Turkey - 1988

Turkey, 1988—the Shakedown Cruise

After our wonderful 1986 trip to Greece with Dick Caldwell, we’d have followed him anywhere, so when he decided to lead a trip to Turkey for the first time two years later we jumped at it. We’d never thought of going to Turkey and knew nothing about it, but we started reading up and were amazed at things that were there. We’d never known that Ephesus was in Turkey, or Ionia, Tarsus, or any number of Greco-Roman cities and ruins. As far as we knew, Turkey might have been a big desert with nothing in it but Istanbul. Even though I’d read a lot of archaeology, I didn’t realize that the Hittite civilization was in the middle of Turkey. Books had said “Asia Minor” or “Anatolia.” Who knew that those names were synonymous with the Asian part of Turkey?

So we went. The trip was delightful and hilarious. Dick had traced the itinerary in a car, but ushering a bus full of 30 unherd-able people took a lot more time than he’d thought, although he’d been leading tours of Greece for years. And we did keep taking unexpected side trips, and finding strange and wonderful detours. Dick always prefers to remain, as he says, “sufficiently disorganized”; this was definitely in that category. And we ended up going with him to Turkey three more times.

Don and I thought we’d try an airport limousine from Philadelphia to JFK. Very bad idea. The van picked us up bright and early in the morning, collected our neighbors Cirel and Howard Magen, and then spent over two hours touring every suburb of Philadelphia getting the rest of the passengers. We arrived at JFK too late to get anything resembling lunch: we had to go straight to the chaotic Olympic gate for our early evening flight to Athens. Needless to say, we were starving to death by the time we got onto the plane. Then there was the usual endless wait in line on the runway to take off—20 or 30 planes all trying to leave at the same time. (I can’t remember now if that was the flight when our attendants got into a big, lengthy argument in the galley near us and left us foodless while the rest of the entire 747 was served, but it may have been. Olympic Air is a trip unto itself.) The flight is nine hours, and since I’m not a happy camper on planes, it’s dismal. (When USAirways started flying to Rome, we found that we could fly there from Philadelphia, go to the next gate, and fly to Athens or Istanbul with enormous ease. Never again to JFK.)

After a night in Athens, we flew to Istanbul and were met by our bus and our driver, whom Dick introduced as Fikrit. “Rhymes with ‘secret,’” he said. “He speaks six languages, none of them English.” Dick had decided, in one of his last-minute freaks, to take us into Istanbul to our hotel-to-be just for a drink before we headed to a special lunch place he’d found and thence to the ferry to Bursa. Fikrit turned off the main street in the Suleymanye district, went down the hill, and parked the bus on the side of a little triangle of trees off the square where the hotel sat. We all went into the hotel. Any doubts about the endurance of 80-year-old Werner, a lean and animated German-Californian who was traveling with his paramour Emily, also 80, were banished as he bounded up the four flights of stairs to the rooftop bar. We struggled up after him and all 30 of us enjoyed beer or wine as we continued getting acquainted.

Then we went out to the bus. Oh, dear. While we’d been inside for less than an hour, cars had parked two abreast in front of, alongside, and in back of the bus, filling the tiny stretch of street along the triangle. We couldn’t budge.

Somehow, a large, loud man, who seemed to be sort of an unofficial mayor of the square, got involved. Car owners were found and coerced into moving. Groups of men simply shifted some of the cars by brute force if they couldn’t find the owner. Finally, after an hour of struggle, we got out, with everyone on the square waving goodbye.

Then Fikrit headed for the restaurant, or tried to. He seemed to have only the dimmest idea where it was, and it rapidly became a quiet joke among all of us as he yet again stopped, pulled up the emergency brake with a series of squawks, and asked directions of a passerby. But eventually we got there. The lunch was good, but hardly worth the trouble we’d had finding it. He did manage to find the ferry stop for Bursa with some ease. We wandered with the others along the waterfront, where Wally, a Canadian, made friends with a bunch of kids by handing out little maple-leaf pins he’d brought with him, and we encountered our first tzimmis seller, carrying his round breads on a tray on his head.

In Bursa, we headed uphill to the Green Mosque. It was quite beautiful, though not quite as impressive as our neighbors Linda and Bill had promised us. Dick had found a restaurant across the street, though, that served us one of the best dinners of our lives. It seems that they are specialists in Iskander Kebab, one of the notable dishes of a notable cuisine—and enough cholesterol for a week. It is beef strips broiled in butter, smothered in rich yogurt or sour cream, with more butter poured over the pita bread that is in the dish soaking in meat juices. Incredibly good.

But the meal came to an end, and we headed down the road to our hotel, many miles away. This trek became known as “the night of the sewer pipe trucks.” On a two-lane highway, Fikrit would come up behind a large truck laden with huge concrete sewer pipes, of necessity and lack of power traveling at a snail’s pace. For ten minutes or so  he would jockey behind it until the heavy traffic approaching us allowed him to pass. We’d cruise happily along for a short while, and there would be another sewer-pipe truck looming ahead. We must have passed ten of them. By the time we reached our roadside hotel, out in the middle of nowhere, it was probably one a.m. and this after being up all night on the plane. At least the long trip allowed more getting acquainted. Cirel explained to everyone that we were friends, but not close friends—“we live in the same neighborhood and we go to each other’s parties.” And Jimmy, a young Asian-American traveling by himself, actually came and sat with me to chat while Don was roaming the aisle. As he had seemed very shy and had hardly said boo to anyone, Cirel was astonished, as was I. I guess I am unthreatening.

Next morning we got on the bus to go to Bergama, getting there at lunchtime. By this time we’d discovered that Mel, of Armenian descent but apparently holding no grudge against the Turks, could speak a good bit of Turkish, so a few of us followed him into a small restaurant and by pointing at what we wanted had a good lunch. After we reassembled, the bus took us up to the very high Acropolis where the Roman ruins are. Dick pointed out the shady site where the Great Altar of Pergamon stood before ending up in the museum built for it in East Berlin. We walked to the edge of the cliff nearby and he pointed down to the town far below, its people looking like ants. “The bus will meet us down there,” he said. Say what?

Anyway,  we walked over to the temples, one of which was being reconstructed by German archaeologists with a huge crane. There is a large complex of temples, in varying states of repair. This was an important center, although its biggest attraction for ancient Roman tourists was the Asclepion across town, where healing was supposed to take place. One of the greatest libraries in the world was here, too, a big rival of the library in Alexandria. So strong was the rivalry, in fact, that the Egyptians refused to send papyrus to Pergamon, thinking to stymie them. But the Pergamese were ingenious—they promptly invented parchment, whose name actually derives from Pergamon.

The Pergamon theater is remarkable: it is built into the side of the existing very steep hill just below the temple complex. We walked down through it and admired the ruins of the little temple of Dionysus beside the bottom. Then Dick led us off to the left along the hillside. Half the site is below the temples: a gymnasium, shops, remains of houses. It was a long walk down, but fascinating. Finally we passed out of the site and into the town, also built onto the hill. We could see some houses that had bits of ancient temples embedded in them as handy stones, scavenged from the site.

The whole group was scattered by now, wandering by twos and threes into the area where the bus was supposed to meet us. Cirel and I had ended up walking together with a couple of others, Don and Howard having disappeared from our ken. As we strolled past a bar, Wally appeared at the door and beckoned us in. About ten of our fellows were already there, mingling in happy polyglot with a bunch of Turkish men. We all settled down with beers, smiling at each other in mutual incomprehension. Wally was a friend to all, noisy and happy, and the Turks enjoyed him immensely. One of the men opposite me—very good-looking with incredible blue eyes—made a broad sweep with his hand around the room and indicated “This is wonderful” with a gesture. It was.

Meanwhile, Don was with others, including Fikrit, in a second-floor bar a block or so away. He sat by the window and made a sketch of the town square, astonishing Fikrit, who kept bringing people over to watch. They were all enthralled. For some reason this made Fikrit our friend for life, especially when Don gave him the sketch at the end of the trip.

The only problem with all this camaraderie was that Dick didn’t know where any of us were. He found Don’s bunch and told them to stay put, then wandered the town looking for the rest of us. Finally he passed the door of our bar and—following the noise, as he said—located our group and herded us off to the bus. Time to go to Selçuk.

We checked into our small hotel on the main street for three days. Our room was on the rear, overlooking a courtyard that was backed up by houses with farm animals in their back yards. We became acutely aware of this even before the roosters started crowing at dawn, because there was a donkey nearby. The “hee-haw” in nursery books does not begin to describe the sound a donkey makes. We had never heard it before, but we’ll never forget it. It is unearthly. (Next time we came we had a room on the front of the hotel. Every morning at daybreak the amplified call of the muezzin, broadcast from the tiny, apparently abandoned mosque thirty feet away across the street, levitated us from the mattress.) But it was a nice, comfortable hotel right in the middle of the small town. We walked across the street for a group dinner.

Later Don and I, having heard that Turkish post offices were open 24 hours a day, went out to find one. It was right down the street, but when we opened the door we were confronted by soldiers. We started to back out, but they laughed and cried out “No, no, come in!” so we did. They were the staff, very jovial. I spread out my post cards and one of them produced a number of stamps, pantomiming “three of these and two of those” with the result that most of the postcard was covered with stamps. Turkey had such bad inflation that large amounts of almost useless money were required for everything. It got even worse in later trips—I remember being jolted when 10 postcards cost 10,000 lira, but it was about a nickel each.

Breakfast in Turkey, by the way, is quite good once you get used to it—certainly better than the little packs of melba toast and “Nes” (instant coffee) that one always seems to get in Greece. It’s just that we aren’t used to having cucumbers and tomatoes for breakfast. And cheese—the Turkish version of feta. With hot tea and their very good bread with honey or jam, it makes an excellent meal when you get over the surprise.

On our first day in Selçuk we took the bus to Ephesus, for which it is the modern town. The site is so amazing, with its marble road still intact in a sweeping L-shape for at least a mile, that you for once can really visualize the ancient city. The restored library façade is shown in every brochure on Turkey, and looks wonderful as you descend the road toward it, passing temple façades and columns, but they don’t show the great gate to the agora, or shopping center, on its right, or the houses they have excavated and restored up the hill next to it. The grand theater where St. Paul caused a riot is in wonderful shape; the marble road has a detour that goes down a magnificent esplanade toward the ancient harbor—like most of them, now silted up for miles. We also explored the ruins of a very early Christian church on the site.

The bus took us then to what is called the House of the Virgin Mary, supposed to be on the site where she lived when St. John brought her to Ephesus. Big tourist trap—Dick never took a tour there again. Then back to Selçuk to the museum.

The museum is small and manageable, all on one floor, but it has a wonderful collection of sculpture from the site, including two of the more-than-life-sized 2^nd-century Roman statues of Artemis with the mysterious globules all over her front. Explanations abound for these; perhaps the most marvelous was expounded by a British/Canadian woman on one of our later trips who read out a postcard she’d written to a friend. “I regret to inform you that the many-breasted Artemis whom we have so admired in the past is now thought to be covered with bulls’ balls.”

One of the marvelous things about the little town of Selçuk is that the Roman aqueduct for Ephesus marches right down the edge of one of the main streets, and houses or stores have been built into the arches underneath. Furthermore, as most of the top structure is missing, almost every pillar has a stork’s nest on top of it.

Above the town is a medieval castle, or citadel, in ruins, and even higher up the hill is the ancient Basilica of St. John—a great, ruined cathedral, long roofless, that is supposed to be the burial place of St. John They weren’t part of the tour, but some of us hiked up the hill and explored both of them.

Next day the bus took us to Priene, one of the few ancient cities that was never Romanized: its harbor silted up before they came along and it wasn’t worth their while. So it is still a Hellenistic town, from the time of Alexander the Great. It’s on the side of a substantial hill, but the town is relatively flat, on a sort of plateau. The council chamber is remarkably intact, with all the seats still around three sides of the square, so we all sat in state to rest. The theater has only a single or double row of seats left, so it must have been much larger once, but the ruler’s (or local big shot’s) chair is impressive. A row of columns from a temple to Athena look spectacular against the backdrop of the cliff behind them. Louise, Wally’s equally ebullient wife, stretched herself as a sacrificial victim on an altar stone for photographs—not that there is any evidence of such Greek activity. (They actually thought the idea was appalling.) And surprisingly, there are a lot of remains of houses, small, but with walls still intact.

We stopped for lunch at Didyma, which is a temple not to be believed. “Is” is the right word, because the town only exists because of the temple and consists entirely of restaurants and tourist shops. Didyma is enormous, awesome. Apollo’s oracle here was consulted by King Croesus of Lydia (“rich as Croesus”) and Alexander the Great. Along with Delphi, Dodoni, and Siwa (in Egypt—we saw it some years later), this is one of the four great oracles of ancient times. A few of the huge temple columns are still standing: I barely topped the bases of them. Each step up to the entrance is a climb. Inside it feels like something between a gymnasium and a football field. (Aside here: while we were wandering around the little townlet, one of our least likeable cohorts was, as Cirel put it, “shat on by a stork.” The mess was astonishing. It couldn’t have happened to a better person.)

Next stop was Miletus. We had read that Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages, had predicted a solar eclipse and measured the height of the Pyramids; his successors Anaximander and Hecataues were the founders of geography. Dick thought that the theater of Miletus was the only thing to see, but Pat, one of our co-travelers, said she thought from her reading that there was more. Indeed there was. The theater is definitely spectacular, and very well preserved. Here we learned from Dick, who loved this little fact, that the exit from a theater—the tunnel cut through to the outside on both sides—was known as the vomitorium. The ones here were perfectly intact on one level, and you could see the remains of a second set at the top of the remaining seats.

But that definitely wasn’t all. Behind the theater was one of the most beautiful sites imaginable. The great white marble gate to the city and the agora had a lake in front of it and was reflected in it. Thank goodness we took lots of pictures, because on our next trip they had drained the area for further archaeology and the lake was gone, replaced by dried mud. We walked all over the gate area, and then explored behind it, where a boggy field, populated by a lot of cows, was filled with bits of temples and other buildings. We went further and found an exquisite little 13^th-century mosque, abandoned in a field of poppies and trees. When we walked back toward the theater we found the remains of the Baths of Faustina (the wife of Marcus Aurelius), with their dressing cubicles almost intact. Behind these was the only completely intact Roman pool we’ve ever seen: about 30 feet long by 15 feet wide and about four feet deep, all still walled in. Alongside was the statue of a lion that we took turns bestriding, and at the end was a triton. Fascinating.

We explored further, led by the Blue Guide, and with the help of a shepherd found one of the lions that guarded the gates of the ancient port. It was sunk almost to its head in grass, but he knew what we wanted, and what he wanted was to have his picture taken with his arm around my shoulder. The port, of course, is long silted up and Miletus is a several miles from the sea now.

Next day we went much further afield, to Aphrodisias, once a fabulous and very wealthy city. Again a spectacular site, with as much to see as Ephesus. The hills around the city are marble, so they used a lot of it. Highlights were the theater, which still has the base of the stage house with all its columns, and a very large complex, not entirely excavated, that looked like a huge oval, surrounded by colonnades, with more colonnades crossing at the center. I suppose the city center—the forum. We walked more and found parts of many temples and a great four-sided gate, and then we got to the stadium. Astonishing: it is completely intact. A very long, narrow oval, with tiers of seats rising many feet high around the whole thing. We climbed up and could just visualize the athletes coming in through the arched gateway (that’s all that survives at Olympia) for the great games.

Our final stop for the day was both ancient and modern: Hieropolis ancient and Pamukkale (Cotton Castle) modern. Hieropolis has a big theater and a huge necropolis (cemetery) with tons of mausoleums and tombs. Its hot springs made it a big healing area, very popular with ancient tourists. Pamukkale is a strange and beautiful natural phenomenon: calcium oxide deposits from streams have created a huge cliff side of white, with little pools and plateaus where you can sit on a smooth shelf atop ranks of snow-white icicles and cascades dabbling your feet (or more of you) in the warm water. The calcium deposits feel like walking in talcum powder, very fine and soft. It is just drop-dead gorgeous. Of course it is topped by many hotels (the modern part), so we stopped in one for a drink and a swim in the indoor-outdoor pool, which had ancient marble columns lying on the bottom for decor. Then back to our last night in Selçuk.

Next morning we headed south to the Turquoise Coast on the Mediterranean. Dick had not planned to stop in Antalya, although on later trips we stayed there for several days and enjoyed both the city and its marvelous museum, but the bus had a flat tire on the way in. So we had a quickly organized walk around the center of town, seeing the Burnt Tower (a minaret struck by lightning some time in the past) and Hadrian’s Gate, which was a little hard to find. Hadrian was certainly a busy emperor: Hadrian’s Wall in England, multiple gates in many cities, and the huge Villa Adriana—almost a city in itself—outside Rome. After enough time to throw us completely off schedule, we headed off to some of the archaeological sites. Not Perge this time (I don’t know if we skipped it because of the flat tire or not), but we went to Side right on the water. The bus had to squeeze through a narrow Roman gate on a sharp curve, but Fikrit made it. Again the theater was in excellent shape—they seem to survive better than anything else, but the most fascinating thing was under it: the public latrine, a curved vaulted room still intact, with the channel for running water under all the seats with holes in them. A very convivial spot.

After lunch we headed to Aspendus, which has just a theater. This is almost the only one that still has the entire “stage house” intact behind the stage—it goes up just as high as the seats, which are very high. Just as we walked into the theater two highly trained opera singers who were also touring burst into a duet to test the acoustics. It was lovely.

A few of us decided to climb up the hill behind the theater to see what was there, and found not only the remains of several buildings but a goatherd spinning yarn and an incredible view of the aqueduct that had served the city. It stretched for miles to the horizon, in remarkably well-preserved condition. We went down a different path and found Dick and the rest of the tour happily consuming beer in a little open-air place owned by a gypsy who said he was the mayor of Aspendus. (There is no town.) Then we went behind the hill to look at the aqueduct. Fikrit followed it for a while but then discovered that the road alongside stopped and he had to turn his giant bus around on a one-lane road bordered by ditches. He did it. At one of the aqueduct’s tower intersections Heinie, who was an engineer as well as an inveterate climber, scrambled up inside, pulling Dick and Don with him, and on descending explained how the water managed to get uphill. I think I understood it at the time, but it has left me now.

Time to get going. Here we discovered that just because a road is a major highway on the map doesn’t mean you can go at highway speeds. By the time we reached our newly built resort hotel outside Alanya it was well after dark. Still, we had a good dinner and then ventured into town to take in a plump belly dancer in some strange venue.

Next day was more proof of the highway maxim. We crept along cliff edges, seeing some of the most spectacular scenery imaginable (while Marilyn, an acrophobe, clung to the other side of the bus and looked, white-faced, away from the views). Top speed was about ten miles an hour. At about three we finally found a restaurant, which advertised its presence by a large fish painted on the road, and had lunch. I fed a Bonamine to one of our companions who had been white-faced for different reasons and he felt much better after that. Dick actually bought a pair of those Turkish trousers, which certainly don’t look like the harem pants of myth. They narrow down at the ankles, have the crotch about knee-high, and flare from the ankles up into a wide triangle which is then bunched around the waist in a lump. The waiters were demonstrating them with great hilarity, standing splay-legged to show the crotch.

We crept off again, seeing crusader castles at Anamur and Korigos (which has two—a land castle and a sea castle), finally arriving in Mersin/Tarsus (St. Paul’s birthplace) at about ten or eleven. The restaurants were all closed, but Zanep (our Turkish guide/accompanier) and Dick managed to talk one of them into reopening, so we had a good dinner.

Next morning I decided to buy myself a bottle of wine. Everybody in these isolated hotels had been happily having a cocktail hour with raki, the Turkish equivalent of ouzo. I hate licorice, so I had been much too abstemious. I walked into a pocket-sized (think coat closet) liquor store and then realized that I didn’t know the word for wine. It wasn’t in any of our otherwise very helpful guidebooks, either. I looked all around: bottles and bottles of everything except wine. Don and friends were giggling at me through the open window. Finally a customer, who had a little of several languages, looked at me inquiringly and I said “wine, vino, vin.” “Ah,” he said, and pointed behind me. The wine was on shelves up over the front door. I still don’t know the Turkish word for wine, but I got a couple of bottles and happy hour was much happier.

We then set off northward, headed for Cappadoccia. This is an area like nothing else in the world. Erosion has shaped the volcanic tufa into the weirdest shapes imaginable: cones, pyramids, chimneys, needles, some up to 100 feet high, and many crowned with oddly balanced stones of a darker color. Very phallic, some of them. The tufa is so soft that for centuries it has been carved into churches, houses, garages, monasteries, and unexplained passages. Whole cities have been dug out underground, some going down nine or more levels; it is suspected that they may even be connected underground. Historians haven’t quite come to grips with how they were used or exactly when they were built: it seems obvious that they must have been retreats in times of danger. The rock churches give you a strange feeling: they have Gothic arches and vaults but you have to keep remembering that they are, so to speak, inside out. They weren’t built; they were excavated. All are abandoned now, as are the monasteries. Many of the houses are empty too: the government decided a while back that living in tufa was unhealthy, but a few diehards still live in them and many stores and bars are dug out of the rock. On a later trip Dick managed to make friends with a woman who lives in one of the dug-out houses and after that we always visited her. I’m sure she got a good stipend out of the visit, but it was fascinating. Instead of bookshelves or whatnots she had little arched niches carved above her sofas. Even the bed was a carved niche with a mattress and box springs in it, all neatly made up with bedspread. Everything was painted white, and ws surprisingly bright because there were carved windows too.

We stopped for a day in Kayseri, and it turned out to be our only unpleasant day. We got separated from the group when we went to change some travelers’ checks, and a carpet salesman who wrote the book on persistence followed us around for hours, even waiting and looking over our shoulders when we stopped to make sketches in the hope of boring him to death. (Pure stubbornness on our part because he irritated us; we did need a rug and bought one in Istanbul.) We did find the nice little museum and enjoyed it. Then we had a salad in a tiny café and went to sit on the grass in the park opposite. We’d lost the carpet salesman by this time, but now we were accosted by a man ranting at us. He was a little scary. Fortunately, the men in the café saw what was happening, came out and shouted at him to go away and he did. They grinned at us and made the universal circular motion indicating “He’s nuts” and we waved our thanks.

When we finally met at the bus our mood was not improved by hearing what a nice day everyone else had had, visiting a carpet factory as well as the museum. At least while we were waiting we had a good conversation with a 13-year-old boy in his school uniform. His English was excellent, and we complimented him on it. He said he was in an immersion year, with all of his classes taught in English. Last year it had been German, “but my German is not so good as my English.” We could learn something from that system. He was very interested in Don’s being an architect.

We stayed the next two nights in a not-quite-finished hotel sort of in the boondocks, with a settlement that wasn’t yet a town around it. (Of course the food was good—it almost always is in Turkey.) The first night Dick gathered a very small group of party-inclined people and we wandered out to see what was around. We passed the sign for a disco that seemed to be thumping away underground. Then a little further on we saw a large excavated area like a quarry with an awning and a door leading right into the bank on one side. The sign said Set Disco. Curiosity reigned, so we slid down the bank and went in. Inside was a very large excavated room, with one huge column left in the center featuring, we were amused to see, a carving of Adam and Eve. Adam had a phallus that could be rotated up or down. The place was empty except for the bartender and a small group of men squatting around a little stove in one corner. Soft Turkish music was playing; after we sat down at a table they put on some disco music but Mel went to the bartender and asked to have the nice music again. After a while we went and joined the men at the stove and did a lot of smiling and nodding, with some rudimentary conversation by Mel.

The beer got to us after a while and the men retreated to the outhouse about thirty yards from the front door. I went out and looked at it, but it was facing away from the lights and was pitch dark. Knowing it was a straddle-the-hole kind, I was afraid to enter, not fancying the idea of plunging in. So I opted to suffer on the way home, not helped by the fact that Dick kept making me giggle.

We explored more strange formations the next day. At one, several of us tried to climb up the slope to one of the excavated churches, but the sand-on-stone slipperiness got us. Angela slid down into me, I slid into Don, we all slid into Cirel, and finally the human avalanche was stopped by Mel at the bottom. We went to one of the underground cities, where those of us who are claustrophobic had a very difficult time. The air, surprisingly, was cool and fresh, but we got stuck in one low tunnel while a German tour leader gave a whole lecture in the room we were heading for. We sat on the floor and suffered. I was very glad to get out of there. We went to Urgup, a charming little town where we had lunch and wandered around window shopping. Don bought, just for the name, a bottle of liqueur called Kwantro and everybody had a taste of it out of the bottle cap when we were back on the bus.

Back to the Set Disco that night to a whole new experience. All of it had been rearranged, with a very long table along one side and a bandstand at the end. There was to be a betrothal party and ceremony. We found a little table in the corner and prepared to watch, but when the party began we were drawn into it. We women were asked to dance by the groomsmen; it reminded me of fifth-grade dances when my arm was pumped up and down with the music. We watched the ceremony with interest, although I remember nothing about it. The groom and one of his friends got into a fight and went outside, leaving the bride in tears, but it all seemed to get resolved. And the proprietors had even made a concession to the party and put a candle in the doorway (there was no door) of the outhouse so one could go in without fear of falling.

On the following day we headed north to Bogazkoy, which has the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusas. The Hittites were contemporaries of the Mycenean Greeks and Ramsses II in Egypt, second millennium B.C. Their library was burned at Hattusas, baking all the clay tablets with their cuneiform writing, so more is known about them than one would expect. Cuneiform has been translated long since.

Our first stop was outside Hattusas at Yazilikaya, the Hittites’ holiest religious sanctuary. They worshipped many gods, but the Weather God and his consort were the most important. This place takes advantage of two clefts in the rocky hill: a large chamber that is carved around the sides with processions of 42 gods on one side—wearing pointed caps—meeting 21 goddesses—wearing pleated skirts and tall hats; and a smaller chamber that has some larger relief carvings of gods, including Sharruma (death and rebirth figure like Osiris) holding the king, Tudhaliya IV, in his hand.

On to Hattusas, which is a vast site with a  great sweep of berm-like walls, within which is a modern road in a circle. The buildings are outlined by their foundations: the Hittites built with mud bricks and their upper parts are long gone. The bus took us to the top of the site and we climbed the walls to the Lion Gate, the one that still has intact sculpture around it—large lions on each side. Some of the other sculptures have been removed to the museum in Ankara; we’d see them later. We also explored the sloping 200-foot tunnel, corbelled, through the walls. They haven’t found anything like it in any other Hittite site and don’t know what it was.  It lies directly north-south.

We wandered down through the site, the bus having gone down to the guard’s little house at the bottom. We passed Bükükkaya, the citadel, but it was a bit of a climb so we didn’t go up.

The big temple was near the bottom of the circular area defined by the road. They think it must have been two or three stories high, but have no clue as to what it looked like. It had (or had the outlines of) long storage rooms with the huge pithoi, or storage jars, that we had seen so much of in Crete. They found a lot of cuneiform tablets here, including one that listed the 208 members of the temple household. Quote from guidebook quoting it: 18 priests, 29 woman musicians, 19 scribes for clay tablets, 33 scribes for wooden tablets, 35 soothsayers, 10 Hurrian singers, the rest is lost. The road leading to the temple and circling it is amazingly intact, if bumpy and upheaved, after some 3000 years. There is a ceremonial basin, once 15 feet long, carved from a single piece of limestone and sculpted with lions.

The most mysterious thing is the great green stone, carved into an irregular shape and polished to mirror smoothness, just at the entrance. No one knows what it was for; our guidebook said “Archaeologists never mention it.”

We left the temple and headed toward the bus. To our dismay, we now discovered that inside the road encircling the site was a barbed-wire fence. The bus was on the other side of the fence, at the little guard house. No gate.

Now at 98% of the other archaeological or historic sites in the world, I’m sure we would have been told we’d have to climb all the way back to the top of the site to get out the gate in the fence where we’d come in. Instead, the guards brought out a chair, handed it over the fence, and instructed us to climb on it one by one while they jumped us over. Amid much hilarity, we did so. I was one of the last, and as I got on the chair Fikrit, always the clown, prostrated himself on his side of the fence so I could jump on him. Don and one other person got wonderful photos of Fikrit getting up howling with laughter as I jumped in front of him.

We stopped at a rather seedy motel/hotel in the middle of nowhere (after all, we were in the middle of nowhere) for lunch, The food, as usual, was fine, but Dick asked me after we got back on the bus how the ladies’ room had been, and when I grimaced he got on the microphone and explained that this are was the Bermuda Triangle of  toilets and apologized, although he said he couldn’t really do anything about it.

I think it was this same day as we drove toward Ankara that Dick suddenly spotted a yellow Archaeology Site sign and got Fikrit to turn into the dirt road to see it. Thus we discovered one of the most beautiful spots of the trip. It was also Hittite, partially excavated, with an impressive gate flanked by granite walls with wonderfully preserved carved sculpture reliefs, and the whole place was awash in wildflowers, making it even more spectacular. The tiny (cabin-sized) museum was not open, there were no signs, and I still don’t know what place it was. I’ve looked at a number of Hittite sites online since then, and none of them look like the pictures we have. Mystery.

We stayed at an unmemorable hotel in Ankara. Walked to a restaurant nearby; all I remember about it is that a waiter passed us at one point carrying something that looked spectacular, so we ordered one for our table. It turned out to be just a whole head of romaine lettuce, all washed and standing upright. You picked off leaves and dipped them in salt, and it was delicious. Who’d have thought?

But the museum in Ankara is incredible: The Museum of Ancient Anatolian Civilizations. It is built in an ancient Roman bath, which is reason enough for it to be wonderful, but the Hittite remains are amazing. They made sculptures not only for their granite gates, but of dark metal. These often are antlered, slender animals stepping thorugh almost a spider web of metal tracery. One is reproduced on a giant scale as the centerpiece of a large roundabout piazza in the middle of town. The artifacts found in Çatal Hüyük, a 9000-year-old settlement in south central Turkey, are here, including their hearths and whole rooms. Their houses were all built wall to wall, with no pathways or streets. The only access was through openings in the roof. They buried their dead under the floor in the houses. The entire museum was a revelation.

In the afternoon we went to Ataturk’s tomb, which is enormous and very bleak. Ataturk is Turkey’s Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and whatever all rolled into one, and his statue or bust is at the center of every town, city, or village we saw. Guards patrol the huge square, keeping any poor tourist from daring to rest on a handy ledge or wall. The little museum is okay, but he was a very abstemious man (except for the ladies) so his artifacts are plain and uninspiring. On subsequent visits we opted out of this site and either had a beer outside or went for a walk.

The bus took us on the long ride west to Istanbul, where we arrived quite late. (On subsequent trips we flew.) Back to the hotel that we had visited briefly on our first day, discovering again that the bar on the top floor had a marvelous view of the Sea of Marmara, with all the boats and ships lighted at night. The bartender was charmed that Don had learned how to say “ice-cold” in Turkish, thanks to Umit—it is buz gibi. That seems to be the only way to get beer that isn’t lukewarm. We got very good at saying Icki birra buz gibi, lütfen—two ice-cold beers, please. On one of our last nights he reached down into his refrigerator and produced, tongue firmly in cheek, two frozen beers.

I can’t remember the order in which we saw things, but in five days we saw a lot. The absolute wonder was Hagia Sofia, a staggeringly beautiful interior space. From the outside it is ugly and lumpy—and pink, with huge buttresses and a lot of outbuildings attached. I remembered seeing a photograph of the interior in my Art History 101 class and thinking, boy, I’d love to see that someday, not, of course, that I ever would (and four times, at that!). You enter into a long corridor and when you turn toward the center you think you are seeing the edge of the enormous dome. But when you move farther in, you discover that what you saw is only the half-dome, one of the two on the east and west sides. The other two walls are flat with windows. The space is incredible. The dome sits on a ring of windows, which makes it look like it is floating. How they could have built it in the 6th century A.D! There are damaged frescos on the pediments—they were plastered over when it was converted into a mosque in 1453, and uncovered when it was made into a museum by Ataturk. All of the columns around the edges of the great space are different; some marble, some different stones, some surfaces painted. If you inspect closely all around, it is a mishmash, but the space defies all that.

We walked up the stairs behind the walls to get to the galleries, where you could look down on the vast area. More mosaics, including the Empress Zoe with her last husband. It is thought that when the first died, she had his face replaced by the second, and I think this is the third. Another wonderful mosaic shows the Virgin and Child with the Emperor Constantine on one side of her and the Emperor Justinian on the other, holding a model of the church he built.

Other notes: in the walls you see little rectangles of glass at intervals. These are alarms of a sort—if the glass breaks, it means the building has shifted and the structure is in danger. And in one spot on the ramp to the gallery, in Byzantine times some Nordic guard, bored with the service he had to observe, scratched a message in Norse runes. He was a long way from home.

We explored the Grand Bazaar, a labyrinth of shops in an ancient building, with importunate salesmen pleading with us to buy rugs, brasses, scarves, anything. We went out a different door and found ourselves in a warren of little streets of shops, each street seeming to specialize. A block of blue jeans stores, a block of T-shirt stores, a block of laces stores, and—most intriguing—a block of stores selling rolls of fake labels: YSL, Donna Karan, Bill Blass, etc., etc. A thriving put-on and rip-off. We finally extricated ourselves and found a place for lunch.

We went to the Blue Mosque, opposite Hagia Sophia. We walked all over the Hippodrome, with its Egyptian obelisk on its pedestal that explains in eroded marble how the Emperor Theodosias is great and powerful and brought it here.

Don and I explored one day by ourselves and went to Sulemanye Mosque, the one on of a hill that you can see from the water. Wonderful. The architect was Sinan, so we thought we had found his tomb nearby and Don posed by it. Turned out it was nearby, but not that one. We looked for and found other Sinan mosques, little ones that were fairly well hidden. (On a later trip we were looking once again for one of his that we had searched for in vain, though we could see it on the map quite clearly We were in a singularly unappetizing area above the Spice Market, the pavements lined with very poor vendors selling very used sneakers  and other such things. No sign of a mosque. Then suddenly there was Umit, a former assistant of  Dick’s with whom we had become very friendly on previous trips, lifting a big leather curtain between two vendors to admit the tourist couple with him. We hailed him with delight, because it was the door to the mosque we were seeking! I think his tourist clients were very startled both by our greeting him but by the fact that we were wandering around in such a neighborhood. But we never felt unsafe in Istanbul—maybe because we were a couple.)

Dick took us to the Archaeological Museum, which is very much neglected by tours and is quite wonderful, full of Roman stuff. It’s one of those circular circumstances—nobody takes tourists there because it is sort of dusty and understaffed, and it is dusty and understaffed because it doesn’t attract enough people and thus doesn’t get enough funding. On later trips they had opened a floor that had timelines comparing the Trojan and Hittite civilizations (I think—it was late in the trip and we were tired) that was new and different. But of course Dick had to bribe someone to let us in because it was closed.

Another great place is an ancient church turned into a museum called the Chorae (I forget its proper name). It is filled with mosaics from very early Byzantine times. I remember on a later trip standing craning my neck at the ceiling full of mosaics trying to explain some of the iconography to some of our Jewish fellow travelers.

And of course we went to Topkapi (the “i” is actually a Turkish letter with no dot, and is pronounced as a schwa, as in “uh.” So it is Top-kap-uh.) It is a fabulous place, from the great kitchens, full of the biggest pots and pans you ever saw, with their funnel-like chimneys lining one whole side of the first courtyard, to the succeeding courtyards, to the absolutely lovely reception building where the Sultan received ambassadors and petitioners, to the lawns and gardens. The museum was staggering—a golden throne studded with rubies and emeralds, huge emeralds adorning turbans, jeweled everything. That’s where the famous dagger that the caper movie Topkapi had Peter Ustinov, I think Gina Lollobrigida, and several others trying to steal. Then there is a little summerhouse place overlooking the Golden Horn, with a terrace and fountains and several rooms lined with beautiful tiles. The only place I didn’t enjoy was the harem, an enormous complex of hundreds of rooms, very claustrophobic and evocative of near-slavery.