Migrating Turkeys
This Turkey has returned home after a week away… We got back on Saturday from four days in Istanbul and three in Cappadocia. It was a great week, in spite of miserable December weather. Istanbul is a remarkable city, well worth a repeat visit at some point in the not-too-distant future.
What were a few highlights (or, at least, notable moments)?
I still have bruised ribs after being very vigorously scrubbed clean (and given some kind of impromptu chiropractic treatment) by a hairy near-naked man in an ancient hamam (bath-house) built in 1450. And all this while being observed by an over-interested, creepy fat man — while he wasn’t busy farting, burping, snoring or noisily scratching at himself “down there.”
This coffee virgin finally “did it”, drinking a cup of strong Turkish Kahve. If I was ever going to do it, it only seemed right to do it in Turkey. After all, the Ottomans apparently brought coffee to the West at the siege of Vienna in 1529. Taken with a good dose of sugar (you have to tell them how much to put in before they make it), I can actually say I enjoyed it, although the afterglow and tingling skin of the hamam experience was possibly clouding my judgment.
I drank liquoricey raki liquor, and also (surprisingly) really liked the “standard” beer of Turkey, called Efes Pilsen. (I say surprisingly because I rarely like the typical beers of places I visit, as my tastes lean towards ales and darker beers that are less widely appreciated by the masses.)
We visited quite a few mosques, including the spectacular Blue Mosque as well as several of the less-touristy ones. They were beautiful and reverential places. We (briefly) awakened every morning around 6am to the pre-dawn call to prayer (known as the adhan) echoing from minaret loudspeakers. I enjoyed these chants: admittedly more so in the city’s high-end sound system than on the tinny speakers of the Göreme mosque. However, when hiking amidst the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, it was mesmerizing to hear the way these trebley chanted prayers merged and diverged as they arrived on the wind from nearby towns.
We visited sultan’s palaces, a harem (which was more family-oriented than the eroticized visions the word may bring to Westerners’ minds) and wandered through incredible markets, all while being hassled by countless vendors on the “tout”. We apparently saw the actual staff that Moses used to part the Red Sea, and the arm of (if I recall correctly) John the Baptist. It was definitely somebody’s arm encased in gold; at least it had been, a good while back (you can see bony fingers poking out).
We had great mezzes and other wonderful food, although sometimes with a tad too much raw onion and cucumber for our liking. There are some fantastic restaurants in Istanbul, and at low season we never had to reserve or wait…just wander in at any hour and have a great meal. Incredibly, for a country in which everyone seems to smoke, Turkey has done the civilized thing and banned smoking in public places, so you aren’t turned into leather in restaurants and bars (unless you hang around outside)… If only Spain would catch the hint: pretty much every other country has done it by now, so why do we still have to be the cool rebels-without-a-cause?
We survived various taxi/bus rides, including several which involved driving a) at high speeds, b) the wrong way on one-way streets, and c) jumping the median to change direction (several times) on freeways. We also bounced along the waves of the Bosphorous on a little wooden tour boat, and thankfully no one got seasick (although a few may have gotten hypothermia). Turkish Airlines got us comfortably to and from Nevsehir, albeit with a dramatic “air avoidance” maneuvre that gave us a good scare on the way home — must have been another plane on an intersecting flight path(?). Yikes, that woke me up and got my legs shaking even more than the Turkish coffee…
We met a Canadian writer (GG Award winner and Member of the Order of Canada) who was on a “working holiday” at our inexpensive but decent hotel. He was there to get away from his distractions at home, working on revisions to his latest novel.
We learned tons of history — I often glaze over historical notes, but this turned out to be so interesting that I couldn’t ignore it. We had the most incredible guide in Cappadocia, who gave us the entire history of Turkey from around 10,000 BC to the present day (to “EU” or not to “EU”?), all over the course of several hours as we drove from one site to another. He also gave us lessons in linguistics and the complexities and oddities of the Turkish language (which is closer to Chinese and Japanese than to any Indo-European language…I was surprised to hear TV announcers speaking what almost sounded like Japanese). I’d always thought that most things we take for granted today were invented by “the Scots”, but it turns out they were brought to us by “the Turks” (or so they claim ;-).
We saw cave churches and the famous “fairy chimneys” of Cappadocia which were (and still are) home to many people; they’re also where many early Christians hid out from their persecutors. They are phallic in shape, not unlike some of the spires of Catalunya’s Montserrat or Alberta’s hoodoos, although bigger and more robust (of course!). They are made of tough stuff — volcanic tuff, in fact — deposited by various massive volcanic eruptions in the region eons ago and then worn down by water and wind. We did the requisite magical balloon ride at daybreak above the Göreme valley, in spite of it being December. Gaudí may have never it as far as Turkey for natural inspiration, but you better believe he would have loved it. Here there were Christians making organic-shaped churches more than a thousand years before his Sagrada Familia. (You see, maybe the Turks did invent everything!)
Turkey is a remarkable country and Istanbul is a city of contrasts and contradictions, full of life and openness and craziness and commerce. While I was there (actually, on the flight home), I read Nicholas Woodsworth’s “The Liquid Continent” (Volume III — Istanbul), which was a fun and insightful (and short) read.
More remarkably than anything else (at least it would be for your “average” tourist), we didn’t buy a single knick-knack, scarf, piece of clothing, jewelry, fabric, ceramic, metalwork, “evil eye stone” (aka Nazar), hat, shoe, slipper, harem outfit, fez, flag or carpet. (Full disclosure: we did buy one thing to take home — a bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans.)
A few spots to recommend in Istanbul: (if you can find it) go for dinner at Helvetia, an almost unmarked restaurant not far off Istikal Caddesi. Not your typical restaurant; it’s lively, full of locals, students and artists, and (surprise, surprise?) inexpensive. We also really loved the restaurant Adonin, on a side street near Aya Sofya. The service was friendly and excellent, as was the food (among the most friendly we’ve tasted, in fact). We befriended Yousuf, who works outside, bringing clients in to the restaurant, in a most atypical, soft-spoken way (this is what won me over). He told us he works two jobs, totaling 18-20 hour days every day. He also recommended the hamam we went to — we wanted a less touristy one, more for locals (like my leering, burping and scrotum-scratching friend, I suppose).
Turkey has tons of Spanish visitors (maybe more than any other kind of tourist, it often seemed, perhaps because our visit coincided with the December puente), so we heard tons of Spanish — both from tourists and from those savvy goods-hawkers…many of whom seem fluent enough in every known human language to sell to any potential tourist. that may cross their path. It’s no good saying “sorry, I don’t speak (insert language here)” to get away from them; they’ll just start trying every language they know until they hit one you do speak.
P.S. I love going to supermarkets in other countries, seeing how they are different from (and how they are similar to) the ones in my country. And I love seeing the different products. I almost bought a bulk package of hot Turkish paprika with the brand name: Economic Boy. Yum, spicy and timely.