August 24th: Van in Eastern Turkey

On August 24th 1978 I was in Van in eastern Turkey.

I had arrived with friends the previous day on the overnight train from Kayseri.  In the morning we passed along the narrow Murat valley with bare hills around, and reached Lake Van at Tatvan. We crossed the lake to Van during the middle of the day on a ferry journey which lasted several hours.

Akdamar, 2006:  Picture by Simon Hooks,  CC

This day we went to the island of Akdamar, without too much hassle, but I had the pleasure of finding the information and the transport, and getting together a party, 9 foreigners, 2 Turks and one child.  The ride to the island was good and the church was beautiful with all the reliefs on the outside, Armenian about 920AD, really ancient frescoes unprotected on the walls; the style, the inscriptions and the pictures were unlike anything I had seen before.  The lake water proved to be warm and slippery; we swam and sunbathed and enjoyed being in the country.  The mountains behind were bare and high, the little areas of green carefully kept, the few people friendly. Back in town there was a fine sunset.  We wandered around the backstreets, had a meal outside in a lively area, as men in turbans walked past.

Van Citadel, 2009:  Picture by Simon Taylor, CC

The next day we went to the citadel, a huge rock near the lake, a place full of history. There was a hollowed sanctum in the side of the rock and a huge Urartu inscription outside, from a kingdom dating back to 850BC. With a minaret at the top and the massive walls and crags all round, it was an impressive place.  The large site below was the old city of Van destroyed during the attack on the Armenians in 1915.  The outlines of the streets and houses and the four mosques was a poignant sight.   Beyond was today's agriculture, cows and horses and donkeys.  I sat high up on the rock and stared. 

In the late afternoon we walked out to the railway station to get the night train to Teheran.  I wrote a piece in my notebook:

First border hassle on the way east, getting out of Turkey, sitting around in the waiting-room wondering if the train is ever going to leave; first it was 7, then 10, then 12, so who knows at what hour we're going to get away from here.  There must be about 30 of us altogether, an English guitar player we met at the bank this morning, three English games players (I played declaration whist, bridge, backgammon) the Canadian from Urgup, the German/Swiss couple from the ferry, "nice" English couple going first class, 6 Pakistanis (4 roughish and a nice couple) sitting on the floor playing cards, 4 Germans we've been with somewhere else.  There are some Turks hanging around as well but I don't know who of them is travelling.  Lots of hassling over the changing of money: you've got to have a form saying you've changed so much money for the journey (took a long time in the Central bank this morning) and in addition a change slip for 500TL, which there was no mention of previously.  There is as yet no ill-feeling.  I thought it might be difficult.

And later on the train:

Fairly comfy Iranian train, the old first class couchette gives everyone space to sleep.  We didn't leave the border till 10.30 this morning, but no hassles, everyone polite.  Some beautiful mountain scenery with lovely greener hills and a river at the bottom, flocks of sheep and goats, and long tunnels.  Now we're in the plain or plateau, dull at first until we came to Lake Oroumieh which is vast and has green patches beside with cultivation.

I remember that we stopped at the huge station in Tabriz for a while around lunchtime.  It was completely deserted as was the vast square outside.  Not one person in sight, no officials.  Very strange.

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August 22nd: Alexandroupolis in North-Eastern Greece

On August 22nd 1972 I was in Alexandroupolis in north-western Greece.  After a month lazing around Greece we were now driving to Istanbul.

We had stopped in Kavalla to buy food in the stalls around the harbour and drove on through the increasingly Turkish looking towns and villages of Thrace.  We stopped for a coffee in Alexandroupolis, a modern town on the coast, did some shopping and drove back a few miles to find an empty spot by the sea to pitch our tent.

Everyone in Greece who knew we were heading for Turkey implored us to be careful and take better security.  One thing which bothered them was the fact that the Land-Rover had no lock on the bonnet so you could easily get in and steal things or change the settings and so on and so forth.  So in Alexandroupolis we found a padlock in a general store and the next morning went to a garage to get it fitted.  The garage owner absolutely refused to let us pay anything for this, arguing that it was his duty as a Greek to ensure that we were not robbed by any of those Turks.

We carried on across the border at the Evros river and into the empty barren hills of European Turkey.  After an hour we saw our first camels and drove on to the Londra Campsite in the western suburbs of Istanbul.  We quickly discovered that Turks were every bit as friendly and helpful as Greeks.  They were amazed that we had managed to spend a month in Greece without having all our belongings stolen.

Road in European Turkey, 2008:  Picture by Dimitirs Kilimis,  CC

August 18th: Urgup in Central Turkey

On August 18th 1978 I was in Urgup in Cappadocia in Central Turkey.  The area is famous for its thin sandstone which has been eroded into fantastical shapes.  The soft rock has long been carved out by humans as well as water, for underground cities, churches and monasteries, and for everyday houses many of which are still lived in.

In the afternoon I walked out into the country to try to record something of that unusual scenery:

Have walked a little way out towards Goreme to try to break a siesta somnolence while the people of the hotel cleaned the room.  The partially clouded weather and the breeze continue to make it fairly cool to sit here in the full sunshine.  The scenery is almost indescribable.  I'm on a rock-spur looking out northwest, the higher outcrops of the pink rock to the left and the outskirts of Urgup to the right.  There are green trees following the river and a road slopes from right to centre at a steep angle.  Below are several little valleys of deeply eroded white sandstone striped with an ochre-yellow, and green trees in the valleys.  Paths winding around the dozens of contours and the little fields and the "chimney" outcrops.  Fields are mainly grapes, with some quinces, loquats, apples, melons, nicely kept.  An old couple are picking some fruit in one field just to my left.  She with white headscarf and bent over back, he just rode in on a grey donkey with normal wooden saddle and a pair of white woven cotton donkey-bags.  Straight in front is one of the toadstool shaped rocks with a square-shaped hole cut  one third of the way up.  To the right is a sort of house by a large field of vines where I saw a man working earlier.  House of stone blocks, look unmortared and a couple of arches, with a downstairs built into the rock and opening on a little garden.  Shrikes clicking and occasionally screaming from the little almond-trees, nuthatches, warblers, doves.  And so - down a little into the biggest valley which is all tiered into little terraces, though only actively used this far down.  The rocks are so soft they crumble to the touch, but the dust is quite fertile.  Walnut trees, olives, tomatoes, peppers.  I frightened the wits out of a tortoise.  A beautiful male golden oriole.  A rufous-backed bush-chat.  Birds here are truly different.  A little arched bridge over a water-course.  A chimney hollowed out like a church with many little niches, and collapsed above, but I think it was quite recent.  Rocks carved out for a water-course.

I stayed in a cheap hotel in the centre of town which was picturesquely part of an old han or mediaeval inn.  Next door was a tea-house where old men congregated which was also ancient and may well have been part of the han. I liked to go there in the evening and play backgammon; the first time I played with one of the locals, he beat me ten games in a row.  I wrote in my notebook:

A tea-house evening, post eating. The men sit around, watch the TV, it's the news now, just had the ads for banks, the usual Western lifestyle.  Here it's mainly the old men, with their cloth caps or the woollen tasselled type, grizzled grey beards, jackets sober with wide-hipped narrow-bottomed trousers, greys, blacks, black dusty shoes, shirts buttoned right up but no tie.  One old man with a stick has a straight cigarette-holder with which he smokes his roll-ups right to the bottom, he sits cross-legged on his chair.  Curtains on the windows, the painting of Ataturk on the wall, the traditional rug-weavings of two peacocks facing each other.  Little tables and chairs, but we sit on a bench, there is a kilim along one wall of the room next door.  Strip lighting, blue and white above washed walls, concrete floor, tea-making area separated off.

In the following days I made the effort to get out to some of the sites.  As the transport was haphazard I chose to hitch.  First I went to Kaymakli, an underground city hollowed out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago.  Several layers of tunnels were open for tourists with others being studied by archaeologists below.  Several of these underground cities have been discovered and, although they were used by mediaeval Christians fleeing persecution, they are much older.  It was good to have been able to visit one of these, despite the flocks of German and Italian tourists seething through its nether regions.

Another day I hitched to Zelve where there are churches and monasteries, lacking the frescoes of nearby Goreme (which I had seen in 1972).  I wrote this up in my journal that night:

Hitching again this time to Zelve, and spending a couple of hours sitting around the deserted village, and poking around the caves, trying to climb up the two little gorges behind one of the two main valleys.  Quite an interesting place, the varied good scenery.  Did walk quite a bit near Goreme and away from Zelve, then got a lift from a friendly family from Istanbul, the lady spoke English, who took me to Avanos, which was a quieter and less speedy place than Urgup, though a bit larger and more modern.  Lift back the direct road, one of the nicest of the whole region, climbing until you can look down on both Avanos and Urgup, then crossing one of the prettiest canyons, little visited, in pink sandstone.

Patrimonium Mundi:  Panoramas of Cappadocia, including this one of Zelve.

Zelve, 2007:  Picture by Noumenon,  CC

Kaymakli, 2006:  Picture by Stephen Hill,  CC

 


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August 15th: Konya in Central Turkey

On August 15th 1978 I was in Konya in central Turkey.  The main intention of this visit was to see the Neolithic site of Catal Huyuk.  The previous winter I had taken an extramural course in Neolithic archaeology and was keen to see if anything was visible in this place which once had been the biggest and one of the earliest urban centres in the world.

I took a bus to Cumra and from there a taxi to Catal Huyuk itself.  There proved to be not a lot to see.  The guardian told me that the excavations had been flooded a year or so earlier and the site was little visited.  I notice that excavations started again in the nineties and the site seems well visited now.  On the way back through Cumra I wrote this in my notebook:

Been to see Catal Huyuk which proved to be more of a hassle than I'd have liked.  I didn't get much of a chance to sit there and cast my mind back eight thousand  years, because the taxi boys were hassling me to get moving all the time.  All the same I did see it, albeit a little annoyed, and it's just the fact that it's there that's so extraordinary, you can see the walls, bricks, the hearths and the setting, and imagine even just a little that there were people living there, building their fields amongst the trees, learning to herd their animals, hunting, trading in obsidian, making copper.  In some sense Catal Huyuk is where it all started.

Today it's a hot, dusty plain where they grow melons and sunflowers, and it needs irrigation.  Harriers and falcons and shrikes and magpies.  Houses with a stone layer, mud brick above, sometimes painted white.

In Konya I stayed in a hotel conveniently near the bazaar.  I wandered round a lot and was made to feel welcome.  The other tourists were all older and in groups, staying in the modern hotels or maybe in camping-cars.  I wrote a letter of condolence in English at the request of the man in the tourist information office.   In the bazaars there was the smell of Asia, a veritable traffic jam of horse-carts, street after street of bazaars, a cheese and olive bazaar, fruit, grains, clothes and so on.  There were beggars in the streets, the deformed and the crippled.  I enjoyed the food in the bazaar, good and cheap and very Turkish.  I discovered it was Ramadan and in the evening rush at 7.45 I had to compete or get the left-overs.  You could see all the men hanging about beforehand looking at their watches.  I visited the Karakoy shrine and museum, admiring the Seljuk tiles and the blue patterns around the dome. 

But I quickly felt the need to move on.  I took the bus to Aksaray across the near desert.  We passed a very few desert villages made of mud baked in classic desert style, little patches of wheat where the salt was not too bad, sandpipers and plovers on the salt margins.  There was a gypsy (or nomad) encampment with little green carts painted red and buffaloes as the main animal.  I changed to a dolmus at Aksaray and soon after passed a great caravanserai.  This great sweep of open country was a world away from the green hills of the Mediterranean.  The air was clear and high and the vistas huge.  I got a thrill of excitement to be moving east.

Catal Huyuk, 2005, Picture by Stipich Bela,  CC

Restoration, 2005:  Picture by Stipich Bela, CC

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September 28th: Dogubayazit in Eastern Turkey

On September 28th 1972, I was in Dogubayzit in eastern Turkey.

After the drive north from Lake Van, we reached the main route to Iran at Dogubayzit. As always we wanted to camp out in the country rather than to stay in the town, but this time, so near a sensitive frontier, we were not going to get away with it. We stopped first at a Jandarma, a police station, 10 kilometres before town, and after an hour we were told that we couldn't stay because it was a military area. So we drove past the town and up into the hills where we had a good view of Mount Ararat. First some shepherds told us it was forbidden to camp, and then the police arrived and told us to go to a hotel as the area was dangerous because of Kurds. So we camped outside the hotel where there were other car campers.

In the morning we drove up to gaze at the wild and romantic Ishak Pasha Palace, high on its promontory. I can't remember if the public could access the building itself, but the view was enough. We didn't linger and went back down the mountain and over the border into Iran.

Ishak Pasha Palace in 2003, picture by moondroog, CC

September 21st: Recep Koyu in South-East Turkey

On September 21st 1972 I was in the village of Recep Koyu, driving to Nemrut Dagi, an ancient site on the top of a mountain in the south-east of Turkey.

When we left Malatya we wanted to find a more direct road to Nemrut Dagi than we could easily find on our maps. We asked a few people but got conflicting information. We decided to give it a try as we had previously driven in parts of Turkey where the maps didn't conform to reality. We were quickly in glorious country on gravel roads passing through Yesilyurt and Celikhan, well tended fields, people wearing fine traditional clothes, increasingly mountainous. The road became narrower and more earth than gravel. We went through a beautiful ford and hoped we were going on a through road in the right direction. As evening drew in we got stuck behind a dolmus taxi which kept sputtering to a halt. We helped it once and eventually had to tow it off the track so we could get by. Finally we found a spot where we could pull off the road and sleep with enough space for other vehicles to pass, although I don't think any did.  This was beside a torrent which fell down the hillside into a gorge somewhere below us in the darkness.

We were up at 5am to watch the sunrise and soon a party of men came down the hillside to talk to us. They were extremely hospitable, offering us water first of all, as so often in Turkey. The older man, the headman of the village, was interested in the water we had in a jerrycan, tasted it and told us which spring we had collected it as we had driven along the road past Celikhan. The water in his village, Recep, was the best in Turkey he assured us. He then invited us up the hill to his house. The steep paths were built of stone, the house of stone and wood, light and airy. His wife was delighted to entertain us and to talk to the women in our party, a strong good-humoured woman, wearing a similar costume and headdress to ones we had seen the day before. They served us ayran, fine bread and butter. As we talked on about the directions in our simple Turkish and their simple German - one of the sons had been to work in Germany as so often in rural Turkey - the plan arose for our host with one of his sons to accompany us first to the next village and eventually to Nemrut which was in his patch but which he had never seen.

Slowly we wound down the valleys as we made our way towards Adiyaman, with frequent stops early on as the headman was greeted by friends and checked on directions. We turned away from Adiyaman towards Kahta and eventually crossed a river on a bridge built by the Romans but still in use. By Kahta we were in a more populated area and the roads were becoming more developed. They went to a hotel for the night while we camped nearby.

Nemrut Dagi was already on the tourist trail by 1972 with a more or less motorable road up and dolmuses available. The site is at the top of a mountain at 2100 meters, where Antiochus, a first century BC king of Commagene, built himself a sanctuary. Antiochus had kept his kingdom fairly independent of the Romans and I had some memory of the history. The top of the mountain has been levelled and huge heads and a tumulus placed there. It is a spectacular place to visit, especially soon after sunrise, and a suitable end to two days of driving through a remote and unspoiled mountain area.

The Roman Bridge

Stone heads at Nemrut

Pictures by Mariurupe, Creative Commons, 2 of a great number worth looking at


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September 12th: Fethiye

On September 12th 1972, I was in Fethiye while driving through South-West Turkey.

From Tavas (after Denizli), where the good road ended, to Antalya took three days, much of it on poor roads, about 300 miles in all. This took us through open valleys and pine-covered mountain roads, through small villages with picturesque wooden houses, and small towns where we tried to shop for food, or find a bank or petrol. It was an empty, undeveloped part of the country, and the roads did not conform to the maps we had.

One highlight was arriving at the sea in Fethiye. We stood on the jetty and looked back at the caves on the cliffs which might have contained some of the famous Lycian tombs. This was the only part of the journey where there was any evidence of tourism as it was a harbour for yachts. Unfortunately the town was shut up that day and there was no-one around. There was some asphalt road on the way east out of Fethiye but it was poor and intermittent and had ungraded gravel stretches. It was a relief to get back on to the mountain roads again.  We drove up through the poor town of Kemer over pine-tree passes and through quaint wooden farming villages to reach the town of Korkuteli and down to the sea at Antalya.

We camped off the road each night, undisturbed. I remember one lovely spot in a grassy valley with running water where we cooked lamb cutlets on an open fire and drank wine. Another highlight in my memory of this journey was passing a travelling band as we came down off a pass, three musicians, one playing a pipe of some sort, one a beating a drum, one with some sort of stringed instrument. They danced along playing and had a bear running with them. They paid no attention to us.

I don't imagine much of what we saw remains. We must have passed close to where Dalaman Airport now is, and not too far from Olu Deniz. Here is a modern picture from Fethiye:

Lycian Tombs at Fethiye.  Picture by Andrew382, CC

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