Ode to an Istanbul Autumn Night

The boza seller--whose somber night buskings herald the Istanbul autumn

In Istanbul’s deep November, the boza man wanders far and wee. He only appears after 9PM, like a chuck-wills-widow. And the autumn night is misty, but not rainy. Swirls of droplets gather on the car windshields like sugar. And the air is still just warm enough to jog in a T-shirt and just feel a pleasant little chill as the wind rushes through the trees and sluices between the rows of apartments. The streets are wind tunnels. The maples and the chestnuts have turned lemon-gold and their leaves scatter the pavement, but the other trees remain stubbornly green. Grapevines wither. The boza man calls boooooooooooooza, booooooooooza. A long cry into the sky. A streetlamp in a line of street lamps sits in the middle of a fig tree like a captured star. The leaves swirl with a gust of wind. I run from island of light to island of light. I want to catch the boza man. Booooooooza. He turns a street corner, from shadow to shadow. I jog past an alley way and see him walking past a dumpster. He’s a bow legged Gypsy and leans to the left where he carried his heavy samovar of boza. A bald spot shines in the middle of his scalp. He calls out that slender, mournful song, like a ghost or a banshee, boooooooooooza and disappears around a Mercedes parked half on the sidewalk. And the street still seems to call booooooooza but with no human throat to voice it. Just a melody in the emptiness. Istanbul’s working class ezan.

Travels in Bingöl, the Castle of Xolxol (Yayladere)

Xolxol Castle (Yayladere Kalesi)

Okay, this may be a very commonplace sentiment, but here goes. 

Have you ever been to a place far from city lights and smog, laid out under the stars and thought about just how huge the universe is? Checked out the swath of Milky Way, the arm of our galaxy, one galaxy among millions? And meditating on these things, have you ever felt that quickening of awe in the center of your chest or maybe down in your gut when you see yourself and your life placed in context to all of that infinity? I get that feeling traveling in Bingöl sometimes, not just from the night sky, but from landscape and the ruins that fill the steppe and high pastures.

A hike for instance, a simple hike up into the mountains behind the town of Xolxol (Yayladere). 

We set out with our picnic supplies—chicken wings, tea (of course), a samovar for the tea, water, bread, makings for a shepherd’s salad, pargaç bread and a bit of beer. With all this on our backs, we trudged up the hill past all the houses, panting and sweating, and then up the dirt road that hugs the mountain called Berroj (Facing the Sun in Kurdish), then past the old cemetery with graves carved with the shamanic images of old Turkic tribes, and up and up toward the “Kele” or castle.

The hike up to Xolxol Castle

It’s a tough walk—up sandy ridges that give way with every footstep, through pathless fields of thorny gunî (milk vetch). Once in a while we stumble on a little goat path and traipse along until it hits a streambed and then  once more plunge forward through brambles or up a slippery rock face. I am in front, and on the eastern face of the Berroj we seem to hit covey after covey of partridges. They burst out of the gunî in a sudden thunder of wings and panicked coos that sends me stumbling back startled each time.

The castle appears on our left—a gigantic ship of red and black rock frozen in its passage over the high pastures. It looks utterly unassailable, with grooved sides that remind me of the great Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and the legend of its formation. Two children took refuge on the mountain after being chased by a bear. The gods, taking pity on them, caused the mountain to rise higher and higher into the sky, beyond the bear’s reach, and the bear, in a frenzy of hunger and rage, tried to climb up the sides, gouging out huge grooves with its claws. That’s what the Castle feels like--it looms heavy and remote and scarred, as befits something created by the magic of a mythical beast and ancient pagan gods.

We set up camp next to a curve of willow trees in the tall pasture grass and take a break for tea and water. Then we continue around toward the western slopes where the ascent is easiest. The climb is breathtaking. We scramble up huge rocks and boulders and occasionally look down toward the steep drop where dry streambeds and shepherds houses are visible. 

Our camp is getting tinier and tinier as we climb. The rock faces of the Castle are getting steeper and larger. Sometimes, after a particularly harrowing ascent up some crop of boulders, I stop and close my eyes to fight the vertigo. The landscape seems to be growing wilder and wilder--swallows and bats flutter from little hollows and nowhere do I see signs of human settlement. Everyone calls this rock the Castle and talks about the ruins on top but so far there is nothing but stone and brush. It’s enough, to be honest. The scenery grows in grandeur, every new vista takes your breath. 

And then we reach the top and I see the stairs. This is where the star-awe comes in. The stair winds from rock and ends in air. Overgrown with grass and lichen, when I first catch sight of it, it looks as if it were rising into the sky itself. For a second, I can imagine what is no longer visible—the crumbled castle walls and soldiers long dead. It's a haunting of some sort. I think of when this was last used—according to local legend, between 900 and 600BC. It was a fortress of the Urartu Empire, the Biblical Ararat, a nation that vanished three thousand years ago. I imagine the ghosts of these Mesopotamians climbing up or down these steps, their feet fall where my feet now fall. I look out over the same plains they looked out over.  Thousands upon thousands of generations between then and now.

The stairs

The view of our camp (where the trees are)

This is at the very peak of the Castle and is called Texte Kele (the Throne of the Keep)

The Urartu used cuneiform for their alphabet. In the Istanbul Archaeology Museum you can read cuneiform letters on small clay tablets. They have been thoughtfully translated. People write to loved ones moved far away for marriage. They write to doctors in the capital, desperate for medicines to help with fertility and virility. They write down details of business transactions. They write love letters. In other words, they write of all the things people write emails and letters about today. I think about these long dead souls and their letters, their worries and troubles and dreams, and there’s something about the continuity of it—generations and generations of similar problems and hopes and millions of millions of ordinary lives swallowed into the past—that quickens the blood. That vastness of time, all the multitude of dead ghosts that I will one day join. This is a palpable thing, an awareness of the immensity of time, here in a lost castle in the mountains that border Mesopotamia.

At the top of the castle, the view is dizzying. Experts think that the castle was part of a communication system, a long line of castles stretched from Mazgirt all the way to Van. If an enemy breached the borders in Mazgirt or Palu, a fire would be lit on top of the fortress there. The fortress in Xolxol would see the signal fire and light one of their own. The next castle east would do the same until the message reached all the way to the Urartuan captial of Tuşpa (now Van). 

Don't know what these were--some say stables for horses?

I never understood why the Urartuans wouldn’t just use Mt. Silbüs, the highest peak in the region and just a few kilometers to the West of us. Perhaps it was too holy. The Hittites believed their gods resided on the mount. But standing on the peak of the castle it seems to command a greater swath of land than Silbüs. It stands alone, it sticks out, where Silbüs is only the highest peak among other mountains.

That's Mt. Silbüs in the background

Looking out over Tujik--another mountain that looks like a castle

It’s dusk when we start our descent. The stars are popping out of the sky. We round the skirts of Berroj and pass the cemetery. As we cross into the town of Yayladere proper, two police tanks race up the hill toward us, their guns circling the surrounding houses. It never crosses our minds that they are there for us. The tanks say ‘Police—Special Operations’, but they look like soldiers, the boys who scramble out and train their guns on us.

Do we know they thought we were PKK guerillas? Didn’t we realize that they might have shot us by mistake? Why didn’t we ask them for permission to hike?

“Why would guerillas trying to hide from you carry around flashlights?” someone asks.

“Oh guerillas carry around flashlights,” the soldier in command says.

They harass for a while longer and then go back the way their came, the turret on the top of the tanks sweeps the houses with its gun all the way down. Of course they knew we were not guerillas. How could they not? There are cameras everywhere, both infrared and normal. They undoubtedly saw us going up earlier in the day. When we came down, we came down stumbling and carrying flashlights and talking loud. A guerilla would do none of these things. And why threaten to shoot us? Especially when the government has supposedly declared a cease-fire with the guerillas. And why train your guns on the houses as you go up and down?

This is another reality of travel here—the sights are remote and spellbinding, but the continued pointless adolescent pressure of the military often gets in the way. It’s almost as if they are trying to strangle any possibility of a normal life here. It was something we noticed throughout the whole visit to Bingöl this time, more security cameras, more military bases, more tanks on the road. It makes one wonder what this whole ‘peace process’ between the government and the Kurds really means.

The shadow of the Castle on the hills below

Mt. Silbüs in the sunset light

Liars and Cheaters Galore

Why yes, son, I'd think you'd make a fine addition to Robert College. Trust me--why would I lie?

 

Cheating, fraud, charlatanism, and my favorite would of all skullduggery--a buggering of the truth—or in Turkish, dolandırıcılık, hile, copya çekme, dolavere. I’ve never felt it was such a part of daily life as I have felt in Turkey—not that we don’t have it in the United States, but, in view of all the cheating, lying, political charlatans now trying to justify every vile action that spews out of their wretched administration—just because something happens somewhere else does not make it okay.

Today, one of my students screamed at me that nothing at our school was fair. In other schools, he ranted, it doesn’t matter if you do your work or not, if you fail or not, other schools give you a 100 so that you can get accepted into good high schools like Robert College and Koç. All of this a justification for why he was trying to sleep on his desk. His parents have been relentlessly hastling all his teachers, badgering them with the same argument. The mother and father had a meeting with me a few months ago suggesting that, while they knew what they were asking wasn’t ethical, couldn’t I just give their child a 100? I felt dirty for weeks after that comment, and every time I look at their offspring now it is with a deep feeling of contempt and pity. And yet today, after his outburst, he seemed about to burst out crying and so I went to the counselor to report that he might be under some unusual stress at home. Her answer? Well he’s right of course. Schools in Istanbul like Doğa Kolej, Bilfen, and Uskudar American’s SEV reportedly have real tests that they give amongst themselves and only they know the scores, and then they have deliberately easy exams that the worst student is guaranteed an A on. And then they make all the other grades from homework to quizzes, 100 without a thing to base it on. (During an interview at SEV I was warned not to get my panties in a bind worrying about ‘ethics’ and ‘fairness’. We faked grades and if you don’t like it you can hit the road I asked) ‘Is it possible that Robert College and the other prestigious schools don’t know this? Why on earth would you accept anyone from any of these schools and risk your reputation?’ The answer was less than credulous—they don’t know, they only base their admissions on the scores coming out of the Ministry of Education. The inspectors for the government are the same—completely naive about the faking of grades. Of course, one wonders how in the world a person whose job is inspecting schools could be so blithely ignorant of what every 12 year old in Turkey knows.

Of course, what could they say since the government itself is built on lying, corruption and trickery. The elections this year were just one sad example—even the election observers of the party we support had to be told why cheating and coersion was inherently wrong and not just wrong when the other guy did it. And the other guy—bullying, sneaking into the polls and forcing elderly people’s hand to your candidate, bribery—and mostly all out in the open. Never mind the recounts in Ağrı, where the ruling party, unwilling to lose, forced 15 recounts and when they still didn’t win, declared the election null and void and called on a re-election.

And I still haven’t quite gotten over the engineer—a  woman in charge of designing and building highways in Istanbul—told me that she had stopped speaking to her best friend for good because she would not let her copy her PhD thesis. She had copied from a more ‘loyal’ friend and when I told her that I thought she had been in the wrong—gently, carefully—she stormed out of class in a huff. She never came back, or I would have asked her for a list of designs and structures that her paws had touched so that I and anyone I cared about could be sure never to go remotely near them. She needed that thesis—fuck it if the rest of her career put countless lives in danger from her incompetence and boobery.

But what saddens me is the impact it has on my students—most of whom I care deeply about. What does it tell them if someone pads their grades? I don’t think you’re smart enough to make it on your own. So I’ll just give you this grade and you’ll never have to earn a thing in your life. Forget the look of glee on the face of the girl who has studied so diligently for the past 3 months that she pulled her grade up from an F to a C for the first time in her life! Never mind the smile of pride of the boy who, doing the same thing, went from a 26 on his exam at the beginning of the year to a 76. I’d rather have these two build me a bridge at the age they are now than that lunatic who copied her PhD thesis or any of the people who were stupid or dishonest enough to accept it.  At least I could trust they would try to find out what to do.

And what hope does Turkey have of cleaning up its system when kids learn at a young age—supported by parents, that cheating is how you get where you’re going, that not only is it a secret passage to your success, it is your right. You deserve the special favor. My students in Turkey are every bit as brilliant, talent, curious, and creative as the kids I’ve taught elsewhere—why are their elders so hell-bent on telling them they’re not good enough and can only lie their way to the top? Thankfully, our school has not adopted this skulduggery—and I hope the rest is just rumor. But I’ve learned in Turkey that rumor is almost more reliable than the news sometimes. Because of course, the news takes part in the same lying and cheating as well.

And if you do work for Robert College or Koç or wherever else—why in the world do you accept these students? How long do you think your the hot air of your reputations will sustain you when you start sending lazy, skillless cheaters to the top schools of the world? Lazy skilless cheaters that came to you with potential, a potential which you helped ruin and deny?

On the Lycian Way Part 2--Electric Bugaloo

The mosaic at Letoön--Apollo's lyre on one side, Artemis's bow (?) on the other

 

The roosters at Gey village were not very good hires, I feel, because they never learned that the crowing was to take place at sunrise--not all throughout the night. We boarded the school bus from Gey at 8:00AM sharp and headed into town because we'd run out of cash, there was no ATM, and we needed transport to the nearest Akbank so we could pay Bayram--also the school bus driver. It was a fun ride--us all the way in the back where the cool kids usually sat. Next to me was a very tiny boy who perched himself on the edge of the seat, keeping his eyes straight ahead, not saying a word to anyone, and his yellow backback like a giant camel's hump on his back. The other kids jeered at him, 'That backpack's bigger than you are! I think it's wearing you!'

 

The ATM was in Kınık, and from there, Bayram drove us the short way to the ruins of Letoön where we could pick up the trail again. (Generally you can do this, drop the trail whenever you're ready for a break and find transport at any point down the line. You may have to borrow a school bus or hitchhike, but it's always an option--at least at this point on the Lycian Way.)

 



The columns half sunk into a swamp full of turtles and frogs (descendants of enchanted sheperds)


 

Letoön was one of the cities of Lycia, later assimilated into Ancient Greece, and our first set of ruins. (There's an entrance fee of 5 TL). Even at 9 in the morning on April it was already hot. The surrounding area is full of orange groves and sheep and the woman at the ticket booth was happy to give us a whole bag of fresh oranges when we asked why in the world no one was selling oranges when there were so many trees. A shepherd told us a little about the current state of the site--a team of French archaeologists used to run it, he said, but the Turks took it back three years ago and now it's in the hands of a team in Ankara, who've done absolutely nothing since then. This is happening a lot in Turkey--there's a patriotic drive to seize all the archaeological treasures from the Imperialist, lots of bombast and nationalist pride rhetoric, and then once the Turkish government has it back, the site is neglected, the artifact is stolen. Respect for ancient monuments is not a characteristic of the culture yet. I suspect it's partly from the sheer abundance of ruins (as plentiful as McDonald's in the States) and partly from the intense right-wing nationalism that wants to play down any evidence of anyone non-Turkish ever having lived here. I say, don't let anybody take your stuff back to their museums in the capitals of the empires, no, but let them pay for the teams to research it--you've got too much on your hands to do it yourself.

 

The famous theater entrance at Letoön

The story of Letoön is this: the nymph Leto came here to give her children (twins from one of Zeus's affairs) a drink of water from the spring. Those kids were the future lords of Olympos, Apollo and Artemis. The local shepherds told Leto no and so she turned them all into frogs. If true, then it must be their descendants that fill the pools here, croaking like mad and filling the water with their tadpoles. There were quite a few turtles as well, sunning on each other's back rather flagrantly. The place is still a wetland and seems to be liquid most of the time. The famous mosaic here, pre-Christian and thus before a lot of the Byzantine ones in more famous mosaic centers, is a colorful symbolization of the twin gods. You have the lyre of Apollo, patron of music, and the bow of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. As a result--Letoön was the religious center of the area and pilgrims would come from nearby Xanthus to worship.

The theater with the only spectators left interested in Letoonian theater apparently

And because it was a religious center, you find a lot of temples and theaters--the theater of course being connected to the rites and worship of Dionysus, god of the grape and patron of the arts. My favorite building (fragment at least) was the grand arch entering the theater--the steps winding upward to the door and the marble floor still preserved. Walking beneath the shade of the archway, you could almost imagine the crowd inside, the actors and music. I found, however, only a flock of sheep and one lone goat grazing in the nosebleed seats. (Animals, despite assurances to the contrary all along the way--do cause damage to these places, a lot, and culturally, are a sign of disrespect--you don't let animals graze in a place you hold any reverence for.) You can see the excavations are only partly done--clearly the stage and part of the seats still lie under ground.

A Lycian style tomb behind the theater where a graveyard is

The book Lycia by Turkish archaeologist Cevdet Bayburtluoğlu says that Leto, Apollo, and Artemis were the national gods of the nation of Lycia. The foundations of the temple ruins we wandered were set as early as the 7th century BC, and the ponds Southwest of the temple--where our frog and turtle friends still splashed--was the fount of holy water pilgrims used to come for.

 

From Letoön we walked through the village of Kumluova to catch a bus to Kınık, and then onto Patara (this was going to be a day of rest). Kumluova is a village of greenhouses, the whole region is covered with greenhouses mainly dedicated to tomatoes though there were some, we saw, full of zucchini. It was a bright sunny day and as we walked by a house with a beautiful old walnut tree in the yard, we heard a hysterical chirping that made us stop and search the branches for the bird responsible. A woman in a flowered kerchief stepped out the house, looked up at the tree and then at us.

 

'Can't find it?' she asked

'Nope,' we answered.

'He's a small little guy, up at the top.'

As we continued to search, she clipped two fat roses from her rose bushes and brought them out to us. 'For your travels!'

 

A little further down we found a farm yard full of chickens and one rather startled looking turkey. It gobbled rather forlornly toward the street and I, who am pretty good at mimicking animal voices, gave it my best gobble back. It immediately spread it's tail feathers and came charging forward, gobbling like a maniac. Apparenly we were going to tussle. I kept gobbling. It kept gobbling back and storming about the yard looking for the unseen rival. We heard an old woman's voice say in a heavy accent.

 

'Hey, why dont you come on back and sit with me a while?'

 

Through the gate was a shriveled old lady with her feet kicked up on the divan, drinking tea beneath a shady tree. She told us to have a seat.

 

'I need someone to talk to sometimes,' she said. 'It's nice to just chat with someone, break the boredom. You guys are both tourists and not tourists. You have the backpacks but you sit down for tea and speak Turkish. Hey, want a tomato?'

 

Unable to walk herself, she directed us to the greenhouse in her backyard. 'Just open the door and go right in!' The greenhouse was steamy and hot, the whole place smelling of fresh tomato flesh. She shouted directions from her perch outside--her voice muffled by the glass panes. 'Pluck a few of the ripe ones! Get some salt from the kitchen! Wash them over there in the spigot! Now bring it all over to the table!' We did as instructed.

The site of the newer, relatively speaking, Byzantine church overlooking the temple of Apollo

While we snacked, she told us a little bit about herself.  She had three sons, one of them a teacher in Antalya, but they didn't come around as much as they should anymore. 'My life is slipping away,' she said at some point. 'It's mostly done and over with--the soul is fleeing.' Delal told her she should make one of her sons take her on a trip--take advantage of retirement. 'Oh nonsense,' she said. 'I can't walk much now and anyway, the single one has shacked up with some foreign girl for a while. Too busy.'

 

We sat and chatted for about an hour. Her accent was heavy and I caught only about half of what was said--imagine sitting down with some old crusty resident of rural Mississippi with no teeth and you might get the idea. We caught a minibus from here to the entrance to Kınık, got off at the bridge and then walked the rest of the way to the bus station where we caught a bus to Patara. Well almost--the driver lied. Out of season (April) he didn't go all the way to Patara. Instead, he dropped us off at the turn-off and told us to walk the rest of the way. 'It was only 2 kilometers,' he said grinning. We were exhausted from the day before and so hitchhiked into town instead. For anyone new to Turkey, hitchhiking is a lot safer than it is anywhere else I've been. Of course, use the usual caution--if you are picked up by a shiftly looking single guy who mumbles too himself and has red stains on his shirt, don't get in. But we were picked up, for example, by an old man and his granddaughter. Another time by a young couple from Istanbul. It's not so strange to hitchhike here and ordinary families will give you a ride.

 

The grand gate and symbol of ancient Patara




The ruins to Patara are protected lands and so there are no pensions there--you stay in the town of Gelemiş on the border. We rented an apartment at the Flower Pension--a place I highly recommend with a very friendly owner whose mother is a fantastic cook (she makes a good apple marmelade) We paid 70TL (35 dollars), total, breakfast included, for an apartment with a kitchnette. They have a newly built pool, a sundeck, laundry service, a small lemon grove and a cozy cafe with a bookshelf jammed full of titles in all languages including a big book on the ruins of Patara that was quite informative.

 

The sundeck where we had a nice lunch at Flower Pension

Patara has a fantastic beach--a 20km plus stretch of golden dunes very rare in the Mediterranean. Billions of tour busses bring billions of tourists here in season but in April there very few people--and miles and miles of empty sand dunes stretched all the way up the beach back toward the mountains we'd hiked out of. The water was 16 C (about 65 F), not too cold at all, and a pristine blue. On our first attempt to walk to the water (go left at the city center and through the ruins NOT right), we got lost and a shepherd told us to just follow the little trail through the trees and it would take us right there--locals did this to avoid paying entrance fees, he said. (It's 7TL to get into the ruins and beach) Well it did take us right there--after wandering through a pine forest, an oak grove, his home where his wife stared at us in bafflement, and then over endless gigantic sand dunes that got higher and higher and were filled with wild rose and other thorny shrubs. It was a beautiful walk though--smooth rolling sands with views of the sea and hilltops crowned with old temples and gates. In May--these dunes are the nesting grounds of the Caretta Caretta sea turtles, and walking anywhere on them is forbidden and just evil.

 

The beach at Patara

 

After a day at the beach--broken up by a thunder storm that swept down from the mountains and turned the whole sky black--we spent some time relaxing at the pool and on the sundeck of the pension and then headed out to the ruins. Patara was an enormous city. Right next to the hotel is a set of tombs overgrown with wild flowers. Apparently, according to the sign, the Lycians would place a coin between the teeth of their dead so that they could pay Charon the boatman for the passage to Hades. An old man stopped as we were reading and asked what it meant-Delal explained what she was reading. It was such a quiet thing--that moment, the sound of cowbells, the bleating of sheep and the wind moving over the grass and fields of daisies. There were lots of old olive trees on the side of the road. I love these trees--like porous old bones whose insides have dissolved away.

 

 

 

An old olive in a field of daisies near the ruins

 

The city was supposedly founded by Patarus, a son of Apollo and archaeologist place some of its earliest inhabits back in 2000BC. Patara was huge--now, wandering through the woods and among the lagoons here, you'll stumble on pieces of an ancient road, a crumbling column, an old ceramics workshop, a ruined temple overrun by trees, and the ruins of maybe the oldest lighthouse in the world. This was the birth place of the cult of the Oracle of Apollo, and second only in size to the temple at Delphi. Homer mentions Patara in the Iliad, the Lycians here were allies of Troy. The city was also the birthplace of St. Nicolas-yes, Santa Claus was popped out of his mom here-and St Paul, in chapter 21 of Acts, travels through here on his way to Rhodes. So it's got a long and starry pedigree.

Wild flowers

 

 

 

Our third morning in Patara was our last day of hiking--we were heading all the way to Akbel where we would catch a bus back to Fethiye. The hike goes up a paved road from Flower Pension and then starts winding through the fields and wood. We again got lost at this point. We followed the main dirt road up the mountain and missed the tiny little path in the middle of the olive grove that headed off through the woods to the left. This was shortly after the fork in the trail and the first signpost for the Lycian Way that pointed the way either to Kalkan or Akbel. Again, if you don't see the red and white blazes after a few minutes, you're on the wrong path! And don't trust that the bigger road is the one you want to be on--it's often not!

 

The road from Patara to Akbel

In terms of ascents and terrains--this is a rather easy portion of the trail and there were lots of elderly couples on the path, not all of whom were in good physical condition. If you want to try the Lycian Way but aren't in shape, this might be the segment to do (Patara to Akbel). There were still some majestic views over the mountains to the north and the beach to the South and the woods were scattered with occasional ruins and lots of wildflowers. We wandered through pasture land and pine wood and olive groves--squeezing past a tight thicket of bushes that arched over the path and cast everything in shadow.

Ruins along the path--a view of the valley below

 

The pipes on top of the aqueduct wall

The trail forks again at the 'Delikkemer'--the ancient aqueducts of Patara, a giant stone wall that skirts the sea with fragments of the pipes that carried the water still running along the top. We missed the path to Akbel here and ended up taking a wrong turn toward Kalkan--a fantastic hike but not one you want to take if you are not in good shape. I am guessing to go to Akbel you want to go up from the aqueducts, we went down.


Delikkemer--the aqueduct of Patara

 

That being said, this was our favorite part of the whole trail. Behind us the heads of the mountains we'd just hiked out of were lost in rain clouds--but the sun was peaking out from behind them so a veil of gossamer white light made a halo around the peaks. In front of us was the turquoise sea with clouds like galleons sailing across a turquoise sky. The path wound around the cliffs at the edge of the sea. You wind down and down until you are eventually crawling over boulders, then over a field of limestone rocks stabbing from the cliff face, then hopping over narrow rocky steps overlooking a precipice. It's harrowing, thrilling, gorgeous.

The road from the aqueduct to Kalkan

 

 

At the end, you find the bus station and if you are hoping to get back to Fethiye, you'd better be there by 7:15PM. There are only a few busses per day to Fethiye off season--two in the morning and two in the evening. We missed the 7:15 and ended up staying in Kalkan for the night at Kelebek Hotel--not a bad place--clean enough even if the manager struck me as little dense. We were so exhausted after the hike that we could have slept in the bathroom at the bus station. Speaking of the bus station, Ayşe's Restaurant, which is connected to the station, had maybe the best food of the whole trip. I don't know why they stuck such a good cook at a restaurant in the otogar, but her homemade Turkish food--dolmas and mucver and mezes--was excellent.

A view of Fethiye from the tombs of the Lycian kings
 

A view out from inside the tombs

Our plane back to Istanbul was at 6 and so we spent the morning and afternoon wandering around Fethiye itself. Fethiye used to be the Lycian city of Telemessos.The tombs of the Lycian kings are grand--a hike up the cliffs to see them however, will bring a little disappointment as they are covered with graffitti and stink of piss--teens and locals here don't show them a lot of respect, I guess, and they're not well protected. From the tombs, we went to the Ölüdeniz, the Dead Sea, so named for how calm the waters are--out of season it wasn't crowded and easily one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever visited--a perfect way to end days and days of hiking.

I would like to end with something about the past elections--everybody was so polarized. People who didn't agree with your own point of view were enemies and idiots. This trip was effective in eliminating that perception in us. We met the villager Enzel who tended goats, the lonely shepherd boy pining for tourist season to open, the nomad woman running a pension in the middle of nowhere for foreign trekkers, the old lady green house owner with her eyes on death--all of these people with very different lives than ours in Istanbul or ours in Bingöl. Many have no idea what Twitter or Youtube is--why should they care if it were shut down? One man we met was a fruit dealer--his biggest political concern was the closing of the Russian border to their produce, something that has never crossed our minds but directly affects his life. I would say to anyone wanting to take a true Democratic stance here, who really wants to understand this country and its people and then represent them in a government (if there are any who truly want to do that)--take a walk in all parts of Turkey, depend on the hospitatlity of as many different people as you can, learn what diversity means--it's a reality, not a liberal fantasy or a nationalist philosophy.

 

The beach at Ölüdeniz--the Dead Sea