5000 Years of History: The Aegean Coast
With more known Greek ruins than Greece and more Roman ruins than Italy, it’s unsurprising that Turkey’s Aegean coast is a history buff’s dream come true. And the region’s history isn’t all just ancient, having played host to significant events in the First World War, and the subsequent Turkish war of independence. A map of the region shows such famous names as Pergamum, Troy, Ephesus and Gallipoli whose historic significance span over 7000 years, from the beginning of civilization until modern times.
I began my visit with a trip to Selchuk, the modern town near the ancient Greek and Roman city of Ephesus. With a history dating back over 5000 years, Ephesus is home to the most spectacular ruins in the entire country.
Having taken a night bus, I once again arrived early in the morning. After checking into my pansiyon I wasn’t ready for the customary late morning nap immediately. First I did a bit of laundry, simply putting on my wet clothes and taking a walk out in the already stifling heat to dry them. Following this I headed out for a more sightseeing centred walk with a Dutch couple riding motorcycles on their way to Nepal. Our first stop was the The Cathedral of St. John. While there are doubtless many buildings around the world that share the name, this is THE St. John’s Cathedral. The bones of the Apostle John lie within the ruins of the 1500 year old building, no coincidence, given that it was to Ephesus that he moved after writing the book of Revelation on the Greek island of Patmos. Nor is the cathedral the only biblically significant site in the region (Ephesus-Ephesians… coincidence? No.) There’s a site rumoured to be the final home of the Virgin Mary, which has been recognized as a holy site, if not actually confirmed as being such by the Vatican, as well as the amphitheatre where angry pagan mobs staged the demonstrations that convinced St. Paul (yes, another apostle) to depart Turkey.
By the time our visit to the cathedral was over, I HAD become a bit sleepy, and headed back to the hostel for a rest. By the time I awoke, it was clearly too late for a visit to Ephesus, so I contented myself with a wander around town. The Pansiyon I was staying at was named the ANZ, and was one of the oldest spots for foreign tourists in town, and its success had clearly influenced others. As I wandered through Selchuk I also came across the All Blacks, Victoria, and Wallaby pansiyons, just to name a few. My wandering took me past several local cafés or chay shops, where Turkish men spend cast swathes of time drinking, talking and playing games. One of the most popular games is Backgammon (or Tavla in Turkish.) I’m something of a player myself, and so sat down at one of the cafés to watch a match in process. Before long I’d been invited to join in, and even managed to win a five point match against my (much) older opponent. (A couple of notes on Turkish backgammon: they don’t use the doubling cube, you re-roll your starting dice, so it’s possible to begin with doubles, and the player winning a game rolls first in the next match… All of these remove some of the strategy from the game, which consistently irritated me.)
After my gaming interlude my walk continued and was interrupted once more by a sit and a conversation with a guy from Vancouver and the people who owned the carpet shop where he was staying. After a long chat I headed off to purchase some tomatoes, cucumbers and bread for dinner before heading back to the hostel.
Here seems a good place to talk about Turkish food. The few restaurant meals I had were generally uninspiring and expensive, while I found the street food (lots of Doner’s and other meats served on bread) to be excellent and modestly priced. If you really wanted to eat on the cheap, however, you had to purchase your own ingredients. The lack of kitchens in most guesthouses made this problematic, but I found a way around it (and a supremely inexpensive one at that) by sticking to self-made sandwiches. Food prices in Turkey aren’t entirely dissimilar to those in Canada, save for a few staple foods whose prices are government regulated. Thus it was possible to get three loaves of delicious bread, a kilo of tomatoes and a kilo of cucumbers for a little over a dollar. Throw in 500g of soft, mild local peynir (cheese) and your food for a day could cost as little as $2.50.
I spent the evening playing a bit more backgammon (this time with an Australian guy at the hostel) before heading off to sleep and waking up nice and early for my trip to Ephesus the following morning.
The walk out to Ephesus was pleasant enough, heading down a tree lined boulevard, about 2km in total. Despite the fact that it wasn’t yet 08:00, it was already very hot out. I made it to the main entrance, passing by yet another of those annoying pay toilets (whose expensive price corresponded to the expensive admission fee to the ruins.) There I was delighted to discover that there weren’t that many people there yet. I headed in and was greeted by the main amphitheatre, which I had all to myself, save for four or five people filming something for television. Following the main road through the (former) town, I soon found myself at the library of Celsus, and while I wasn’t alone, the place (perhaps the highlight of Ephesus) wasn’t too crammed with tour groups.
Immediately after the library, this changed. It suddenly became obvious that hordes of visitors HAD descended on Ephesus as soon as the gates opened, but that most of the tour groups had entered via the rear entrance. It had been nice while it lasted. In fact, it wasn’t un-nice with the crowds either. Though Ephesus was suddenly busier than an Istanbul market street, the crowds did, as my guidebook suggested, give the place a “living,” feel. And despite the fact that I was heading the opposite direction I had English speaking to listen to at almost every significant spot on the trip.
The main road turned and climbed up a hill to the centre of the old town. On the way it passed the bath house, as well as the ancient public toilets which, were the aqueduct still working would have been entirely functional. At the top of the hill the crowds were thicker still. While the ruins themselves weren’t quite as impressive as those lower down, the wild poppies growing amongst them made up in some degree.
Leaving the hordes behind, I headed back towards Selchuk by a different route, stopping for a few minutes to sample a huge, delicious peach offered by a farmer attending his roadside stand. Also on the way back I stopped at the Temple of Apollo. It wasn’t much to look at, with only a single column surviving, but in its time it was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world, alongside the pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon and others.
Arriving back at the hostel in the late morning, I made arrangements to head on up the coast to my next destination, the town of Ayvalek. I wasn’t altogether sure what I’d find there, but it received only a couple of sentences in my guidebook, so I’d figured it would be a relatively un-touristed place. The countryside along the way was every bit what I’d imagined Turkey to look like: dry brown hills, olive groves, with the occasional spartan pine forest. In addition to “typical” Turkish countryside, I had lunch in the town of Edremir where I learned that once again I’d been overcharged for my bus ticket. Grumble. But for all that, the friendly folks at the bus station in the VERY untouristed town left me feeling cheerful, with their willing conversation and their constant offers of chay.
Just before arriving in Ayvalek the bus passed by a large lagoon. It wasn’t exactly NEAR to the road, but was still close enough that I recognized the hundreds of pink birds wading within as flamingos. Wild pink flamingos! Cool!
Ayvalek itself wasn’t anything like what I’d imagined. True, there were very few foreign tourists there, and little in the way of facilities specifically designed for them. Nonetheless, it was clear that Ayvalek WAS a major tourist centre, only for Greeks and Turks who would begin flocking to its seaside in a few weeks once the school holidays began. I wandered through the town a bit in search of a specific pansiyon, but was having some trouble finding it. Finally I asked a friendly young shopkeeper who explained that the place had formerly been immediately across the street from his shop (at least I’d been looking in the right area) but had closed down a couple of years before. He grabbed a friend of his who was working at a nearby chay shop and asked him to take me over to another pansiyon a few minutes walk away.
The fellow did this, and I returned to the shop to sit and have some tea with the men and their friends. We sat outside his shop in the cool(er) afternoon watching the women headed in and out of the beauty parlour across the road, the drivers with their horse carts across the square, looking for customers with goods to carry, and talked (insofar as our language incompatibility allowed) and drank our tea. This provided a fine example of how retail business works in Turkey. Everyone sitting with us was the proprietor of a shop that remained open. The men just sat and enjoyed their tea, and if anyone happened to notice a customer walking into his shop, he’d quickly hop up and get to work serving them. I wholly approved of this attitude towards business.
The other people I met in the town were also very pleasant. In the evening I sat with the pansiyon owners, chatting with them and their cousin who was visiting from New York. I watched their two children dance, and listened to them sing. I saw about half of The Fellowship of the Ring in Turkish. It was a fun evening.
The next morning I set about seeing some of the town. Ayvalek is best known for its 19th century Greek architecture. This may sound a bit odd, given that there’s not a Greek to be found living there (except of course for the ones on holiday who came on the ferry) but at one time Ayvalek was an almost entirely Greek town. Then, after the founding of the Turkish republic, they all vanished. This isn’t nearly as mysterious as I made it sound. In fact, before that time, there were many Greeks living in what is now Turkey and vice versa. With the founding of the republic, a massive exchange of population took place, and incoming Turks were settled in former Greek towns, often taking them over buildings and all, as in the case of many of Ayvalek’s homes, and two of its churches which were converted to mosques in the new, Turkish town.
The bus carried on up the coast in typically comfortable Turkish fashion. Before I knew it we’d arrived in Chanakkale, and before I’d thought about it for a minute I was aboard the ferry across the Dardanelles (or the Hellespont if you like [as I do.]) This was a little unfortunate, as it put me on the wrong side of the straits for a visit to Troy, which I’d planned on making the following day. All in all I wasn’t that crushed. I’d heard from several sources that Troy itself was much less impressive than Ephesus (which, in truth, hadn’t excited me tremendously.)
That said, as far as unexciting places go, the town of Ejeabat where the ferry discharged me was really first (or last) rate. It was a place of drab two and three story concrete buildings, and save for the town square near the ferry dock, not much seemed to be happening. I wandered around the town for a bit, but didn’t manage to find anything even vaguely interesting. In the end I resorted to sitting in my hostel’s rooftop restaurant talking with a kiwi fellow guest and then reading until dark came and it was time for bed.
The next morning was another matter entirely. I was up and ready to go early in the morning and caught the first dolmus out of town towards Kabatepe.
It was no surprise that I’d met a New Zealander the previous night. Indeed, the Gallipoli peninsula on which the town sits is almost a pilgrimage site for Aussies and Kiwis. On April 25, 1915 a large force of ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) troops were landed at (what later became known as) ANZAC Cove in an attempt to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula allowing the allies to drive towards Istanbul and knock the Turks out of the war.
Things didn’t go according to plan, and while the ANZACs fought bravely, making some initial gains the Turkish resistance was fierce and they were driven back towards the sea. Despite the addition of more and more men, the breakthrough was never achieved and in December 1915 the offensive was called off and the allied troops withdrawn leaving behind 160 000 allied and 86 000 Turkish dead.
Today relations between citizens of the former combatant nations are in an interesting state. Antipodean tourists are a very important part of the area’s economy, and far from separating them, their former enmity has brought the Turks, Aussies and Kiwis closer together.
My visit to Gallipoli started with the official war museum. As with similar places I’d visited on the trip, it was the personal, the human that was most striking. The letters home from soldiers, the pictures on the front lines.
Leaving the museum, I walked north up the peninsula to the first of the allied cemeteries. Compared to those in western Europe, there were fewer graves in each, but for all that they were no less affecting than the larger ones I’d visited elsewhere.
As I carried up the peninsula I passed by the steep hills, the cliffs and the short rough beaches that the ANZACs had landed on and got perhaps the tiniest idea of how hard their task must have been. I sat and ate my lunch near one cemetery where, after a lonely morning, I met an Australian who was cycling around the peninsula.
Shortly thereafter, I came to another cemetery, this one with a large monument nearby. The monument displayed words I’d read before, but they were even more poignant located right above ANZAC Cove as they were. The words on the monument came from a speech by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who, In addition to being the Turkish republic’s founding father, was also one of the foremost generals during the first world war.
As the afternoon wore on, the solitude of the peninsula was broken as several tour buses appeared, crowds surrounding the monuments and cemeteries as I approached them. Before long, however, the crowds had gone and I carried on up the road towards the Hill 60 cemetery. The light from the setting sun turned the white stone of the monuments golden as I sat and stared out at the surrounding beautifully fertile farmland, and the ocean in the distance trying to imagine what it must have been like 90 years before.
The following morning I woke before sunrise and hit the trail again, this time with an aim to visit the largest of the monuments on top of the peninsula’s spine. As I walked, I was passed by many tractors loaded with people on their way out to work in the fields. Later in the morning I passed through a small Turkish village, complete with its own war graves and monuments. It was probably roughly here that I lost my way, and instead of visiting the hilltop monuments, I found myself wandering through the beautiful countryside of Gallipoli. While my feet were growing tired, I was still enjoying the walk, picking stalks of wheat from the fields beside the road, and passing the time by husking and eating them one grain at a time. I didn’t even feel the need to accept a ride in the milk truck, which was an ordinary pickup laden with old fashioned milk cans picked up at the roadside where they’d been left by local farmers.
My return to Ejeabat had me there in time for a late lunch. I pondered what I should do with respect to travel. Eventually the unexciting nature of the town convinced me that I should head out for Istanbul that evening. I spent the afternoon and evening sitting in the town square, watching the ferry passengers come and go, and making new friends at the café at the square’s centre. Over the next few hours, I chatted with a retired horticulturalist, several young boys (this “chatting” consisted almost entirely of hand gestures… My Turkish still wasn’t very comprehensive,) and finally with a Turkish family who invited me to sit down and join them for a coffee, which turned out to be several coffees, only interrupted by the rain that forced them back home and me into the office of the bus company.
At 01:45 (considerably later than had been promised) the ferry arrived disgorging several buses, and sending the representatives of each company running across the road to meet them. One of the fellows was in such a rush that he was actually hit (softly thank goodness) by a car that had left the ferries just before the buses.
It was rather later than I’d planned, but before 02:00 I was aboard my bus, bound for Istanbul and for my last days in Turkey.
Tags: Turkey
Llew