Of all the places we have seen so far, Turkey has been the one that has escaped categorisation the most. It simply has so many blends of so many cultures and people, primarily courtesy of its geography, that describing it as typically European, or Middle Eastern, or Asian, fails to do it any justice. As with Israel and Jordan we elected to do a tour to ensure we did not miss anything significant. We were initially worried how we would go with 15 other people for 14 days when it had just been Christine and I for the bulk of our travels, but we were more than pleasantly surprised with the quality of our companions (all Australians by the way, god we love to travel) and that made it a lot of fun. Our first few days were spent in Instanbul, prior to the tour starting, and we took in the Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque and the Grand Bazaar, as well as our usual trick of just wandering around somewhat aimlessly and taking it all in, including a magnificent stroll along the Bosphorous and a great meal at their fish markets. 20 million people in one city though is difficult to comprehend!
The tour proper began in Instanbul with a walking tour of the city, much of which we'd seen, but the weather unfortunately turned very nasty and the temperature plummeted until yours truly caught a 'man flu' which has been with me ever since. Christine has remained well, which makes me suspect her as a 'benign carrier' ;-) One thing that stuck from that day (apart from the illness) was seeing the Snake Pillar, made from the bronze shields left behind by the Persian army of Xerxes after their defeat by the Greeks in 480BC. Incredible piece of history! We also had a look inside a 2000 year old Roman cistern that was rediscovered in the 18th century after the locals were found to be catching fish through cracks in the floors of their homes.
Our tour of Turkey can basically be broken into three parts; the mountain region in the interior around Cappadocia, the Mediterranean coastal area, and the north coast area of the Aegean and the Dardanelles. After a horrid overnight train ride from Instanbul to Ankara (with the temperature continuing to plummet) we eventually arrived at Goreme in Cappadocia where we spent the next three days. The highlight of this area was the extraordinary geography which helped account for much of its unusual history. The whole area consists of soft, volcanic rock which can be literally carved into cities by the people that have lived there. And there have been many, many different people. Roman Emperors, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Timur Lane, Sultan Mehmet, are just some of the leaders who have conquered the area at one time or the other, and it is all well documented in the magnificent Anatolian Civilisation Museum in Ankara. In order to escape from these continual marauders, the locals built vast underground cities in the soft rock. There would be a single, hidden entrance in the middle of a vast featureless plain, and then once inside, a 10 story cave system big enough to house 20,000 people! There are estimated to be hundreds like the one we explored, and the majority of them are still undiscovered.
Other highlights included the mountain caves around Goreme, used by the early Christians when escaping Roman persecution, and a trip to the local Turkish bath for a Hammam, which is a complete scrub down with something like sandpaper to remove all the dead skin. This was a hoot, as the Turkish guys that do this love a laugh and a joke (as do most Turks apparently) and one of the larger guys in our group got what can only be described as a semi-erotic massage from his masseuse who had fallen in love with his tummy. Very funny! My own masseuse was built like an Olympic wrestler (they all were) and to turn me over he simply picked me up and spun me like a rag doll. It was like a shower scene from a prison movie without the really bad ending... On a more PG note, our tour guide, a great young guy called Bayram, took us all to his apartment for lunch, as well as to his cousins place the next day, where we got to experience a typical Turkish family meal. Probably the best meal we had for the whole two weeks. Perhaps the most poignant moment though, and the one that captured best the feel of the whole place, was a climb we made up a 150m pillar of rock carved into a castle that stood in the middle of the Cappadocian plain and was surrounded on all sides, in the great distance, by enormous, snow capped mountain ranges. Just as we made the summit the Muslim call to prayer began to sound from a nearby mosque and it echoed off the mountains all around us. Unforgettably alien and strange moment that you could not experience anywhere else.
After that, it was a bus trip across those same mountains to the, thankfully, relative warmth of the Mediterranean coast at Antalya. This whole section of coastline, stretching north from Antalya all the way up to Selcuk, is famous for its ancient Roman ruins. In fact, supposedly far superior to anything to be found in Italy! The reason for this appears to be that most of the sites we visited were essentially abandoned before being rediscovered several centuries ago, unlike Italy, where the sites were always inhabited and simply built upon. Again, there were far too many sites to describe in detail, but one of the better ones included Phaselis, which was a Lycian city established in the 7th century BC, and the incredible city of Ephusus, near the modern town of Selcuk. This is considered the best example of Greco-Roman architecture in the world and at its height had 300,000 people living there. Only 20% of the city is uncovered, but in that you can see the remains of libraries, temples, bathhouses, gymnasiums, townhouses and even the local brothel (which had an underground connecting tunnel to the library, sneaky Romans!) We also spent a glorious sunny day on a chartered boat cruising around the islands off the coast and looking upon ancient ruins that had sunk into the sea following one of the earthquakes the whole region is notorious for. A sadder visit was to the beautiful ghost town of Kayakoy, an old Greek city of 35,000 people that is now literally empty after its population was forcibly relocated during an enormous population exchange between Turkey and Greece following the war between their countries in 1923. All the Greek Orthodox people living in Turkey and all the Turkish muslims living in Greece were essentially 'swapped', about 1.5 million people in all. Difficult to imagine the hardship and sense of dislocation felt by people who had lived in a country all their lives, were citizens of it, and were then rejected by it.
The last part of the tour encompassed only two places a few hundred kilometres part near the Dardanelles but were, for me at least, the initial reason why we came to Turkey (this was before I realised how much more was there). The ancient site of Troy, subject of the Iliad, is on the southern side of the Dardanelles. It was rediscovered in the late 19th century after about 1500 years. Having read the Iliad and the Odyssey as a kid and then have the opportunity to stand beneath the remains of those 12 metre high, 4 metre thick walls was something special. If two guys called Achilles and Hector had ever actually existed, then that was the exact spot where they had fought, and the text that describes that battle is one of the foundations of western mythology. Christine was not as enamoured as I was with the (possible) site of two bronze age warriors bashing each other with swords, but she was happy for me and my silly interests all the same! Our last stop on our tour was the site of another foundation of our mythology, this time a specifically Australian one.
The first thing that strikes you about Anzac cove is how small the place is. It couldn't have been a kilometre from one point to the other. Standing on the beach and looking up at the ridge line that completely overshadows the cove, you didn't need to be a master strategist to realise just how completely screwed they were from the moment they landed. Even more horrifying was to visit the place they were supposed to land, about 500 metres further to the East. That landing would have put them behind the ridge line, on relatively flat terrain and in a perfect position to strike at the high point of Chunuk Bair from behind, their ultimate goal. Well, no need to bore everyone with details we all know, but they spent the next nine months dug in on those ridge lines and all to no avail. It was interesting, but intensely sad, to move along the top of the ridge and visit places whose names have been ingrained in you since you were a kid; Lone Pine, Quinn's Post, Steele's Post, The Nek, all leading up to the high point at Chunuk Bair. Again, I was struck by just how small all these little plateaus were. It seems inconceivable that so many Turks, Australians and New Zealanders could die over such small pieces of land. The Nek, if you recall, was the action depicted in Peter Weir's Gallipoli, and hundreds of light horseman died in minutes trying to get across a piece of ridge-line about 200 metres wide and 100 metres across. It's all covered in brush now, it would have been stripped bare back then, absolutely no cover, and it seems such an inconsequential place, impossible to imagine the carnage. We visited the various graves and payed our respects to to the fallen, and then headed back to Istanbul where we finished our tour.
A hectic two weeks and some of the busiest travelling we have done, but worth it to see some of the most magnificent historical and cultural sites in the world! Now it's off to Austria for Christine's idea of culture, and it rhymes with 'peeing'...
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