I realized that the trilingual 10-year olds -- Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic -- we've been meeting in the southeast know three languages from three completely different language groups. Likewise impressive are the kids who have tourist shpiels memorized in six languages. With proper opportunities, they might be capable of an awful lot as grownups.
Camels have adorable bare bottoms. I had not realized this. They also seem quite happy in the sun, unless some jerk has made them wear immense saddles and be chained to things to give tourists rides.
In eastern turkey, men walk around holding hands or with linked arms. It's quite charming.
Abraham, apparently, after hiding in a cave for 10 years, emerged and started smashing King Nemrut's idols; King Nemrut, upset, ordered him to be thrown into a fire. But when he was thrown out the window, the fire turned into water and the wood in it turned into fish. So now the descendants of these fish are the best-fed fish in the world. It's fairly frightening to watch them swarm for food.
I saw some nine-thousand year old rocks. The rocks were unimpressive, but the artwork on them was pretty great - vultures and foxes and lions and so on.
Turkish hospitality does not allow you to pay for anything. This is frustrating, but also sweet.
Panoramic views vs. driving out of the city: you can't see the new Mardin from the old historic one. But driving out you realize how the city makes sense -- there's all these highrises on the other side of the hill. Diyarbakir is more mixed in the downtown, but still on the drive out you see lots of much less "mixed" neighbourhoods - subdivisions, big blocks of housing units that look the same, etc. More for the everywhere is the same file, and so on.
Urfa (or "Sanliurfa" - glorious Urfa - as it was officially renamed in the 1980s -- I can't find out why; the same happened to Antep; in both cases it's to commemorate the brave struggles of the people in the "war of independence") is lovely - the city has been heavily developed in the last 5+ years under a mayor whose first term was AKP and then ran for his second as an independent, and the development (parks, wide sidewalks, public squares, repaved roads, lots and lots of trees and flowers) seems to have had a very impressive effect. All kinds of people walking around - this is a pilgrimage point (see the fish above), so there are lots of conservative muslims and LOTS of iranian tourists, but there are also more women on the street in all degrees of religious and secular dress than we've seen since Istanbul. Very friendly. Visited a mosque that was a church until the 1920s, then a prison, now a mosque. The caretaker did not know what kind of church it was; he had even heard a rumour it was a synagogue. I haven't found out either (just checked the guidebooks). another example of the selective history erasing...
Urfa has experienced some of the biggest effects of the GAP development project, particularly the Ataturk dam (obvious name), on the Euphrates -- there are irrigation channel running all along the fields, which are now extremely green, large plots, full of machinery (there's a New Holland assembly plant here). Much more could be said on this, but I won't now. We drove through this on the way to the 9000 year old rocks at Harran (where there was a university in the 1100s, as well)...
Two opinions on Kurd / Arab relations in Urfa: one person told us Kurds and Arabs get along well here; although there are some separate neighbourhoods people mix happily (this matches much of what I saw). The other opinion was that Arabs are dirty and rich and got all the best plots of land in the GAP project but make the Kurds do the work while they relax in their four houses with their four wives and their fancy cars, and that no self-respecting Kurd would have tea with an Arab.
This is my last day in Turkey.
20 Temmuz 2009 Pazartesi
18 Temmuz 2009 Cumartesi
Eastern Turkey, of course, used to have a large Armenian population and a substantial Syriac Christian population. After the genocide of 1915, most of the surviving Armenians left the country, but in the Southeast there were still sizable communities in the 1960s and 70s (I had not realized this until the last two days). We visited a semi-museum in Diyarbakir set up as the "traditional Diyarbakir house", at least for the better-off. (This is a nice thing for tourists: because the traditional house is set up in a square around a central courtyard, walking down the streets you only see the walls of the houses, not the outdoor space where people congregate. This makes peeking in half-open doors pretty irresistable). The house had belonged to a rich Armenian family, and there are photographs and clothes and curtains / carpets etc. all through it. The last Armenians left Diyarbakir (there are probably a few left) in the 1980s and early 1990s during the civil war; most of the Syriac Christians did the same.
We visited Syriac churches in Marden and Diyarbakir (also, outside of Marden, a Syriac monestary that was pretty disappointing - a 10-minute guided tour by a guide who didn't do much more than explain what christians were.. the monestary is still active, but the monks hide while the tourists are let in) and got to speak with the priest in Diyarbakir. The only Armenian churches we've visited have been ruins or abandoned. (There are the ruins of a very large Armenian Catholic church in Diyarbakir, something I hadn't known existed). The Syriac communities in Mardin and Diyarbakir are only a few hundred each. The patriarchate was once in Mardin, but moved to Damascus a few centuries ago (Syria's population today is about 10 - 12% christian -- although in this part of the world these labels are more about who your grandparents were than what you believe).
A few things are striking. One just comes from architecture: there was a tremendous amount of give-and-take between Christianity and Islam. Many buildings went from being pre-christian temples to churches to mosques to churches to mosques, or some other pattern; mosques were modified from church patterns and later churches borrow heavily from Seljuk and later Islamic architecture.
The other thing that is striking is how many people I've met who are willing and even eager to talk about the history of the Armenians. I've met several people now who had Armenian grandparents (Mahmood's grandmother "converted" at 15 when her family was killed and a Kurd who liked how she looked married her); the mosque caretaker who showed us around today was quite cutting in his criticism for how christians had been treated; and all the young political activists - especially the Kurdish activists - we've been meeting talk about this history (and I don't usually volunteer that my great-grandparents were Armenian). This is a marked difference from most of the older generation (and from most of the younger generation, honestly -- nationalism is pretty bred-in-the-bone here, and the proud Turkish Secular Identity is premised on the idea of Turks as One Kind of People). But a lot of Kurds realize that their situation now is not that different from that of the Armenians (and the Greeks, and the Syriacs, and the Alawis) -- except that the Kurds are still there. Mahmood asked me to apologize to my father for the part the Kurds played in the Armenian genocide.
We also got a copy of a new travel book -- available for free download at www.anotherlookateast.org -- on East and Southeast Turkey put together by a group based in Diyarbakir and that writes history back into the region. I've only read the chapters on Diyarbakir and Urfa, but it's interesting (most of the official tourist plaques don't mention Armenian owners or communities and treat christian sites mostly as ancient historical curiosities). And a friend of Mahmood's (who works at a youth cultural centre here where they teach Kurdish dance & music and do theatre classes in Kurdish and Turkish) of a book that, among other things, lists the names of Armenians deported from Erzurum and the region in 1915 (this is the region my great-grandfather came from).
Could say more, but now I am off to take a shower. It is very very hot here.
We visited Syriac churches in Marden and Diyarbakir (also, outside of Marden, a Syriac monestary that was pretty disappointing - a 10-minute guided tour by a guide who didn't do much more than explain what christians were.. the monestary is still active, but the monks hide while the tourists are let in) and got to speak with the priest in Diyarbakir. The only Armenian churches we've visited have been ruins or abandoned. (There are the ruins of a very large Armenian Catholic church in Diyarbakir, something I hadn't known existed). The Syriac communities in Mardin and Diyarbakir are only a few hundred each. The patriarchate was once in Mardin, but moved to Damascus a few centuries ago (Syria's population today is about 10 - 12% christian -- although in this part of the world these labels are more about who your grandparents were than what you believe).
A few things are striking. One just comes from architecture: there was a tremendous amount of give-and-take between Christianity and Islam. Many buildings went from being pre-christian temples to churches to mosques to churches to mosques, or some other pattern; mosques were modified from church patterns and later churches borrow heavily from Seljuk and later Islamic architecture.
The other thing that is striking is how many people I've met who are willing and even eager to talk about the history of the Armenians. I've met several people now who had Armenian grandparents (Mahmood's grandmother "converted" at 15 when her family was killed and a Kurd who liked how she looked married her); the mosque caretaker who showed us around today was quite cutting in his criticism for how christians had been treated; and all the young political activists - especially the Kurdish activists - we've been meeting talk about this history (and I don't usually volunteer that my great-grandparents were Armenian). This is a marked difference from most of the older generation (and from most of the younger generation, honestly -- nationalism is pretty bred-in-the-bone here, and the proud Turkish Secular Identity is premised on the idea of Turks as One Kind of People). But a lot of Kurds realize that their situation now is not that different from that of the Armenians (and the Greeks, and the Syriacs, and the Alawis) -- except that the Kurds are still there. Mahmood asked me to apologize to my father for the part the Kurds played in the Armenian genocide.
We also got a copy of a new travel book -- available for free download at www.anotherlookateast.org -- on East and Southeast Turkey put together by a group based in Diyarbakir and that writes history back into the region. I've only read the chapters on Diyarbakir and Urfa, but it's interesting (most of the official tourist plaques don't mention Armenian owners or communities and treat christian sites mostly as ancient historical curiosities). And a friend of Mahmood's (who works at a youth cultural centre here where they teach Kurdish dance & music and do theatre classes in Kurdish and Turkish) of a book that, among other things, lists the names of Armenians deported from Erzurum and the region in 1915 (this is the region my great-grandfather came from).
Could say more, but now I am off to take a shower. It is very very hot here.
Diyarbakir
Diyarbakir: largest city in eastern Turkey, and the major city of the Kurds... it's grown fourfold in the last fifteen years, which means there's a big "modern" city (tall buildings, straight streets, even starbucks and mcdonalds now) outside of the old walled city. We met Mahmood, a friend of Marlene's - also studying at Bilgi in Istanbul - who is from Diyarbakir and showed us around. He was born in a village about 20km south of Diyarbakir; all the villagers were expelled & the village destroyed in the mid-90s, so he lived in the city during his preteen / teenage years and then went to school in Van and moved to Istanbul a year ago.
Before we met up with him, Julia met a guy at a bookstore (the bookstores in Eastern Turkey, at least the ones we've been to, seem to be underground and contain a surprising amount of Kierkegaard in translation) who works at a tourist centre / Dengbesh house - he saw her looking at Kurdish books and started up a conversation... Dengbesh are singers / storytellers - they perform acapella, singing old songs or writing new ones or adding onto the old ones. At the house there was a circle of old men singing in turn... when the singer needs to take a deep breath the rest of the circle joins in for a few seconds to fill in the gap. There are also nighttime sessions, they told us, inside the house; younger singers (there still are some) can come and "try out" for the outside circle. There was a cassette shop around the corner, and after babbling and pointing and sort-of-dancing for a while the owner pulled out CD-roms of Kurdish music - Dengbesh, "traditional" music, and pop music - much of which he's recorded in Diyarbakir (given I know about eight words of Turkish and none of Kurdish, I may not have gotten everything straight). The cds don't open in my computer, but so it goes.
Before we met up with him, Julia met a guy at a bookstore (the bookstores in Eastern Turkey, at least the ones we've been to, seem to be underground and contain a surprising amount of Kierkegaard in translation) who works at a tourist centre / Dengbesh house - he saw her looking at Kurdish books and started up a conversation... Dengbesh are singers / storytellers - they perform acapella, singing old songs or writing new ones or adding onto the old ones. At the house there was a circle of old men singing in turn... when the singer needs to take a deep breath the rest of the circle joins in for a few seconds to fill in the gap. There are also nighttime sessions, they told us, inside the house; younger singers (there still are some) can come and "try out" for the outside circle. There was a cassette shop around the corner, and after babbling and pointing and sort-of-dancing for a while the owner pulled out CD-roms of Kurdish music - Dengbesh, "traditional" music, and pop music - much of which he's recorded in Diyarbakir (given I know about eight words of Turkish and none of Kurdish, I may not have gotten everything straight). The cds don't open in my computer, but so it goes.
15 Temmuz 2009 Çarşamba
Catchup
Tonight I am in Marden, amidst the honey-coloured houses (according to the Lonely Planet, dispensor of what must be millions and millions of tourism dollars every year to specific places) and now able to recognize all the other tourists doing the southeast Turkey tour (two Japanese, four czech guys, a belgian girl, a french family who speak Turkısh, a couple other French guys, a german named Sven).
This morning I woke up on a wood platform sitting above the Tigris river to the early morning sun (and it really is early, since all of Turkey is one timezone) to the sound of donkeys braying (which is the weirdest sound ever) and water lapping about on its way own to the Gulf of Basra, and I realized how this whole thing is pretty ridiculous.
Things:
Batman - the l.p. says this is a dismal petrol town with nothing interesting. Which doesn't really account for the fact that it's a very green (in terms of many trees planted) shady place with a huge market (and we were there on market day, so it was filled with people from surrounding villages bringing cheese and vegetables and fruit and stuff) and a newspaper with a frontpage story about protests against the TOKI (state-owned but for-profıt (if I understand this right) mass housing project) developments for their failure to include low-income housing or sufficient amenities. Also, adults kept telling the children to stop bothering us (which they weren't doing that much of -- the Dogubeyazit cry of "hello money!" was missing). Ah, the paradox of development - it giveth with one hand and taketh with the other...
Travel by cheese-wagon: from Van to Batman we bought tickets from a somewhat sketchy bus company and ended up in an extended van whose back was full of cheese. The roads were under extreme constructıon for much of the way, so our mouths and noses were full of a mıx of dust and cheese. It was actually pretty comfortable and the people were really nice.
Kurdish children - are totally adorable and well-brought up. I'm sold.
Van - we did not see the famous Van cat, white with one blue eye and one yellow, although we saw many many many drawings, cross-stitches, and paintings of it. Our totally skeevy hotel manager told us he had one which was world-famous and could swim and open doors, but now all of them are under observation at Van university. He also told us he had ten thousand friends, and that french canadians are not friendly. Van is shaped a lot like a north american city - big buildings downtown, mostly residential subdivisins and housing blocks further out, a pathetically maintained waterfront in a poor area on the outside of the town (when Van came back from the Russians after WWI, the city was scrapped and relocated four kılometres further from the lake). We saw Van from above from the Van Castle outsıde of town; it also sprawls in a recognizable way. Trains from Istanbul to Iran go across lake van on a ferry boat, which we saw arive.
Turkish buses - When my parents worked at the University of Ottawa, they could catch a bus from their the top of the road above their little village to go a half hour into town. This seemed impressive to me. In Turkey, you can flag a bus down outside your village and go five hours into town. It is ridiculous that we do not have something comparable in Canada. Actually, it is in general ridiculous how little Canada seems to be interested in rural life being possible. Sometimes the roads are very bad (especially in the east, where one way to fight the war is to keep people immobile and poor); many of the people are unacceptably poor and probably do not have other transportation options; but all in all I'm very impressed by the bus system.
Hassankeyf - We spent two days in this village, where people have been living, in caves (and very nıce roomy well-carved-out caves) and houses for a few thousand years... It's on and in and below cliffs above the Tigris river. The old city (where some people still lived until a decade ago when it was declared a museum) is huge, with a graveyard, an old palace with a very large water reservoir under it, and the ruins of lots of houses. From the view alone, it's rather a no-brainer of a place to have a town.
Hassankeyf has been under threat from a dam project for a few decades now - a dam on the Tıgrıs would bury the town (not the old city at the top of the cliffs, but the rest). This has opposition from villagers, from Iraq (since the dam would reduce the water flow there) and - because of how gorgeous Hassankeyf is - from tourists, history buffs, nature lovers, and generally well-meaning people all over. Germany was going to provide funding for the dam - just this last week this was rescinded, so the balance goes on. 1) the paradox of development, agaın; 2) none of this can be separated from the fact that the people who live there are kurds and arabs; 3) of course there are other villages that don't happen to be in such scenic places that have had all their resıdents evicted, many many of them; 4) clean energy!; and so on. We slept outside above the river under the stars. We had a long talk with a former regional leader of the DTP (kurdısh party) who is now facing a court trial for organizing a peaceful Kurdish new year celebration (he's an Arab). Interestıng conversatıon; actually mostly a presentation he gave us (after which everyone in the town knew we'd talked with him and stayed at his place) on a very specific version of events. Travelling with Turkish speakers - good. Not speaking Turkish - less so.
This morning I woke up on a wood platform sitting above the Tigris river to the early morning sun (and it really is early, since all of Turkey is one timezone) to the sound of donkeys braying (which is the weirdest sound ever) and water lapping about on its way own to the Gulf of Basra, and I realized how this whole thing is pretty ridiculous.
Things:
Batman - the l.p. says this is a dismal petrol town with nothing interesting. Which doesn't really account for the fact that it's a very green (in terms of many trees planted) shady place with a huge market (and we were there on market day, so it was filled with people from surrounding villages bringing cheese and vegetables and fruit and stuff) and a newspaper with a frontpage story about protests against the TOKI (state-owned but for-profıt (if I understand this right) mass housing project) developments for their failure to include low-income housing or sufficient amenities. Also, adults kept telling the children to stop bothering us (which they weren't doing that much of -- the Dogubeyazit cry of "hello money!" was missing). Ah, the paradox of development - it giveth with one hand and taketh with the other...
Travel by cheese-wagon: from Van to Batman we bought tickets from a somewhat sketchy bus company and ended up in an extended van whose back was full of cheese. The roads were under extreme constructıon for much of the way, so our mouths and noses were full of a mıx of dust and cheese. It was actually pretty comfortable and the people were really nice.
Kurdish children - are totally adorable and well-brought up. I'm sold.
Van - we did not see the famous Van cat, white with one blue eye and one yellow, although we saw many many many drawings, cross-stitches, and paintings of it. Our totally skeevy hotel manager told us he had one which was world-famous and could swim and open doors, but now all of them are under observation at Van university. He also told us he had ten thousand friends, and that french canadians are not friendly. Van is shaped a lot like a north american city - big buildings downtown, mostly residential subdivisins and housing blocks further out, a pathetically maintained waterfront in a poor area on the outside of the town (when Van came back from the Russians after WWI, the city was scrapped and relocated four kılometres further from the lake). We saw Van from above from the Van Castle outsıde of town; it also sprawls in a recognizable way. Trains from Istanbul to Iran go across lake van on a ferry boat, which we saw arive.
Turkish buses - When my parents worked at the University of Ottawa, they could catch a bus from their the top of the road above their little village to go a half hour into town. This seemed impressive to me. In Turkey, you can flag a bus down outside your village and go five hours into town. It is ridiculous that we do not have something comparable in Canada. Actually, it is in general ridiculous how little Canada seems to be interested in rural life being possible. Sometimes the roads are very bad (especially in the east, where one way to fight the war is to keep people immobile and poor); many of the people are unacceptably poor and probably do not have other transportation options; but all in all I'm very impressed by the bus system.
Hassankeyf - We spent two days in this village, where people have been living, in caves (and very nıce roomy well-carved-out caves) and houses for a few thousand years... It's on and in and below cliffs above the Tigris river. The old city (where some people still lived until a decade ago when it was declared a museum) is huge, with a graveyard, an old palace with a very large water reservoir under it, and the ruins of lots of houses. From the view alone, it's rather a no-brainer of a place to have a town.
Hassankeyf has been under threat from a dam project for a few decades now - a dam on the Tıgrıs would bury the town (not the old city at the top of the cliffs, but the rest). This has opposition from villagers, from Iraq (since the dam would reduce the water flow there) and - because of how gorgeous Hassankeyf is - from tourists, history buffs, nature lovers, and generally well-meaning people all over. Germany was going to provide funding for the dam - just this last week this was rescinded, so the balance goes on. 1) the paradox of development, agaın; 2) none of this can be separated from the fact that the people who live there are kurds and arabs; 3) of course there are other villages that don't happen to be in such scenic places that have had all their resıdents evicted, many many of them; 4) clean energy!; and so on. We slept outside above the river under the stars. We had a long talk with a former regional leader of the DTP (kurdısh party) who is now facing a court trial for organizing a peaceful Kurdish new year celebration (he's an Arab). Interestıng conversatıon; actually mostly a presentation he gave us (after which everyone in the town knew we'd talked with him and stayed at his place) on a very specific version of events. Travelling with Turkish speakers - good. Not speaking Turkish - less so.
10 Temmuz 2009 Cuma
Dogubeyazit
Is where I am now. Directly underneath Mt. Ararat. Things:
1) Right by the Iranian border, which means most of the downtown is stores selling all sorts of things brought in from Iran (where things are less expensive than Turkey) -- many of them (called "Passaja" (sp?)) are long hallways filled with all sorts of totally random things. These then make their way further west in Turkey.
2) Right by Mt. Ararat, which means central for adventure tourism, which means all the little boys running around the downtown know a bunch of English on top of being bilingual Kurdish - Turkish. And all the little boys are trying to sell things or get work as guides. It's quite overwhelming sometimes.
3) Fruit is unbelievably cheap here. And tea has gone down to 0.25 a glass from 1.50 - 2.00 in Istanbul.
4) It is very hard to get children to stop playing with you once they start. And one very small one, in particular, doesn't want to stop taking pictures. And they're phenomenally cute.
5) flat, dry, dusty, at the base of the mountain... some little houses behind mud-brick or concrete walls, the kids play in the alleyways and the mommas (at least sometimes) sit inside the walls... lots of taller buildings, which look like they could easily be expanded up once there's money to.
6) lots of squares with fountains (not decorative, just functional - where you can get water from for all the things you need it for). Julia fell in love with this place immediately, it was quite fun watching her be so happy about it. A place where space for living seems to override a lot of the republican "educative" design features (this area WILL BE A PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY, there's even patches of golf-green grass to prove it).
7) Pretty stunning landscape on the drive down. Going from green to brown; steppe (plateau plains) butting up against hills & the few peaks.
8) things are possibly beginning to change for the Kurds; the AKP recently introduced legislation allowing the Kurds to use their language more openly, and instituted a Kurdish-language state television channel... so far, though, all signage seems to be in Turkish only. Made me think about Quebec, obviously... And there's a long way to go, since the war is still going on. (The other major development in Turkish politics was the revelation that several terrorist attacks in Istanbul - which I remember hearing about, 80 dead in one blast, etc - were orchestrated by figures in the military and then blamed on the PKK... this one makes me think about Algeria-- no one high up has been implicated, but some people think this might lead to some change in popular support for the military -- this is all really quite uninformed since I haven't had a chance to research, but that's the outline)
9) not about Dogubeyazit : there is a totally modernist sculpture overlooking Kars that I am really awfully fond of but haven't found out what it is. It's two figures facing each other; I suspect it'll turn out to be a monument to the incapacity of races to coexist or something like that, but for now I think it's swell.
1) Right by the Iranian border, which means most of the downtown is stores selling all sorts of things brought in from Iran (where things are less expensive than Turkey) -- many of them (called "Passaja" (sp?)) are long hallways filled with all sorts of totally random things. These then make their way further west in Turkey.
2) Right by Mt. Ararat, which means central for adventure tourism, which means all the little boys running around the downtown know a bunch of English on top of being bilingual Kurdish - Turkish. And all the little boys are trying to sell things or get work as guides. It's quite overwhelming sometimes.
3) Fruit is unbelievably cheap here. And tea has gone down to 0.25 a glass from 1.50 - 2.00 in Istanbul.
4) It is very hard to get children to stop playing with you once they start. And one very small one, in particular, doesn't want to stop taking pictures. And they're phenomenally cute.
5) flat, dry, dusty, at the base of the mountain... some little houses behind mud-brick or concrete walls, the kids play in the alleyways and the mommas (at least sometimes) sit inside the walls... lots of taller buildings, which look like they could easily be expanded up once there's money to.
6) lots of squares with fountains (not decorative, just functional - where you can get water from for all the things you need it for). Julia fell in love with this place immediately, it was quite fun watching her be so happy about it. A place where space for living seems to override a lot of the republican "educative" design features (this area WILL BE A PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY, there's even patches of golf-green grass to prove it).
7) Pretty stunning landscape on the drive down. Going from green to brown; steppe (plateau plains) butting up against hills & the few peaks.
8) things are possibly beginning to change for the Kurds; the AKP recently introduced legislation allowing the Kurds to use their language more openly, and instituted a Kurdish-language state television channel... so far, though, all signage seems to be in Turkish only. Made me think about Quebec, obviously... And there's a long way to go, since the war is still going on. (The other major development in Turkish politics was the revelation that several terrorist attacks in Istanbul - which I remember hearing about, 80 dead in one blast, etc - were orchestrated by figures in the military and then blamed on the PKK... this one makes me think about Algeria-- no one high up has been implicated, but some people think this might lead to some change in popular support for the military -- this is all really quite uninformed since I haven't had a chance to research, but that's the outline)
9) not about Dogubeyazit : there is a totally modernist sculpture overlooking Kars that I am really awfully fond of but haven't found out what it is. It's two figures facing each other; I suspect it'll turn out to be a monument to the incapacity of races to coexist or something like that, but for now I think it's swell.
9 Temmuz 2009 Perşembe
Kars - the Sault Ste. Marie of Turkey
And so ends this series of similies -
In Kars right now - city of about 70 000, close to the Armenian and Georgian borders; laid out on a grid by the Russians while this was part of Russia from roughly 1870 to 1920... the Europeans are shocked that it doesn't have a city centre or even a central square. It's a real mix - big housing buildings (lots of buildings painted green), dense areas, sort of melting out at the edges until you can't quite tell where it stops being city and starts being little houses and kids and geese. Our hotel is across the river from downtown; walking the long way around took us through streets full of children and more self-built style houses, flattish roofs set back a little more from the road; then you get dumped out from that into more large housing blocks or a surprisingly ornate bridge that leads from a dingy little house to a T in the road. It all does feel quite a lot like a northern canadian city... similarly, again, it's a little hard to figure out what people do here. It's crawling with men, but there's not an obvious employer apart from a couple of factories and an immense police / military presence. There are people living in fairly expensive-looking recently built houses, people in falling-apart hundred year old houses, people in ramshackly little places, all squished side by side. Lots and lots of trees. Many statues that are not of Atatürk, which is quite refreshing, really. An amusement park that we never quite got to, although the music from it comes through the hotel window (the hotels are provided free thanks to Marlene's incredibly sweet roommate from Istanbul, whose uncle knows someone who knows someone...). I quite like it here, although walking back across the river at 10pm all that seemed to be around was bored-looking men driving SUVs looking for things to stare / glare at. Again, the world is the same everywhere...
During the day we went to Ani, right by the armenian border (we could see the border from where we were). It was, in the 11th - 13th centuries, the capital of the Armenian kingdom, and a city of about a hundred thousand people. Today it is just ruins, but quite an awful lot of them... until recently, you could only visit with military escort, but now you can wander around in the field and look at things. The city goes down a hill to a ravine overlooking the river... there's a beautiful little convent directly over the river (in the city there would have been a wall between it and the river, and several little buildings alongside it, probably, but now it's spectacularly placed there by itself). Several churches, a large cathedral, sections of wall, and so on.
Fascinating church architecture: the armenian churches (not the cathedral) are very small and circular, but quite tall, with the dome raised again above the roof. They are decorated with frescoes - one of them is almost completely covered with them. None of us knew what about armenian orthodox liturgical rites would call for such small spaces - the cathedral could hold big masses, but these would have had to be pretty private affairs. Today they are filled with swallows.
On the bus ride here we drove through Erzerum, where my great-grandfather was born and lived until he was driven out (and his family killed) in 1915. It's on the edge between eastern anatolia, craggy and rocky, and the high plains of the east. I had a tea in the bus stop there, surrounded by people eating soup for breakfast with stacks of bread. And now my battery is dying and I am off to bed.
In Kars right now - city of about 70 000, close to the Armenian and Georgian borders; laid out on a grid by the Russians while this was part of Russia from roughly 1870 to 1920... the Europeans are shocked that it doesn't have a city centre or even a central square. It's a real mix - big housing buildings (lots of buildings painted green), dense areas, sort of melting out at the edges until you can't quite tell where it stops being city and starts being little houses and kids and geese. Our hotel is across the river from downtown; walking the long way around took us through streets full of children and more self-built style houses, flattish roofs set back a little more from the road; then you get dumped out from that into more large housing blocks or a surprisingly ornate bridge that leads from a dingy little house to a T in the road. It all does feel quite a lot like a northern canadian city... similarly, again, it's a little hard to figure out what people do here. It's crawling with men, but there's not an obvious employer apart from a couple of factories and an immense police / military presence. There are people living in fairly expensive-looking recently built houses, people in falling-apart hundred year old houses, people in ramshackly little places, all squished side by side. Lots and lots of trees. Many statues that are not of Atatürk, which is quite refreshing, really. An amusement park that we never quite got to, although the music from it comes through the hotel window (the hotels are provided free thanks to Marlene's incredibly sweet roommate from Istanbul, whose uncle knows someone who knows someone...). I quite like it here, although walking back across the river at 10pm all that seemed to be around was bored-looking men driving SUVs looking for things to stare / glare at. Again, the world is the same everywhere...
During the day we went to Ani, right by the armenian border (we could see the border from where we were). It was, in the 11th - 13th centuries, the capital of the Armenian kingdom, and a city of about a hundred thousand people. Today it is just ruins, but quite an awful lot of them... until recently, you could only visit with military escort, but now you can wander around in the field and look at things. The city goes down a hill to a ravine overlooking the river... there's a beautiful little convent directly over the river (in the city there would have been a wall between it and the river, and several little buildings alongside it, probably, but now it's spectacularly placed there by itself). Several churches, a large cathedral, sections of wall, and so on.
Fascinating church architecture: the armenian churches (not the cathedral) are very small and circular, but quite tall, with the dome raised again above the roof. They are decorated with frescoes - one of them is almost completely covered with them. None of us knew what about armenian orthodox liturgical rites would call for such small spaces - the cathedral could hold big masses, but these would have had to be pretty private affairs. Today they are filled with swallows.
On the bus ride here we drove through Erzerum, where my great-grandfather was born and lived until he was driven out (and his family killed) in 1915. It's on the edge between eastern anatolia, craggy and rocky, and the high plains of the east. I had a tea in the bus stop there, surrounded by people eating soup for breakfast with stacks of bread. And now my battery is dying and I am off to bed.
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.
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.
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