some hematite necklaces and a couple of other trinkets.

Bayram Dancing with Jakey Bear at Perge

Backstage at the Theater

The Theater at Aspendos

Next, we drove further east to Aspendos. Aspendos has the best preserved theater in Asia Minor. There has been some restoration done and the place is perfectly usable. We first climbed the hill so that we could look down into it. I scaled the wall and walked around on top of it. Deanna passed up her camera so I could film it for her. The old city of Aspendos is on the hill behind the theater. There are some pretty impressive ruins there, as well. After poking around the hill for awhile and nearly falling into a couple of unmarked cisterns, we walked back down the hill and went into the theater, itself. Like many modern theaters, this one was entered via a pair of staircases in towers on each side of the stage. The staircases led to a wide walkway which ran all around the theater, mid-way between the top and the bottom. We walked around a little in the vaulted apce behind the seats and also went back stage. There was a nice gift shop and a small museum housed under the tower.

Restored Seljuk Bridge

After Aspendos, we drove further east to the Manavgat waterfall. We stopped along the way at a restored Seljuk bridge. Like most Seljuk bridges, this one was hump-backed. It was built of cut stone between 1996 and 1997 on the piers of the original bridge. Below it, there was an egly highway bridge which made quite a contrast.

At Manavgat, there is another waterfall, but it was not as spectacular as the Düden falls, being much shorter and more out in the open. The park there was also very nice and the restaurant hae a lovely view of the falls. We ate a tasty, if rather expensive, lunch there.

Manavgat Falls

The Harbor at Side

After Manavgat, we continued east to Side. Side had been completely overrun by German tourists , but Bayram knew someone at the gate. We were able to ride through all the tourist traps in his taxi. He took us down to the harbor at the end of the peninsula. The harbor was an old, Roman one, but it had been recently reinforced and there were many excursion boats calling Side home, including one immense, three masted galleon that could barely fit through the entrance. At the tip of the peninsula were temples to Apollo and Athena. The temple to Apollo is collapsed and now houses the Apollo Dance Bar. The temple to Athena had been partially reconstructed and was quite lovely silhouetted against the sea. There were many businesses catering to German tourists and we stopped for some (lousy) streusel küchen in a café beside the harbor.

It was a long drive back to Antalya from Side, but we stopped at the Kuşunlu falls just in time to see them before it got dark. These falls were high, but did not have a lot of water going over them. In the summer, you could walk beneath them and take a shower.

Bayram brought us back to the pension and we picked up our laundry after a brief dispute over where to find it. We dropped our belongings off in the room and went to have drinks beside the pool at the Alp Paşa Pansiyon, a fancy restored Ottoman house where they had a live pianist in the evenings. We drank a couple of beers and chatted with Hakim, the bartender who had lived in England for five years and was pale and thin enough to have been English. He was very amusing. After two drinks, we decided to forego dinner and came back to our room.

Oct. 29, 2000
White Garden Pensiyon, Antalya, Türkiye

Saturday, it rained and we didn’t feel much like getting up. We left the pension at 10:30 or 11:00 and walked up Hesapçi Sokak to the used bookstore. The owner was a very well-read man named Kemal, who was clearly desperate to talk about books, or history, or wine, or anything, really. He had a very friendly, white and tabby cat. We traded in a couple of books we had read and bought a few more. Then we headed up to the main drag to look for vitamins for Deanna. She managed to find most of what she considered essential and then we set off, I thought, for the museum. Instead, we had to look in every gold jewelry store along the way, which drove me nearly crazy.

The Ataturk Statue

Finally, we reached a position opposite the square where the shops petered out and I hoped we could actually walk a bit without stopping. Unfortunately, we encountered a platoon of soldiers bearing a wreath. Several such groups, each bearing a wreath, had already congregated around the Ataturk statue. It was time for the opening ceremony for Turkish Independence Day, which was a big thing, that year, because it was the 75^th anniversary. I stayed for awhile, but it soon became apparent that, while every soldier, middle school, and highschool student in the city of Antalya was converging on the square, none of them played any instrument other than a drum. There was a curious lack of spectators, which could have been because it looked like rain. I felt it was because the whole proceding was incredibly boring. Deanna was in the thick of it with her video camera, but I got chased out of my spot by a bunch of guys with guns, so I left and went to the internet café until the ordeal was over.

Deanna finally showed up about 14:00 and then we went to get something to eat at a restaurant overlooking the harbor at the west end of the park. I had chicken Kiev (made with bologna, not ham) which was reasonably good. We walked the rest of the two kilometers to the museum, after lunch. The entire length of the street was lined with high-rise apartments owned by Germans, no doubt. The water side of the street was all a nice park.

The Antalya Museum has a wonderful collection of Greek and Roman statuary, mostly taken from Perge. When we were at Perge, we noted all the niches for statues along the collonaded street and wondered where the statues had gone. It was nice to be able to see them, but a shame that they had all been removed from the site. All of the important artifacts in Türkiye seemed to have been removed to the large cities. It was a shame, really, because it made it hard to tell what came from where and what these places were like in their primes.

We stayed at the museum until they closed at 18:00 and then took a cab to our pension because it had only just stopped pouring and looked like another deluge might be imminent. I crawled into bed with a book. Deanna eventually went out for dinner, but I passed.

ANKARA AND CAPADOCCIA

Oct. 17, 2000
Hotel Olympiat, Ankara, Türkiye

Ankara

We landed in Ankara at 7:30 and I sat downstairs in the airport and swatted mosquitoes while Deanna went upstairs and tried to determine how to get a bus to Capadoccia. We wanted to go to the Archaeological Museum in Ankara and it quickly became apparent that it would be expensive and awkward to schlep our luggage from the airport to the museum to the otogar. We decided to give ourselves a break and stay over in Ankara. We took a taxi to the Hotel Olympiat and took a nap for three hours since we had slept badly the night before.

Kamil in His Shop

When we woke up, we realized that it was Monday and all the museums were closed. We took the opportunity to shop for new jackets, since we had both managed to lose ours. Deanna had left hers on the bus from Tatvan to Diyarbakir and mine got lost when the hotel in Malatya moved our luggage out of our room while we were in Nemrut Daği. (About a year later, I found it in a pocket on my suitcase that I never used.) I bought a cheap jacket at Yimpaş, the Turkish equivalent of Target. Deanna bought an expensive jacket in a shop near our hotel. We wandered through some 60s era shopping courts and stopped in a silver shop owned by an older man named Kamil.  We really enjoyed talking to him about antiques and his family’s history. I bought a silver pin for a friend and Deanna bought a turquoise and gold necklace and a gold plated snake. We ate lunch at Kebapistan and I had some pide and a wonderful salad with actual lettuce and oil and lemon for dressing. Later in the afternoon, we stopped at a Pastanesi (pastry shop.) I bought some little cookies and Deanna got some Aşure and a fermented millet drink called Boza that made her giggle every time she took a sip.

We spent the whole evening in Oslar’s InternetCafé and Billiard Parlor, which boasted the slowest computers in Türkiye. Despite having spent three hours there, I did not manage to bring my travelogue up to date. They threw us out at 22:45.

We got up early, today, ate some breakfast, and went back to the internet torture chamber. They couldn’t get connected to the internet, so we headed over to Kamil’s shop so that Deanna could pay him for her necklace. We talked to him for another hour and then we walked up the hill to the Archaeological Museum. The museum was built in a restored Ottoman covered market from the fifteenth century. They did a good job of restoration and the museum is a delight. The upper floors feature exhibits from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods up to the Phrygian civilization. There were lots of pieces take from Çatlhojik, including some great bull’s head sculptures. There were many bronze figures of bulls, deer, and goddesses and lots of unusual pottery. My favorite piece was a large jar made so that you poured liquid into an opening and it cascaded out of the mouths of four bulls facing the inside of the jar to fill the body of the jar. That jar also featured four bull’s heads on the outside. We also enjoyed a great Phrygian cauldron with four bull’s heads on the rim.

The lower floor contained classical pieces and items found in Ankara, itself. There was also a pleasant sculpture garden where visitors could drink tea during the tourist season. There were several busloads of tourists there ahead of us, but they played through and then it got quiet enough to enjoy the exhibits.

Sprawling Ankara

From the museum, we walked up the hill to the Hisar, the ninth century Byzantine fortress built on the site of earlier fortresses and utilizing their remains as building materials. We saw stones featuring Greek lettering and Roman sculpture set into the Byzantine walls. We ate lunch in a restaurant/museum called the Zerger Paşa Konaği that served very expensive, mediocre food, but had a nice view of Ankara and its awful smog. We were charged a million lire for butter, 300k lire for bread, and 250k lire for “rounding” just to bring the bill to an even 15 million lire. The meal cost three times what we usually paid and the service was almost as slow as Oslar’s Internet Café.

Old Turkish House Museum

The Castle in Ankara

From the restaurant, we tried to visit the castle and found it off limits because of construction. We then went searching for the Old Turkish House Museum, which everyone said didn’t exist. We managed to find it. It was a private museum run by a retired school teacher named Hicran Aktay Şenkal. She ran the museum and had made many of the needlework pieces herself. The Ottoman style house was built in 1884 and was pretty rickety, like most houses constructed in that manner. The floors and ceilings sagged and the floors and stairs creaked with every step. She had a nice collection of folk art and the place was shady and homey. We talked to her for some time about her attempts to save the castle from development. She was quite an activist and had alienated a lot of her neighbors who favored development, hence everyone’s denial that her museum existed.

Once we left the Hisar, we wandered endlessly through more jewelry stores than anyone could imagine until we finally reached our hotel. We went to the internet café, again, and found it even slower than the night before. It took me 25 minutes to get to my inbox. When Deanna dragged me out of there after two hours, I still had not finished my message. We ate dinner at the Arjentin 78, a restaurant with Argentine décor but the usual Turkish kebaps, whose only redeeming feature was the availability of beer.

Oct. 18, 2000
Hotel Ehran, Ürgüp, Türkiye

We started the day in the internet café and didn’t get out of there until noon. We checked out of our hotel and took a cab to the Aşti Otogar. The Aşti Otogar is amazing. It is arranged like an airport and has a hundred gates. It is immense, but very efficient and modern. The ride to Capadoccia took five hours and most of the scenery was featureless grassland. We met a young couple from Iran on the bus. Their names were Taher and Azurah. They were Ba’hai and had to leave Iran because they could not go to school or work there because they were not Muslim. They had only been married for twenty days. They showed us their marriage license. It had both their pictures like a joint passport. They were temporarily living in Nevşehir until their visas came through to go to the United States. Taher had an uncle who lived in Indiana. They had already been granted asylum and would eventually be able to go. They were very sweet and obviously in love. I wanted to adopt them.

Ürgüp

We arrived in Ürgüp about 18:00. We took a cab to our hotel. The hotel was wonderful. Everything was clean, new, and functional. I even had a double bed. The room was built from stone blocks with a vaulted ceiling. I loved it, but Deanna insisted on moving because we were not in a real cave. I hated to leave that gorgeous place with friendly staff for only $25/ night.

We ate dinner at the Han Ciragan. The food was pretty good and they had some menu choices with herbs other than red pepper. We each had two glasses of red, Capadoccian wine. We liked it so much that we bought a split of the same brand on the way home, but it was a disappointment. We wandered around town for an hour or so and chatted with a couple of carpet sellers. Everyone there spoke good English. Eventually, we went back to the room, played cards, and drank bad wine.

Oct. 20, 2000
Hotel Ehran, Ürgüp, Türkiye

Yesterday, we slept longer than we intended because it was so dark in our cave-like room. After breakfast, we went looking for a real cave hotel, but couldn’t find one. Our carpet friend, Orhan, wasn’t at his shop, so he couldn’t help us. We looked at a few hotels ourselves, but didn’t find anything to suit us. We decided we would have to spend at least one more night at the Ehran. We went for a walk beyond the edge of town along a pretty, dirt road and around back into town. We stopped at Orhan’s carpet shop to see about the hotel and of course we got involved in looking at carpets. Deanna bought another one. Then Orhan took us to look at some hotels. We found one we really liked, with exquisite rooms carved out of the rock and decided to move there, eventually. Orhan took us back to town and we had a lunch of pide at the Yeprak Restaurant. Then we went next door to the Magic Valley Tour Company because we had met the manager, an Aussie named Rob, at Orhan’s shop. We booked tours for the next two days and they made us a reservation at the Agartha Hotel. After we finished our business there, we climbed up the hill to the terrace overlooking the city. There was an old tomb up there that held an exhibit of old photos of Ürgüp.

Our landlady at the Ehran, Fatima, cooked us a homemade dinner. We had lentil çorba, salad, bread, mantı (Turskish ravioli), köfte with potatoes, pilau, and watermelon for dessert. We shared dinner with a German family who had a Turkish housekeeper along with them. They were fun. Later, we walked back to town to drink raki with our Aussie friend, Rob. He was planning to travel to the east and wanted to pick our brains.

Oct. 21, 2000
Hotel Agartha, Ürgüp, Türkiye

Friday, we got up, checked out of our hotel, and went on a tour. I had bought some cough medicine the day before. It didn’t agree with me (or didn’t agree with the raki) and I felt kind of sick all day and spent the day running from WC to WC. It was raining and Deanna didn’t want to go, but we had already paid for the tour. I was pretty livid that we had seen nothing but carpets and hotels the day before, so I insisted we go, anyway. It was very cold, but didn’t rain most of the day.

Monastery Carved from Rock

The Fairy Chimneys

First, we went to see the fairy chimneys. It wasn’t raining much, so we got our of the van and walked amongst them. Then we went to the monk’s valley where there were many cave dwellings that had been used as a monastery. The tour normally goes to Zelve, but it was closed for restoration so we went to Çavuş, instead. There were some very elaborate and rather modern cave homes, there, that had been inhabited until 1953 when the government built an apartment block down the hill and made everyone move. It was rainy but the caves were so interesting that we walked through them, anyway. Then we went to Avanos and ate lunch in a restaurant there. It was market day in Avanos and there was a huge covered bazaar made of quonset hut-like structures and a sodden overflow of merchants trying to do business under leaky, white awnings. The bazaar was fascinating, but we all got very cold.

Also on our tour were a couple of Russians on their honeymoon, two women about my age from Canada, and an older couple from Canada. There were also two Australian girls who had kind of a bad attitude. Our tour guide was Mesut or “Happy.”

After lunch, we went to a pottery factory in Avanos and saw a demonstration of how they produced the pottery. We spent quite a long time there, but didn’t buy anything because the prices were very high. Then we went to the Göreme Valley Open Air Museum. The Göreme Valley is quite beautiful, with lots of apricot trees and grape vines. It is dominated by huge, stone pillars shaped like penises. Penises had been the theme of the day. One of the Australian girls had tried to throw a pot at the pottery factory and it had come out looking like a penis. The more she handled it, the more we laughed until we were all quite helpless. The resemblance of the Göreme chimneys to penises had not gone unobserved and there were vendors selling, among other items, onyx dildoes. We walked around the open air museum and visited the monk’s monastery and three churches: the Smoke Church, with its frescoes of St. George and St. Theodore killing dragons, the Apple Church, with its earlier paintings (from the iconoclastic period) peeking through the frescoes, and the Sandal Church where all the images are warning obvious sandals. We also visited the Chapel of St. Basil. We did not get to see the Dark Church because they were charging $10 for a ticket. The Dark Church is the best and most restored church, but we decided we could look at pictures, instead. We were supposed to stop at spots where we could see Uçisar Castle and Pigeon Valley on the way back, but it was so foggy that we couldn’t see over the edge at all. It was also very cold. It snowed at Uçisar, the night before.

By the end of the tour, I was feeling very nauseated, but Deanna insisted on accompanying the two Canadian women to the women’s carpet co-op (staffed by men, of course.) The kilim prices were fair, but the carpets were overpriced. We told them this, but one of the women bought one, anyway, although we coached her enough to get the price dropped from $750 to $480 including shipping. The rug could probably have been had for $350. From there, they dragged me back to the Murat Bar, where they sat and drank while I tried not to throw up. After dinner, despite my pleas that we wait until morning, Deanna hauled me back to Orhan’s shop so she could get her paperwork. We left the Canadians there because the other one still wanted to buy a carpet.

I was very ill by the time we got home. I had constant diarrhea and was feeling more and more nauseated. I got very cold and was overtaken by fits of shivering. Finally, about 22:30, I vomited everything I had eaten for the past thrity hours. After that, I felt much better and managed to sleep.

The Agartha Hotel

I was really too sick to appreciate it at first, but the Agartha Hotel was really lovely. The beds had puffy quilts and hand embroidered linens. The room was carved out of the stone and had lots of niches and other details, including a rosette in the center of the ceiling. The bathroom was nice and there was even a shower enclosure. There was a pretty terrace with cushioned settees carved into the rock that we had been unable to use because it had been so cold and wet.

In the morning, I heard a noise on the terrace and looked out to see that they had set the table out there and put out a basket of fruit. We asked them to bring the table inside. They served us a delicious breakfast in our room with fresh-squeezed orange juice and homemade jam. There was even apple tea so I could have something hot. I ate only a banana.

Later, we went on a second tour. First, we went to the underground city of Derinkuyu. The city was begun by the Hittites sometime around 1800 BC and was used for defense until the time of the Ottomans. They have excavated eight levels and we visited all of them. There was an ingenious ventilation system and several wells inside the city, but no toilets. How they handled that aspect of life is a mystery. There were huge, round “millstones” that could be rolled across the narrow passageways to repel intruders. These stones had holes in the center big enough to spear the enemy through if he got too close. Each successive civilization added new levels of chambers. The Christians hid in the caves when the Muslims tried to drive them out.

The Ihlara Valley

From Derinkuyu, we drove 52km to the Ihlara Valley.

Walking in the Ihlara Valley

We stopped first at the top of the valley to take pictures and then drove down into the valley. We walked four kilometers down the valley and visited the Church Under the Tree. We followed the stream and saw many cave dwellings in the canyon walls as we went, many of which had been exposed by earthquakes. At the end of our walk, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch. Then we drove to the end of the valley where we could see the hollowed out beehive caves used in the filming of the original Star Wars in 1974.

Rock Formations Used in Star Wars

Uçisar Castl

From the Ihlara Valley, our guide took us to an Onyx factory where Deanna won an onyx egg for knowing how to say, “Thank you,” in Turkish. No one bought anything. They did make good on Mesut’s promise of the day before and stopped so that we could see Uçisar Castle and Pigeon Valley on the way back. We also stopped at a caravanserai from the silk road.

When we got back, I was starting to feel bad, again, but we stopped at the bar to check our guidebook for hotels for the elderly Canadians. Then Deanna ate dinner and sent Doğan an email while I drank a beer. We went back to Orhan’s shop to see the supposed green carpets he had collected for me, but none of them were vaguely green. We dropped by the tour agency and chatted with Rob and then, finally, they brought us home.

Oct. 22, 2000
Hotel Agartha, Ürgüp, Türkiye

We got up rather late, as Rob was not due to call us until 9:00. He called us on time, but it took another two hours for him to round up a car and driver. It was census day in Türkiye and everyone was ordered to stay at home to be counted. The streets were completely deserted. It was a little weird and the oppressive, gray weather made it even more ominous. Eventually, Rob (one of the owners of the Magic Valley Tour Co.) rounded up his partner, Genghis’ brother, Ali, who was a taxi driver. Rob talked him into taking us for the day for $40.

Churches in Soğanlı

From Ürgüp, we headed south through ever more fantastic rock formations toward the village of Soğanlı. In places, cave houses lined the road, just like normal houses do. In some places, the caves had been converted to warehouses by the addition of steel doors. We traveled 35km south, climbing gradually until we reached the top of the plateau and then dropping back down into the village of Soğanlı. We bought tickets to the valley and then headed up the right branch. We stopped to see the Black Head Church, which had nice frescoes and a spacious community carved into the rock around it.

Interior of One of the Churches

From there, we drove up to the end of the valley, got out of the taxi, and walked along the hillside on the far bank of the stream back towards the town. It was a pretty walk through yellowing poplars, above stone-walled gardens of squash and apricot trees, with cows munching contentedly. We stopped to visit the Cupola Church, which has a weird eastern looking cupola on the outside that has been hollowed out on the inside to form a dome. The whole thing is carved out of a conical rock formation and resembles a castle from across the road. We also stopped at the Hidden Church. There are the remains of a small chapel at path level and then a large and elaborate church underneath which is not readily visible. Behind the church is a defensible hiding place with a round “millstone” to roll across the door. We met up with the taxi in the village and then drove back to the Sky Church and the Buckle Church.

Rob at the Buckle Church

We didn’t get to the Sky Church because it started to rain. Rob and I climbed up a long, steep, and worn set of steps to the Buckle Church. There weren’t any frescoes, but the architecture of the place was interesting and the surrounding complex was extensive. Deanna stayed in the car because she was afraid of the steps, which I found rather humorous after all her complaining about not getting to see all the churches over the previous two days.

On the way back, we had a difficult time finding a restaurant because of the census day. Passing through Güzelöz, Ali met a friend of his father’s and we stopped to have ayran and freshly baked bread with the old man and his wife. They lived in a stone house by the roadside, with a cozy woodstove and a charming donkey in the stable, outside, who brayed at us as we left.

From Güzelöz, we climbed up the hill onto the plateau and found ourselves in a snowstorm, the last thing I expected from “sunny” Türkiye. Then we dropped back down to Mustafapaşa, called Sinasos by the Greeks who occuplied it until World War One. There are a lot of beautiful stone buildings there and a church (now mosque) dating back to Constantine. All the restaurants in Mustafapaşa were closed, as well, so we got back in the taxi and drove to Göreme, where we ate lunch in a backpacker’s hangout called the Local. It was a fun place with good food, but terribly slow service. I had eaten so many squash seeds on the way (tasty buggers, squash seeds) that I wasn’t very hungry, but I enjoyed my beer.

Ali brought us back to the hotel and Rob stayed a couple of hours and gave us lots of tips on where to go in the south and west. After Rob left, we decided to pay the bill, since we would be leaving early. We were appalled to discover that they had charged 16 million lire for a load of laundry. The clothes were still wet when we got them back and they hadn’t ironed Deanna’s pants. Usually, it cost 2 or 3 million lire, including the ironing. It was a great hotel with wonderful service and a cute puppy named Mozart, but the laundry was a rip-off.

EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN IN TÜRKIYE – VAN TO ŞANLIURFA

Oct. 7, 2000
Otel Kardelen, Tatvan, Türkiye

We got up late, even though we had a lot to do, because I was too sick to jump out of bed. We barely made it to breakfast before it was finished. There was nothing left but bread, cheese, and olives. Mehmet joined us for tea and then Deanna and I went out to round up the cash to pay for Deanna’s carpets. I had paid Fuat the night before and would have my parents wire the $2200 to Mehmet, as I could never get that much out of an ATM. Six banks and two credit cards later, we finally managed to round up the 1,030,000,000 lire that Deanna owed to Fuat and Mehmet. We paid them and arranged for them to ship the rugs to the United States.

Mehmet took us to a music store and helped us to select some traditional Kurdish music to bring home. We bought two tapes of instrumental music and one CD of vocals. Then, we went to an internet café for a couple of hours, where I almost managed to finish writing about our adventures in Van before we had to dash to the bus. Mehmet drove us to the otogar in a taxi that he had borrowed from someone. We thanked him for all of his help and hospitality and hugged him goodbye. We would miss him. He was very bright and interesting and completely trustworthy. He offered to take us to Iran someday. I had mixed feelings about going there, but he would have been the perfect guy to travel with and I was sure we would have no trouble as long as we stuck with Kurds. (The events of 9/11/2001 prevented us from ever going.)

The bus ride to Tatvan, in the southwest corner of Lake Van, should have taken two hours, but took two and a half because we were delayed at an army checkpoint where they searched all the luggage and patted down the men. The soldiers were friendly to us and one of them did card tricks while he searched my bag. There was one handsome fellow in a beret and mirrored shades who seemed to be in charge. He tried very hard to look cool, but even he had a good laugh with us as Deanna pantomimed the uses of the various vitamins and cosmetics in her bag. No one would ever beat us in charades after our trip to Türkiye.

As the guidebook warned, there wasn’t much in Tatvan. The city is on the lake, but they didn’t use it to advantage. We tried to get a hotel on the lake, but had to make do with craning our necks out the window to see it. The hotel was expensive for the region at 24 million lire per night, even after we wangled a 20% discount. The room wasn’t much, but the furnishings and the bathroom were nice. There was even a tub with a shower curtain, an unheard of luxury. Apparently, modern plumbing was just reaching Türkiye because television ads for sinks and toilets dominated Turkish TV. We watched the news with a dictionary in one hand, trying to figure out what was happening in the world.

Oct, 9, 2000
Otel Güler, Diyarbakir, Türkiye

Neither of us liked Tatvan much, so we got up and headed straight for the bus. We took a cab all the way out to the otogar for 1.5 million lire, 500K less than the “nice” man had charged us to take us four blocks to the hotel. At 11:00, we boarded a bus to Diyarbakir. The trip was very slow and some of the road was unpaved. Diyarbakir had been the center of Kurdish terrorist activity and the army was taking no chances. We were stopped at two checkpoints and some of the luggage was searched, but not ours. We passed through rocky mountains, at first, and then emerged into the most depressing landscape we had seen in Türkiye, to date. The rolling hills were covered with sparse grass and scattered oak trees. There were numerous ugly towns built out of mud and cement blocks with no aesthetic consideration, whatsoever. They all looked like they were related to mining of some sort. The weather must be very hot in the summer because most of the houses (ALL of which had rebar for an eventual second floor sticking out of the concrete slab roofs) had bedsteads on the roofs. Many of the houses had oak branches piled on the roof for insulation and/or kindling in the winter. This pruning (read denuding) of the native oak trees did little to improve the appearance of the landscape. Everything was covered with a fine layer of dust. We stopped once in a dusty little town that seemed to specialize in manufacturing candy. After five hours, we finally reached Diyarbakir. The outskirts featured mile upon mile of modern apartment blocks and wide streets, in sharp contrast to the dark and narrow alleys within the walls.

Modern Buildings Surrounding Diyarbakir

We entered the old town through the Dağ Kapı, where a section of the wall had been demolished to ease traffic. The walls surrounding Diyarbakir are the most extensive walls in the world after the Great Wall of China. They were constructed from imposing, black basalt blocks.  We caught a taxi into town and the driver had no idea where to find the Otel Güler and must have been illiterate because showing him the name and address in the guidebook did no good at all. Despite our protests, he drove us to the scummiest imaginable hotel in a distant intercity neighborhood. We protested vehemently and finally managed to get him to take us back to where we wanted to go. Our attempts to direct in Turkish must have been hilarious. When we finally reached the hotel, he tried to charge us seven million lire for the trip. We refused, since he had taken us on a wild goose chase. We gave him five million lire and walked away. He followed us, complaining loudly, but the hotel staff paid him no mind.

The Wall Surrounding Diyarbakir

The Otel Güler was very nice and even the bathrooms were clean and modern, although there was no tub and the shower still splattered all over the floor. They charged 22 million lire per night. Prices were high in Diyarbakir. Deanna had left her Slick 50 jacket on the bus, so we went to the bus office to try to arrange to get it back. They indicated that it would arrive by the morning, so we went to the Sinan Lokantasi, a very nice, rooftop restaurant that actually served beer, for dinner. The food was nothing special but the staff was friendly and the beer was cold. There was BBC news in the room, so we went upstairs, watched TV, read for awhile, and crashed early. Diyarbakir gave us the creeps and we decided to move on,

Oct. 9, 2000
Bus Between Diyarbakir and Malatya,Türkiye

We got up very early and went to see if we could retrieve Deanna’s jacket. The office said to try the otogar. We took a taxi out there and were gratified that the ride plus the tip came to exactly what we had paid the previous day’s clueless driver. Once again, we inquired after Deanna’s jacket. There was a young man there who spoke German and he told me that the jacket was in Mersin and would not arrive until tomorrow. We asked him to hold it there for us.

After waiting for half an hour or so, we boarded the bus for Malatya. Our ride to Malatya took us through prettier country. We wound for 100km or so through low mountains covered with oak and pine trees. The earth was red and looked a little like the Sierra foothills. Eventually, we came to a large reservoir, which sported a few attractive, new towns on its banks. The buildings were plastered and painted in pleasing colors. There were even a few single family homes.

We were stopped at a checkpoint between Diyarbakir and Elaziğ. There was a female jendarma who took us into a little shack and patted us down. They did not, however, search the luggage.

View of Malatya from Our Hotel

We passed both the Keban (first) and Karakaya reservoirs and then drove through green apricot groves to the gracious, modern city of Malatya. Old Malatya was eleven kilometers to the north and was largely abandoned. New Malatya was founded in the nineteenth century and was mostly comprised of new, tile-roofed apartment blocks. Most of the growth occurred after the construction of the two dams.

The otogar in Malatya was fabulous and contained every possible service including an internet café. From there, we took a local minibus into town and, for an extra 1 million lire, the driver took us to the tourism office. We had some difficulty locating the office and, when we found it, it was closed. There was a note on the door directing us to another office back the way we had come with all our luggage in tow. I waited with the bags while Deanna went back. She located a nice man named Bülent who arranged a hotel for us and told us how to get a tour to Nemrut Dağı. He got the bellboy from the hotel to come and carry our bags three blocks to the hotel. We stayed in the Yeni Sinan Hotel.

Oct. 11, 2000
Nemrut Dağı Güneş Motel, Malatya,Türkiye

After getting settled in the hotel, we went for a walk to see some old Ottoman houses. We had not gone very far before we heard, “ Hoç geldiniz.(Welcome.)” We turned around and saw on old woman with her daughter and grandson beckoning to us. She didn’t speak a word of English but she invited us up to her apartment for tea. There, we met another daughter, a friend, and all their children. They served us tea, baklava, and fruit. We conversed as best we could in our limited Turkish. They were very happy to see us and we were interested to see what Turkish women did all day, since we seldom met any. Deanna took some video and the older woman was very moved when I stammered out, “Benim yeni arkadaş (my new friend,)” while posing with her. We played the video back for them and they all got a kick out of that.  (Unfortunately, the video did not survive and I took no pictures.)

After our visit, we went back to our hotel to meet Bülent, but he thought we were meeting him at the office, so we missed him. We spent the evening in the internet café.

The next day, we had intended to go to Nemrut Dağı, but the tour was delayed because there were more people who wanted to go, but could not go until the following day. The tour guide, Sabri, took us on a trip to Old Malatya, instead. We went to the 13^th century mosque, which is still in use. The floor was covered with many carpets and there was original Seljuk tilework in the dome over the mihrab. The brick minaret was broken. There was a separate mosque for women, which had stoves for warmth. In the winter, the women got ousted and the men used that side because it was warm. We also visited a 17^th century caravansary, which still smelled of camels. After Old Malatya, Sabri took us out to the lake formed by the dam. The plants had all turned a reddish color for the fall and made a pretty picture against the eroded white banks and blue water. There was a litter of puppies huddled in the middle of the road.

Reservoir in Malatya

After we came back, we left Sabri and wandered off to the carpet bazaar where we met Erhan, who turned out to be a friend of Bülent and Sabri’s. We spent a couple of hours with him and Deanna bought a Caucasian style carpet made in Malatya for $385 and four small kilims to be made into pillows for a total of $220. Bülent met us there and came back to our hotel with us. We drank beer and tea and chatted for a couple of hours about relationships and whether or not to have children. Bülent works in tourism and would like to travel, so he was leery of getting saddled with a family. We told him to find a different girlfriend who would welcome the chance to live in different places.

The Road to Nemrut Dağı

We awoke the following morning to the sound of rain. We picked up our laundry and Deanna got her sunglasses soldered back together where the hinge had broken. After much deliberation and several changes of plan that left me with no pajamas or clean underwear, Sabri decided to take us to Nemrut Dağı, after all. We were joined by a Dutch couple and an Israeli couple, both of whom were quite young. We drove for 100km through the mountains. After we climbed out of Malatya’s valley, the weather improved. The mountains were reddish shale and the poplars were beginning to turn yellow. There was some farming on terraces and the villages looked prosperous. We stopped for lunch at a roadside place out in the middle of nowhere and I had liver with rice. We then drove for a few more hours through an increasingly fantastic landscape until we reached

Sabri's Village

Sabri’s village, just outside the Nemrut Dağı National Park. The village was lovely and commanded panoramic views. A little way up the hill, we ran into Sabri’s cousin on a donkey. He invited us into his vineyard and gave us bunches of big, tasty grapes. The grape vines grow right on the ground in Türkiye.

Sabri's Cousin, Deanna & Sabri in the Vineyard

After the vineyard, we struggled up a steep, muddy hill until we had to stop and change a tire. Then we got stuck and had to get out and walk up a particularly steep hill while Sabri drove the van up. Once we got back in the van, the road improved and we drove a few more kilometers, past the stone walls of the summer encampment of Sabri’s village, to our hotel, looking very out of place all by itself in an alpine valley.

The Tomb of Antiochus on Nemrut Dağı

We stopped at the hotel, briefly, and then headed up the mountain to see the big carved heads. It was raining lightly but we got to see the tomb of the Comagene king, Antiochus, built around 2200 B.C. Sabri’s friend had a stone hut on the side of the mountain with a wood stove and we ducked in there to warm ourselves and drink tea whenever we got cold. We stayed up there a couple of hours, looking at the heads and the massive pyramid of scree constructed by Antiochus. There was also a fabulous view of the immense, sprawling lake formed by the Ataturk Dam. A cloud envoloped us just as the sun set and we scurried down to the van and back to the hotel.

Jumble of Statuary on Nemrut Dağı

Deanna on Nemrut Dağı

At the hotel, we had a nice dinner of chicken and couscous with watermelon (picked from a field by the road on the way) and grapes for dessert. After dinner, the two couples went to bed but Deanna and I stayed downstairs to hang out with Sabri and his silent friend. We had intended to read, but a strong wind blew up and the power went out. All we had was a small lantern, so Deanna and I drank raki and I played a few games of backgammon with Sabri. He was surprised that I knew this eastern game so well.

Oct. 13, 2000 (Friday the 13th)
Ipek Palas Hotel, Şanlıurfa, Türkiye

The Big Heads in the Morning Light

Yesterday, we got up at 5:30 to watch the sun rise from the top of Nemrut Dağı. It was beautiful, although a layer of clouds delayed the actual appearance of the sun until after the colors had faded. It was cold, but not freezing, and the rain had stopped. We went back to the hotel for breakfast and then hustled back down the mountain to Malatya. Sabri took us to the hotel to fetch our luggage and then took us to the otogar to catch the 11:00 bus to Şanlıurfa. There was supposed to be a through bus, but we took a small bus over the mountains and were headed for Adiyaman when we saw a dolmuş coming toward us. Our bus pulled over and we ran across the road and hopped onto the dolmuş to Şanlıurfa. I’m not sure how the switch was arranged but it went smoothly. Money changed hands between drivers. Deanna said, “I think he just sold us for four million lire.”

We headed south on the dolmuş to Şanlıurfa, passing through very dry, rolling hills where there were large groves of figs. There was some confusion when we got to the otogar because no one wanted us to take a taxi, but we finally found a man who spoke German and I got him to call one for us. We tried to get a room in the government guest house near the kale, but they were full. It was difficult to find a room in Şanlıurfa at that time of year because pilgrims come there from Türkiye and Iran to visit the birthplace of the prophet, Abraham. Some people speculate that the Garden of Eden was located at Şanlıurfa.  It was very hot there in the summer and still about 80 degrees in October. We finally got a room at the Ipek Palas, which was cheap at 16 million lire, but didn’t offer much service. The room was tiny but had good ventilation and the first window screen we had seen in Türkiye. The bathroom was good for hanging laundry.

Sacred Fish Pond in Şanlıurfa

Sacred Carp

Today, we did a few errands and then walked down to the sacred fish ponds, where we spent most of the afternoon shopping and eating lunch in the bazaar and complex across from the kale. We met a young man named Ali and he and his friend escorted us up through a tunnel in the rock to the top of the kale where we watched the sun set and then walked back down the stairs on the surface of the rock. There was a large rose garden and complex of mosques surrounding the sacred pools and the cave where Abraham was born.

Rose Garden & Mosques

We climbed up to the Onur Café to visit a young Kurdish man named Metin that we had met in a jewelry store earlier in the day. We drank soda and then had tea with Ali and Metin. The kale and mosque are beautifully lit at night and we could hear the muezzins sing. Metin played a CD of Ibrahim Tatlises, the Kurdish singing sensation from Urfa. We liked it very much and recognized many of the songs from the radio. Then we walked back up the very dark main street where most businesses were closed, grabbed some dessert for dinner (We had a big lunch.), bought a beer to share, and came back to the hotel.

Oct. 14, 2000

Ipek Palas Hotel, Şanlıurfa, Türkiye

We started today with a visit to the museum. It was supposed to open at 8:30 but, when we got there at 10:00, the gates were still closed. We pried them apart and got them to open up the museum for us. The museum had a nice collection of bronze age pottery and metal implements from the areas flooded by the Ataturk dam. There were also many Christian statues taken from churches that had been converted to mosques.

The Kale in Şanlıurfa

After the museum, we picked up dry cleaning, ate lunch, and bought plane tickets to Ankara. Then we went to the PTT to mail postcards and headed for the old section of town. We visited the Ulu Cami, where the muezzin showed us around and offered us holy water that was reputed to be good for the eyes. We were afraid to drink, but rubbed some on our eyes so as to show him we believed. We then headed for Abraham’s birth cave, but got side tracked by old Ottoman houses with stone corbels supporting their overhanging second storeys. We soon got tangled in the web of streets that comprise the bazaar. We turned into one seemingly insignificant archway, only to find ourselves in the main vegetable market. All of the merchants were very glad to see us and many of them wanted to be in Deanna’s video. The bazaar offered every conceivable vegetable, fruit, and spice. Goods were moving in and out by donkey, hand cart, and motorbike with side car. None of the motorbikes had mufflers and the din was ear shattering. A man selling dried fruit gave us a sample of a sheet of a dried fruit that tasted like pear. We were a bit turned around when we exited the market and we wandered for awhile until we emerged into the courtyard in front of the complex of mosques surrounding Abraham’s cave.

Vegetable Market in Şanlıurfa

Women weren’t allowed into the main part of Abraham’s birth cave and westerners weren’t allowed at all. It was very crowded with pilgrims, many of whom were Iranian. The women carefully arranged Deanna’s scarf to cover her blonde hair, surrounded us, and hustled us past the imam at the entrance. The cave was carved out of the rock and the floor was covered in carpets. Women were donning elaborate coverings before settling down to pray. We prayed for peace in the Middle East.

When we came out, there was a group of Iranian women in black chadors listening to the iman lecture. One of them had a video camera. As we walked back to the park, we were stopped by two modern looking Iranian women who wanted to greet us. They wanted to know if we had been to Iran. They assured us that the Iranian people had nothing against Americans.

Cemetery in Şanlıurfa

From the park, we climbed up to the government guest house and had a cold drink in the courtyard. Then we walked up a back street lined with old buildings, some built from the remnants of even older buildings. Children kept running out to say, “Hello,” and old men on horseback rode by the blue painted doors of those residents who had made the haj to Mecca. We came upon a cemetery where contemporary graves rested beside those from the 14^th century. It was crowded with tombs and stretched on as far as one could see. Next, we walked back to the main street. Deanna grabbed a bowl of soup and I bought a banana. Then we headed back to the hotel.

Oct. 16, 2000
Plane between Şanlıurfa and Ankara, Türkiye

Pognon's Cave in Soğmatar

Yesterday, we went on a tour of Harran and the surrounding countryside with a jovial, singing taxi driver named Yusuf. He would have been a lot of fun if he could have kept his hands to himself. We traded arabesque songs and show tunes. We drove on paved roads for awhile and then rattled over stony dirt roads through low hills of decaying shale to Soğmatar.  The hills in that area are composed of layers of soft shale and many natural caves have been enlarged to form homes and other necessities. Soğmatar features the Pognon’s Cave temple (150-200 AD) and another open air temple to the sun and moon gods on top of the hill. There are several inscrpitions in Aramaic

Deanna and Me in the Temple to the Sun & Moon

carved into the stone hilltop. There are ruined structures on seven surrounding hilltops that were either beacons or temples to other gods, depending on who you ask.

From Soğmatar, we jolted along another 15 kilometers to Şuayb Şehri, the supposed home of the prophet, Jethro. This was the region where Jesus was said to have wandered in the desert.  There are many, many cave homes there, some with elaborate arches and lamp niches. There are also the remains of some massive stone structures on the surface. It must have been quite a place. Yusuf hired two small boys to show us around who were doing a fine job until the local mafia, in the form of a gorgeous, rifle toting Arab with a shawl wrapped around his head, ran them off and made us buy tickets from him. We felt guilty that we never got to pay the boys.

Şuayb Şehri

Yusuf & Deanna in a Cave Home

We ate lunch in the home of an Arab family. The woman was probably 30 and had eight children. Their concrete block house had a bedroom, kitchen, and living/dining room. The only furnishings in the living room were two strips of indoor/outdoor carpeting on the floor. When we ate, they dragged in a plastic tablecloth with the food on it. We had rice, lavosh, tomato and cucumber salad, and watermelon. They spoke no English but were very hospitable. The children were shy, but curious and kept drifting in and out and peeking at us from behind their parents. We had brought the food with us, but we made sure to slip the lady of the house some money when we got her alone.

Yusuf & Deanna at the Caravanserai with Locals

We bounced over another 25 kilometers of desolate wasteland to the Han el Ba’rur Caravansarai. The people in that area near the Syrian border were all Arabs. Yusuf was half Arab and half Kurdish. He was related to many of the people we met and got into a loud family argument with the Arab ticket seller in Şuayb. We weren’t exactly sure what they were arguing about at the time and passed a few anxious moments there. 

At the caravansarai, we met three Arab ladies and their children. The two younger ones were dressed in lovely, green silk robes. They begged us for sunscreen and marveled at how young we looked for our ages (39 and 62.)  Their children were wearing modern kiddie garb but they were absolutely filthy. We took some video of the ladies and they enjoyed watching the monitor as Deanna played it back for them. I took a picture of everybody watching and Yusuf asked for a copy. The caravansarai was built by the Seljuks in 1128-29 and was in disrepair with cakes of dung stored in the remaining rooms.

Not far from the caravansarai, we stopped to visit the Bazda Caves. These caves were actually a huge quarry where most of the stone to construct Şanlıurfa, Harran, and Mardin was taken. The caves honeycomb an entire mountain and are four kilometers by one kilometer and as much as fifty feet high in places. Light and air shafts have been conveniently placed, which makes them more pleasant to visit than most caves. We drove right into the cave and, I must admit, the first sight was spectacular. Pat Yale, the Lonely Planet writer, refused to go there with Yusuf and omitted the caves from her account of the area. We could only assume this was because she had had enough of his roaming hands by that point and just wanted to get to Harran.

Gate at Harran

Harran from a Distance

Harran was another twenty kilometers west of Şuayb and the road improved as it neared the site. Harran is in the biblical land of Canaan and Abraham was said to have dwelt there after leaving Ur (Şanlıurfa?) There was a great three-story castle built by the Hittites in 2200 BC, replete with (mostly buried) gates featuring dogs on chains carved into the stone. There were also the remains of the world’s oldest university and a tower once used for astronomy. The buildings had also been used for the worship of the sun and the moon, by Byzantine Christians, and finally as a mosque. Only a couple of arches and half of the tower remained intact. Harran is most famous for its beehive houses and a nice young man named Ibrahim showed us around a couple of restored ones and took pictures of us dressed in Arab garb. The sun set while we were in Harran and we returned to Şanlıurfa in the dark. I was beginning to feel sick, again, and Yusuf bought me a very nice bowl of lentil çorba while we wrote in his memory book.

Beehive Houses in Harran

  When we returned to the hotel, we discovered that we had been moved to a room without toilet or shower. The toilet in the hall was a squatter without a light. I was too sick to object, but Deanna went downstairs and made such a stink that they managed to find us a better room despite the arrival of 47 ladies from Ankara.

This morning. We got up at 4:00 to catch the 5:00 service bus to the airport. All flights in Türkiye seem to leave at ungodly hours. Our flight left at 6:00. No one could complain about security. Our bags were x-rayed as we entered the airport and then searched before we boarded the plane.

Me and Deanna in Arab Costume