Turkey
Listen to: “Breaking Out” — Protomen
Istanbul was sparse. Maybe all countries are sparse after attempted coups; I’m willing to believe that’s the case; the city is beautiful and the people kind, so the only thing that seems likely to keep people away is some other disaster.
Since two weeks in Turkey is a long time, and I don’t have the patience to explain everything I did there in detail, this newsletter will be a series of vignettes, trying to paint a picture of my time there through small stories.
Along The Walls
Theodosius II gets the credit for the walls that surround Constantinople, but it was the prefect Anthemius who probably deserves it. I wonder what the advisors to emperors and kings would think if they could look back on history and see their patrons’ names on everything they did. I expect Anthemius knew the terms of his employment, so it would hardly come as a surprise that the structures which represented a thousand-year bulwark against invaders with pretensions to European settlement bore the name of an emperor who was a child during their construction.
I arrived at the run-down south end of the walls in the middle of the afternoon, seeking an Ottoman fortress, which was protected as a UNESCO world heritage site. When I finally found it, the gate was barred closed, and a sleeping homeless man’s dog chased me through the yard in front of the entrance. This was an inauspicious start. I crossed through the Golden Gate, the entrance to Constantinople for victorious emperors and namesake of a certain bridge in San Francisco, and, on a run-down section of wall directly next to the gate, I saw a pathway leading up to the ramparts. It definitely seems like I was crossing into the trespassing side of tourism here, but given the blankets and tents that I saw in the small alcoves along the walls, it looked like nobody would give me too hard of a time for going over that particular line.
The walls were run down, falling apart. I stepped into Byzantine guard towers whose last use may have been staring down Mehmet II’s janissaries, with the tower half missing, and beer cans littering what was there.
If only Maslama had the patience to wait a handful of centuries during his unsuccessful siege of the city back in 717, he would’ve found the walls much less formidable.
After a short walk across decaying fortifications, I came across a section that had been kept up for the last 17 centuries. Staring up at the three layers of barriers, each taller than the last, I understood why so many armies had failed to take Constantine’s city. This was a gift from the pinnacle of Roman wealth and engineering talent to the declining skill and prestige of the Middle Ages. It was the gift of security, of knowing that, so long as those walls held, the city wouldn’t be taken even by an army double or triple the size of the defenders.
And now, decayed and rotting, the walls were largely an encampment for the destitute. The section between the walls that used to hold a moat was full of vegetable gardens. Humanity grows like weeds; we cover and reclaim anything left stationary for too long. Even the greatest symbols of defensive military might will be eroded, repurposed, reused. It was a farmer’s field before Byzantium became Constantinople, and now it’s a farmer’s field again. Two thousand years of history in symmetry.
Bullet Time
It’s my third day in the city. A Swiss traveler and I have been sightseeing, and we’ve made it to the Asian shore of the Bosporus, in Üsküdar, right before sunset. A few entrepreneurial Turkish folks have set up small shooting ranges with balloons and air guns on the shore. We pay five lira and take turns sharpshooting with the sunset behind us. There’s a bet: whoever wins has to buy the other a drink. I warn her before we start that I used to shoot airguns with my sister, aiming at cans from 60 yards. My sister was better, but I was pretty good. She laughs it off. Taking aim, I squeeze the trigger 12 times in rapid succession, popping 12 balloons. I never ask for the drink; pitting an Oklahoman against a European in a shooting match is rarely a fair fight.
The sun sets, and the seagulls fly around a lighthouse just offshore. The lights from the New Mosque and the Hagia Sophia start to shine in the rusty red dusk, as we board a ferry back to the hostel.
Ribbons
Out of Istanbul, and I’m on a gulet, a large Turkish sailboat, outside of Fethiye. Every night, we fall asleep on the top deck, under the stars, waking up as dawn lights up the eastern Mediterranean. I keep waking up, taking a look at the purple sky, realizing the sun hasn’t quite crested the ridge next to the cove where we’re anchored, and going back to sleep. Another few minutes, then a few minutes more. After three or four repetitions, I’m awake as I’ll ever be, and decide to take a quick swim before breakfast. The water is warm and turquoise, and I swear that I’ve never seen, nor will I ever see, another color quite like the Mediterranean in the summer. The Pacific is light, tropical blue, easy and inviting, the Atlantic is cold, gray, and hard, but the Mediterranean invites you to marvel at the color alone. Inviting, but hinting at an almost Homeric sense of adventure, reminding you that the Odyssey took place along its shores.
Underwater, I look towards the boat through my goggles, and through the narrow columns of light flickering between me and the hull of the ship, I see thousands of tiny fish, circling around the boat, moving in a swarm, wrapping the gulet. They’re shining in the dawn sun, glowing in the water. A ribbon of aquatic life, tying up our boat.
Cities And The Sky
Cappadocia has never been a normal sort of place, not for the last two millennia, at least. Early Christians settled the area in the third century, building monasteries into the malleable volcanic rock.
I’ve been traveling through Ephesus, on the gulet, and up to Cappadocia with an Algerian couple whose tour happened to align with mine, and now we’re hiking through a valley dotted with rock columns harboring the occasional tiny church on their peaks. About halfway through our hike, in the middle of the valley, we see a sign pointing to a cafe. Surely, this is a mistake, we’re kilometers from any actual town, but no, sure enough, inside one of the rock chimneys is a house with a kitchen, and outside is a table, chairs, and an awning. The man running the cafe tells us there’s a thousand year old church nearby, which he owns, and he’ll gladly let us tour it if we buy a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice from his ad-hoc cafe.
A few minutes later, we’re sipping orange juice.
He gives us the key to the church after we finish; it didn’t occur to me until we were inside how oddly trusting of a gesture this was. On the walls of the church were well preserved frescoes a millennium old, painted by Byzantine Christians, and depicting various aspects of their religion. Given the obvious cultural value of this place, I was surprised that it was both in private hands, and that those private hands weren’t too concerned about supervision. Maybe we just looked trustworthy?
Vesparado Part Two: Byzantine Byways
Renting a scooter in Turkey is surprisingly cheap; for $20, they let me loose on the Cappadocian highways for an entire day. I had 125ccs to work with; while it wasn’t quite the same level of get-up-and-go as my GTS 250 back home, it was more than enough to immediately get into trouble. And by trouble, I mean a pretty extensive dirt road, thus reenforcing my claim to the title of Vespacross World Champion, 2016. With only one near fall, I thought I managed the little Kymco Agility 125 rather well. I even managed to find highways for the rest of the day.
Thousands of years ago, the Hittites settled in Cappadocia. To protect themselves during invasions, they built places to hide, underneath their farms and cities. During Byzantine times, frequent raids by the Caliphate and the Turks resulted in the expansion of those little hideouts into full-blown cities, capable of supporting between 10,000 and 100,000 residents, with all the necessities one would require for protracted stays, including livestock, grain, and wine. There are over 200 of these cities in Cappadocia, and my first stop was one of the largest. I pulled the scooter into a town, and a teenager working a cafe near the entrance offered to hold my helmet for me while I explored the city (naturally, with the expectation that I’d get a cup of tea or coffee when I came back to get it, which I happily obliged). I walked up to the entrance, and went down. The first flight of stairs opened on a huge series of connected chambers, a maze of underground space. It felt like an achievement for anyone to have made something like this, much less those living thousands of years ago. I was getting ready to head back into the light of day when I saw another staircase going down. The doorways and spaces were deliberately made small to slow any invaders, so I crouched down, and took the stairs further down. And then, another staircase. I was three stories underground; the complex as a whole extends for five. Two hundred feet. There’s even a passageway connecting to an adjoining city. This felt like something out of a fantasy novel, something a child would dream up while digging in the sandbox. Its mere existence was jaw dropping.
From there, I left to Ilhara Valley, a good 45 minutes away on the scooter. The city of Ilhara sat at the south end, and was lined with houses built into the stone walls of the valley. The valley itself was protected as a national park, and was lined with more cave churches, some with frescoes that predated iconoclasm. I took a quick stroll by the river that ran through the valley, then it was back up to the scooter for an hour and a half ride back to my hostel.
The scooter rental was almost certainly not the best way to see every site in Cappadocia, but it felt good to be riding again. I was grinning like an idiot the entire time, feeling the wind against my face as I pushed the scooter up against its 55mph top speed. Even if I missed seeing a church, or a monastery, or a beautiful rock formation, or an underground city, it was worth it just to feel in control of my own motion again, not at the whims of a tour guide or boat captain. If travel’s about freedom, those are the moments I feel the most free.
To Bulgaria
The border crossing station was a bit shabby, but not as shabby as the Bulgarian train itself. There were moths, mosquitos, half-empty beer cans, all lit up by flickering fluorescent lights. This wasn’t a popular train, so me and the few backpackers that had made the bus ride from Istanbul to the border had a car to ourselves. I tried to spread out on the seats to get some sleep; the girl across the aisle from me made it look so easy, but she was six inches shorter than I was. I awkwardly sprawled all over the row of seats, changing position every five minutes or so, trying desperately to get comfortable. I managed, somehow. The train left the border at 4am; we arrived in Sofia around noon. In the middle was six hours of the most uncomfortable sleep I’ve had in my life.
My plan was to spend a single night in Bulgaria before heading on to Romania; but the city is lovely, the people kind, and the beer cheap. I spent two days in Sofia, and I plan to spend two more in the coastal city of Varna. The first night was a bizarre series of coincidences that started with meeting a group of Norwegians and an Italian for dinner and ended with dancing at 4am in what might optimistically be called a club but was, in reality, just a room with a bar, six people, and a DJ. Two nights of barely sleeping in a row.
The second day in Sofia, it felt like fall was setting in. It had rained the night before, and it was just on the border of what you’d consider t-shirt weather. I was shivering in the outdoor cafes, and it was perfect. Autumn in San Francisco is permanent, so there’s not a gradual creeping in of cold days, the sudden realization that you’ve stopped sweating whenever you leave the house, the unexpected need to buy a sweater. This slow build is what makes fall special, it’s change, it’s the year in motion.
And I’m in motion too; as I finish writing this newsletter, the Bulgarian countryside blows by as I head towards the Varna and the Black Sea. I’ve never seen the Black Sea before, so this is yet another new experience to cross off my list. There have been quite a few of those lately.
Until next time,
-Esten
