Thursday, July 15, 2004
Selcuk
Woke up with a start this morning as someone violently rattled my doorknob. I glanced at the clock: 6:30 AM. I'm pretty bad about locking my door at night (especially when it means using the only key, on the inside) but for some reason last night I remembered, and I'm glad I did. I rolled over and mustered a weary, "Hello? Who is it?" and suddenly a thickly accented "Oh! Sorry." in response. Clearly they'd decided that my door must be the bathroom. Early morning. Strange environment. Shared W/C. Understandable.
But looking back, it does make one wonder: who incessantly rattles and shakes a locked bathroom door? Especially when it's a common bathroom?
I tried to get back to sleep, hoping to get in a few more hours before the street noise and the heat became prohibitive.
Then it came again. A knocking. "Hello? How much longer?" I was still sleeping in the bathroom, it appeared. And was taking much too long. "Not a bathroom." I groaned. "Down the hall."
"Oh. Sorry."
I finally got back to sleep just as people started checking-out, repeatedly slamming the creaking, metal front door beside my ground-floor window...
----
After breakfast, Dervish kindly offered to drive me and my new Belgian friend, Sam, to the Ephesus site, about 5km away. The Belgian needed to go to the bank, but Dervish insisted on just lending him the money, and getting it from him later, to save time and convenience.
As Dervish drove us to the site, he stopped to help a blonde woman who stood in the middle of the street, glancing about aimlessly, carrying a guidebook - a Swedish tourist, looking for an “authentic” Turkish restaurant. Rather than suggest his own restaurant, Dervish insisted that she hop in, guide us to the hotel where the rest of her party was staying, and then he drove them all into the smoldering heart of the industrial part of town, where the "most authentic" Turkish food could be had. He even went in and ordered for them. Then hopped back into the van and drove us on to the gates of Ephesus. Pure generosity. (There could always be a comission involved, but at this place… I doubt it.)
---
Dervish drops us off at the upper gate to Ephesus, amidst the frenzied calls of an army of salesmen swarming around a recently arrived tour-bus. “Books! Post-cards!” The call out. “Souvenirs! Maps! Sonnets!” I glance over to Sam: “What’s that man across the street selling?”
“Sounds like ‘sonnets,’” he says in his Belgian accent. “Is this right?”
That’s what I heard. I imagine a few steps down off the road, leading into a corrugated-metal lair where a row of impoverished poets scribble out verses on demand:
“This is a type of poem, yes?” Sam asks.
I nod in disappointed agreement as I finally spot the purveyor of poetry – once again my imagination has run away with me – in his hand, a plethora of colorful sun-hats.
----
Cell phones in Turkey work everywhere, even in ancient Roman ruins (amazing when you realize I still get no signal in my Brentwood apartment), and K manages to text me a sad little message about being stuck in her hotel room, incapacitated by her swollen foot. I feel a little guilty being away (I always seem to be away when she goes to hospital) but after a few exchanges, it seems she's doing ok, just SAD.
----
I'm moving through the site too slowly for Sam, who isn't really a "ruins" kind of guy anyway, so he wanders ahead, photographing children that stray from tour groups as I wrestle with the four different guidebooks I've brought to reference (in lieu of hiring one of the more than eager human guides).
There's an astonishing cacophony in the ancient streets as four tour groups speaking four different languages collide, each guide striving for linguistic supremacy. Even with such tourist-congestion, I can tell it's a bad season. The gaps between the groups are too big; the empty stores and idle guides too many. Aside from the ten or twelve key photo-op points, the site's vacant. You can easily identify these key points of interest - if you wander a few meters away from the pre-programmed lecture spots beneath the Hercules Gate or the Temple of Domitian, you find yourself suddenly alone. Everyone else is in a group, and they're clearly doing the 1-hour tour.
I wander amongst the shoulder-high walls, through the labyrinthine rooms of the "brothel/house" (once identified as a brothel, but now probably not) and find some magnificent mosaics completely bypassed by the groups. They feel like my own little discovery - something uniquely mine. I'm blocked in my explorations by a sturdy woman, built like an East German swimmer, who stands squarely in the middle of a doorway, staring off blankly. At first I imagine she's just intently attempting to envision the house as it might have been, trying to conjure the sounds and smells of the ancient home and hearth. But the more I try to subtly move past her, the more she refuses to make eye contact. Finally I push past and discover her daughter in a corner of the next room, just finishing an impromptu bathroom break.
Such respect for the past.
Ironically, the passage she's blocking leads to a pristinely preserved block of latrines - replete with a musician's platform. If only she’d held on just a little longer…
I rejoin the main street, the ancient paving blocks still underfoot and the tour groups moving along as briskly and brusquely as ever. The site is impressive, but somehow pales in comparison to the impossible "you-are-there" experience of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This is of course a different sort of city, and can be appreciated as an example of an Imperial center of trade. There are unique historical elements to enjoy, but the “wow” factor seems to be less than I’d expected. And the groups and the noise and the signs (and as K's conference would say, "the scripting of the experience") seems somehow less authentic than the sprawling ruins of Hieropolis and Aphrodisias. This, the site I was saving as "best for last," seems to have been usurped by its lesser rivals.
Not to say that it isn't amazing. The (heavily restored) Library of Celsus is astonishingly evocative. And in all fairness, the Terrace Houses are closed, so the decision of whether or not to pay the exorbitant extra admission fee is spared me, but so are some of the most renowned and best preserved parts of the site.
The thing that strikes me most, though, is how, remarkable as a classical site like Ephesus is, for scale and preservation it just doesn't compare to Egypt - from the mighty monumental architecture to the little elements of daily life. And much of the Egyptian stuff is a millennium or two older. I could be biased, but I don’t think that's it.
I wander down towards "Harbor Street" - the main promenade of the town, and a wonder in ancient times - it's said that it was kept lit even at night with blazing oil street-lamps, all the way from the amphitheater to the harbor. Even in those times, the Menderes river was constantly filling the harbor with silt (it was dredged every occasion an emperor or dignitary paid a visit) and once the imperial majesties ceased their visiting (and the dredging stopped), the shoreline started moving away as the delta filled in. So now the ancient harbor is actually land-locked, stranded 5km inland. You can just see the distant waters of the Aegean on the horizon, from the top rim of the amphitheater.
I meet up with Sam at intervals, explaining a few key monuments to him. He seems happy to wait for me, even though I've told him it could be a while.
Eventually we head back to town, walking along the roadside and then cutting across the rural fields, still plowed with donkeys when tractors can’t be had. There’s a bizarre streak of anachronism running through the rural towns I visit – internet cafes, paragliding and ultralights for the tourists, and back-breaking farm work for the locals. A cart loaded with produce or wood drives through a busy town intersection, the horse stopping at a red light along side motor-scooters and dump trucks.
----
Back at the pension, I spend a little time trying to write in the upstairs restaurant. It’s nice and light now, so I can take in the details. Here they go for the young Atatürk, in his army uniform, complete with beret.
It’s not long before Laura and Dervish’s sister, Oya, lure me into a conversation. Oya’s an older, smiling Turkish woman who repeatedly insists she cannot “talk English so good” and then jabbers on without a breath for half an hour. But any story she tells, be it about her “brothers” and “sisters” all over the world, or about her dreams of going to Australia and Alaska, there are always two constant refrains: “I no talk English so good” and a variation on: “Sorry, sweet Jesus.” “Oh my sweet Jesus.” “Oh, Jesus, I am sorry.” Strangely, this doesn’t come across as fanatically overbearing religiosity, but rather just part of her bizarre whirlwind personality.
It is a little funny, though, when she finally asks me, “Brother, what religion are you? Christian I think?” She then smiles and reaches back behind a bench and takes out a little book with a hand-made cover. “This is my bible. I am Christian too, but don’t tell anyone. Muslim country.”
I smile, flip through her bible appreciatively, and then as gently as possible, I point out that her allusion to Jesus every other sentence might be a bit of a give-away.
“Oh, sweet Jesus. I am sorry. I talk too much. Oh my Jesus.”
Most of the other guests, I later learn, are convinced that Oya is crazy. But I think she’s just enthusiastic, and strangely has been locked into a peasant mindset that her brothers, Dervish and Aslan, seem to have escaped. Aslan lives in Berkeley, and Dervish couldn’t be more of a modern entrepreneur. But Oya cooks, and cleans, and swears that she can never visit the places that she talks constantly about. “Oh, I’m too poor. Just a poor Turkish woman. I could never go anywhere. Too much work. Not me. Oh Jesus. Not me. But it is my dream, Jesus, to go to Australia. But I am too poor.”
Laura tells me Oya could go, if she wanted. She just can’t conceive of the reality – she can’t imagine leaving. Not working. Dervish’s mother, who’s well over 70, is the same. She still cooks at the Pension, keeps a market garden, hauls massive tanks of natural gas and loads of produce up to the fourth floor kitchen every morning. She can’t imagine stopping. Can’t imagine going anywhere. The same with Oya.
I wonder how Dervish and Aslan can be so different. But there is one obvious answer – they are both men.
----
Aslan has just arrived for a visit home (taking a few weeks off from his job as a salesman of Indonesian furniture in Berkley) and before I can finish eating my dinner, he insists that Sam and I, along with two other Belgian girls, come with him to a “Greek” town to taste the local wine. It’s late, and I’m tired, but how can one say no?
We hop into Dervish’s van and bounce along the country roads to the next village. Naturally the village isn’t really in Greece, but it has stubbornly clung to its Greek heritage following its assimilation by Turkey, and it likewise has kept up its age-old wine-making traditions.
Even in ancient times, this area of Turkey was famous for its wines. It’s hard to imagine Italians going out of their way to import wine from Turkey, but the Romans supposedly revered wine from Ephesus as a treat to be savored.
As we turn onto ever narrower, ever bumpier roads, I begin to guess at the adventure before me: a tiny corrugated hut behind a distillery. Reused dusty bottles of syrupy wine poured into murky glasses for sipping. Tinny music emanating from a 30 year old transistor radio and a wrinkled, leathery old man eying these young foreigners with suspicion.
We pull into a little town, not unlike Selçuk, and hike the last few blocks to the winery. And my imagination could not have been further from reality. What we find is a refined, immaculate show-room – rustic in its architecture but modern in its conveniences. Wine racks line the walls, exposed beams, finished to a polish, loom overhead. Music’s pumped in through a state of the art stereo and young men in crisp white shirts expertly pour the wine. It’s a tasting room that would shame half the trendy wineries in Napa Valley.
I of course don’t drink, and this confuses the waiters to no end. Eventually one of them runs down the street to buy a coke which he can re-sell to me. (Aslan observes that this was one of the most confusing behaviors to him when he arrived in America – he went into a store asking for something, and was told, “I’m sorry. We don’t carry that.” He points out that in Turkey, you’re never told “we don’t carry that” but rather, you’re detained while someone runs out the back, down the street, and finds whatever it is you want so that they be the ones to sell it to you. This hasn’t really been my experience in Istanbul, but certainly in the country…) It’s funny to think about what a hard time I’m having NOT drinking alcohol in this “Islamic” country. Though clearly here, in Selçuk, the Greek/Christian population is still well represented, along with all the drinking that such a population entails.
In the end, it’s a refined, muted evening of sitting back and telling stories as the Belgians sip the wine and politely remark that it’s more like sherry or brandy than anything they’d ever call wine: too sweet, too light. But Aslan will hear none of it, and I can happily abstain from judgment.
|
But looking back, it does make one wonder: who incessantly rattles and shakes a locked bathroom door? Especially when it's a common bathroom?
I tried to get back to sleep, hoping to get in a few more hours before the street noise and the heat became prohibitive.
Then it came again. A knocking. "Hello? How much longer?" I was still sleeping in the bathroom, it appeared. And was taking much too long. "Not a bathroom." I groaned. "Down the hall."
"Oh. Sorry."
I finally got back to sleep just as people started checking-out, repeatedly slamming the creaking, metal front door beside my ground-floor window...
----
After breakfast, Dervish kindly offered to drive me and my new Belgian friend, Sam, to the Ephesus site, about 5km away. The Belgian needed to go to the bank, but Dervish insisted on just lending him the money, and getting it from him later, to save time and convenience.
As Dervish drove us to the site, he stopped to help a blonde woman who stood in the middle of the street, glancing about aimlessly, carrying a guidebook - a Swedish tourist, looking for an “authentic” Turkish restaurant. Rather than suggest his own restaurant, Dervish insisted that she hop in, guide us to the hotel where the rest of her party was staying, and then he drove them all into the smoldering heart of the industrial part of town, where the "most authentic" Turkish food could be had. He even went in and ordered for them. Then hopped back into the van and drove us on to the gates of Ephesus. Pure generosity. (There could always be a comission involved, but at this place… I doubt it.)
---
Dervish drops us off at the upper gate to Ephesus, amidst the frenzied calls of an army of salesmen swarming around a recently arrived tour-bus. “Books! Post-cards!” The call out. “Souvenirs! Maps! Sonnets!” I glance over to Sam: “What’s that man across the street selling?”
“Sounds like ‘sonnets,’” he says in his Belgian accent. “Is this right?”
That’s what I heard. I imagine a few steps down off the road, leading into a corrugated-metal lair where a row of impoverished poets scribble out verses on demand:
Praise the bus that brought thou here,And so on… (no, I’m not going to fake an entire sonnet (and yes, I know it’s only 10 more lines…))
To marble columns rising so,
That ancient lands be brought e’er near
And tourists shop before they go.
“This is a type of poem, yes?” Sam asks.
I nod in disappointed agreement as I finally spot the purveyor of poetry – once again my imagination has run away with me – in his hand, a plethora of colorful sun-hats.
----
Cell phones in Turkey work everywhere, even in ancient Roman ruins (amazing when you realize I still get no signal in my Brentwood apartment), and K manages to text me a sad little message about being stuck in her hotel room, incapacitated by her swollen foot. I feel a little guilty being away (I always seem to be away when she goes to hospital) but after a few exchanges, it seems she's doing ok, just SAD.
----
I'm moving through the site too slowly for Sam, who isn't really a "ruins" kind of guy anyway, so he wanders ahead, photographing children that stray from tour groups as I wrestle with the four different guidebooks I've brought to reference (in lieu of hiring one of the more than eager human guides).
There's an astonishing cacophony in the ancient streets as four tour groups speaking four different languages collide, each guide striving for linguistic supremacy. Even with such tourist-congestion, I can tell it's a bad season. The gaps between the groups are too big; the empty stores and idle guides too many. Aside from the ten or twelve key photo-op points, the site's vacant. You can easily identify these key points of interest - if you wander a few meters away from the pre-programmed lecture spots beneath the Hercules Gate or the Temple of Domitian, you find yourself suddenly alone. Everyone else is in a group, and they're clearly doing the 1-hour tour.
I wander amongst the shoulder-high walls, through the labyrinthine rooms of the "brothel/house" (once identified as a brothel, but now probably not) and find some magnificent mosaics completely bypassed by the groups. They feel like my own little discovery - something uniquely mine. I'm blocked in my explorations by a sturdy woman, built like an East German swimmer, who stands squarely in the middle of a doorway, staring off blankly. At first I imagine she's just intently attempting to envision the house as it might have been, trying to conjure the sounds and smells of the ancient home and hearth. But the more I try to subtly move past her, the more she refuses to make eye contact. Finally I push past and discover her daughter in a corner of the next room, just finishing an impromptu bathroom break.
Such respect for the past.
Ironically, the passage she's blocking leads to a pristinely preserved block of latrines - replete with a musician's platform. If only she’d held on just a little longer…
I rejoin the main street, the ancient paving blocks still underfoot and the tour groups moving along as briskly and brusquely as ever. The site is impressive, but somehow pales in comparison to the impossible "you-are-there" experience of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This is of course a different sort of city, and can be appreciated as an example of an Imperial center of trade. There are unique historical elements to enjoy, but the “wow” factor seems to be less than I’d expected. And the groups and the noise and the signs (and as K's conference would say, "the scripting of the experience") seems somehow less authentic than the sprawling ruins of Hieropolis and Aphrodisias. This, the site I was saving as "best for last," seems to have been usurped by its lesser rivals.
Not to say that it isn't amazing. The (heavily restored) Library of Celsus is astonishingly evocative. And in all fairness, the Terrace Houses are closed, so the decision of whether or not to pay the exorbitant extra admission fee is spared me, but so are some of the most renowned and best preserved parts of the site.
The thing that strikes me most, though, is how, remarkable as a classical site like Ephesus is, for scale and preservation it just doesn't compare to Egypt - from the mighty monumental architecture to the little elements of daily life. And much of the Egyptian stuff is a millennium or two older. I could be biased, but I don’t think that's it.
I wander down towards "Harbor Street" - the main promenade of the town, and a wonder in ancient times - it's said that it was kept lit even at night with blazing oil street-lamps, all the way from the amphitheater to the harbor. Even in those times, the Menderes river was constantly filling the harbor with silt (it was dredged every occasion an emperor or dignitary paid a visit) and once the imperial majesties ceased their visiting (and the dredging stopped), the shoreline started moving away as the delta filled in. So now the ancient harbor is actually land-locked, stranded 5km inland. You can just see the distant waters of the Aegean on the horizon, from the top rim of the amphitheater.
I meet up with Sam at intervals, explaining a few key monuments to him. He seems happy to wait for me, even though I've told him it could be a while.
Eventually we head back to town, walking along the roadside and then cutting across the rural fields, still plowed with donkeys when tractors can’t be had. There’s a bizarre streak of anachronism running through the rural towns I visit – internet cafes, paragliding and ultralights for the tourists, and back-breaking farm work for the locals. A cart loaded with produce or wood drives through a busy town intersection, the horse stopping at a red light along side motor-scooters and dump trucks.
----
Back at the pension, I spend a little time trying to write in the upstairs restaurant. It’s nice and light now, so I can take in the details. Here they go for the young Atatürk, in his army uniform, complete with beret.
It’s not long before Laura and Dervish’s sister, Oya, lure me into a conversation. Oya’s an older, smiling Turkish woman who repeatedly insists she cannot “talk English so good” and then jabbers on without a breath for half an hour. But any story she tells, be it about her “brothers” and “sisters” all over the world, or about her dreams of going to Australia and Alaska, there are always two constant refrains: “I no talk English so good” and a variation on: “Sorry, sweet Jesus.” “Oh my sweet Jesus.” “Oh, Jesus, I am sorry.” Strangely, this doesn’t come across as fanatically overbearing religiosity, but rather just part of her bizarre whirlwind personality.
It is a little funny, though, when she finally asks me, “Brother, what religion are you? Christian I think?” She then smiles and reaches back behind a bench and takes out a little book with a hand-made cover. “This is my bible. I am Christian too, but don’t tell anyone. Muslim country.”
I smile, flip through her bible appreciatively, and then as gently as possible, I point out that her allusion to Jesus every other sentence might be a bit of a give-away.
“Oh, sweet Jesus. I am sorry. I talk too much. Oh my Jesus.”
Most of the other guests, I later learn, are convinced that Oya is crazy. But I think she’s just enthusiastic, and strangely has been locked into a peasant mindset that her brothers, Dervish and Aslan, seem to have escaped. Aslan lives in Berkeley, and Dervish couldn’t be more of a modern entrepreneur. But Oya cooks, and cleans, and swears that she can never visit the places that she talks constantly about. “Oh, I’m too poor. Just a poor Turkish woman. I could never go anywhere. Too much work. Not me. Oh Jesus. Not me. But it is my dream, Jesus, to go to Australia. But I am too poor.”
Laura tells me Oya could go, if she wanted. She just can’t conceive of the reality – she can’t imagine leaving. Not working. Dervish’s mother, who’s well over 70, is the same. She still cooks at the Pension, keeps a market garden, hauls massive tanks of natural gas and loads of produce up to the fourth floor kitchen every morning. She can’t imagine stopping. Can’t imagine going anywhere. The same with Oya.
I wonder how Dervish and Aslan can be so different. But there is one obvious answer – they are both men.
----
Aslan has just arrived for a visit home (taking a few weeks off from his job as a salesman of Indonesian furniture in Berkley) and before I can finish eating my dinner, he insists that Sam and I, along with two other Belgian girls, come with him to a “Greek” town to taste the local wine. It’s late, and I’m tired, but how can one say no?
We hop into Dervish’s van and bounce along the country roads to the next village. Naturally the village isn’t really in Greece, but it has stubbornly clung to its Greek heritage following its assimilation by Turkey, and it likewise has kept up its age-old wine-making traditions.
Even in ancient times, this area of Turkey was famous for its wines. It’s hard to imagine Italians going out of their way to import wine from Turkey, but the Romans supposedly revered wine from Ephesus as a treat to be savored.
As we turn onto ever narrower, ever bumpier roads, I begin to guess at the adventure before me: a tiny corrugated hut behind a distillery. Reused dusty bottles of syrupy wine poured into murky glasses for sipping. Tinny music emanating from a 30 year old transistor radio and a wrinkled, leathery old man eying these young foreigners with suspicion.
We pull into a little town, not unlike Selçuk, and hike the last few blocks to the winery. And my imagination could not have been further from reality. What we find is a refined, immaculate show-room – rustic in its architecture but modern in its conveniences. Wine racks line the walls, exposed beams, finished to a polish, loom overhead. Music’s pumped in through a state of the art stereo and young men in crisp white shirts expertly pour the wine. It’s a tasting room that would shame half the trendy wineries in Napa Valley.
I of course don’t drink, and this confuses the waiters to no end. Eventually one of them runs down the street to buy a coke which he can re-sell to me. (Aslan observes that this was one of the most confusing behaviors to him when he arrived in America – he went into a store asking for something, and was told, “I’m sorry. We don’t carry that.” He points out that in Turkey, you’re never told “we don’t carry that” but rather, you’re detained while someone runs out the back, down the street, and finds whatever it is you want so that they be the ones to sell it to you. This hasn’t really been my experience in Istanbul, but certainly in the country…) It’s funny to think about what a hard time I’m having NOT drinking alcohol in this “Islamic” country. Though clearly here, in Selçuk, the Greek/Christian population is still well represented, along with all the drinking that such a population entails.
In the end, it’s a refined, muted evening of sitting back and telling stories as the Belgians sip the wine and politely remark that it’s more like sherry or brandy than anything they’d ever call wine: too sweet, too light. But Aslan will hear none of it, and I can happily abstain from judgment.
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