Cold Turkey
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday June 20, 1998
GREG LENTHEN dodges traffic hazards, urban sprawl and an unseasonal blizzard
to discover ancient Turkish delights.
THE TRUCK in front of us attempts to slow on the icy descent but brakes just a bit too heavily and locks its rear wheels. The back swings about, seemingly in slow motion, so that it is travelling down the hill at an angle of 45 degrees.
Our driver, Naci, stiffens and brakes gently. Wherever the truck ends up, we don't want to be with it. As we slow, the truck driver regains control, straightens up and rejoins our convoy through the snow. Omer, our guide, catches his breath, picks up his microphone and looks down the aisle of the coach to one of the back rows: "Brian, this is your fault. We have to go back and untie that knot."
That knot is at the ruins of the ancient city of Pergamum, two days behind us on Turkey's Aegean coast. The knot is the reason for the snow.
It's not supposed to snow at this time of year in Turkey - well, not this much. It's spring. But where are the crisp mornings ripening into warm afternoons? Not on this 14-day tour. Fields are freshly starched and pressed. Naked poplars stand with fragile arms, shivering white. Pepper-and-salt hillsides rise behind quaint old towns that appear to be auditioning for Christmas cards. It's relentlessly beautiful - and very, very cold.
It had been cold when we arrived at the ruined acropolis of Pergamum which sits, cruelly exposed, on top of a mountain, the steep sides dropping away to wide valleys. The sun had come out but the wind was ice as we paused to look at a stunted bush that had small white ribbons tied all over it.
"There is a belief," Omer explained, "that if you tie a ribbon on a tree near the grave of a great man, your wish will be granted. But after it is granted, you must come back and untie the knot otherwise your wish will go on forever."
Brian, from Brisbane, shivering in his jeans and leather jacket, had thought that if it was going to be this cold, he'd rather like it to snow, and tied a piece of paper to the bush. That was day two. By the fourth day he had his wish.
TURKEY will surprise you. Not the spectacular ruins and the museums jammed full of treasures. You'd expect as much at this crossroads of a score of cultures where the Turks themselves are only Ahmed-come-latelys, here for less than a thousand years. And you'll have more than an inkling of the varied natural beauty of a land that sprawls between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and stretches from Europe to Georgia and Armenia.
But modern Turkey will take you unawares. Cities and towns are raising great ramparts of new construction as they find themselves besieged by refugees from the harsh life of the countryside.
Whole suburbs of multi-storey apartments are built as one, covering entire hillsides even before there are roads. (Those "kilns" on every balcony are for barbecuing kebabs.) Fields fill with "built-in-one-nights", crude houses with concrete frames, walls of red brick and semaphores of washing on uncompleted top floors. No trees, no paths, just mud.
Those who once coaxed a living from small farms are quitting for jobs in textiles, motor vehicle manufacture, tourism. Istanbul's population is now some 14 million (as near as anyone can guess) and growing at 400,000 a year. It's a similar story at the capital, Ankara, and Antalya in the south and Izmir on the Aegean and a score of smaller cities and towns.
But we are not touring the present. Our gaze is on the past, which is nowhere more glorious than at Ephesus, on the south-east coast. Excavation has been going on for 150 years, yet just a tenth of the site is exposed. The Turks aim to restore what they have before digging up any more.
Ephesus is grand ruins and small absurdities. We are told the Romans measured the necks of vestal virgins to see if they'd been faithful to their vows because sex enlarges the thyroid gland. (We laughed, but Omer insisted that was true.) Nike is not a shoe but the goddess of victory. That's her, there, frozen in white marble. But that's not Medusa, just Emperor Hadrian's boyfriend, Apollonius, on a bad-hair day.
This is the city as it was under the Romans, much of it dating from the second century. Its focus is now the painstakingly restored facade of the Library of Celsus, with its elegant columns and counterfeit statuary.
A summer's day in Ephesus is a sweaty contest with 5,000 other tourists trying to escape heat amplified to as much as 50C by the white marble. No problem today. Nor at the ruins of Perge, a couple of days later, where we are very nearly snap frozen as we step from the bus into the arms of two boys thrusting oversized bagels at us and whining for money.
We are at the remarkably intact 240-metre-long hippodrome where the Romans, when they weren't wrestling and boxing, raced chariots before an audience of 14,000. Oily and sweaty, they would retreat to the city's elaborate baths. The frigidarium, tepidarium and caldarium are still there, open to the skies, their high walls, stripped of their white marble, now just weathered brown travertine. But look down. Here's a black and white marble tiled floor and, just outside, sweep aside the dirt with your shoe and you are standing on a mosaic.
Perge was an important trade centre as early as 1500 BC, but the ruins you see are mainly second century. Apart, that is, from the golden towers of the third-century BC Hellenistic gate. Beyond the gate, goats tug at tussocks of grass between the flagstones of a Roman avenue that ends in the ruins of a monumental fountain. Water once cascaded down the centre of the avenue as merchants sold oils and leather, ceramics and metalware from stalls in the colonnades on either side. Now the commerce is just a few women offering jewellery of polished anthracite, bead necklaces and lace.
Fields bright with yellow flowers lead you to nearby Aspendos, with a 15,000-seat amphitheatre built into the side of a mountain by Marcus Aurelius. It looks surprisingly little touched by the 1,800 years since. Entrance was by ticket - made of metal or bone - which showed your row and seat number. Today, hawkers greet you with Guten tag and Wie geht's? Turkey's relatively modest tourist trade - it's twice the area of France, with an eighth as many visitors - seems to be largely in deutschmarks.
(Ephesus and Perge will be among the vivid memories of your trip, but not Troy. Or the Troys, because there are nine of them, piled carelessly on top of each other over millennia. More than a century of excavations have yet to uncover anything as bright as the Troy of your imagination.)
Between Ephesus and Perge is the hill-top city of the dead, Hierapolis. Sarcophagi are strewn about at odd angles, lids askew. Their travertine has turned gold and black, and is mottled with grey lichen and dark green velvety moss. The sides of vaults have been smashed by grave robbers, mocking the long-winded inscriptions as to who may and may not be buried within.
The tombs are only a walk from the famous white cascades of Pamukkale, where a sign declares: Entering the travertines is not certainly allowed to protect this amazing place natural beauty as it used to be.
Too late. They cascade no more because the water from the hot mineral springs has been diverted to the thermal pools in nearby hotels. The terraced pools of the "cotton castle" are dry and turning grey. But there are plans to knock down the most intrusive of the hotels and let the springs flow again.
JUST off the highway we see a makeshift arena, a circle of buses and trucks stacked high with people. Outside the circles are camels with brightly coloured saddles.
"Camel wrestling," Omer explains. "They wrestle with their necks. The winner is decided by a judge. I'm not sure how."
I would have liked to stop. When will I next get a chance to see camel wrestling? But that's the price you pay to see so much, so effortlessly. Because coach tours must keep to schedule, much remains only half-glimpsed and mysterious. Like Antalya on Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
From our hotel room, the city - or at least its setting - is magical. Here the Taurus Mountains charge headlong into the Mediterranean.
We see them first in the very early light, roughed in charcoal against a brightening sky. The sun catches the white of the highest peaks while the slopes sleep in the misty blue of the early morning. We seem to be at the end of one arm of a large harbour, so far from the centre of the city that its apartment buildings look like a ruffle of surf at the feet of the mountains behind them.
And what of Izmir? What is it like, this city of 3.5 million, also on a bay circled by mountains? We arrive in the sickly light at the end of one day and are gone in the faint beginnings of the next.
ON OUR first morning in Turkey, Istanbul refuses to be roused, lingering under the heavy haze of a million coal fires. Slowly, the shapes step forward from the grey: a football stadium, a pile of apartments. But the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia remain just hints of domes and minarets across the water.
At breakfast we meet Jackie, from the US, on her fifth Trafalgar tour: "People say, 'You're going on vacation' but I say 'No, I'm going on a learning experience'."
Outside the Parksa Hilton, Omer has tallied his charges: 18 Americans, nine Australians. "Gunaydin. Good Morning. Anything you want to know I will tell you, or at least discuss. We will talk about history, geography, politics and economics." Jackie may be right.
Omer is a compendium: Turkey has 9 million fig trees, 850,000 soldiers, 33,000 archaeological sites and 16 per cent unemployment. It is Muslim, yet secular. That's the way Kemal Ataturk wanted it after declaring the republic in 1923. Women got the vote and an education in Ataturk's parliamentary democracy - and alcohol continued to be sold. The national drink is raki. According to Omer, Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the liver.
Perhaps most surprising are the close military ties with Israel. While we are there, a delegation of Israeli generals and senior bureaucrats flies into Ankara to discuss arms deals. Remember, says Omer, Turkey's neighbours include Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Omer is not all facts; there's plenty of passion, often at its most obvious in his impatience with his country's smallest faults. "Look at that gutter! Why can't they keep this street clean?"
On a bus tour in Canada last year, our drivers doubled as guides, baggage handlers and doers of everything else that needed to be done.
In Turkey, we have not only the driver and guide, but an assistant, Saffet, making sure our bags get from bus to hotel and back and wandering the aisle of the coach dispensing lemon cologne and "apple tea" (actually reconstituted apple juice).
In the end, Omer is an optimist who believes the military will retreat from the country's political life and that the fundamentalists will never thrive.
"In Turkey, people don't want to lose their rights; they don't want to be like Iran or Algeria. People won't support a religious party after 75 years of democracy."
Apple tea?
CASE NOTES
THE TOUR: Trafalgar's Best of Turkey - 14 days from Istanbul to Gallipoli, down the Aegean Coast to Ephesus, east to Antalya, out to Cappadocia in the centre of the country then, in a broad arc, through Ankara back to Istanbul. It's a 3,200-kilometre introduction to the country - and very good value from $1,450 (plus 10 per cent currency surcharge),
twin-share, for accommodation, transport, guide and two meals a day. Details: Phone (02) 9657 3333 and 1300 787 878, or travel agents.
Return fares to Istanbul from Australia with Qantas and British Airways start at $2,499, with two stopovers permitted in each direction. Talk to your travel agent about booking air travel with your tour.
THE FOOD: Our first lunch is typical - a choice of small sausages, chick peas, pastries stuffed with cheese, rice, meat balls, stuffed zucchini, salads and fruit. Cost, with soft drink, about $5.
Or it would have been. But Omer tells the manager, a large man with a broom of a
moustache, that I am a journalist writing about Turkey. The manager beckons me over, plies me with Turkish coffee, presents me with a postcard of two camels
copulating, then hugs me to him - one side, then the other - so that I can give him a kiss on each of his long-unshaven cheeks. Media relations are different in Turkey.
Breakfasts are big, with lots of cheese and vegetables, and the evening meals, bigger, with more salads and a range of hot dishes. Both are included in the package. Sometimes the evening meal is a la carte but mostly it's buffet and mostly in hotel ballrooms. It's like being a stranger at a very large wedding reception.
The hotels: It's hard to believe that the race that built Istanbul's glorious Hagia Sophia also built the engagingly awry Hotel Arkol at Canakkale on the Dardanelles. Our room is huge, maybe 15 metres long, and not a right angle to be found. The walls narrow from front to back, from about four metres to three, and change direction twice. But with a couple of exceptions, the standard of hotels is high.
Most boast four or five stars and list prices exceeding $300 a night - plus another $30 a head for breakfast.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
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