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.