An Account of a week spent travelling through Eastern Turkey.

In the Spring of 1997, at then end of the major Muslim holiday of Ramazan, I went with a bus tour to visit historical sites in Eastern Turkey. When our tour left Ankara, the word in the press was that matters in the South East were under control, hostilities with the Kurdish Nationalist group known as the PKK were at an end. This didn't prove to be the case, however, and within days after my return the Turkish military had launched another of its annual "anti- terrorist" offensives.

Amazingly, the region is safe for travel anyway. The Army controls all major roads and all the towns you might wish to visit. Although the areas we travelled through have been some of the most continuously violent regions on earth, very little I saw inspired me with instant recognition of that fact. Despite its drawbacks, a chartered tour is probably still the most politically expedient way to see many places in the Turkish East, especially in the Southeast. What follows is an account of my pleasure trip to the Eastern Turkey.

When the bus showed up, a little past seven on the morning of April 18, I was not happy. It was a mini-bus, or a half-bus. All of its seats were full. It didn't even have a space underneath for luggage: all the bags had to be piled on the back seats. I complained to the guide. Where's our real bus? But since this is all we had, we had to make the best of it.

It was senseless to have left so early on an itinerary that had us spending the night in Kayseri. We should either have left later or continued farther. As it was we reached this city, named after Caesar Augustus, by mid-afternoon. The weather was miserable, cold and rainy. There was nothing to do. I had lunch by myself in one of the few lokanta that were open. It was Friday, the high holy day during the Bayram, the Feast of Sacrifice, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to kill his son and God's mercy in the face of Abraham's demonstration of true obedience. Nothing better could express the authoritarian and fatalistic side of traditional Turkish society. Most everything in town was closed. I saw places where they were slaughtering sheep, and other places were the hides were being collected in piles. The street gutters ran red in the rain. The rain was a good thing, because it helped clean the streets of blood.

Our guide, Mustafa Bey, reinforced my first impression of his ineptitude by taking us around that evening to places which were closed for the holiday, something he should have known. Mustafa had already told us that he'd spent the previous night trying to sleep in an Ankara phone booth. This had not inspired confidence in his abilities. Next morning as we were loading the bus there came a new blow to our confidence in our guide when Mustafa announced that he had lost his suitcase. It had been set in the wrong pile of luggage, he said, and the hotel people had put it on the wrong bus. This meant that Mustafa spent the entire trip wearing the same set of clothes. Even though people offered to lend him clean shirts, he never accepted, nor did he buy anything new along the way. I began to suspect that Mustafa never had a suitcase to begin with, and merely made up this story to disguise the fact that he prefers to wear dirty clothes.

The morning was very bright and sunny. The skiing mountain, Erciyes Dag, loomed over us as we left town, a great extinct volcano completely covered in snow. The fields and valleys along the road were covered in snow, too. The world seemed fresh and new. After about two hours we made a rest stop, climbing off the bus onto the muddy parking lot. But inside the little lokanta, it was very cozy. There was a big metal wood-burning stove in the center of the room and some of us stood around it, warming ourselves and drinking tea. Farther down the road the snow had begun to melt, except up in the hills which still glistened white. The earth was colored a bright orange and whatever was growing out of it was bright green, and the sky was very blue. The trees which dotted here and there were very funny looking: scrub oak, I think, from which the branches had been trimmed year after year, so that they looked like twisted, headless stubs, the kind of trees you might see on another planet. There was rushing water everywhere, the streams and rivers overflowed and drown their banks, churning on like cream-topped chocolate milk. The houses we past no longer had tile roofs, but were covered with tin instead. At one point we stopped to take photographs in the pristine air.

Lunch-time past and people were getting hungry. We stopped at a dusty town to look for a restaurant. The jandarma at the cross-roads suggested a place, but it was closed. "What can't be cured, must be endured," quoted Mustafa. At the next village, comprised of a handful of houses that looked across a green field to mountains beyond, we made the driver stop at a bakkal and got out to buy biscuits, chocolates and oranges. There were some tables set up by the road. A man came on a donkey and tied it up nearby, and we listened to its protesting bray. I sat on low wall munching pistachios and watched our driver negotiate something with the shop keeper and some other men who'd come around to look at us. Soon they began bringing out more things to eat, setting them on the table: loafs of bread, sliced tomatoes and peppers, and nuggets of a rubbery, tasteless white cheese. So that we had a spontaneous picnic and got back on the bus satisfied. I slept nearly all the way to Adiyaman where we would spend the night.

I went out alone before dinner to have a look at the town. Adiyaman is an oil-boom town, large and sprawling and not very attractive. There was not much to give me an idea of what the people are like, what they do, how they pass their time other than by watching TV. The boys and young men play futbol. The girls and women look out the windows of their "modern" apartments. The children, mostly dark-faced, laugh or cry. At about the center of town there were a few shops, a bakery that smelled of fresh bread, and a mosque.

Sunday morning we left the hotel before 8:30, on our way to nearby Kahta where we rented three smaller vehicles and drivers to take us to the top of Nemrut Dagi. The road was steep and in poor repair, washed out in places. The last 5 km were paved with uneven stone, and the jolts and bumps were unsettling. Our mini-bus would not have made it. We picked up an old man carrying a sack of onions hitching up the road. It was very cold at the top of the mountain, which is the highest one around. We got out into the mist and snow and began making our way to where the monuments are--large stone statues of gods and kings and animals constructed about 100 BC, from which the heads have fallen. The footing in the snow was very difficult, and most of the group turned back before seeing the monuments. But I went on. Everything was white, and the slope beneath fell steeply away. There wasn't much to see because everything was half buried under the snow. I continued around the backside of the peak along the narrow, icy path and came to a few more carvings, alone at the desolate end of the world.

We rode back down the mountain and stopped for tea in a village were it was sunny and warm. Some spring flowers were coming out, and group of village children came to sing us a song. We stopped again to see the ruins of the palace of the king who had built the monuments. There's not much left standing at the crest of a hill among some goats, but the air was fresh and the view of the surrounding valleys was pleasant. In the grass I found the drum of a ruined column carved delicately with grape leaves and fat, delicious looking grapes. Nearby was a deep passage cut into the rock with steep stairs leading down. The guide books said it went for many meters before coming to a dead-end, so none of us went down.

Next, one of the three dolmus we were riding in stopped with a tire puncture at a place where the road was washed-out. We climbed out into the sunshine to watch the drivers change it. Not far ahead was a Roman bridge which we stopped to see. It still carries the main road over a small river at the point where the waters emerge from a steep gorge to fill a broad, shallow lake. It is an interesting comment that beside the old bridge built many centuries ago two concrete piers have recently been sunk for a new bridge. But the project had been poorly planned, for one of the piers was placed too directly in the current, which had undermined it and caused it to shift, so that construction had to be abandoned. A little beyond was the burial mound of some ancient princesses. It's hard to describe the sense of remoteness felt in these places, remoteness in both space and time. But we hardly had a chance to feel it, to breath in the air of it, before the drivers herded us back on to the dolmus.

We got back to our mini-bus and went for lunch in Kahta. They brought us pide and lamacun, which were spicy and rather good, though we had to wait a long time for them. Outside on the street, one of our party asked a pair of carefree school girls to sing a song which he recorded with his sophisticated new video recorder. We spent the entire afternoon on the bus, headed for Sanli Urfa. About mid-afternoon we crossed the Euphrates River (Firat Nehri), and pulled up to look at the big Ataturk Dam that blocks its headwaters and forms a vast lake. Here my friend Father Cadoc Leighton--an Irish monk who taught European History at Bilkent University--tried to remember a reference from the Apocalypse that mentions the head-waters of the Euphrates. From here Armageddon would be launched, when four angels should bust from the stream and carry vengeance to the four corners of the Earth. We tried to pictured the massive figures of these "angels" breaking through the rubble of the dam.

From here to Urfa the countryside was flat and very green with growing grain, green and flat as far as the eye could see. Our bus pulled up in front of the hotel at the same time as another, larger bus, full of dithering, elderly Turkish tourists, so that there was a lot of confusion in the lobby. The lobby ceiling was of wood panelling hung with crystal chandeliers--and somehow it stuck me that the wonderful thing about Turkey is its feeling of decadence, of faded glory that hasn't given up its gaudy tastes, or its faith in the importance of life and emotions. Plus, the beer is inexpensive. At dinner, one young woman of our party ate nine pieces of baklava for dessert.

Very early next morning, about 4 am, I was awakened by the call to prayer. There must be 300 mosques in Urfa, and all of them started up, not together, but in an overlapping way, so that it took twenty minutes for the hypnotic singing to be over. I thought it sounded rather beautiful. After breakfast, we were greeted by the news that our bus had broken down. The driver had discovered something leaking and nobody knew how long it would take to be fixed. This made most of the group upset. But I was content, sitting in the lobby with my notebook beside Cadoc who read from his prayer book. Before long, a dolmus was hired to take us into the old city for a walking tour.

Urfa has several important shrines. There seemed to be quite a few pilgrims visiting them, and there was a sunny, holiday atmosphere prevailing, but at the same time a contemplative sense of holiness. First is the cave were Ibraham is said to have been born. We came to it down a wide walkway boarded by elegant grill work of wrought iron. Inside the men are divided from the women. It was funny to see the Western girls tied in head scarfs. On the men's side you can have a drink from a sacred spring inside the cool stone of the cave. Then there are sacred carp swimming in a long rectangular pool surrounded by beautiful architecture. The fish are quite large, said to be descendants of the ones Allah transformed from the hot coals Ibrahim was going to be burned alive on by a local despot. After this we climbed up to the kale, through a long steep tunnel through the rock, very ancient, but there really wasn't much to see up there, aside from a few Roman columns and defensive walls.

We had about an hour's time for exploring the nearby pazar. About half of the shops were still shut for the holiday, but the rest were open and the pazar was lively and interesting. I was attracted by the tobacco sellers. They welcomed me, sat me down beside them on a little wooden stool with a woven leather seat, and rolled me a cigarette. I made myself fairly well understood in Turkish. They said that over the past three years Urfa had grown a lot, with more people moving in from the country-side. One of the men said he was 35 and had five children. We drank tea, and the cigarette was not bad.

The women in Urfa wear very colorful clothing. The shops in the pazar are filled with the kind of material they make their dresses out of. Typically it's of velveteen stuff, printed in patterns of large red and green flowers, or yellow and purple, against black; or it's made of shinny silver, gold or colored sequins. There was a bakery where half a dozen men worked quickly shaping the dough into long oblongs, and where small boys stood waiting to carry it fresh from the stone oven to various places in the pazar.

The bus had been repaired and came to pick us up. We headed south to Haran, which is just a few kilometers from the Syrian border. Haran is said to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth. Ibraham lived there. The First Crusade had conquered it in the 12th- century. You can read something about the place in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, by Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese francophone who writes brilliant historical novels. There are still some people here. They live in mud houses that are built into a series of cones, like bee hives. Their first language is Arabic, and the children follow you around asking for money, calling "monsieur, monsieur," because before the Wars of Liberation in the 1920s the area had been occupied by the French. I was particularly pestered by a group of young girls, 12 year olds, carrying their infant brothers or sisters tied to their backs and asking money for the babies. They were freckle-faced and innocent looking--but very bold, and in my pocket there was nothing smaller than 1 million notes. They wanted my pen. But I kept that, too, since it was the only one I had.

The population isn't very large. There are far more goats and chickens, cows and horses than people. But Haran was once a city, and stone rubble covers the treeless wastes as far as you can see. What's left of the city walls are impressive. There are ruins of a large castle, and of one of the oldest mosques in Turkey. After seeing these things we went into one of the beehive houses for lunch, sitting on carpets and leaning against the mud walls with our shoes off. It was cool inside, nice after being out in the sun. The food was very simple: a papery kind of bread, a hunk of cheese, a couple slices of salami, washed down with ayran. They kept promising us tomatoes, but they never arrived. After lunch, Mustafa made an announcement: the bus had broken down again. A fan belt had snapped and a new one had to be sent for from Urfa. It might take an hour, he said. It took five hours! We sat around very bored, too hot in the sun, too cool inside the house, and if you did step outside, the children came to surround you and ask for money. I did a little writing, hiding myself in the shade of a ruined wall inside the ancient mosque. But the time passed slowly and everyone became bad-tempered. We invented a story about us, saying it was like being in a disaster film, where the plane crashes or the boat sinks, or perhaps it was a set up and we were all about to be taken captive by terrorists. A tour group from Istanbul arrived and we thought of hijacking their bus. Everyone was relieved to get out of there.

The road to Diyarbakir was long and slow because it was full of potholes, and we were tired. We finally arrived the hotel about 10 pm and ate dinner at a nearby lokanta at about 11. A long day.

Tuesday morning (22 Apr.), up early for breakfast and then a walking tour the old city. The authorities were concerned for our safety, especially since the Czech Ambassador and his wife were part of our group. Several men with suits, sun glasses, hand guns and walkie-talkies were assigned to guard us. They warned us not to "scatter," so of course we did. I headed off to find an eczane, that is a chemist's. I needed eye wash for a mild infection that had started in the heat and dust of Haran. I told the man in my best and most polite Turkish that I wanted boric acid, and explained what I wanted it for. He raised his eye brows. Yanlis. Boric acid is not for the eyes, he said. You make a paste of it and put it in a dressing for flesh wounds. But you can also dilute in water, and wash out your eyes: su, temizlik, goz icin. He brought a dusty, yellow- leaved book down from the shelf, found the entry for borik asid and began reading, slowly, out loud. Ah! he said. Dogru. Goz icin (for the eyes). Someone brought me orange cay (tea) while I waited for the solution to be mixed, mixed into hot water that was brought from the cayci (tea man) in the square outside. Anyway, it worked wonders. By the next day my eye was nearly cured.

I walked through the pazar and bought a metal cigarette case in which to keep the tobacco I'd bought, the kind the men had in Urfa, the kind, too, I saw men in Diyarbakir rolling their cigarettes out of. The buildings of the old city look like they're ready to fall down. Parts of them HAVE fallen down. But the shops use them anyway, and the streets are crowded with people. Ahron, a Turkish university student of Armenian descent, later told me how he had heard many strange words in the streets of Diyarbakir, words which must have been Kurdish, a language which, officially, isn't supposed to exist. I ran into Ahron and Cadoc as I was walking around looking at the shops and the people, watching the men fire and hammer out knives and sickles at a blacksmith's. They were off in search of an old Armenian church, led by a boy whom they had hired as guide. I followed them through tumble-down back streets till we found our way through a gate into the courtyard of the church. It was locked but there were many places where you could see inside, a big church, built in the 19th-century, now roofless and gone to ruin. I asked Cadoc, what had happened to the Armenians? They'd been driven out by an army of Kurdish irregulars during the chaos of the First World War. Then a woman appeared with the key to the present day church, and we were led into a small room of a house nearby, with an alter and icons and a few whitewashed wooden benches. Even I said a prayer. There must still be a very few Armenian families in Diyarbakir.

The rest of the long day, and into the night, we spent on the road to Van. It wasn't long before we reached the first of many military check-points, and we had to wait for an escort to be dispatched for us. This was probably because of the Ambassador. I don't know whether or not we would have needed an escort otherwise. So down the road we went, no other traffic to be seen, other than our little convoy of an armored car ahead and a troop carrier behind. It made me nervous to see so many guns and uniforms. We stopped for a picnic lunch beside one of the power project dams, with an Ottoman bridge nearby, soldiers standing guard. Later we had to stop at a hot, dusty village to have another tire puncture repaired. We rested in the shade inside old truck tires at the garaj, cursing our fate. By the time we reached the western shore of Lake Van it was dark and the road we were supposed to have taken had been closed by the curfew, so we had to go around the long end of the lake. The soldiers, however had been replaced by police. The flashing lights of a patrol car guided the way for our tired driver, as the full moon rose and left sparkles on surface of the lake. Inland the mountains rose out of the plateau like camel humps. The hotel in Van was the nicest one we stayed at. They served us cocktails before dinner, and the food was great: a buffet of local specialties of which you could take as much as you liked as often as you liked. However, yours truly was experiencing a traveller's stomach.

Wednesday morning we rode along the lake shore to where a motor boat was waiting to ferry us out to Akdamar Island. I gave up my seat in the front to the Ambassador's wife and sat on the deck near the side with my head back enjoying the air. The small island is visible from the shore; it only took twenty minutes to reach it in the puttering boat. How peaceful it was there! After the boat's engine stopped the only sounds came from birds. Up the banks stands a tenth-century Armenian church in wonderful condition. It's cylindrical in shape, with a round peaked roof and a dome inside. There are beautiful stone reliefs on the outside walls, of animals, birds, men and scenes from the Bible, so strong and alive you think they're going to start moving. Inside there isn't much to see. It's cool and dark. The dome towers above us and you can just make out the faded, nearly invisible frescoes. It feels like a holy place. Everyone moves quietly here, reverently. We left sneaker tracks in the dirt floor which harmonized oddly with the carvings in the scattered paving stones. I walked around the island a bit. In some places it's covered by very old almond trees, the nuts from last year carpeting the ground. The peace of the island seemed to sooth everyone's ruffled feathers.

Then we came to the ancient citadel of Van, a place first settled by a people known as the Urartu almost 3000 yrs ago. Some of their metal artifacts can be seen in the Ankara museum. We climbed to the top where we found a group of local young people singing and dancing in a half-circle. Their songs sounded like the baa-ing of the sheep. Beyond the dancers, in the distance, towered a ranged of snowy mountains. We ate lunch in a busy restaurant in modern Van. Old Van, that used sit on the lake shore, had been destroyed in the aftermath of the First World War. The best word to describe the houses and markets of modern Van is squalid.

Our next destination was Dogubayazit, which someone in the group nick-named "doggy- biscuit." The road climbed slowly up the plateau, nothing around, no towns, or trees, or fields. Wild country. Sometimes a swollen river came near and we followed its course. Otherwise all we saw were rounded granite hills dotted white with snow, and tall rugged mountains in the distance. It was here, in the middle of nowhere, that we stopped. The police from the next district were waiting to take over as our escorts from the Van police. The men in the cars all got out, along with Mustafa and Kemal, our driver. They greeted each other happily, shook hands, kissed, began chatting away like long lost brothers. I decided to get into the spirit of this, so I got off the bus and said hello to everybody, kissed one of the policemen, said how beautiful everything was! The others came off after me and did the same thing. Everyone posed, the passengers and the policemen, in the middle of the road, for a group photograph. The rest of the way to Dogubayazit, I sat on the stoop next to the driver, watching out over the road ahead, and life seemed good. It wasn't long before Mt. Ararat came into view, where Noah's Ark is said to have landed after the Flood. Everyone out for pictures!

The hotel in Dogubayazit was a little run-down, but I've stayed in worse. The next morning our first stop was Ishak Pasa Palas, up on hilltop in the sun. It took a while for the kapaci (gate keeper) to show up with the key to the front gate. Inside the palace--which is really a fort (now being renovated) from which Ishak Pasa, a 19th-century Emir, ruled under the Ottomans--there are some splendid rooms. One is called, in English, the "Feasting Room," with stone carvings and fancy columns, an atmosphere of luxury I would have liked to see in action.

By lunch time, we were in Kars. Dusty, overcast Kars. The streets were paved, but carried an inch of dirt on them anyway. At lunch with Cadoc and Ahron, Ahron asked the waiter what sort of people lived here: some Russians, some Kurds, along with a special Turkish group whose name was unfamiliar. Then there was some elaborate paper work to do with the local police (Mustafa was no help) before we'd be allowed to visit Ani, which is on the Armenian border, 40 km east of Kars.

Ani reminded me of Haran, only it's bigger and more deserted. No one lives anymore inside its medieval walls. The contemporary village is outside. There was a 10 year-old girl at the gate walking her ducklings. I managed to find a little money to give her when she asked. The most impressive structure in Ani is a tall, cylindrical church left from the tenth-century. It had stood intact for 900 years, but sometime earlier in the century, maybe 50 years ago, it was struck by a lightning bolt that blew half of it clean away. There it stands, one half perfectly preserved, the other half a pile of rubble--like a ruin from another planet, or a haunted laboratory of some mad scientist gone berserk. I felt an immense sense of melancholy in Ani. There were other ruined churches to see, alongside a river gorge that forms the border with Armenia. I saw them all, but mostly what I saw was the rubble covered ground, in an effort to remember who I was: that's what a powerful sense of dislocation Ani held for me. The first church had done it: gave me an image for a life blasted in two and half destroyed. I studied the ground, I shifted the contents of my mind, trying to find the missing pieces. The next morning we were on a jet back to Ankara.

Peter Grieco
old friend of HiTiT and now in Korea