Travelling Hopefully - Limestone Edition

It is a commonly held fallacy that any liquid takes on magical qualities if it has bubbles in it. This explains the appeal of champagne and soda water. If you pass said water through a couple of random chemicals suddenly you have a healing spring and people will flock to it eagerly for a “cure”. 

This made a lot more sense in ancient times when a one in ten survival rate was still better than most doctors could claim. So it isn’t surprising that when the Ancients in what would eventually become Turkey discovered warm springs bubbling out of limestone they went nuts for it and built a spa town called Hierapolis right next to the source of these healthful waters. What is slightly more surprising is that the place is now a ruin rather than a thriving health resort.

And what an impressive ruin it is. There are Roman ruins heaped on top of earlier Greek ruins. There is an impressive set of Roman baths, now a museum containing relics dug up from the surrounding site. There’s also an extensive necropolis. As any medical practitioner will tell you the best place to find corpses is a hospital. People die there all the time. It’s the same with Hierapolis, being a centre of health and healing meant it attracted the sick and the dying. A goodly number of them never left.

One can still bathe in the warm mineral springs if you think it will do you any good. The occasional drowning aside it probably won’t do you any harm which is the first requirement for a medical treatment. I didn’t bother, deciding to treat my disease riddled body in the traditional manner, by paying a doctor to misinterpret my symptoms and prescribe some generic drugs that probably cause your colon to explode if you mix up the dosage. Medical science, as you can see, has moved on although its destination remains in doubt.

I did go to the theatre which is huge for the ancient world and amazingly well preserved given that the entire city was flattened by an earthquake. I managed to get a few good photos once we shoved the influencers out of the way.

By this time it was evening and we repaired to our hotel in nearby Pamukkale. This is a Turkish town that seems to exist so tourist buses heading for Hierapolis have somewhere to park. Our hotel had a pool that we didn’t swim in.

Travelling Hopefully - Greenhouse Edition

One of the hidden gems of the trip so far has been being informed of whatever agricultural product the particular region of Turkey we’re travelling through is famous for. As we headed towards Beypazari on the first day it was all about carrots. Cappadocia was grapes and pumpkins then Konya, centre of Turkey’s wheat belt. As we approached the Taurus Mountains we were solemnly informed that strawberries were the crop du jour and down around Antalya and Kas it is cucumbers, zucchini and tomatoes.

To facilitate the production of the latter the flat land (there isn’t much) is covered in domed structures. From a distance it looks like an industrial estate but they’re actually greenhouses. Only these aren’t just greenhouses they’re more like green mansions, sprawling estates where the aforementioned vegetation can grow unhindered by such trivialities as the weather.

Of course this proud defiance of nature has its limits. A flood has recently sloshed through the region leaving the locals to conduct frantic repair work. We passed them digging ditches and laying pipes. We lolled back in our comfortable minibus and wished them well as we put their efforts behind us.

We thought about these noble sons of the soil as we ate our salad that night. Well I didn’t but presumably somebody did. Or at least had vaguely positive thoughts towards farmers in general. On the positive side if there’s another flood the locals can upend their greenhouses and paddle them to safety.

Travelling Hopefully - Brief History Lesson

The trouble with anywhere in Turkey and indeed the whole Middle East is that no matter how long someone has been living in a place someone else was there first. Take Lycia where I am temporarily domiciled at the moment.

Lycia has been around in some form or another as far back as Wikipedia can remember. The Hittites knew about it at which time the Lycians had their own language and government. Then the Persians turned up and dispossessed the Lycians of such foolish notions. Only not really because the Persians were quite happy for the Lycians to go on being Lycian as long as they did what they were told. Which the Lycians dutifully did.

They fought with the Persians against the Greeks, lost and wound up as part of the empire of Athens. Apparently that wasn’t to their liking so they left, got conquered by somebody else who wound up being beaten by the Persians so Lycia wound up being Persian again. Then Alexander the Great dropped by. Once again the Lycians found that siding with the Persians against the Greeks was a losing proposition.

After that lax immigration policies resulted in most of the Lycians vanishing under a tide of Greek immigrants as Alexander’s successors settled down to rule various parts of his empire. That should be enough for any self respecting society but then the Romans came. The Romans gave Lycia to Rhodes (Why? Don’t know) then took it back again and made them a self governing protectorate. Some time later the Romans converted them to a non self governing province.

Over a thousand years went by and any surviving Lycians and their Greek replacements might thought things had settled down a bit. Then Romanus Diogenes made a mess of the Battle of Manzikert and suddenly Lycia was welcoming the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuks didn’t hang around long in the grand scheme of things and little over a century later Lycia was part of the Beylik of Teke. Never heard of the Beylik of Teke? Don’t worry it didn’t last any longer than it took the Ottoman Turks to become aware of its existence.

Now Lycia is an integral part of modern Turkey and surely will remain so because history never repeats itself over and over again. All we have to remember the Lycians is a bunch of looted sarcophagi with roofs that look like ships and the occasional ruined city. Why the ship shaped sarcophagus roofs? Apparently the sea was very important to the Lycians. Possibly because it constituted the only escape route from the people constantly overrunning their homeland.

Travelling Hopefully - A Little More Side a Good Deal More Sea

After the house of death we clambered back into our minibus and headed for Kas. Kas should have a little curly thing on the “s” but I don’t know how to do Turkish accents so adjust your pronunciation accordingly.

The Taurus Mountains pretty much hit the coast at this point so our journey to Kas (don’t forget the accent) was appropriately windy with towering hills on one side and the ocean on the other. The scenery scened impressively and I attempted to take photos out of the window with a marked lack of success. We stopped for lunch in a small town and dined amidst a German tour group. I don’t know if Alternative for Deutschland does package tours but I was rather glad when they left.

We paused at a lookout which gave us a view of the two eastern most Greek islands just a couple of miles off the coast. With that cultural experience under our belts we headed into Kas.

Kas is a small town with the standard fit out of narrow picturesque streets and alleys full of shops catering to/preying on tourists. I was very restrained and made only one modest purchase.

The next day we set out for a life on the ocean wave. Honesty compels me to admit that the life was very brief and the waves were very small. We piled onto a modest sized vessel and spent the day noodling from cove to cove, pausing to swim, photograph a submerged Lycian city and marvel at the turquoise waters. We also marvelled at tiny fish, storm runoff from a recent flood, random sarcophagi and a helicopter that was searching for a couple of missing persons. You name it we marvelled at it.

What does a submerged Lycian city look like I hear you cry? It looks like any other Lycian city that’s been relocated to the bottom of the sea by an earthquake. Possibly a lesson to build a little further inland in future.

Travelling Hopefully - Ho For the Seaside

 We left Konya and pointed the nose of the minibus towards the Mediterranean. First though we had to cross the Taurus Mountains. The Taurus Mountains are located between the Aries Hills and the Gemini Plains. I saw my first snow in Turkey clinging modestly to the peaks as we wound our way through. Scenery abounded and I photographed as much of it as I could through the window as it went by.

Once over the Taurus Mountains we stopped for gozleme at a family home nestled among the ruins of a Roman bath. The family have monetised cooking by selling a delicious lunch to passers by. Replete we headed on to Antalya, a seaside town famous for its Roman harbour and ceremonial gate memorialising the day that the emperor Hadrian dropped by for a visit. It’s called the Visitor’s Gate.

No it isn’t, it’s called Hadrian’s Gate because Hadrian couldn’t pass by a rubbish bin without naming it after himself. Hadrian was an emperor of the Antonine dynasty widely regarded as the high point of pagan Rome. There were six emperors in the Antonine dynasty only two of whom were actually related to each other. “Dynasty” being a rather broad definition applied by later historians.

Antalya is a pleasant town with the usual collection of old buildings. There’s a Seljuk mosque, Ottoman houses, a Roman harbour and a statue honouring the town’s founder back when it was the Kingdom of Pergamon. Even that doesn’t seem to be the beginning of the story as artefacts have been found which pre-date even him.

All this means there are lots of narrow, twisty streets and a bizarre variety of souvenirs to be hawked from every second shop. It also means people have been dying here for ridiculously long period of time.

As evidence of the previous point the next day we visited a charnel house. Sorry I mean a museum dedicated to the dead. The museum is planted on top of an ancient cemetery that appears to have been used from pre-Hellenic times until well after the Romans adopted (or abducted) Christianity. As is traditional in cities of this age the cemetery was discovered when the foundations were being dug for something else, in this case a convention centre.

The museum now occupies the site and displays selected pieces of the sarcophagi, ossuaries and grave goods that have been unearthed. There was no mention of what became of the convention centre. Presumably it was relocated to somewhere a little less corpse intensive. After our visit to the museum we were similarly relocated.

Travelling Hopefully - Giving it a Whirl

 After a few days crawling into holes and over suggestively shaped rocks we piled into our faithful mechanical steed and headed to Konya.

Konya is the fifth, sixth or seventh largest city in Turkey depending on refugee influx and who’s counting. It’s also the centre of Turkey’s wheat belt and a major car parts manufacturer. But all of this pales into insignificance compared with one other fact our guide imparted. Konya is the most conservative city in Turkey. There was a pause as that sank in then a trembling voice from the rear asked the question we were all thinking. “Does this mean we can’t buy alcohol?” Our guide dolefully confirmed that this was the case. Wisely the guide had waited to tell us of this fact until we were actually on the road. Nevertheless there was a concerted scramble for the windows as we attempted to flee back to Goreme.

Despite our tearful pleas the minibus continued towards Konya. Of course Konya has more to offer than just the sight of a collection of senior citizens undergoing delirium tremens. It is also the death place of Rumi. His full name was apparently Jalal al Din Muhammad Rumi. The “Rumi” was a nickname meaning “Roman” which he wasn’t. But he gained his fame in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum which was so called because their territory was traditionally Roman or at least it was until the Seljuks arrived. Rumi was actually Persian by which I mean he was born in Afghanistan.

Rumi founded the Mevlevi order of Islamic mystics who would become famous to people who knew nothing of Islam or Sufism as the Whirling Dervishes. Rumi’s romb is a magnificent building, now a museum, and we were able to walk through it along with what appeared to be half the population of Turkey. Rumi himself is apparently buried under a gorgeous turquoise spire. Apparently Rumi had asked for his tomb to be open to the air so he could look up at the sky but his followers hadn’t been able to resist honouring him by building an impressive pile over the top of him. They coloured it turquoise in the hopes that Rumi would still feel he was looking at the sky. It’s an interesting lesson in exactly how much people are going to honour the wishes of even the most respected person once they’ve unlikely to return and berate you.

That night we went to a Whirling Dervish performance which was a lot more elegant and impressive than my ignorant mind had imagined.

Travelling Hopefully - Pumpkin Edition

We passed through Turkey’s carrot country on our way to Cappadocia but once we arrived it was all about the pumpkins. In between the tortured rock formations, fairy chimneys and churches carved into holes in the stone there were pumpkins. Every flat piece of ground was given over to these bulbous orange plants.

You might think, therefore, that every meal would have abounded in pumpkin soup, roast pumpkin, grilled pumpkin, pumpkin with ice cream and pumpkin juice. You would have been wrong. I think I am yet to see a pumpkin adorning a dinner plate in any form whatsoever.

Pumpkins originated in Central America and have since colonised the world, including Turkey. According to my research they are one of the most popular winter vegetables in the country. Which doesn’t explain why I haven’t yet managed to eat one.

According to our guide the pumpkins in our region are harvested for their seeds or not. Apparently if the pumpkin price is not competitive then the pumpkins are simply left in the fields to fertilise the next generation of pumpkins. Essentially the pumpkins are eating their parents.

Of course cannibalising ones parents and other esteemed family members is a tradition in some ancient cultures. Painfully gained wisdom and positive attributes are thus passed on to the next generation. By this argument the pumpkins of Cappadocia must be some of the most gifted and knowledgeable in all the world. No wonder the Turks don’t want to eat them, they’re probably afraid of the uber pumpkins they have created. I give it a few more years before these hyped up psycho pumpkins erupt out of their fields and take over the world. At that point somebody is going to pay for Halloween.