Category Archives: Travel

We’ve settled into a daily routine in Istanbul: after a hotel breakfast, we head out for the major excursion of the day. Then we’re back to the hotel for a couple of hours snoozing, reading, respectively drawing and blogging, with perhaps an excursion to the teras for a slice of cake proudly baked and offered for free by the young woman who sometimes helps at the front desk. We go out again for dinner some time between 7 and 9, which generally involves a lot of strolling, a little getting lost, continuous people and animal watching, intermittent admiration of antiquities (the aqueduct, Constantine’s column, the minarets of Sultanahbad), occasional recognition of another loan word in Turkish (like kuafor for hairdresser or tuvalet, pronounced toilette, for toilet), and all that. Then it’s back to the hotel for some TV, always looking for the moment in a dubbed US or UK show when a bright squiggle turns up to mask the presence of a cigarette.

Yesterday’s main excursion was to Dolmabahçe Sarayi, the palace that replaced Topkapi Sarayi as the residence of the Sultans and their wives in the 1850s, and the place where Kemal Ataturk died in 1938. We’d intended to visit it on Sunday but after standing in the queue for half an hour or so without making much progress we decided to come back when it was less crowded. Hah!

We arrived at 10 past 10 in the morning. Queue No 1, for the security check, was a non-event. Queue No 2, to buy tickets, was less than half the length of Sunday’s. But it moved just as slowly. Here I am soon after joining it.

And here I am half an hour after that, with only ten minutes or so to go, just entering the roped section:

Note the woman swathed in black with a hand resting on the bollardy thing. If you are ever in a queue and she turns up beside you, challenge her. If she says demurely, ‘My husband,’ pointing with her eyes toward the front of the queue, DO NOT accept the implication that her husband is up ahead between the ropes. DO NOT LET HER PASS. Her husband has sent her in to save them both the 50 minute wait. I suppose I should add that if you do courteously allow her past, and advise the people immediately ahead of you do do so as well, when you realise that despite her appearance of a pious Muslim woman she is actually a lying scumbag of a queue jumper, you probably shouldn’t shout after her, ‘Madam, you are a liar. You lied to me!’ even if you’ve observed on Tripadvisor that Saudi tourists call hotel staff they don’t like liars quite a lot, so you know the term has currency. Your companion is likely to find this behaviour embarrassing. But of course, you’d have no way of knowing if it was the same woman. I could recognise her by her large brown bag, and noted with grim satisfaction that her male companion was one of the many men accompanying women sweltering in black to the eyeballs who found the weather far too hot for long trousers.

Queue No 3 turned out to be a pack:

On the left, the sign said, were tour groups, on the right individual visitors. Another sign that was invisible until we reached the top of the stairs said that no individual visits were allowed: we weren’t queuing at all, we were waiting for the English-language tour at 11.35.

The tour turned out to be pretty much a moving queue, Queue No 4, as a hundred or so of us, many of whom spoke very little English, followed the guide, whose English was largely incomprehensible anyhow, through vast room after vast room, each furnished with great opulence.

Queues No 5 and 6, for the harem, were a repeat of Nos 3 and 4, though shorter and more comprehensible respectively.

Perhaps you’ll forgive me for going on so much about the queues if I quote a chap we’d met somewhere along the line: ‘After all that it was all the same, room after room of kitsch!’ I thought he put it well.

The man marshalling the harem queue ushered the Art Student and me to seats off to one side, probably out of consideration for our grey hair (have I mentioned that we’ve met with the most extraordinary generosity and kindness on this trip?), and said that audio guides were being developed and some year soon all this queuing and herding would come to an end. Compared to places like Iran, he said, Turkey is doing brilliantly, but it is still modernising, not there yet.

There was a weird pleasure in seeing how the other 0.1 percent lived, and it was eerie to peer into the queen mother’s room where Ataturk died, but really, I’d rather have the three hours of my life back and the 80 euro it cost for two of us. Your mileage may vary. If you do go, I strongly recommend you do it with a tour group.

Oh, the best thing about the visit, apart from the drama with the lady in black, was a performance by a military band in full Ottoman drag and fierce Jannisery glares, which we could have seen for free.

We debated back and forth whether to go on a cruise up the Bosphorus. There’s something offputting about the Offers on every street corner down at Eminömü, towards the Galata Bridge and the piers. Just 30 euro each for a six hour cruise, they say, and I don’t know which I’d miss, more the euro or the hours. We decided instead to spend 1.75 Turkish lira on a ferry ride to the Princes’ Islands/Adalar, a small archipelago in the Marmara Sea where members of various royal families who were out of favour over the millennia have lived and died in exile.

It was a bit more than an hour, across the mouth of the Bosphorus and then out into the Marmara. There are four inhabited islands, of which we went ashore on the second biggest, Heliabatsu. Fabulous views of Istambul’s minaret-ful skyline, of the Asian side, the still,sea and the cloudless sky, and once were ashore, we walked through picturesque narrow streets where the only motor vehicle allowed seemed to be the fire engine – tourists of every stripe rode past us on bikes and horsedrawn carriages. With the help of a complimentary map from one of the many kebab shops, we went in search of the synagogue and a famous old church. We had no success, but we did pass by a number of spectacular wooden houses:

We saw Karl Marx as pirate on a wall:

And there was quite a bit of stuff on sale. These floral crowns are everywhere, and that sign is pronounced tatch, not tack.

Heliabatsu was home to two famous poets, who are commemorated by special benches along the waterfront:

And then there was this:

Maybe this is the place for a paragraph about cats and dogs in Turkey. They are part of every streetscape, and don’t seem to belong to any particular human or household. Many of the dogs have plastic tags in their ears to indicate that they are participants in the canine population control program, and some have collars, but I’ve only seen one on a leash. Most of the cats seem to be well looked after. I’ve seen one of them on a leash too, tied up outside a baklava shop. I’ve seen three young men watching a fourth playing with a tabby with a foot. Tourists ooh and aah over them. One evening when we were eating dinner on a terrace we watched a man on a roof below us pursue a wild kitten, grab it, and place it on a high spot next to a bowl of food, then stalk its mother with similar intent. It’s one of the many unadvertised attractions of this country that it’s full of purposeful dogs and independent cats, living more or less harmoniously with humans.

We caught the fast ferry back to town – 6 Turkish lira each.

The thing is, once you start uploading photos, you realise you can save yourself thousands of words. Especially when the Art Student / Photographer is keen to have her work seen. So here goes, with Day 4’s dot points:

• Breakfast at our new hotel was a bit of a people-watching moment. It may be that breakfast is in two sittings – an early one for guests whose womenfolk veil their faces in public, and a later one for the rest. We arrived at the very start of our allotted time to find meals well under way at two tables. The niqab must come off for breakfasting purposes, and one young woman in a hijab had a huge floppy hat on over it – in the street this would have looked like a slightly awkward way of shading one’s face, but indoors at breakfast it seemed to be more of an identity statement: I wear the hijab but it doesn’t define me.
• We caught the tram. Each tram is three linked vehicles the size of a Melbourne tram, they come every five minutes or so and are always crowded. A phenomenal number of people are moved around this way. As we moved out of the old city, the demographic changed dramatically – the niqabs that are everywhere in Sultanahbad (the area around the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi) almost completely disappeared.
• We walked the better part of a kilometre along along the Theodosian Walls, originally built at the command of Emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century CE, finally breached by Sultan Mehmet II, Fatih, in 1453, and a now standing reminder of that great triumph.
  
• After bickering over the map and receiving helpful advice from a complete stranger who called out to us from 20 yards away, we reached the Church of St Saviour in Chora, aka the Kariye Camii. From the outside it could be any beautiful old Byzantine church of modest proportions that had been converted into a mosque:
  
  We bought orange juices at the inevitable café cum souvenir shop, paying seven times as much as we had in Karaköy a couple of days before. Then we went inside to be blown away by what John Freely says are ‘the most important series of Byzantine paintings in the world’. I don’t know anything about important, but these frescoes and mosaics, executed in the 14th century, were covered by plaster rather than scratched out in Islamic times, and the ones that survived earthquakes and other disasters are, well, look:

  

  

  

  Just look at the tension in Christ’s body as he drags whoever that is out of the tomb.

• Another long walk, a ferry that turned out to be non-existent, a cheerful scene of families picnicking (it was Sunday) beside the Golden Horn, evidently oblivious if the garbage littering their waterside park, a taksi ride (see how I’m picking up some Turkish vocab?) back to more familiar territory.
• We tried for a second cultural outing, to the Dolmabahçe Sarayi, but we hadn’t reckoned on the Sunday crowds. The queue was possibly the biggest and slowest-moving I’ve ever seen. Rather than wait in line for at least two hours we caught the tram back to the air conditioning.

That was yesterday. I’ll post about today tomorrow.

The Kas–Konya leg of our travels was an 11 hour haul. Three and a half hours in a dolmus took us to the Antalya bus station, a vast space where it cost half a Turkish lira for a bottle of water and a whole Turkish lira for a piss. We ate, and attended to other bodily needs. The Art Student, who was under the weather, ate carefully. Then we hopped on a proper bus for close to six hours, stopping a couple of times, one of them at a town famous for its roasted chickpeas. These are said to be good for an upset stomach, so I bought a small packet. The Art Student turned up her nose at them, and when I had a nibble I turned mine up too. Once we reached Konya – the first Selçuk Turk capital and the home of Celalleddin Rumi Mevlana (in Turkey Mevlana, in the West Rumi) – it was just a quick 20 minute ride in another dolmus and we were being greeted with glasses of Turkish fizzy drink at the Mevlana Hotel. (I’m typing this on the next leg of the journey: about 20 minutes on our way, one of us realised she had left her purse back at the hotel; we turned back, but for some reason couldn’t get through; in response to a phone call a man from the hotel brought the purse to us on his bicycle. This isn’t just good service, it’s a whole ethos of hospitality.)

On our first evening, we squeezed in a visit to a felt shop before dinner. Despite my impatient stomach, I was fascinated as the Argentinian owner of the shop demonstrated her techniques. Her Turkish husband had learned the craft from his grandfather, who had learned from his father, and back for generations. The craft had been close to dying out, but they are staging a revival, partly by introducing modern designs. All the same, the most interesting part of the show was the demonstration of how to make the hats worn by dervishes. Characteristically, there was no pressure to buy, though some of us did buy a hanging or a silk and wool scarf.

The fabulous Burak explained at dinner that there are two sides to Konya, the conservative side where women have to cover their shoulders and knees, and the other side. He called them the Allah side and the yalla side, a witticism he sadly had to explain to his ignorant charges (yalla in Arabic means lets go!). We had the option of exploring the yalla side after dinner, and I believe some did, especially as it was the night of the Euro Cup final – though I wouldn’t want to assert that the Allah side of town is indifferent to football. The Art Student and I took her queasy digestive system back to the hotel where we watched some Turkish TV, and an episode or two of things from home on the iPad, including Clarke and Daweon possible solutions to Australia’s asylum seekers stalemate.

Next morning, we visited the Mevlana Museum, which as far as I understand it is the original building where Rumi established the Mevlevi dervish sect. Maybe twenty tiny rooms, perhaps once cells if the Sufis, held objects connected to the sect’s history, but the main attraction was the building itself, which contains the tomb of Rumi and a number of other leaders of the sect. We had visited a Sufi museum in Istanbul and attended a whirling ceremony in Bursa, so we had some background. The tomb is gorgeous, but the room where they whirled is sublime, with a high decorated dome that could bear being looked at for hours. Most impressive of all, though, was the crowd: school holidays are just beginning, and we were there just as the museum opened, but the press of respectfully attentive people – old and young, traditionally dressed and scarved just for the occasion, an all-women coachload, a group of teenage boys and family groups, Turks, Arabs and us – was wondrous, all the more so when the bulk of the objects on display and most of the wall decorations consisted of calligraphy in Arabic, which I’m guessing most of the people there don’t read easily. Among the tiny and enormous illuminated Qurans in the final room, there were a number of poetry books from the seventeenth century, with delicate representational illustrations.

Then we just had time for lunch and we were on our way again. As I type this we are about to stop at a caravanserai – evidently there used to be one every 40 kilometers, because that’s how far a camel can travel in a day. I’ll post again after our adventures in Kapadokya, the land of well-bred horses and fairy chimneys.

We arrived at Kayaköy on a stinking hot afternoon. After a quick orientation walk, we ate and then curled up like pythons in the welcome cool of our guest house / Pansiyon Makri (phone 0252 618 0405), which turned out to be a prime example of Intrepid’s knack of finding accommodation that’s close to interesting things but not in the middle of tourist-trap territory. Our host came from generations of butchers: on our second night we had dinner there. He spent a good bit of the morning taking a cleaver to a large section of lamb, and the results were excellent. (For the record, I had fish, which was also excellent.)

But on the first night, once our wilting spirits had revived, we went by Dolmus over the next hill to the port of Fethiye to photograph some Lycean tombs carved into a cliff face, then dinner at the fish market and a stroll along the esplanade. Fethiya used to be called something else (I cant tell you what because I’m iPadding this on the bus and so depend on my naked mind for facts and figures). It was renamed after a pilot who died in 1914, a martyr in the struggle for a Turkish republic and the end of the Ottoman Empire. There’s a splendid heroic statue of him in goggles and leather helmet with huge angelic wings at his heels. We also saw weirdly cohesive Turkish ice cream being made, and ate some.

Next morning, in slightly cooler weather, we visited the ghost town of Kayaköy, which occupies the hillside above the tourist village: two churches, 14 chapels, two schools, a thousand dwellings, all abandoned in the population exchange of the mid 1920s when everyone who lived there, being identified as Greek in spite of having lived in this place for perhaps a thousand years, was sent ‘back’ to Greece. We were told several times that Louis de Bernières tells the story in his novel Birds without Wings. A while back there was a move to turn Kayaköy into a tourist village, but this was foiled, and it is now a museum dedicated, I read somewhere, to fostering peace between Turkey and Greece.

Kayaköy means stone village, and that’s what’s left of what was the village Levissi: roofless, doorless and windowless stone houses, whose walls have almost all survived upright, stone churches stripped of ornament except some faded colour in the domed ceiling and some red, white and black pebble mosaic floor, narrow stone streets, many of them disrupted by an earthquake in the 1950s. It felt like a memorial to all the people who have been displaced and dispossessed by nationalism, war and colonialism over the last couple of centuries. This forced emigration happened a couple of years before the Coniston massacre, Australia’s last recorded large massacre of Aboriginal people, so there’s no call for moral superiority here. Perhaps the time will come when we’re bighearted enough to have as substantial a memorial as this for the terrible episodes of our history. These solemn ruminations were interrupted by the discovery that, unlike other memorial museums, this one is occasionally put to practical use. I took this snap of the inside of a house near the bottom of the hill:

After our first walk in the ghost village, most of our group went on a six kilometre hike along the Lycean Way to Oludeniz Lagoon, which I regretfully bowed out of as the first leg brought me to the brink of an asthma attack and we were warned that the rest of the terrain was steep.

The others returned in mid-afternoon well pleased with themselves. But as I’d used the morning to blog about the Asia Literary Review I wasn’t too unhappy to have missed out.

The Art Student and I caught a dolmus to nearby Gelmeri, a picnic ground at a beach, where we swam in buoyant salt water and lazed beneath a hired umbrella. The were quite a few Turks there, but most people sounded English. Did I mention that everywhere in Kayaköy cafés offer English Breakfast, and gozlemes are advertised as pancakes? We chatted with a couple of bright red Brits who have been coming to Turkey every summer for 20 years. This year for the first time they experienced earthquakes, two of them. Both times they were at the beach, and both times they observed that the Turkish people in their vicinity reached immediately for their phones to text about it. Sounds just like Melbourne.