An American in Turkey

The merchants were forward, crass, ingratiating, insistent; they were fun: "Hey, I’ll bet you’re an American! Have I got a deal for you." Another opened: "You know, I’ve got a cousin in New Jersey." A third, his arms thrown above his head, beseeched: "I like you both so much I’m willing to sell this carpet to you for nothing!" Hard to beat, that.

Susana was dizzied by the glitter and flash of the merchandise, the clanging colors of hanging cloth — run through with threads of gold, by the gleam of brass on every side, by the human swarm itself, but mostly, by the confusion of trying to calculate in a currency where the basic unit is a million lira, worth 6 cents American.

All this was pleasurably distracting, so it was not until two days later, as we cruised eastward through grassy hill country toward the Bolu Mountains, that Eric Tawar’s realization in Ephesus began to creep into my mind. We may be the only Americans in Turkey, my wife and I and about seven others who shared a bus with an equal number of Canadians and Australians on a voyage through this land I learned as a child to call Asia Minor. The reason was obvious: The prospect of war.

In Ankara, Turkey’s capital since 1923, we visited a large establishment where fresh-faced young women from the country were weaving and knotting beautiful carpets of intricate design, rugs to last a century. The manager, a gracious fellow named Ugar Aricioglu, said: "We are hurting. Where are the Americans? It is because we are so close to Iraq? Don’t you agree?"

How could I not? Susana and I began planning our visit to Turkey before the drumbeat of "regime change" grew so insistent. By midsummer, friends were giving us odd looks when we revealed our vacation plans for the fall. Our children worried, even urged us to cancel. Turkey was just too close to Iraq. The two countries share a border, in fact, and Baghdad is less than 300 air miles from the southern Turkish city of Diyarbakir.

Somebody suggested we masquerade as Canadians. This is an old gambit: In 1970, I went to Europe on Icelandic Air, then known as the "hippie" airline; it was cheap and popular with young Americans, and aboard were more than a few with rucksacks decorated with maple leaves. Our misadventure in Vietnam was in full cry then. So was anti-Americanism in Europe.

No masquerading

I would feel uncomfortable hiding behind the flag of another country. This is not a patriotic reflex so much as a conviction that most people you encounter who disapprove of your government’s policies will not hold you personally responsible.

And there was another consideration that grew out of many years of newspaper work, mostly gathering and analyzing foreign news: I was aware that press reports of political and social unrest in foreign countries, even when plainly told, tend to become exaggerated in the minds of readers by the distance, a phenomenon I have never understood.

Also, we both knew that the larger events in the world will always be beyond our control, and that we must live around them as best we can; avoiding them often means to shrink from the rewards that travel has to offer. So, we flew off to Turkey wondering if we would be welcome there. And before our tour was over, we would learn something about the legacy of warfare.

We were part of a group tour, our second of these in 27 years. The first was disastrous. This time we had an efficient guide and a congenial group.

After Ankara, and a visit to the stunning Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, where we learned of the Hittites and various other indigenous races of Anatolia, we rolled on to Cappadocia. This is a region of fantastical topography, including weird "fairy chimneys," towers of soft volcanic stone called "tuff," formed by the abrasion of wind and moving water over millions of years. They look like giant mushrooms, their stems soaring hundreds of feet to a widening cap, above narrow valleys filled with poplar trees.

In the 4th century a Christian monastic culture sprouted there, and the monks, Greeks mostly, carved houses and churches deep into these towers, and entire cities underground. The churches were filled with rough Christian images, and later with gleaming frescoes. The Christians kept birds in carved niches on the balconies of their cliff- like dwellings.

"They look like mailboxes," said one in our group.

We visited a village near our hotel in Goreme, found someone who still owned a cave dwelling — the government ruled them unsuitable in the 1960s — and he took us there. It was a comfortable abode, roughly carved out of the soft yellow rock, with an ample, low-ceilinged main room, fireplace, thick rugs on the floors and walls. Its window opened on the Valley of Goreme, spotted with golden apricot trees, a perfect match to the yellow and pink of the other chimneys, each with its own windows far above the valley floor.

Hobbits could live there, I thought.

Dervishes whirl

We left Goreme on a cool Anatolian morning. A balloon floated over the valley, not far above the tilting fairy chimneys. Shortly we passed into an area of wide yellow fields where people gathered sugar beets. We would travel on a remnant of the ancient Silk Road for a while, that 4,000-mile caravan route that brought silk out of China to the West, and received in return gold, silver and, most significantly, ideas such as Christianity from Rome and Buddhism from India.

This would be the longest leg of our journey, 12 hours to Antalya, with a stop at Konya, the capital of the Seljuks from Central Asia. These were the first Turks to settle in Anatolia, in the 11th century. In addition to Oguz, our guide, we had two drivers. On these long hauls, the driver who was unoccupied would provide us with coffee, cold water or apple tea, a Turkish favorite.

Konya is deeply Islamic. There, it seemed, we saw more women wearing headscarves than we saw in vast Istanbul. Konya is also home to the Whirling Dervishes of the Sufi sect. We saw their ceremonial dance one evening in a restored caravansary with vaulted ceilings and stone walls a yard thick.

The Whirling Dervishes were all men (there are women in the sect, we were told), and their movements of ritual prayer were languid, in keeping with the music that animated them. They turned and turned slowly, counter-clockwise, and moved collectively in a larger circle. Their heads were *censored*ed to one side, arms held loosely aloft, their motions fluid, and the hems of their long white gowns followed just behind the twisting axis of their bodies. They were not in a trance while doing this, we were told, though they seemed to be.

The tomb of the founder of the order, the mystical 13th-century philosopher Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, is there, near a museum that explains the sect’s spiritual purpose.

The caravansary was built in 1229. The Seljuks constructed 130 of these small fortresses along the Turkish portion of the Silk Road, one every 30 miles to shelter the caravans out of China heading for Istanbul. Some are restored; most are in ruins.

After passing through the Konya Plain, Turkey’s "breadbasket," we climbed into the Taurus Mountains. There we saw nimble angora goats scamper down precipitous slopes, leaping from rock to rock, one following the other like a cascade of fine furry wool.

"Look there," said a fellow traveler, "a herd of sweaters."

The Taurus Mountains are all gray rock and green-black conifers, cut through by twisty roads. They rise to 6,000 feet, and open now and then into deep, mossy valleys. While rolling through one of these, Oguz had the bus stop: He ran out into a field to a herd of goats, picked one up, brought it back and stood holding it in his arms while those interested took his picture.

I saw the goatherd scratch his head as Oguz put the animal down and watched it run back to the flock. Oguz was given to unexpected gestures. When we came to the top of the mountain that offered our first view of the Mediterranean, he had the bus pull over again. As we all got out to stretch our legs and take in the view, he uncorked bottles of crisp white wine to celebrate our reaching the sea.

Jaw of old St. Nick

This part of the Mediterranean coast was favored by ancient peoples, especially those Roman emperors, like Hadrian, who loved to build. We moved slowly through their ruined cities: Aspendos, Perge, Aphrodisias, Hieropolis and, of course, Ephesus, capital of the Roman Province of Asia. At Antalya, on the Turkish Riviera, we rested by the sea.

A museum there holds a relic, a bone from the jaw of a 4th-century bishop thought to be the St. Nicholas who gave rise to the legend of Santa Claus. He was known for providing dowries to impoverished young girls, dropping bags of coins down their chimneys.

Another Christian monument, and a popular one evidenced by the number of people we encountered there, is Mother Mary’s house on a mountain near Ephesus. She was brought there, so the story goes, by John the Apostle, who accepted responsibility for her after Jesus’ death. The apostle is buried near the remnant of a Byzantine basilica built in his honor, the biggest in the world at the time. Now only a few columns remain.

We stopped at a roadside inn on our way to Ephesus where an American, off a bus going in another direction, came up and asked, "How do you feel as an American to be here?"

Because I wasn’t sure how I felt, I replied, "How do you feel?"

He didn’t seem to know, either, so he got back on his bus. The encounter set me thinking again about the current political situation. Suppose the United States was not the world power it is, and a country far stronger than ours, say Russia, was determined to launch a war against Canada or Mexico.

Knowing that war is never an isolated event, and that "surgical strike" is a military euphemism that bears little relation to the way conflicts unfold and spread turmoil, how would we Americans greet Russian tourists in Baltimore?

At the inn, we bought glasses of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice for 10 million lira each, then got back on our bus. We drove to a town by Lake Salda, a crater lake 300 feet deep and very salty. In the market we saw things we were unaccustomed to seeing, like persimmons, quinces, pomegranates; every sort of nut that ever grew, every size and color of olive, more mushrooms than could be counted by a supercomputer. It was all very local and chatty:

"Try a nut, here. First one’s free!" Tough shopping bags, woven from plastic strands, were on sale. "Cheap! Only three million." There were sheep huddling in pens, their eyes blazing with terror; men with tanks of big fish stood on the beds of pickup trucks, ready to pull one out if you decided to buy it.

Tangerines were in season. We saw them on the road, along with apricots, thousands of fig and olive trees, lemon trees through the arches of Roman aqueducts. There were cypresses and as many Lombardy Poplars as in all of Tuscany.

Disappearing in time

In the city of Aphrodisias, the Romans built an immense stadium. It is a ruin, only partially restored. If you walk over its stone bleachers high up in the cheap seats, it can teach you what the expression "lost in time" really means.

On many of the stones, there are inscriptions: a word in Greek or just a letter, a fragment of Latin disappearing under a layer of gray lichen. Lying in the grass is a marble block, either emerging from the earth or being swallowed by it again; the meaning, the idea contained in the inscription on it goes unconveyed. But whatever the message is, it remains unshared except to experts, and eventually will disappear beneath the sea of grass, and be lost again.

At that height, the only sounds that come to you are natural — a bee’s buzzing, the wind rushing over the stones. I saw a large orange butterfly land on the marble piece in the grass. I looked up and saw a jet’s contrail in the cloudless sky. I wondered what the people who walked in the agora, drank wine, bought and sold goods in the shade of their porticos, would have thought of something like that in the sky.

Would they have seen it as hopeful sign, a line pointing toward the future? Maybe. But perhaps it would have frightened them. There is reason to think they would have resisted anyone who tried to persuade them that it promised better times.

In the heyday of magnificent Ephesus, the deity of preference was Artemis, or Diana. When the famous letter writer, Paul, author of the Epistle to the Ephesians, visited there, he tried to tout his new god. But he was routed out of the amphitheater by the partisans of Artemis, who waved her image in his face. They wanted nothing to do with Paul’s new idea.

After Ephesus, we visited Pergamum, where papyrus was invented, then went to view the uncovered remains of Troy, fractions of 10 cities, stacked one upon another. They have put a wooden horse there, I suppose to make sure you know where you are.

The sixth city was the Troy of Priam, Ulysses, Achilles and the rest of that crowd, but it looked like all the others. Before crossing the Hellespont and returning to the electric streets of Istanbul, we stopped at Gallipoli. This was supposed to be a short visit. It turned out otherwise, and more affecting than I had anticipated. By the time we reached the memorials there, the majority on our bus were Australians (people would drop off for a couple of days, others would join us along the way).

The presence of the Australians, and the purposeful way they moved among the cemetery headstones, made us understand that all the other sights we had seen, though spectacular, had been objectified for us by time — that is, by their remove so deep in the past.

Though fascinating visually and intellectually, the ruins of Ephesus or Aphrodisias lack human resonance. But the failed invasion of Gallipoli in 1915, the British decision to use untried Australian and New Zealand troops to knock Turkey out of World War I, was a mere 87 years behind us, near enough so that some of the many dead placed beneath these stones still had living relatives, perhaps some right there standing above them, taking note of the young age at which these soldiers met their end.

Today the cemeteries at Gallipoli, filled with Turkish and Australian-New Zealand fallen, are among the most frequently visited war memorials in Europe. It is a place of pilgrimage for Australians and New Zealanders of all ages, almost as Lourdes is for Catholics, and Mecca for Muslims.

The sense of poignancy that abides there is palpable, and is almost an indictment of the arrogance and lethal folly of those who send the young off to die in little-remembered battles and wars that settle nothing.

During our excursion through Turkey, we gained at least an impression of how the Turks feel about President Bush’s presumed plans for Iraq. The correctness of that impression has been confirmed by polls published since our return home. The Turks, the people, oppose a war against Iraq.

We were not in Turkey long enough to determine if the Turks are angry with Americans in general. At least we met with no unpleasantness, and on only one occasion a murmur of resentment. What we encountered might be described more as a kind of sad congeniality. There was nothing that we could tell them they didn’t already know. Even when they asked where all the American tourists are, we could tell they already knew.

Getting there: Ours was a package bus tour through Turkey, lasting two weeks. The company, Pacha Tours, is the largest in the country, and offers a variety of routes and prices. The total price for the two of us was $3,194. Included in that fee was round-trip airfare from New York to Istanbul ($802 each, which includes a $72 airport tax in Istanbul). All other expenses — land travel, hotels (mostly three-star but an occasional four-star) nearly all meals, excursions and museum tickets, plus transfers from and to the international airport in Istanbul — were included.

For more information about Pacha Tours, contact them at 226 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10001; 800-722-4288; www.pachatours.com

Information: There are many other companies offering tours in Turkey. An Internet search for "package tours in Turkey" will turn up various options. Consulting the Elderhostel catalog (877-426-8056; www.elderhostel.org) is also a good idea.
For more information about traveling in Turkey, contact the Turkish Tourism Office, 821 U.N. Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017; 877-367-8875; www.tourismturkey.org.