Hidden gems

After a good night's sleep we found Miss Bec tucked deep into her covers to escape the chill in the Ankara air then we were up and away heading towards Istanbul.

Tucked up tight

We lunched in  Eskişehir and followed our usual routine of finding the specialty food for the town to hunt down.   This often involves dedicated effort trying to then find a place that sells this specialty food, but today this was easy: we only had to walk a few hundred metres from where our motorhome was parked.

We ordered Cibörek, and what a delight it is.   This dish was bought to Eskişehir by the Tartars of the Crimea early in the 19th century, who were among the early settlers in this town.    It is as light as a feather pastry, thicker than filo, but so fragile you barely know it from air.  It is filled with mince meat, shaped like a half moon, and cooked in vegetable oil.

This was just one serving 

It should be deadly, but it is one of our favourite dishes, to date.  Mind you, we say that at least once every day.

I doubt we will find it so brilliantly prepared and served ever again, so we are already in mourning for it.

Eskişehir is a university town and it feels like one.  Just a few hundred kilometres away is Konya: traditional, fundamentalist, sombre.  Eskişehir is different.  Students walk the streets hand in hand.  Tight jeans and trendy T's are the girl's standard gear.  You rarely see young people, or old ones for that matter in traditional long or black gear, tho' there are suburbs where this still happens, we drove through them.

So it will be interesting to see how this developing regional difference will pan out as future years roll on.

Several villages around Eskişehir mine a very rare product that looks like chalk but is much lighter and much softer,  though as soon as it hits air it hardens.  This white stone is called meerschaum.

Beautifully carved

Meershaum is mined by drilling vertical shafts some thirty metres deep.  Then using a rope ladder to access the material.   As it has always been mined.

It is carved into some of the finest tobacco pipes in the world, and some of them sell, even on the second hand market, for exceptional prices.

Expensive Meershaum  pipe

Today's driving turned into a marathon, which really was no great hassle as the roads were brilliant.   Formal camp sites are frequent along the coast in Turkey, and in very touristy inland spots, like Cappadocia.  But,  elsewhere, they are few and far between.   We finally found a lovely informal spot on Lake Iznik,  just south of the town where the tiles that were used in Istanbul's Blue Mosque were made.

We were given permission by some restaurant folk by a lake to use their car park.  We stopped because of the view.  They gave us power, access to the amenities, and a brilliant fish meal from the lake for dinner.   With a view second to none.

Lake Isnik 

This was on a back road heavy with ancient olive trees, and hardly a development in sight.

How old is this olive tree?

I can't believe the Istanbul billionaires don't realise this little gem is there.

We loved it.

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As usual, the rest of our trip was too busy to allow detail.  We took a ferry across the water back to Istanbul, camped one night near the heart of the city close to where the ferry landed, then our lovely motorhome rental agent came there to collect it next morning, saving us finding him.   We found transport to the airport from there, then headed home that day.  

 But this trip, for each of us, was one of our favourites, ever.  We would do it again in a heartbeat.  We loved every minute.  

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Fragments of yesterday

We are, sadly, running out of time.   We have to get back to Istanbul and we haven’t even explored the territory of the Hittites, the Phrygians, or, even fully explored the Ottomans yet.   Nor will we be able to.   We needed weeks longer than we planned to do all that we had hoped. Turkey’s history is simply so dense: it is everywhere. 

As we were particularly bereft at missing Hattuşaş and the Hittites, which we’d been looking forward to as much as Çatalhöyük, we decided to compensate and head to Ankara, enroute to Istanbul, and visit their much acclaimed Museum of Anatolian Civilization, one of the top museums in the world. 

Major error.  

To start with, Ankara is the capital of Turkey.  It is full of pigeons.  Aside: A little known fact: Turkey uses pigeon guano for fertiliser.  I think they likely could get most of it from the streets of Ankara. 

Pigeon guano everywhere

Where old men sit around doing what they do all over Turkey: absolutely nothing.

   

The meeting of the elders

And chaotic traffic is of the frightening kind.   Drivers oftentimes appear not to be able to distinguish the pedestrian thoroughfare from the roadway.  And if they can, they seem not to give a damn.   

Anarchic driving

Drivers in Turkey are notoriously bad, but in Ankara they are anarchic.  There are no rules to be observed.   Red lights mean nothing.  Double parking on driving lanes obstructing on-going traffic happens as a matter of course.  They, most times, don’t even put their blinkers on to alert you that they have left their vehicle— and gone across the road shopping.   Nor do pedestrians observe any lights, or road rules.  And there appears to be no policing of any of it.  

When we arrived at our first stop the Ethnographic Museum was closed.  It was Monday.  Every Monday this month we have missed something special in Turkey because we happen to arrive on a Monday, which, unlike Sunday, seems to be a day of rest.  We weren’t too sorry about this as someone had told us this one was all about Ataturk, which, quite frankly we could do without.  His picture and his statues are plastered everywhere, like Mao’s, and we are well and truly over him. 

The Museum of Anatolian Civilisation was open. Partly.   One very tiny hall.  The rest were under wraps and not able to be visited.  Someone said it had been like this for nearly two years, but I doubt it.  I think they were just repainting and cleaning up in preparation for the summer, as the rest of Turkey is.   But, I nearly wept.  There was one tiny display of Hittite finds in this hall, and I coveted every little piece.  

I particularly loved the exquisite jointed container.  

Hittite container

And the beak-spouted jug. 

Hittite jug, over 3000 years old

It is hard to conceive that these Hittite pieces are 3,500 years old.  The quality of the pieces, even the tiny ones in this single hall, is so superb it is no wonder Ankara’s museum has such a great name.  

I loved this Phrygian pottery mug, too.  This is nearly 3,000 years old, yet I have one at home that is shaped so similarly.  Good design lasts.  

Simple everlasting design

And the lines of this Byzantine jug with its filter that is made of glass.   I have rarely seen anything so fragile, so fluid and yet so functional.    

Byzantine. So fragile yet so functional 

As for this bearded man’s head.   He is from Hadrian’s time, so this piece is nearly 2000 years old.  Just beautiful.   

Beautiful male in stone

So, in truth, the visit was not all bad.  

Especially as we spent time walking the old part of the city and found the wonderful old Bakırcılar Çarşısı, the Ankara bazaar famous for quality original and handmade copper goods.  In every little alcove and behind many dusty shop frontages, we found copper artisans at work, hammering away at their  pieces.  We spent a lot of time just ogling. 

Copper artisans at the bazaar

The bazaar covered many hilly lanes and alleyways and different streets were devoted to different products.  One street was all about bathroom fittings; another about hardware; another about lighting.  It reminded us of Athens.  This alley was all about the cutlery.  

Only cutlery for sale in this laneway

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Lunch, enroute, the next day was at Aksaray.  We had passed through here a week before, enroute to the Ihlara Valley, and ended up with a meal that looked like this.  

A simple pizza in Aksaray

Exceptional.  

We hunted the place down again, which was no mean feat, but thanks to Recent Destinations on our Sat Nav we found it again.    And, this was our lunch, today.

Pizza, again, a metre long

Both times the chef and the wait staff took photos of us to put on their Facebook pages.    

This only started happening in Aksaray, but happened non-stop after that in all parts of Cappadocia.   Pete was kept so busy posing with teenage Turkish school girls desperate for photos of him in his Aussie hat and grey hair with them for their Facebook page, that he has missed out on many of the sights. 

Crocodile Dundee in Cappadocia, I think they think he is.  

Sadly, I missed getting a shot of him.  

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Curiosities from Cappadocia

We woke up early to watch the balloons fly from the top of Rose Valley panorama point.  Too early as it turned out.  Wind had blown up the previous morning and stopped any flights, so we waited and waited, and were about to head home thinking that would happen again this morning, when finally one balloon floated up, then the rest slowly followed. 

Floating balloons like Chinese lanterns

There must have been a hundred when they were all aloft.  The morning was icy cold so those brave enough to fly must have had on their heavy duty mitts and ear muffs as it would have been brutally cold higher up.  The balloons floated slowly over the valley, hanging before our eyes like a hundred coloured Chinese lanterns.  One or two dropped down for a thrill into one of the wider gorges near us, but we don’t think conditions must have been perfect today, either, as most floated down after just 45 minutes. 

A lovely spectacle though over this magnificent valley.  

Superstition is still alive and well in Cappadocia.  One of our early morning coffee cafes had this spiky thorny concoction hanging in each corner of the its coffee shop.  We saw them elsewhere, too.  This is a hazar, there for protection from the evil eye. 

Hazar, warding off evil 

We often see threaded chickpeas decorating walls.  This one is more complex than most, threaded like a macramé piece.  

Yüzerlik, chickpea talisman

Here this chickpea talisman is called a Yüzerlik and is hung to seek protection for the home or shop, with the added wish for prosperity.

Gourds are everywhere in Cappadocia and these, traditionally, were emptied and used to store salt, paprika and mint, some of the essentials ingredients in Turkish cuisine.  

Spice gourds

This gentlemen had no use for gourds.  He used recycled plastic jars.  His name was Yoğurtçu Baba and he was selling home made yogurt from the boot of his car, parked by the pedestrian crossing.  A consummate seller.

Selling fresh yoghurt in recycled plastic

Turkish folk sit low for most things.  Women often sit to work, we notice.   The town of Ortahisar was filled with these low tables and chairs, and the men use them in the çay shops for much of the day.  

 Cafe table and chairs for drinking çay 

At home, traditional Cappadocians sit on the floor to eat around a large copper tray, with a cloth hanging from it, all around the table.  This doubles as a napkin.  And eating is quite communal, using spoons from a common dish. Our salads, with every meal we order, are always served communally.   For çay, later, the family moves to one of the divans, which doubles as a bed.  

Copper serving tray for communal dinner dishes

Prior to her wedding as in many societies a traditional Turkish girl collects her trousseau: the linen, napery and special embroidered pieces she has carefully selected and collected she places in her wedding chest, or glory box as we call it. This is her sandik.  This shop had many of them for sale.

 Sandik - Turkish glory boxes and a tuluk pot

It also had in stock one of the large stone pots that is used to strain the water when making yoghurt. This is called a tuluk.

For food storage thorny sticks are often used to string grapes.  When these grape-laden sticks are hung in a cave, or a cold room, the fruit can last for months. 

Grapes preserved on thorny sticks

We found more than this in one cold room when we were driving one afternoon.  We saw a sign for  ‘Lemons Underground Storage’ and stopped to investigate. Here, we discovered, that deep in underground caves all over Cappadocia there are massive stores of citrus fruit that was grown this season along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It is trucked to these mountains to be storedin virtually free cold storage. Hundreds of tons of fruit throughout many of these working caves in Cappadocia. Who would have imagined that?

Coastal lemons stored in inland mountain caves

We were invited in.  Women packers were quality checking lemons that had been in cold storage and were being reboxed and banded, taken from here in trucks to be shipped out to different areas of Turkey, or exported to the rest of the world.

Women at work

It was dark.  It was cold. The smell of moist underground mould hit the back of your throat like an acid sting.  The ladies were all rugged up.  And all I could think of was mesothelioma.   

We had just come from seeing a street funeral, too. 

Mainly men in the street funeral 

Which was quite similar to one at home, though this colourful casket was walked right through town by the menfolk.  Women did not appear to follow the cortege,  and seemed to take no part at this stage of the procession.

Tractors, mules,  horses and carts are very common in the rural parts of the country.  They are used as means of transport to go anywhere, in lieu of cars or trucks.   This one is in town for a chat: parked in the driving lane and going nowhere slowly.

Working wagon decorated in fine folk art

The wagons and drays are often beautifully decorated  with fine folk art.

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Lunch today was a variation on a clay pot with breads the size of a cricket bat each and salad enough to feed a large family. 

Low bowl clay pot lunch 

Coffee, earlier, was served exquisitely.  We shall be expecting this standard of presentation  when we get home.  

Delicious coffee beautifully presented

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Snippets from Cappadocia

Our campground in the heart of Cappodocia is on top of a mountain overlooking Goreme.  The views could not be more fantastical.

The area falling away beneath our camp site looks like a million Lilluptian children have taken buckets of soft sand and randomly poured it all over the surface of the land, leaving pyramids, cones, mushroom shapes, and striated raw edged cliffs all  touched with the colours of white, rose, cream orange and grey.

Like Lilliputian sandcastles

This whole area is one of the earliest sites in Turkey that was protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site which also tend to be our favourite sites to visit in any country.

Here are the mushroom shapes at the tail end of Rose Valley.  Perfectly natural tuff is eroding exactly where it has stood for centuries.

Mushroom rock caps in Rose Valley

The ground is hard to walk on, yet it looks as soft and shifting as sand.  So your brain keeps having to make adjustments when you walk: is it soft? isn't it?  Quite disconcerting, though Bec doesn't seem to mind.

Sand beneath, giant rock caps above

One day we hiked one of the longest trails into the valley where the Zelve Open Air Museum has been set up.   Here, carved into the pyramidical and pointed cliffs, are a collection of monasteries, seminaries, chapels and rock dwellings.

Zelve religious site 

One of the monasteries was occupied from early times right up until 1952 when it was finally left empty.   Amazing.

Otherwordly 

I loved the dovecotes in this valley.  My favourites.  Carved high onto the vertical face of the tuff, then painted in a geometric Islamic fashion.   Imagine taking your life into your hands doing this: hanging on twisted bits of soft vegetation plaited into ropes, mayhap, or building a scaffold out of sinewy branches of surrounding trees, just to create a palace for your pigeons.  There are so many of these throughout the valley, too, yet it must have been so dangerous to create.  And still they did it.

Palaces for pigeons

We took our walking poles for a hike into the amazing formations of the Goreme Open Air museum, which is even more astonishing.   Here, we found our old friend from Ihlara Valley,  St Gregory, with his best friend, St Basil, along with Basil's brother, who became another saint:  St Gregory of Nyssa,  decorating many of the walls, showing their iconic status.   The work of these three holy men attracted a large community of followers and pilgrims to this part of Turkey,  and by the 3rd cent AD there was a thriving Christian community living in these cliffs, leaving many traces of their presence.

Sometimes a little too revealing

I particularly loved the long elegant refectory tables with stone benches that you slip into to sit on.  Though this particular one looks as though it has been touched up almost to new.  These can fit about 50-60 young monks.  Behind, is the carved and beautifully decorated apse, where pride of place was given to one of the elders in the community at mealtimes.  Cushions, anyone?

A lit refectory table, seating and beautiful apse

The decorated churches in these cliffs hold some of the  most amazing early Christian art in the world.

Extraordinary Christian art

Though, in recent times, teams of specials have moved in and tarted them up,  to show what they once were like.  Ornate.  Dense with meaning.  Exquisitely done, considering this is painted on rock with a surface just like sandpaper.

Dense painted dome

This museum draws  never-ending crowds.

Visitors from all religions come to see these works

Busload after busload of tourists pour onto the site on the hour,  every hour, every day of the year, and merchants line the pathways much as they did in the days of the silk trade -- making it a little bit  like Disneyland, in truth.

Tourist traders are out in force

With tourism generating something like $32 billion last year alone in Turkey, a lot of this has to be coming from sites like Goreme Open Air museum which so many access.  It really is one of the tourist gold mines for the Turkish government.

So one can understand why they are tempted to bring in specialist painters to tart up the cave walls and ceilings every so often.

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Lunch, today, was Testi Kebabi: meat cooked in a clay pot, sealed, and broken open by the waiter after he brings it to the table.    This is my lamb dish, still flaming in lemon-scented alcohol sitting on a bed of rock salt layered onto a clay dish.  

To cook this dish from beginning to end takes all of 4 hours.  After the meal is complete the clay is thrown away.  So, the cost of the pot is included in the price of this meal, which, with drinks, ended up being $AUD8 per person.  In a restaurant where mum is the cook,  dad the baker,  and the wait service exceptional.  

Testi Kebabi:meat in a clay pot

Every day we try something new.  Every day we say this is the best we have ever eaten.  Or, this is as good as the best.  It doesn't seem to matter whether we eat at a fine dining establishment or a temporary cafe hanging off a cliff edge to catch the summer tourists -- the food has been exceptional.  And we have yet to have a meal that is disappointing.  

Bread and meat, but anything but simple

There is a spicy edge to each dish that makes eating here so interesting.  We are just loving the food.  

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Tens of thousands of tourists stay in cave hotels or cave houses carved into the tuff which make little villages in this part of Cappadocia look as if they are in fairyland.

Storybook dwellings of  Capadoccia

Straight out of the pages of a child's storybook.  

Except for the increased incidence of malignant mesothelioma in many of these villages: 50% higher here than elsewhere in Turkey.  Breathing malignancies.  

So cave dwelling does not always have a happy ending.  

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Bearing the imprint of time

We are still not getting very far, very fast. We can't seem to drag ourselves away.  So today we are back in Güzelyurt visiting Monastery Valley, and as we head down into it we are enchanted by how parts of this place look as if it has stood here for centuries.

Now as then 

Monastery Valley is overlooked by a small domed church, now a mosque, reputedly built for St Gregory of Nazianzus in the early 4th cent AD at a time when being a Christian was no longer a crime. He was a theologian and a scholar whose writings were among those that influenced the split to Orthodoxy. During his lifetime, wherever he was stationed, people flocked to hear him preach.

Religious buildings in the valley

A monastery was set up here to train young novitiates and the near vertical rocks on all sides of this pretty and ancient valley are riddled with cave dwellings, chapels, and churches that have grown up through the ages. Too many to count.

Pilgrims trekked from afar to visit.

Then, and now.

Pilgrims travelled far

Monastery Valley follows a stream, edged with willows, and there is a tree, probably near a sacred spring, bearing ribboned votive offerings and pledges to the gods. The valley is dotted with subsiding holes that indicate that there is an underground city, lost and forgotten, beneath our feet. There are hundreds of these all over Cappadocia, but just a small number opened at the moment. Many have still to be found. On some flat sections in the valley there are fresh plots of vegetable gardens, attached to leaning rock dwellings, that are sometimes crumbling, sometimes made stable, still inhabited.

One colourful group of buildings stand out on high: terraced houses built by the Greeks who lived here before the population exchange. The Greeks were master stone masons and carved the rock material so plentiful in this valley into beautiful homes, using traditional methods and built them to last.

Built by the Greeks

We became absorbed in the tale of St Gregory so tracked him yet further afield driving over a treacherous little mountain road to yet another peaceful and picturesque valley, south of a village called Sivrihisar, high on fragile rock that looked as if it might erupt any day.

Here we found what is locally called the Red Church, with its charming central dome on four pillars, and in near perfect proportions for a small country church. It is one of the oldest Christian churches in Cappadocia, and folk lore has it that St Gregory spent his last days here, preaching, and was buried in a field not far from here.

The Red Church

And well he may.

Here, they say, pilgrims came from afar, before heading on towards Antioch, then Jerusalem, leaving behind a deeply imprinted footpath that can still be seen today, if you know where to look, though we were hard pressed to differentiate it from the many possible mountain goat tracks also permanently etched into the hills.

Ancient art on church stone

We drag ourselves away and head deeper into rural Cappadocia with its vast high plains of grain stretching until another mountain range stops cultivation. Enroute to the underground cities of Derinkuyu and Kaymakli we are attracted by a sign that advertises the ‘biggest’ underground city, Gaziemir.  Just here. We are becoming more successful at translating the translations on signs and information boards throughout Turkey. We take ‘biggest’ to mean ‘tallest’, and after hearing horror stories of some of the underground cities being really claustrophobic and difficult to negotiate, we quickly do a u-turn and head back to Gaziemir, hoping that this is the case.

And we find a treasure trove of a little underground city, utterly unique in so many ways, and, not only that, we have it all to ourselves. If the tour buses have passed through here, it must have been earlier in the day, as now, late in the afternoon, we are the only ones visiting, and are free to explore it in peace.

We pay our fee and enter through a heavy, block stone passage way, still bedecked with a locking millstone which could be levered into place to block unwanted intruders. This doorway has been labelled a Hittite structure as it is similar to those found in Hatussus. So already a remarkable and unusual feature showing that this underground city goes way back in time. And, over time, it has likely been used for many different purposes: hiding from animals, seeking protection from inclement weather, and escaping religious persecution. The living spaces reveal the imprint of the passage of time.

Hittite entrance

The Hittite doorway leads into a central organising courtyard, from which the various buildings for different functions branch off accessed through different doorways, some of them decoratively carved.

Decoratively carved entrances off courtyard

Through one of these we access a Byzantine church with an amazing dome of stones arched in air, almost. It looks as if it should fall. The church features large pillars, decoratively carved out of the rock.

Dome of arched stones that defy gravity

Close by there is a wine factory, with a large indentation which seems to be for treading the grapes and  great clay amphorae buried into the ground, used for storing wine.

Clay amphorae for wine storage

Handy for Communions, no doubt. And grapes were everywhere around here by then, as they were planted further east from here, by Noah. One of the first jobs he undertook when the Ark was safely grounded. So, very sensible, Noah. And no doubt traders regularly brought seeds for vines from back east.

Tucked away in another corner on this level is a prison, accessed through a beautiful curved narrow corridor. The prison walls are heavily pitted. These might be the marks of the rock carving tools. Or, it might even be the scarring of prisoners who are counting the days.

Carved corridor to the prison

There is another church, and kitchens with great cavities carved out for tandir ovens, and a pantry for the storage of cereals, grains, oils and olives.

Tandir oven spaces in kitchens

There are many living spaces and even a hammam well served no doubt by the large cistern and plumbing throughout on the various levels. There are ventilation shafts for ladder access, rainwater collection, and for security, way up we could see a shaft accessed by steps for the sentries who happened to be on lookout duty for the protection of the community.

Steps for sentries on lookout

And, surprisingly, there is a caravanserai. The only one yet found in an underground city. Deep in the bowels of the city they carved out a home, not only for the merchants passing through this place, but for their animals. All through Gaziemir are spaces wide enough for a camel to pass until it reaches its stables down a ramp into the next level.

Underground  caravanserai

Everything they wanted was accessible in the city.  Residents could live here for as long as they needed to withstand whatever force it was that might have sent them hiding here in the first place. But, at times of no threat, they likely spent most of their time outdoors.

Gaziemir reminded us of Çatalhöyük. When similar threats applied to the folk at Gaziemir, they used similar solutions to solve those problems, gradually introducing small changes.

Life slowly evolving.

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We only realised how slow we had been today when we caught up with some French cyclists. This family of four with two kids, ages 6 and 4, have cycled from France to see Turkey and are now spending 15 days in Cappadocia. They stayed at the same pansiyon where we camped last night. Their trip is set to take them all of six months, and they are now half way through.

On two bicycles. With two kids.

French family with kids biking around parts of Turkey

They left before us this morning and while we have been on the move we  have clearly not gone very far as we caught up with them late in the afternoon when we were rushing to reach another camp for the night and they were not far from their next pansiyon.

We may as well be on bikes at the pace we are going.

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