Amasya - the Peterborough of Turkey

We took a night bus on Tuesday from Istanbul to Amasya, roughly halfway across Turkey. The city is famous for apples - famous enough that there are pictures of apples on their metrocards, the buses that go to the city, etc. - although the actual apples we had were rather mediocre (they were the first of the season, and we are assured they'll get better). The apricots we had were, on the other hand, spectacular.

Amasya is between two hills; one of them is dotted with tombs from ~300 B.C. The tombs themselves are nicely closed off with gates, but you can hike up at look into them from the outside. (They look rather like holes in the rock, but with a really spectacular view). We met a couple of little girls who followed us around for most of the afternoon after Anna bought them ice cream... Anna had long conversations with them where they spoke different languages at each other and seemed to get along alright.

Apart from that - Ottoman-era wooden houses, dinner on the river, napping on the grass (apparently several people were discussing whether they should give us money so we could afford a place to sleep, but no one seemed offended), meeting lots and lots of friendly people, etc. We visited the Amasya music conservatory, which was once a hospital for the insane -- possibly the first place where music was used to treat psychological illness (14th century). There are some wonderful pictures describing medical techniques -- very happy patients with terrifying-looking implements up their noses. And the space is acoustically quite beautiful. There was a concert that evening, but we had to take our second evening bus before it started (an evening bus for which we'd been sold tickets that didn't exist -- the end result was that people had to stand up for four hours so we could have seats, something that we didn't sort out until it was too late).

Overall Amasya reminded me of Ontario tourist towns -- small downtown of pretty and often over-restored buildings nestled along a river; very friendly, and sometimes a bit over-friendly when the people have terrifying political views (one gentleman who was happy to see germans since "the Turks and the Germans have done so much together... we were in the war together, etc."). The Peterborough reference isn't really accurate since Istanbul is a good 10 hours away. But I can't think of a better one right now.

More fascinating mosque architecture: the oldest in town, about 1000 A.D., is clearly modelled off of Byzantine churches - a T-shaped layout with separate rooms off the main chamber (the other popular interpretation is that the side rooms were there for jihadis - to which I can only respond that an army that could fit in these rooms would have trouble storming a barn, let alone a crusader castle)... the nicest in town was double-domed; apparently most Istanbul mosques are single-domed because the Haggia Sophia (which translated from Greek (greek alphabet) to Ottoman (arabic alphabet) to Turkish (roman alphabet) as Ayya Sophia, see last post) was taken to be the gold standard for architecture. The double-dome model, while not as overwhelming when you look up, allows for a bigger central space which is rather pleasant.