Dalyan-ce

Tombs of the Lycian King (ca. 400 BCE)

Four days back in Dalyan. Last trip we parked it on a beach in Cirali which was very. Ice, but on the whole I think this place has a bit more to offer. The early flight out from Cappadocia involved a long taxi ride from Ayvali to Kayseri, early morning on the Cappadocian plains. The volcano outside Kayseri is remarkable, but otherwise the flight from there back to Istanbul and then on to Dalaman was in eventful.

Pegasus Airlines did offer a refresher course on the charms of super economy air travel, starting with some surprise overage charges for baggage and a bill for the glass of tea proffered in flight - but okay, it was a cheap flight and here we are.

Dalyan is our beach place, so there's not a whole lot of opportunity for historical or cultural observations. Actually, beaches are a kind of inter-cultural constant. Sun and surf reverts us to some kind of pre-Babel state of harmony and agreement.

We paced the visit here nicely. Jumped in the river and enjoyed the gardens of this happy little hotel (pansyon, really, although there is a magnificent meal served up each night). Monday we got to the beach. Tuesday we took advantage of the fact that there are four of us traveling together. That means a private tour boat is your for pretty much the same price as hopping on a boat with a larger gang and following the instructions of the guide. We rode outside Dalyan to swim near the caves in the next bay. We saw sea turtles chase after crabs tossed in the water by the tour guides, lunch, sulfur mud baths, and a trip to Lake Koycegiz for a final fresh water swim and rinse. Beautiful weather, wonderful water.... More beach today.

The town here - I think- has grown a bit since I was here last (seven years?). Mostly it's tourist trinket joints, restaurants and cafés, some facing the river and others pitching their "garden" seating. The touts in front of the dinner places do a good job at chatting you up all the way up and down the street. It's a beach vacation city. The shadow of Ramadan seems a lot thinner here, and come to think of it the call to prayer is scarcely audible at least in this part of town.

The place where we are staying is beautiful. A long house with only about ten or so rooms emptying out onto a gorgeous and beautifully maintained garden that opens on to a terrace and a dock on the river. The ancient tombs of the Lycian Kings (ca 400 BCE) rise up on the other side of the river. Each morning I start with a plunge into the river for a brackish water rinse and stretch. My only complaint is about the beds - about as large and soft as a camping mattress. I find myself taking a couple ibuprofen to prepare for the nights sleep. The hotel back in Istanbul tomorrow will be a welcome sleep, at least for that reason.

 

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Home Cookin'

Weekly Market in Urgrup

Fun day today. Enough of the rocks and churches - we got to focus almost exclusively on food and home life.

 

First off, the weekly market in Urgrup. Spectacular place with is proliferation of produce of all sorts - nuts, dried fruits, vegetables - especially tomatoes and peppers, great vats of farmer made cheeses and yogurt, raw chickpeas still on the branch (vine? bush?). Huey also sell clothes and housewares, potted plants and flowers, tools, farm equipment -almost everything you want for Cappadocian daily life.

 

 

Then off to the home of our driver. We got to meet his mother and his wife, see the pictures of one of his some off in military service (mandatory twelve months here). We "helped" make lunch - which essentially means we shucked some beans, tasted the tomato sauce and generally got in the way. Still, it was great to see the way things are made. We had some bulgur and minced meat Koftecisi cooked up in a tomato and oil sauce - slightly spicy and very good. We started with a really nice yogurt and rice soup (not what I would generally expect to like, but this was really good) with minced onion and maybe some cucumber and cooked rice heated up in yogurt with maybe some mint. There was a vegetable course with those beans cooked in a bit of cucumber, onion and tomato sauce - seasoned with some hot pepper and cooked in a stove top pressure cooker. The desert was a mild, soft and slightly sweet pudding/drought made from cooking flower in oil and then adding milk and grape seed molasses.a simple preparation but I could see things had to be timed just right to bring it all together.

Actually,what impressed me most was the kitchen and the garden. The kitchen was carpeted with an oriental carpet floor, but otherwise totally simple. Shelves were a few planks covered with a cloth curtain. Containers tended to be old plastic margarine containers. Completely basic, and the food was excellent. They even have a little bread oven out in the garden.

 

The home was also clean and simple. Really four rooms off a hall entryway. Nice view of the valley. Furnishings were a few couches pushed to the sides of the room, one television and a bowl of pet minnows. The gardens were great - some lettuce, tomato, basic herbs, a few plum trees and a big walnut tree and a little five by ten foot patch of carefully cultivates grass.

 

Most remarkable: there was a Hoopoe nesting in the garden wall. Amazing bird - brown and black barred feathers, some bright red accents, and an enormous crest behind its head - when folded about as long as it's beak making its head look like a pick axe. I'm neither talented enough nor equipped to get a good picture - but find it on the web. I remember reading a line about a Hoopoe in a Rumi poem last semester and had no idea about the reference.

 

 

 

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Paradise

Ilhara Canyon, Cappadocia

 

Two days ago our tour guide took use for an easy stroll through the Ilhara Canyon. Cappadocia - at least historically- seems to he all about hiding. If you don't run up into a cave high up a cliff, you sink down into an underground city. A happy alternative is these canyons. The country side of Cappadocia is arid and rocky, but now and again you find these canyons carved by a river or stream. You don't know they are there until you nearly fall into them.

 

That would be a tough fall into the Ilhara Canyon. I think we went down about 400 steps getting from the lip to the bottom. Down there you find this lush green valley and a river filled with fish meandering beneath the cliffs. People of old have carved homes into the rocky cliff sides (again, protection just in case someone does find the canyon) and, of course, there are a series of cave churches with walls covered in different ages of Byzantine Church art.

 

It surprises me how so many of these ruins are left relatively unprotected. You can see some vandalism, but most of that looks quite old (some of the graffiti we saw dates to the 18th century). There was one church in another valley where Eastern Orthodox if old would go to carve their prayers and wishes.

 

We stopped at one little trail side restaurant/camp where this family carries in food and supplies in their backs, and runs a little outdoor cafe. I understand this family used to own a chunk of the valley before the government took it over as a park. By letting them run their cafe here they both incentivize some oversight of the place and offer some more compensation for the dispossessed locals. We saw a similar arrangement before where a local family retains the rights to collect a little fee and have a nice garden in and around a monastery valley.

 

Easy stroll in a cool place on a hot day. Of course, followed by the usual four or five courses of lunch.

 

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Sobessos

Church at Sobessos

 

Fine Cappadocia day!

I declined the chance to go down into the underground city at Kamakali. I've gone down that hole twice before. It is worth the trek, but although I am not claustrophobic it does tend to bring it out of you.

 

Later on the most interesting thing was this ancient Roman city (pre-Byzantine) that they are digging up out of a farmers field here. The first remarkable thing is that they found this at all. Apparently when a farmer reports thing like this in his fields, reporting it means the land is taken away. Although they get paid for the loss, they use the field for food and no one else is ever willing to sell off another orchard here. So, there are disincentives.

 

They think it's Sobessos - an ancient capital city here. Above is a picture of a nice mosaic uncovered in one large building. Its a nice image of the conversion of an old Roman hall (temple?) into a Byzantine church with the church walls and altar build right on top of the old floor with its tile mosaic. There's also a nice old Roman bath set beside this with it's raised floor for heating.

 

We had lunch in an old Greek town deeply impacted by the population exchange back in the 1920s. A family run place - wonderful food out on a covered terrace. Then a trip to a small park with some sweet panoramic overviews, some pottery in Avanos and back for a swim and a nice meal. Good day!

 

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Justinian's Church

Got reacquainted with the delights of a Turkish breakfast (simit, tomatoes, cucumbers, meat and cheese and that nice mix of tahini and grapeseed molasses - sort of a Turkish peanut butter).

 

The off to Hagia Sophia (Aga Sophia, Ayasofya) - trying to beat the crowds. Topkapi Palace is closed today, so I suspect Hagia Sophia gets all the more attention.

 

His is the third or fourth time I've visited - best yet. Knowing a bit more about what you are seeing makes all the difference. The outside of the building is very grand - particularly in the old images where you see the church more or less set off by itself. Today it's crowded in with all sorts of additions - old and new: Sinan's minarets, medrasse, the Hurrem Hamam, various tombs - and t)9/3 are just the old additions. So, from the outside it's something of a jumble. The effect is all the more dramatic because as you entire through the lodge and into the world under the dome suddenly it all appears as large and lofty as the sky itself. That, I gather is the intended impact- a highly crafted and ornamented Byzantine universe. All of this overwritten with the Islamic features of worship and decoration. This is another wonderful feature of this building - the layering of a Byzantine and Ottoman art and religion. I took a picture of one corner there in the gallery where they have literally peeled back the Ottoman and Byzantine layers to reveal the old brick and mortar construction underneath it all.

Lunch at Doy Doy - a very nice constant across now three of these trips to Turkey. Good inexpensive food in a beautiful place overlooking the Bosphorous and the Blue Mosque - mostly vegetables and a few pieces of very nice ground lamb or sausage.

 

The afternoon adventure was hoofing it over and down the hill to Galata bridge and figuring out how to get a nice boat tour up to the Ataturk bridge and back.

 

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And back again...

 

The Blue Mosque - picture taken in 2009 from the DoyDoy terrace.

Here's the plan....

• Leave Sunday
  
• Two days in Istanbul
  
• Four days in Cappadocia
  
• Four days on the beach in Dalyan
  
• Four days back in the city
  

And back on July 14th.

 

Planning on this one got away from me. I wanted to get out to this conference on Heybeliada (one of the Princes Islands off Istanbul), but that one seems to have vanished - not the island, but the conference. Five days before the conference begins the website still posts "coming soon..." regarding the program and the conference details.

 

Too bad... Just a few days ago I listened to a podcast about the monastery and seminary there on Heybeliada and an interview with the leader of the monastery there who was talking about the meaning of the place and it's future. There was also a longer interview with a Dominican monk from Istanbul who has become a scholar of mysticism and the Sufic tradition.http://www.onbeing.org/program/spiritual-boundaries-modern-turkey-fr-alberto-ambrosio-and-metropolitan-elpidophoros>

 

It's been five years now since I started teaching my course on Istanbul - it's mostly about historical stuff (Byzantines and Ottomans). Now I am heading back again to the City. It's the classic vertigo experience - the more I fall into the place the more the floor recedes. I think this go round of the City and it's sights and neighborhoods might be the best yet as it comes after a few years of on again off again research and reading. I'll have a much better idea of what I am seeing.

 

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Beaucoup de French Kids

Up and out in good form this morning. Made it through our very fine breakfast and out the door to the British Museum not that long after it opened. That was a good plan as the museum just seemed to increasingly fill up as the day moved along.

I was mentioning to my loyal opposition that the one surprising thing about London is how few English people you run across hereabouts. I guess it makes sense that we tend to cluster around the tourist things, but perhaps this is the very first truly international city. It’s past, though, is thoroughly British Empire as we saw today with gallery upon gallery of the world’s archaeology. We took in some of the Assyrian and Greek stuff first off – including the Nereid tomb from Lycia (which has greater meaning having spent some time these past two summers in Lycia itself) and, of course, the Parthenon marbles. I enjoyed those and felt it is fine by me if UK holds onto those for now, my guide and contradictrice feels otherwise – but settling that one goes beyond the scope of my plans for this trip.

The museum itself was impressive. The dome that was built over the entire internal courtyard of the museum is really striking. The museum was thronged, unfortunately, with squads of little French kids being marched past things with “grand importance historique”. The English school kids wore dayglo green vests and seemed well managed; the French kids were more of a force – drumming on the sarcophagi or some of the teenagers smoking in the stairways. I’d imagine that smoking in a place like the Smithsonian is probably a felony now in the US – anyway, kids today…

I liked the early European galleries most of all. There was an intriguing exhibit of clocks and also lots of material from early Medieval or even stone age Britain. I was surprised to see what a large footprint the Byzantines had even in Medieval British art and artifacts. I gather their arts and artisans were sought after all through Europe.

We did not push the museum thing too far. The museums in the US – and particularly Boston – do a nice job with lots of the archaeological stuff as well – and the contemporary world beckoned. So, after a few hours of galleries we had a nice lunch down in the cafeteria and wandered out by foot and by tube to Trafalgar.

My memories and image of Trafalgar was of an utterly immense place, so I was surprised by its relatively modest scale. We spent a bit of time at St. Martin’s in the Field.

Probably the most remarkable thing today was tea at Claridge’s. This required swinging back by the hotel to put on a sport coat but it was a surprisingly nice experience. Nice tables in the back of the lobby, a five page menu of tea selections and a succession of little tea sandwiches, biscuits, little pastries are brought by the table over the space of an hour or so. Very nice place - mirrors, pianos playing with cellos, leather upholstering on the walls. Very nice and relaxing experience – my teas in Durham, NH are going to have to kick it up a notch starting with a bit more clotted cream, scones and black currant jam.

Also, I am happy to report more advances on the “getting around” front. The #13 bus is everything we need, running from next block on Baker Street down past Selfridges through Oxford Street and Oxford Circus down onto Regent Street, Piccadilly and Trafalgar – everything you need on one double decker run.

Photo: The Elgin Marbles in Lord Duveen’s Gallery at the British Museum