Turkish Delight Part II: Mediterranea

Flying out of Istanbul and renting a car in Antalya was definitely a good decision. Winding down the coast in the dark, we soon found ourselves sitting by a bonfire with a hearty brew thrust into our hands by a couple of hearty aussies whose self-proclaimed employment was “making jokes and acting like jerks”. They “worked” (using the term loosely) at Kadir’s Treehouses where we spent our first Mediterranean night, shivering underneath piles of crusty blankets in a 3-bunk shack built up in a tree with the girthy trunk running right through the middle and taking up most of the space. The novelty of the lodging and the company were worth the poor night’s sleep, but we were thankful for the warm sunshine in the morning. We awoke to find ourselves a 10 minute walk from the ancient city of Olympos, a town that centuries ago had been expelled from the regional government on the grounds that it harboured pirates. The ruins were situated along a narrow stream that led us straight to the beautiful, secluded, pebbly beach of the Mediterranean sea. We had to swim. Yes, it was cold. But we had to. And really, like the Newfield gorge in early summer, once the initial shock passes and the cold seeps in, you feel emboldened by it, and strike out swimming more strongly than you thought you could. Once in I didn’t want to get out, but I soon was chilled to the bone and shivered back into my clothes with salt in my hair and a gnawing void in my stomach. Luckily, not too far down the beach an old lady in a split skirt and headscarf was shuffling around some tables laid with faded red tablecloths.
She looked like the kind of lady whose food I wanted to eat, so we sat down and ordered calamari and 2 different whole fishes, beer, and fresh orange juice from the trees out back. Perfect.

That night we hiked up a hill to the Chimaera, or eternal flame, where some sort of petroleum product seeps out of the rocks and fuels several small, natural fires that have been burning for centuries. We made our way to the flames around dark with a bottle of wine, crusty bread, cheese, olives, and dried figs for our dinner. We laid on our backs and looked up at the stars for what seemed like hours and stumbled down the hill in the dark with only the light of our cell phone screens to guide us. We found accommodation at a humble little guesthouse with the best breakfast we had the whole trip, and picked some oranges from the trees out back for the next leg of the journey……which wound up into the mountains through hairpin switchbacks lined with olive groves decorated with grazing goats. We drove first to the ruins of Arykanda and then to Kas, a little tourist town on the coast where the mountains plunge into the sea. After accidentally buying 2 kilos of honey from a dude on the side of the road earlier that afternoon, we decided we better find some good bread to go with it and a vantage point to watch the sunset, so we again scrambled in the fading light up a hillside on the tip of a tiny peninsula and feasted on random things scavenged from fields and street corners and passed around a bottle of cheap red wine. The next day we decided we wanted to get on a boat so, because it was the off season, we found the only boat making excursions that day to a small island belonging to Greece just 40 minutes away. We joined a group of 6 others, but since the boat was only authorized to carry 8 passengers, Eric had to be smuggled in the cabin of the boat and his passport hidden from the authorities.

The island was dreamy. Like, an actual dream. The colors of the buildings and boats were surreal in their muted brilliance, and the whitewashed stone path winding up the hillside that led past herds of sheep and goats to a bird’s eye view of the entire bay was like something out of a fairy tale. It was spring in the Mediterranian, and wildflowers burst from between the white stones and scattered themselves over the windy hill-top. Looking out over the tiny islands and the tiny gleaming boats in the cobalt water, the beauty made my eyes sting and my chest feel tight. After a meal of calamari and fresh grilled mackerel, we headed back for the mainland.

As we approached the marina, Eric was gruffly ordered to leap onto the deck of a neighboring ship before the police arrived to check all of our passports. The boat captain, I think, felt bad about this and made us coffee and shared his cigarettes and we fell into easy conversation. He invited us to stay the night with him on the boat, and offered to make us his famous fish spaghetti, but alas our flight was leaving from Antalya very early in the morning. He did insist, however, that we take the keys to his moped and motor up the road to see the ancient theatre built into the hillside and overlooking the sea. Autumn was the only one amongst us with moped experience, so the three of us clung precariously to the bike and we teetered through the town past old men clucking their tongues and shaking their heads with disapproval. The theatre was like the one we saw in Arykanda only smaller, and positioned perfectly to catch the rays of the evening sun.

After returning the bike and saying our farewells, we headed by car back to Antalya, scoring the LAST room in a city filling to the gills with hippies in town for the solar eclipse that we missed by 3 days. Tired, scruffy, gritty-eyed and delerious, we cracked one last Efes in the Istanbul airport at 5 minutes til 11:00 am. As mom would say, it was noon somewhere in the world.

The Turkish Mediterranean is so beautifully not-quite-European, like the city of Istanbul. A bit rough around the edges and un-self-conscious, like we aspired to be on our journey. I think what is so fascinating about Turkey is that it isn't European, it isn't Asian, it isn't Arabian... It is just Turkey, with its own aesthetic and aura that defies categorization. Like the Turkish language that occupys its own tiny language group whose closest relative is Uzbek, the country itself is un-analogizeable. And its beauty is all the more poignant for its singularity.

And so, with a fuzzy head and peaceful heart I have returned to Doha. Be well my queridos.
Love
Emelie

Turkish Delight: Interlude

I left out the most archetypal event of our time in Istanbul on purpose, because it had to stand on its own. On our last night in town we went to a hamam: a Turkish bath. It was every bit as romantic and transportive as I imagined without really believing it could be so. We walked through a large reception area warmly panelled with blonde wood and smelling of essential plant oils and into a changing area with wood benches and friendly matrons handing out towels and swaths of red-and-white-checked fabric (that proved to be multi-functional in the course of the next hour). Autumn and I had parted ways with Eric of course, and as we pushed open the heavy wooden door and beheld the scene before us we couldn’t help but speculate on the spectacle that was confronting our dear companheiro. We stood in a perfectly round room in front of a huge, round, low, slightly convex marble platform, knee-high and about 15 feet in diameter. Five or six women in various states of undress were sprawled across it, lying on or wrapped in their red and white sheets. We laid our own swaths out on the grey stone and rested our tired lower backs against the radiant heat that grew more intense the closer one laid to the center of the obelisk. After a few minutes of silent reverie, a middle-aged woman in red bikini underwear and swinging breasts, her hair piled pell-mell on top of her head, approached me and said “massage?” I handed her my token that entitled me to a half-hour scrub and she set to work. As I lay on my stomach with my cheek pressed against the warm marble, she poured a rich lather over my back and worked me over with a rough touch and a surprisingly coarse loofah glove. She proceeded to exfoliate every inch of skin, periodically smacking me smartly on the rump and ordering, “sit!” when she wanted me to get up and change positions. At the end she led me to one of several marble fountains around the outside edge of the round room and washed my hair in the tepid water. I returned to the marble slab and laid on my back staring at the high plaster ceiling shot through with star-shaped holes, listening to the low murmur of women’s voices in more languages than I could count. I raised my head and looked around at the scene before me: two dozen naked women in un-self-conscious repose, gossiping, combing one another’s hair, being roughly scrubbed by the pendulously-breasted women bearing tin pans full of hot water… I imagined that the scene here in this bath a thousand years ago was probably not so different, and I felt it curious how patriarchy can create this kind of a space, where women are at ease with themselves and one another, whispering secrets with an easy intimacy that we in the west grasp at but never seem to achieve. I stepped onto the street with a wet head that elicited shouts of “You look very clean! You’ve been to Turkish bath?” in heavily accented English, and I thought, I’ve never been cleaner in my life.

Turkish Delight Part I: Istanbul Was Constantinople…

I can’t write about Turkey all at once. There is too much to say. So I’ll start at the beginning: Istanbul. We arrived on March 17th, a Friday afternoon. Our lovely host Ozerk—friend of Serkan and Orkun, our Turkish friends here in Doha—met us at the airport and whisked us to his apartment in Bakirkoy (meaning “copper neighborhood”). It was a beautiful, unpretentious neighborhood that boasted a luscious Tuesday street market selling everything: fresh fish, bread, olives, cheese, fruits and veggies, household goods… It was just one of the moments that I lamented the lack of street culture in the US. We have farmers’ markets in designated locations, but you can’t buy a fresh grilled-fish sandwich with tomato and onion or roasted chestnuts on a whim from a street vendor in any American town I’ve ever been to, and that is one of our biggest cultural defecits, in my opinion.

Anyway, Ozerk’s hospitality was above and beyond the call for 3 rowdy Americans he didn’t know beyond a couple of email exchanges (another lamentable cultural contrast), and I am very pleased that we got to know this guy. He took us out for a traditional Turkish feast our first night (meat on a stick, handmade tiny raviolis in yogurt sauce, minced meat and potato pastries, tomato and cucumber salad…) and then back to his apartment for beer (Efes! My new favorite international brew! How I long for thee...) and good conversation.

The next 3 days were packed with touristy sightseeing, haggling, and happenstance. First on the list were the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and the Basilica Cistern, all right together in the old city known as Sultanhamet. The first is a breathtaking structure dating from the 4th century BC that was first a church and then a mosque. Earthquakes and sectarianism had lent it a ravaged beauty over the centuries, but what really struck me were the marble thresholds of the doorways worn into smooth saddle shapes by 2,500 years of shuffling feet. Imagining the sieges, weddings, deaths and tedium spanning that time made me shiver.

Before entering the Blue Mosque, Autumn and I wound scarves over our hair and we all removed our shoes and carried them with us in dirty black plastic bags. Now as most of you know, the built environment holds far less fascination for me than the natural one, but stepping inside the Blue Mosque took my breath away with the same sensation I used to get seeing Mt. Rainier loom over the Olympia skyline. I was actually speechless, and I honestly felt a sense of reverie that not even the most opulently embellished Catholic church has been able to conjure in me.

Of the three, however, the most fascinating was the Basilica Cistern. Probably about twice the size of the house I grew up in, the cistern was the water source for the ancient city. It was eerily murky with the sound of water dripping from the intricately carved stone columns. It was really shockingly vast, and seemed even more cavernous for the traditional string band playing at one end under a plastic canopy stretched between 4 of the columns. It was gorgeous, really, hearing such music in a giant underground water tank.

Most of the rest of our time in the city was divided between shopping at the Grand Bazzar, walking the streets of Besiktas and Ortakoy, and boat trips on the Boshphorous River, the body of water that connects the Back Sea with the Sea of Marmara and divides Europe from Asia.

We also got quite a taste of the Istanbul nightlife, which my Turkish friends in Doha tell me is “very fast”. The most legendary of our nights out on Taksim Square and Istiklal Street began in a tiny underground smoke-filled bar with stone walls and candles on the tables. A very young musician sat alone at one end of the narrow room, playing an acoustic guitar and singing what were apparently traditional Turkish songs. The small, intimate crowd would shout out requests and the singer (with an incredibly sweet and athletic voice) would oblidge with everyone in the bar singing along. Next we changed genres completely in search of dancing and ended up listening to Turkish hard rock a la Pearl Jam but, happily, very Turkish indeed. Again, the musicianship was so impressive that I found myself transfixed by the skill of the ensemble and oblivious to the ear-splitting volume that soon drove us back to the street.

Finally, we ended up at a bar called Mektup where another traditional band was playing. My comrade Eric decided that it would be cool if I got up on stage and played something, to which I protested vehemently. But when he walked over to the band during a set break and I saw the guitar player coming over to our table, I knew there was no avoiding it. They handed me the guitar with barely a word of English among them and so I shrugged and took the stage. Despite shouts from the audience with requests for Jewel, I played a couple of simple country and traditional numbers that the bassist and drummer could easily follow. Though I hated him for it at the time, I ultimately had to thank Eric for his initiative, because as you can see, I had a total blast.


After crawling blearily home at 4:30 AM, we headed out for Antalya and the mediterranian coast. But more on that in the next instalment. That’s all for now meus queridos!