In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
—The Hobbit

I only had one night in Istanbul. I arrived Wednesday morning, hopped across to Europe to buy spices and a new man purse at the Spice Bazaar, and back to pick up my last two packages from my friends-gifts from my aunt and an Asus netbook. I had a new requisite commodity, Internet, to survey for and seek out.

My friends Gavin and Nellie and I went out to lunch at a pide place with yard-long pides, and ate three, and caught up over drinks. I unfolded on the futon and got my first good night’s sleep in a long while. In the morning I exploited my netbook, and in the afternoon met my friends for lunch at a fish place, and crossed the Bosphorus with them to attend one of the exhibits for the Istanbul Biennal art festival. Oh, modern art, how nebulous art thou!

Gavin had to work, so we shook hands farewell. I went with Nellie to a small place called Kop Cafe, on the street in Kadikoy with all the sports bars, for mezes and beers. My train left for Ankara at 8. I quickly packed my things and said goodbye and left, and felt as I did so that same grief that accompanies the completion of an entertaining, friendly novel. It was something I would have been quite content to continue indefinitely, which was now fatally over. Nothing lasts forever. A new chapter had to begin.

Heroes sanctify a wide plot when they rot. From Atatürk’s corpse sprouted a national monument called An?tkabir. Leave your baggage at the gate. A garden of plants from twenty-four countries and from the Anatolian regions. A lion road of twenty-four statues. A court ringed by a blocky stoa of stone I’m sure is native; and up 42 steps stands the Mausoleum, in a shape reminiscent of the Lincoln Memorial, but more square and sand-colored. Beside the doors, Atatürk’s speeches—”How happy the one who says, I am a Turk, is”—are inscribed in gold leaf. Inside under gilded rafters, at the end of the ornamented hall, stands Mustafa Kemal’s 40 ton tomb of red marble, and before it a wreath placed by President Obama.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

The Museum of Atatürk memorabilia contains: Lincolns and a Cadillac, photos, passports, swords, daggers, pistols, canes and a cane rifle, medals from kings and sultans and governments, cigarette cases, pipes, wallets, drinking sets, writing instruments, clothes and shoes, and a wax statue of the eagle-eyed founder. I was infected by foreign patriotism and love of Atatürk, and reminded of the Turkish love for kitsch by the dioramas, models, dramatic quotations—“Armies! Your first goal is the sea! Forward!”—and wax statuary—one has Father Turk standing amongst his collected clothing, and another in the final room before the library seats the President and his diligent work at his desk. (Let’s also mention, to continue this abuse of punctuation with kitsch outside of An?tkabir: Miniaturk in Istanbul, and the habit of Turkish couples for wearing matching outfits.)

The road goes to Cappadocia! Gold hills, blue mountains, and a fading sky of platinum horizons and blue depths. The bus drove out through grassy hills like dunes, and past a glittering plain which required lengthy study to distinguish as a desert and not a sea. It turned dark and I put down my new book and listened to new music. Cappadocia! That limestone wonderland at the edge of Arabia! When we pulled into Goreme, city of cave buildings and fairy chimneys, my goal was to find the Nomad Hostel. New places excite my thought process into an activity which generally resembles the following:

Okay, where do I start? Look at all these backpackers, waiting for a bus. Quit walking around in circles, you look like an idiot. It’s only bus companies here, where’s tourist information? Closed. God dammit. Hey, English speakers! I could ask them, but I’d look dumb. Come on, boy, you’ve been traveling nine months, harden up. It smells like snow here.

I’ll ask this guy.—”Hi excuse me, do you know Nomad Hostel? Yeah, sure, Nomat Hotel. That way? Teshukular.”—Man I really hope that guy knew what I was saying. Jesus Christ, Nomat Hotel. Probably close enough. Where the fuck am I?—A nearby house looked like the Flinstones’.—This is the weirdest place I’ve ever come into late at night. Hey, restaurants. Remember the priorities: bed then food.—”Hi, excuse me, Nomat Hotel? Teshukular.”—Sending me down a dark alley. What the fuck is that?—This one was a collapsed sandstone structure built into the hill, like an arid Bag End.—Dude this place looks like Mos Eisley. This place looks more like Tatooine than that sandstone mosque on Crete.

Where the fuck am I? Did he say left or right? Look at all these pensions and cave hotels. This is some weird shit. Check out those poor people by the chemical fire. I should ask them. One of them is pounding on rocks. Oh no, white people! Bail!—I went up a hill and saw to my delight:—Hutt mansion! Wow, this is so like Tatooine. Look at all these rich Hutts. Fat as hell. I’m going to run into a womp rat or something. A bantha.—”Hi, Nomat Hotel? Back down that way?”—Oh sweet, look at these stairs! Look at these fucking stairs! This place is nuts!

Okay right or left? Dude, how do you get lost so quickly? World record holder. I’m a fucking idiot. How did I make it this far? I hate wandering around. This place kind of looks like… Morrowind? I can’t place it. Hey Nomad! Nomad Tourism Office? Fuck! Well fuck this, I’m done wandering around. I’ll just go to one of those Aussie dumps. Shoe-String or whatever.

Unknown to me at the time, the Nomad Hostel was right around the corner, but Shoe-String Hostel turned out to be a fine choice. I checked into a bed in the cave dormitory, which contains three chambers and a loft reached by climbing up rungs bedded in the cave wall, and ate pide and lentil soup at a place around the corner.

In the morning, I went out into the courtyard and selected from the hostel breakfast menu. I sought the highest caloric content and/or volume, and so awarded the Turkish breakfast, of egg, tomato, cucumber, cheese, bread, and honey and jam. I realized my mistake when two Japanese ladies were served their Menemem, egg scrambled with tomato and onion which came out of the kitchen still frying in a hot ceramic plate. Each woman made the, “Ooh,” noise peculiar to their race in turn on being served the steaming dish.

I felt very sociable so invited over a Dutch girl named Laura who was sitting alone, and her South African friend Elena soon joined us. They were on their way to a convention about brainwaves and human communication, but more immediately planned to visit an underground city called Kaymakl? and a placed called Pigeon Valley, and invited me to come.

There are hundreds of underground strongholds carved out of the soft limestone of Cappadocia as refuges during times of invasion by any of those forces to pass through this middle of the road-Hittites, Assyrians, Cimmerians, Scythians, Medes, Greek adventurers, Roman legionaries, Parthian shooters, Arabs and Mongols, Turks and Kurds. Mustafa, our hired guide, a short Turk in a nice suit, showed us with his tiny flashlight their stables, their living quarters, the sooty roof of their kitchen, the black basalt rock used for smelting copper and grinding spices before it was used to make gunpowder, the mill-wheel doors they rolled across the entryways, the 130 meter well that looked up to fresh air and down to groundwater. Low passageways and stairways dropped us down to lower rooms, all with indentations to hold supplies or water or dead bodies, depending on need.

Imagine the stench, O Reader, of 3000 live bodies and all their gross acts and deposits! And a secret passage led to a city which held 10,000 across eight stories! All trace gone now of those residents, but the empty ruin of their sanctuary. The smooth walls hardened when exposed to air; the obsidian and granite and marble mixed into the soft limestone made the exterior Cappadocian rock like concrete. The place would last forever.

We took a bus back toward Pigeon Valley. There were too many people, and the driver had a few stand but waved them into a crouch when we passed a gendarme truck. Pigeon Valley is one of the unearthly Cappadocian wadis that resemble more alien landscapes than terrestrial formations. There under the rock fortress of Uçisar and its Hyborian city the narrow valley deepens towards Goreme. At the lip the gray and grainy limestone mushrooms out, and it rivets down in waves like Saharan sand dunes. From these embedded pillars, hillmen carved great estates and manses for pigeons, with small holes for the entrance and cubbyholes for nests and juvenile red patterns advertise vacancies, for the purpose of collecting the ensuing dung to fertilize the valley floor, where in autumn old ladies and small boys gather melons, and the pomegranates are almost ripe.

We followed a strange path about these groves and up the rocky hill and sometimes under it, until we came to a part where it had fallen away into a gorge with the heads of trees far below, and no way down. A path led up toward the plumed tops, and we followed it through a long, narrow cave and further up, since that valley was deep. At the top of the hill stood a Japanese man with a camera.

“Harro,” he said to us as we were still staggering up the last slope. “Ex-cuse me, but do you know where is Pigeon Varrey?”

“Yes,” said Laura. “It’s up the valley that way.” She pointed, and we gave him more detailed directions.

“Ooh,” he said. “Okay. Sank you very much.” We watched him walk off towards the pigeon district and was silent as we took a track back towards Uçisar. (We decided to just take a bus back.) I couldn’t figure out what struck me as so odd about that scene-other than encountering a Japanese man at the top of a mushroom plateau under a rock castle in Cappadocia-but I realized it as we drank sodas at the House of Memories, before waiting for our bus in front of a mass grave for pottery: It’s strange and somewhat sad to see a Japanese tourist alone, almost like seeing a sheep separated from its clan.

Sunset crimsons and gilds that rocky place, and I went with Elena and Laura to watch it from a spiny ridge on the east side of Goreme. Swallows clouded the colored sky. “It sounds like they’re laughing,” said Elena of the avian chatter. “‘A swallow in the hand is worth ten in the air.’ What does that even mean?”

I said something about how having something is better than its possibility, and Elena said, “Well yeah, but why do you want a swallow anyway? Do you eat them?”

I was reasonably interested in those girls’ courses of study and learned through my inquiries about the Clean Language Theory.

According to its inventress, language has grown too complicated, with its tropes and ironies and artistic flourishes; miscommunication results. In order to be fully understood, and to fully understand others, we must undertake the following regressions: Eliminate from your speech the simile, metaphor, ironic, and anything implied; do not look people in the eye when waiting for a response, because that pressures them to speak immediately when they may wish to consider moronically their every tongue slip; when making to talk, look in someone’s eyes to see if they are thinking, and if they are, wait until they are not. Madame Psyche is unclear on what these signs are, but seems adamant that there are long stretches of the day during which most people are not thinking at all.

Obviously we could reduce this theorem to a wicked stratagem by an idiot, desiring to impose her idiocy on the collective that we might not ignore her simplistic, delayed communications, and that she might never have to say again, “I don’t get it.” If only I could wield this universal tongue of man, and cease with these infernal metaphors and inferences, release this unwieldy lexicon! Verbum sapienti sat est!

In South Africa, communications is a simple thing, if you speak a few languages. That gray nation has fourteen official ones, though English, Afrikaans, and Zulu are chiefly spoken. Several strange names survive from the horn’s furry colonial past. One arid town near Zimbabwe is called Otazhell, and some towns with Dutch names translate to things like Pregnant Chicken, Big Drink, and Well Without Water.

Another breakfast. I received my Menemem with eager satisfaction, and stirred the pot and doused it in chile pepper and salt. A few Nipponese sat at a table across the courtyard, goggling over their own dishes of Menemem with much more glee and energy than I could muster so early or over so little as a breakfast.

“I wish I was a Japanese tourist,” I said enviously to the Brits with whom I broke my fast,—”going around taking pictures of myself being cute and amazed. They have a lot more fun than we do.”

That day (Sunday) I had no fun at all and tripped for hours on significant technological hurdles. While I tried to blindly reset my camera’s color sensitivity and to make a Windows Recovery Console of my USB stick with Turkish utilities, I grew very agitated with the whole idea of digital progress.

Why can’t things just be simple!

Snoring woke me up, so I quickly dressed and walked up to the spinal ridge east of the town. A fleet of balloons sparked awake in the wadi below, and rose from angled graves. They bubbled up into the sky and dispersed on the currents to swoop down and bob among the sun-gilt dreamscape of columns crowned in golden hair-a grand armada of every color. One cruised close to my vantage point so I could see the faces of people packed into cubicles in its dangling carriage, and I did not envy them; my view was as superb. On the other horizons of that hill spectators stood diminished under the sailing craft. I tried to fit it in a camera, but it was too panoramic. It will never leave my memory.

I ate, played on my computer, and went for a long walk, running around on the ridges of limestone formations, free and unafraid. I took a long way back through the sandstone city. Veiled women sat cross-legged in front of their doors, and children played with sticks in the dirt, and chickens pecked at the refuse of melons harvested only to roast the seeds. How could I ever have thought I knew the world?

I sat back on a bench in the hostel common room in an electric glow that made me as inconspicuous as any invisibility draught. The sleepy Canadian staffer was talking with some sort of pilot from somewhere dirty in America. I listened to him talk about some Turkish belly dancer whom he met Istanbul, describing her body and imagining it nude with unhesitating candor. I was guilty of extreme satisfaction on hearing that he had lost the phone number of this Houri.

As the pillow-headed Canuck steered the conversation towards the pilot’s wife and kids, I stopped eavesddropping, at least until I found out he did not pilot commercial planes, but hot-air balloons. He had flown over all the states in the Union except Alaska and Hawaii, as well as fourteen countries, and hoped to fly across the Himalayas, which only one of many attempts had succeeded in doing. He was working in Goreme at the moment, for Shoe-String Balloons, and had moved there specifically for the scenery.

“I still take pictures,” he said. “All the tourists look at me funny when I take my camera out, and say, ‘Don’t you see this every day?’ But I just tell them that it’s still beautiful, and I want to remember the views.”

Go there Reader—to somewhere fantastic! To read, to see a picture, is not enough.

The Goreme Open-Air Museum costs twenty lira. The cave chapels in their stalagmite palaces included friezes and older cave paintings, juvenile as those red marks of Pigeon Valley, and their patterns would be geometric if the artists could produce a straight line. Among the kindergarten art of the Chapel of St. Barbara was a monster in a turtle shell, with a broom for a tail and the head of a beetle, reaching two bony arms straight towards the sky.

In one of the refractories, a big group of Japanese tourists had seated themselves around the long table formed by an ovoid ditch carved in the rock, which creates benches along the perimeter an an eating surface in the middle. They all posed on one side while another Nihonjin tried to balance his timed camera on a rock. After watching one failed attempt, I offered to take one by pantomiming.

The photographer was politely grateful, and his subjects errupted with Japanese enthusiasm and thanks. The timer was still activated for the first photo-op, but we got it working the second time, and after much ego-boosting and private photography sessions, I had the room to myself, to look at the paintings and the dining table and climb around in the nooks.

Contrasting with that party’s exuberance, I overheard a Texan aristocrat outside remark in his dialect, “It must have been a grave yard this morning. You see all those buses?” America: Why so serious? Why all the cynicism and sarcasm, of which I too am guilty? We should take lessons from the Japanese, who see the world through wider eyes. (Sorry but I couldn’t help it.)

Now after all this strolling through caves and waiting for tour groups, I had a great deal of energy. One of the great cones I saw on the way down the hill appeared a good way to spend it. I stepped off the path and climbed up a gash in the side of the cone, until I was between its two peaks, where I savored a few photos. When I turned around, some Japanese were standing there taking pictures of me. I gave them a big thumbs up, and then hopped easily down the slope while they gasped in wonder at this white monkey.

I pushed my way out of the crowd of humanity that had disgorged from metal boxes before the gates of the Open Air Museum. Across the road, another rocky hill: a composite of several cones, like a natural Angkor Wot, with barely a suggestion of a path to its summit.

I find the best way to face a problem is by running at it. The way around difficulties, walls, and pitfalls, usually presents itself to one with open eyes and a little alacrity, who is better served by momentum than stasis. In the present case, I charged a dirt path and scaled the face of a sloping rock wall by digging my Tevas into a dry channel formed in the soft rock by the spring melt. I passed an arched nich surrounded by what looked like small altars, and went up another hill past a cave, and up another to perch for a while on a pinnacle overlooking the museum. I was one hundred feet high.

I dropped back down to enter the cave, and ran over the pile of rocks there. Those and the uneven ceiling suggested a cave-in, but the door on the opposite side of the chamber remained unblocked. Through it, I sped onto a goat path, and clung to the edge where it spurned deep gullies by sheer force of momentum, which carried me into another formation of fairy chimneys. One of these had a door, which I clambered through. Left the new cave bled back to deep, empty shadow. A few holes in the wall served more to blind than aid he who would know that dark. I turned right, out another door, and hopped down a crevice by moving side to side. I almost tripped up in the dirt, but leapt instead over a few scrubs to land safely in the grass beyond, with enough inertia left over to sail me down more switchbacks and out onto the asphalt.

That night, before the hostel served dinner, I climbed the stairs to the topmost level and sat in a chair next to the frosty pool. The hostel was shaped like half a funnel, with stairways and ramps and walkways and tunnels reaching to its three stories of rooms and dormitories, and from the top it looked like the Skywalker ranch, and the city looked like Bedrock.

Two Kiwis found me up there-a mate on an Oregonian’s motor-sailer named Janna and a trauma expert named Jenny. Over beers I learned about a small island of a thousand inbred souls, where the single cop can be run off if he doesn’t do his job right, about the lifeguard culture of Kiwis and Aussies, and about Kiwi slang. Brits are Poms, or Prisoners of Her Majesty, and white people are paheka, from a Maori term. Americans are seppies, from septic tank, from tank, from yank, from yankee. Brilliant.

Dinner came downstairs in the form of greasy lentil soup, fresh bread, grilled vegetables, and the best part of the chicken, as well as three glasses of wine. We sat with a Kiwi couple, Jonno and Steph, and talked about the Russians who pose half-nude for photos at Pammukale. Someone brought up Peter Jackson, who Jenny lived near and had done some job for, and whom she said was arrogant, doubly so since he lost a lot of weight and married such a weird wife.

This got us onto the subject of some fat woman Janna and Jenny had seen in a carpet shop. “She sat on a douve,” said Janna, “and her fat spilled out over the side. Some boy I used to know called it- Well, nevermind, it’s not appropriate.”

She carried the story out to its conclusion, and then I asked, “But what was the word for the woman’s fat?” Jonno also wanted to know, and we pressed her until she finally told us: “Gunt.”

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off―then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
―Moby Dick

I left some things with Tuna and Monica at the pension and took an early bus to Demre, about three hours drive from Fethiye and one hour from Olympos. There as the bus offloaded a man cradling a clipboard met me and two others, an American named Jeff and his Istanbullu girlfriend Sinem. He led us at a distance, as we dragged our baggage, to a cafeteria where we ate chicken and rice and introduced ourselves to our shipmates―the South Africans Dave, Zach, and Christopher; and Jeff and Katie, Rhode Island honeymooners. On the shuttle bus across a marsh to the harbor we met two Aussie girls, Nadia and Jennifer.

A dinghy motored us out past various indistinguishable craft to our twenty meter gallet, the Babaveli 4. Of the knights and squires who crewed her, there were three: Soner the burly captain, Ramazan his sleepy mate and deckhand, and Zuzu the cook. These three set about explaining various rules of conduct in a matter not intended to maintain our attention, but only to expel those requisite words as one spits out mouthwash. Ali our guide left on the taxi with his clipboard and nearly with my shoes, one of which fell in the sea as the pilot tried to toss it past a net on the Babaveli, and we thank Tevas for buoyancy. He returned forty minutes later with our last two guests.

“Ah, they are older,” said Soner. “This is bad. Now we cannot play loud music.”

Now Captain Soner rolled out two tattered treasure maps on the table and explained our route, which the reader will soon know from beginning to end in all its deviations from the plan he proposed, which for the sake of confusion we will mention no more. The boat hauled anchor and cast off on the full torque of its motors―if you asked, the sails were broken, or the wind was not right; the masts stood useless for the duration of the trip, holding only a hammock and the two flags, the crimson Turkish and the white of V-Go Tourism.

All of us passengers had our stories. Jeff taught English in Istanbul, Sinem physics in the same. The Afrikaners were partway through a closely budgeted trip. The Rhode Islanders had their honeymoon to savor, and nagging legal work that refused to permit such satisfaction on the bridgegroom’s part. The Aussies had five months of travel ahead, before jobs noosed them into an auditing department―“Taxman,” I said; “Taxwoman,” they corrected.

Our older couple, after proving the Captain’s prophecy and dimming the volume at which Bob Marley was permitted to wail, said they were from California, from Los Altos even! John worked for Cisco. Joanne was a retired op-ed writer for the San Jose Mercury News, from before their acquisition by the MediaNews fascists! I was fascinated and querulous and probably obnoxious, as only an almost-professional journalist could be, and also learned that Joanne’s ex-husband’s daughter was the same Meghan who entered Santa Clara at 14 and is about to graduate, at 17, with a degree in Classics.

The Babaveli sailed through a wide strait between hills of sharp white crags with an adolescent peach fuzz of scrub; to starboard the Lycian mainland, to port the island of Kekova. We passed our first landmark, the Sunken City, whose name suggests a more romantic scene than reality confirms, and which I am shortly to deprive you of as well. There were indeed some submerged foundations, and some walls and door frames on the cliff, to suggest where the Roman village had stood before a shattering earthquake, but to call it sunken you must apply that same adjective to a bar of soap you dropped in the tub.

Then we crossed to the mainland and docked at Simena, where the day-trippers outnumber the locals five to one, and crossed the disheveled concrete pier to join them among the old overgrown stone houses and cafés. Cracked stairs rose to the heights of the fortress at a conical peak of the ridge. This costing about $5, I went with Nadia around the side of the cliff, where scattered on the hog-backed hump stood twenty stone tombs in various states. They had boxy bases, most of them with holes punched through, and high sloping roofs, and looked like statues of the thatch roof cottages in some Carpathian village. Everyone arrived at the bottom at the same moment and ate ice cream or drank beer, depending on disposition, before we disembarked once more for the waves.

“I heard you say you’re allergic to the sun,” said Jennifer.

“Yeah,” said Dave, vulgar Afrikaner accent measured by years in theater. “It’s a rare condition called TK. I was diagnosed with it last year. The sun turns me red and makes me sick, so I have to wear this,”―he held up a bottle of SPF +50 sun cream,―“whenever I go out.”

“That’s horrible,” said Jennifer, and I asked scientifically as Doctor Van Helsing, “How long can you be in the sun?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never tested it. I normally don’t go out at all.”

Indeed foul vampire, you stick to your night lair since the condition struck you. Were you bit and infected by some Vampire Bat in darkest Africa, or by some carrier of that Undead plague in an urban jungle? Now do you flee brave men that might seek you to anywhere but the world’s furthest corner? I watch you and mark well the remark that you have gone through as much sunblock as normally takes half a year to employ. Two things are peculiar: a vampire should balk at the sea, being helpless in the water, and should likewise fear the strong Lycian sun; yet you embrace both.

Yet something interrupts these meditations, for Zuzu strangles passionately a bell and shouts, “Tea time! Tea time!” with a wild grin and energy, an understanding of the scene’s comedy, and a joy in its execution.

Over tea and biscuits the Afrikaners laughed at the supposedly dangerous territories they’d visited. They had stories from Johannesburg and Cape Town and their slums of being shot at and robbed, of knife artists who slit you into a dozen pieces before you see the first flash of their blade, of men walking home naked for having been robbed of everything, and would have continued this sensationalism had Christopher, a Pole by birth and still perfecting his Afrikaans, dispelled it by saying, “Come on guys, it’s not that bad.”

Is this not true of most dangers―harsher horrors in reputation than reality?

Now the Captain steered us back the way we came for three leagues, or ten miles, to a wide bay sheltered by two weathered peninsulae like mandibles. It was, due to the harshness of the rocky landscape around it, a place only boats could reach. Three galiots similar to our own already anchored there, and we dropped our weight a bit apart near the southern lip, but only after tripping to the northern one to visit a hole. It was twenty feet high and the same width, and pirates once used it for their haven.

The Afrikaners and I, me with borrowed snorkel, dove off to explore. The deep bay shallowed to six feet at the entrance, and inside the cave shot off for fifty feet to the left and right. A further chamber off the left branch held in knee-deep water a rocky island ten feet across, which was the only dry land.

After mooring we swam about the bay and I climbed onto one of its small islets, in spite of the foot-slicing keenness of the jagged and porous rocks. We lounged about and chatted as other caravels pulled in, and Jeff and Sinem fished off the side with nothing but a reel, weight, and hook, with mussels to bait the piratical fish, and caught tiny flounders. At 8 we received a feast of sea bream, potato salad, tomato salad, spaghetti, and bread.

Dark came and a rumbling dinghy followed it closely with an echoing rumble to taxi the eight youngest of our boat and its Captain, to the cove’s other attraction: the Smugglers Inn. A bayou sort of dock leads up to the grass-roofed pavilion, the outer terrace with great squares of floor-level cushions and low tables, and the bar and dance floor inside. We got expensive drinks and sat with some people from the other sailboats, who were this remote taverna’s only patrons, though the Babaveli was by far the best represented.

The DJ played oldies from the 60s and 70s that girls love to dance to, and which young men tolerate for that reason; but while most of our table left for that I was too much engaged with a couple from Vancouver, discussing travel plans and beer. In our homesickness for hops and cheap sushi we reverted to the fast speech and cheap sarcasm of our territory.

“You guys are very sarcastic in Vancouver,” Dave commented. Josie admitted, “We are very cynical.” “Well I think you’re a bunch of dicks,” he said,―”That was sarcasm!”

Now Jennifer had made the mistake earlier of talking alone and at length with our Turkish Pasha, and this manifested itself in the Pirate’s Inn with Soner, in a green Hawaiian shirt, asking her constantly for the next dance and becoming very drunk between her refusals, so much so that when the dinghy finally returned our merry band to our merry ship, Soner nearly fell overboard reaching for the ladder.

I sat drinking restorative draughts of water with him and some of the Afrikaners on deck, and he said, “I saw you dancing Jon.”

“I saw you dancing, too,” I replied. We had not been more than five feet from each other, and he danced in an erratic, eye-catching activity.

“I saw you are not a very good dancer,” said our Captain.

“I’m better when I’m drunk.”

He laughed and said, turning to an Afrikaner, “Don’t you agree?”

“I think,” said Zach, “that Jon dances with inspiration.” This thankfully closed the topic, since the girls started giggling below and Soner wanted to imitate them.

The eight of us who had went to the Inn brought up our wool blankets and pillows and laid them out on the sunbeds of what a very enthusiastic person would call the forecastle. Then the Afrikaners and I jumped into the water. The sea there had phosphorous in it, and when you moved your hand that element made sparks fly out like alchemy. I climbed back aboard, washed the brine off myself, and descended into my nest of blankets. I had turned my mattress around so my head stuck out from the tented tarp, and I lay there watching the night sky, which was particularly fine due to our distance and the absence of the moon, on that final eve of the Ramadan.

Permit me this opportunity to exhibit something I wrote on the topic:

What is space? It is no sea, for what makes a sea but containing land? The firmament is an ocean, free and mysterious, bound only by the unknown limits of the Universe, as the circumference of Earth binds its ocean streams. Wonder at its grandness, never to be fully realized; despair at its oppressive spaces; yield to its cosmic courses, uncontrollable by all the might man can muster; for only one so humbled can course safely the stars, and never can a man say, “Here do I belong.”

Justly wrote, O Muse. I lay there considering this and counting the shooting stars, and trying to figure out what was going on next to me, where there was some frantic whispering. I discerned the voice of Jennifer and some man, who I soon determined to be our Captain, for that Torghud Ra’is, that Khaireddin Barbarossa, that Ottoman ravager of Christian seas, had rolled into the mattress next to her in order to inform her, “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you about my feelings.”

“You’ve only known me for one day,” she said, and, “You’re the Captain,” and, “Shouldn’t you go to bed? You have to get up early.” I’d heard enough of that, and once I’d swallowed my brotherly instincts, and determined that it really wasn’t any of my business, me being a stranger to all those around me, I drowned it out with some moody post-rock from my iPod to match the starscape, which had the advantageous effect of muting the Captain’s subsequent yacking.

Let me tell you about my boat.

Seat yourself aft, for the purpose of this exercise, in the quarterdeck. There are blue cushions along the rear of the chrome railing that lassos the ship, and white deck chairs surround a long dining table with bumpers to defend the laps of those dining there in the shade of a blue canopy. Behind stretches the plank―a fifteen-foot wooden board, supported in its erection by one of the two bare white masts by rusted cable―for when the gallet backs into port. A blue and white dinghy hangs from two cranes propped to either side of the stern plank. The wine dark sea foams below with the energy of our passing.

Look forward to a stairway down into the low galley, with the pilot’s helm and console to the left, a stuffed minifridge between. On the roof are speakers, a blue mattress, and a water tank. A hammock hangs between the mainsail mast and one of the many spliced-steel guywires supporting those crossed towers, which fly the red colors of Turkey and the white of V-GO Tourism.

Inside the tight gallery: to the right are benches in an L-shape around a table, and to the left a kitchen and bar. Fore of this and down two steps is a hallway, around which are based four cabins with barely more room than the beds, and with closet bathrooms and high windows looking out onto the gunwale; and aft of the galley, above the engine, are two more, enough for twelve people. The crew sleeps in the galley or on the deck; and so, weather abiding, do the other sailors.

From our position in the quarterdeck we can see through slanted windows the forecastle or poop deck above the four forward cabins, slightly lower than the roof of the galley. There in the shade of a canvas tarpaulin, hung over the boom on the foremast, are twelve blue mattresses with headrests and stains from tanning oil. To reach this, walk around the galley on the narrow gunwale. Towels and swimsuits dangle from clotheslines along this stretch, and on the starboard side the railing opens for a ladder to be dropped. All along the railing, miscellaneous ropes and devices and bumpers hang, awaiting some mariner’s need.

We lie on one of the blue mattresses and look forward across sailors reading or chattering, around the foremast, to the bow where deck and railing pinnacle in a picturesque pulpit, where the sails are folded and stored. A net and a pair of anchors hang under this ridge. On top can be seen the crank and crane for the anchor that stops our momentum for sleep.

I woke up, as is the misfortune of sleeping outdoors, with the dawn. I watched this celestial show passively, went for a swim, and ate a Turkish breakfast with the rest when Zuzu rang his bell. The Captain, who slept on the roof and had since vanished below, had yet to reappear, despite his plan to sail before dawn to Kaş. We all speculated on his situation until finally he came topside, looking awful, and directed the Babaveli out of the pirate cove and into the strait. We passed the Sunken City of Kekova and Simena town for the second time and emerged from the island’s shelter onto the sea’s full chop.

Something should be said of the sway. You get used to a rocking boat rather quickly, though night time, when there is no twisting horizon by which to establish your direction, can be disconcerting. The crash and pound of the open sea, especially on a windy day like that one, is random and nauseating. I sat on the roof and wrote while the others slept. I envy those who can nap, as I can only when extraordinarily tired.

The northern shore during this voyage was the same span of white and beige rock and green scrub, only it rose higher into peaks and ridgelines. To the south was the curved void between Lycia and Libya; upwards the sky swirled with frothy cirrus clouds. We sailed towards more ominous cumulus fortresses. In Kaş these clouds banked around the sloped port town in the shielding shadow of a mountain, and their thunder echoed while the rain did not wet us. Yet after a three hour stop―during which time I used the Internet and bought a paper and drank tea, the boat ate a lunch of green beans, rice, salad, and yogurt, and John and Joanne debarked permanently, citing a loose disc―we sailed into and through the storm over rough seas that rocked us side to side.

In Firnas Bay we anchored in a scattered convoy of sailboats and catamarans, most of them rigged for sailing. I tried my hand, or rather lungs, at snorkeling and at diving to the bottom, learning from the Afrikaners how to keep my pressure equalized. Zach was an expert at it and could reach 50 feet―though at that depth his streamlined goggles pushed into his eyes. Zuzu signaled tea time, and at an advantageous moment, for sitting there slurping coffee I witnessed the streak and bloom of lightning on a distant hill.

“Fifteen miles,” I said after counting the seconds. When I explained my methodology, the Australians and Turks were impressed, but Jeff asked, “Isn’t that an urban legend?”

“No,” I said, “that is the truth.” There were more booms from the mountains. “At least I hope it’s the truth.”

The lightning closed in―ten miles, then eight and two―and a torrent of rain fell, and the wind took on all that intemperate fury that cast away Odysseus. I got dressed and helped take in things from the deck and batten down the hatches, as the Babaveli moved to the middle of the bay along with the whole vacationing armada. We climbed downstairs and sulked in the galley around backgammon games and books.

Ah, the storm at sea! Regaled and shrunk by nature’s fury in nature’s playground! Diminished at the feet of capricious, jealous Poseidon! What survival skill cannot accomplish, prayers must supplement, and when they fail so doth thy ship. She bounces and jostles her penitent crew, her unhappy inmates, who take every superstitious step toward the guarantee of parole. We can scarcely see the shore, and the pounding rain and howling wind keep us in as well as an electric fence. Then Tempest passes and leaves in her wake the rainbow, and a gyrating mass of recombinant ships, jostling to secure their positions against future aggregates of her wrath. So the day ends in gratitude and beer and grilled chicken and backgammon and words, and so we look up at the sky in newborn wonder.

We ate fried chicken and pasta and salad, all very salty, and Christopher, known to his friends’ moms as the Horse, and myself were chief consumers. Then we all fell back to cards and backgammon, and too early to bed in our cabins. The mattresses above were soggy.

A boat at night is a muddled multitude of sound. The wind carries distant noises―calls to prayer, Turkish pop, conversations―across the water and makes its own terrible noise and rattles the boat. The timbers creak, and the bilge water shifts as if someone next door were taking a bath. Sometimes the pump churns to life. Through paper-thin walls you hear all the boat’s activity―the clink of dice, the chatter of Zuzu and Ramazan, the whispers of other sailors. The masts and the lines drip water in the fresh wake of a storm. Morning overwhelms these peaceful noises. In the fore, the weighing anchor rattles worse than Marley’s chain. Aft the engines rattle your teeth.

This cacophany, and the heat, humidity, and odor of a ship cabin, make sleep a hard luxury of the distant shore; but, for a night at least, you can’t really mind it.

I rose at 5:30 with the grinding engines and went top side in a fleece to watch the sun rise golden with Dave and Chris and coffee. The Turks took turns piloting out of Firnaz Bay and along the Lycian coast, and those not thus engaged slept on the galley benches.

Around 9 we anchored in the Valley of the Butterflies, a cleft in the mountains south of Fethiye that opens only to the sea, though some reach it by repelling down a high cliff. In summer this place fills with butterflies and at all times of the year with hippies who sleep in tents and rented bungalows. A boat ferried us in after breakfast for an hour’s exploration, and then we swam and left. Two hours took us to Ölüdeniz, which I was not displeased to see again.

Here I went snorkeling to see the strange things that grew on a peninsula’s steep slope, which I climbed in flip-flops; and on boarding the ship I listened to the Afrikaners argue about paragliding. This was done under curved parachutes, and under an experienced pilot strapped to your back, as you coasted from a ridge’s mile-high peak to the beach, across updrafts and swirling thermals, which could prolong your trip to an hour. Ölüdeniz ranks among the best places in the world for this vertiginous sport, yet phobic Dave was the first to insist on going to the peak, only for a look. When Chris and Zach decided to do it, and took turns saying, “I’m doing it,” and calling Davea homo, he said, “Alright, I’m going to do it.”

“We’ll jump,” said Chris. “We might have some homo tendency not to, but we’ll get over it.”

Jeff from Providence, who I must remind the reader was a Toulane-educated lawyer, replied, “I’ve never heard it put that way before.”

“I’m more nervous,” said Dave, “than the first night when I played as Marc Antony.” Chris was originally Polish, Zach very Afrikaans Dutch, and Dave did Shakespeare and Stoppard and a Sprite commercial, “But I just couldn’t take my Dad’s nagging anymore, so I went back to school for an MBA and got a suit and tie and a nine-to-five.”

A taxi picked up the three adventurers, and we sailed off to a natural harbor between the mainland and St. Nicholas’ Island, which supported thousand year old ruins that I thoughtfully explored―and was later accosted by a ranger of tourists for climbing in without paying. (How can you charge entrance for an island?) An amber and lavender sunset framed the jungle of the hills, and a sliver moon rose in the southwest. The Afrikaners arrived after it was over, in an adrenal euphoria from their glide. They had jumped off a cliff and survived.

Dinner came as a feast of salty hamburger patties and salads and noodles, but we ate it all. Afterwards Soner sat with us and taught us some Turkish drinking games, which stressed slapping and clapping, and Christopher led us in a game of Twenty-One. We listened to a sappy CD that some American girl had made him, signed, “Love Stacey,” and to the Dire Straights. Ramazan and Zuzu delivered a final concoction: a cored watermelon with a feral face lit by candles―a tropical Jack-O-Lantern. We jumped in the cooling water to play with the phosphorus and swam over to a luxury super-yacht parked next door to play in the light it bled across the bay. We slept on the roof and looked at stars.

In the morning, we were underway for Fethiye, skipping a final bay due to weather and the Captain’s hangover. Turkish music blared over the speakers, and Soner told us, “This singer is a transvestite.” It sounded like a man, so I asked, “He started out a man and became a woman?” “Yes,” said Soner. “She is very popular.”

In Turkey homosexuality carries with it the same stigma you would expect from a pious, conservative country; the homosexual son is banished, a gay neighbor scorned and refused service; and yet curiously, if these once contemptible Sodomites convert their sex through surgery, they are accepted once more, as fitting in with what God intended them to be. Look up statistics on Iranian sex changes―I don’t have the time!

We crashed into the thick forest at the harbor, filled ourselves with a last lunch, and dispersed to various ends. The Afrikaners went to Bodrum, party capital of Turkey. The girls from Oz were on their way to Greece and Italy. The honeymooners had a ticket to Rhodes, and Jeff and Sinem for Istanbul. I myself had a later one for the same old city. I picked up my liquor from Ferah Pension, had a few beers, and settled into my seat―the last one available on that ride―to fight for leg room with an old Indian pitted opposite me across a table.

I am but a poor man, but wit’s better than wealth.
―Rob Roy

Immediately on landing in Rhodes I sought out the post office, where the replacement debit card I had expected to arrive few days before I did was not there. This put me in as precarious a position as Odysseus landing on Phaeacia. I stumbled in aimless but determined wanderings into tourist office and received from my Nausicaa, who was much older and more disillusioned than the one in the story, a card for a local hostel run by a Greek named Peter.

The Rodos Hostel certainly rescued my chances. It not only offered beds for $15 a night, a especially low price for a Greek resort afforded by its lack of toilet paper or even toilet seats, but also a substantive exchange library, and a kitchen for me to cook cheap. This fine dining began with my traditional meal of bread and cheese and a beer―a Mythos. I picked up The Alchemist from the library and was lying around reading when an Aussie ski-instructor and traveler came in. Adam was born in Spain, and as a lot of people from the younger British countries do, told me that he was Spanish. I went out with him, and with three other Aussies: Craig, Matt, and Andrew. We went wandering around the battlements of that old town until we were well lost.

The Knights of St. John turned Rhodes into a massive fortification, so as to continue their solitary crusade against the infidel Turks. High battlements and deep moats surround the old city, and a great Castle of the Grand Master of that order. The old town itself retains a medieval character, as it was never sacked or destroyed. The Knights Hospitaller only lost it when the Sultan made a concerted effort to expel those corsairs from his domain, and after considerable losses agreed to led the Knights leave in peace. (They went to Malta to continue their zealous piracy.) The Italians later occupied it, after World War I, and their repairs and renovations to the old town give it a Latin character―not that the old stone buildings, the narrow alleys arched by additions and supports, the mosques and churches, the marketplaces and castles, or the clocktower, are in any need of that.

As I learned on Friday that my new cash card was in Halki, a small rock that supports 300 people, a lighthouse, and a vacuum of a post office, and could not be transferred to the Rhodes Central Post Office until the following Tuesday, I had plenty of time on my hands. That day the Aussies and I went up to the old harbor where the Colossus stood, and to a beach north of there with a fifteen-foot diving board on a platform out in the surf. Rain caught us on the way back under a stoa with two dozen package tourists in sun-hats and short-shorts and sarongs, and when it slowed we hustled over to a kebab shop and got gyros and beers in one-liter boots. When these were done, we stopped by the hostel on our way to another bar for more cheap beers on a rooftop terrace, sitting in the center to avoid the wet viewpoints.

The conversation shifted from an illuminating lecture on Aussie abbreviations when Adam learned that the other three Aussies all left girlfriends behind to travel. Incredulity resulted because he saw illicit affairs with the opposite sex as one of travel’s greatest directives, and talked wistfully of the life of a ski instructor in Whistler and the blonde American girls he had met there. Adam had a girlfriend before he left, and while he did not technically break things off before rambling on, he hoped nine months away with minimal contact and no efforts at fidelity on his side of the world would accomplish the hard, emotional work for him.

For dinner we bought groceries at a supermarket outside the southern ramparts and made the Western brand of mousaka described three chapters prior, which was very filling.

Saturday we rented a small Hyundai for $45 and drove around the island: first south on the east coast to Faliraki, then west to the Valley of the Butterflies, which we insisted on visiting even as we deprecated ourselves for it, and which we never actually entered, it being egg-laying season. Rather than bowers weighed down with billions of winged insects, we saw five butterflies and an unfortunate crab which we photographed and dropped a few times.

I inexpertly took over the driving down the west coast, stopping at a wine factory, and south to some Greek city, which we also did not enter. Driving there was an incredible sight. The roads were straight and distant, the rules mere suggestions. My hands itched for impromptu lane changes and constant honking after so long in the Orient. The sky had a mystic quality, with great spreads of shaded clouds on a brilliant blue sky. Shadows played on the island terrain, which on the coast was mostly flat but in places and especially inland shot up into wrinkled ridges.

Andrew took over for the next leg further south to a fortress on top of a high ridge over Glyfada Bay. We took off our sandals for a better grip and augured up to the top of the wall, just because it was there. Below it we followed rusted sign to an isolated restaurant called Johnny’s Fish House and stopped there for lunch. We swam in a rocky cove underneath the diner and jumped off the cliffs, before continuing south to another fortress, this one called Monolithos, where we found a sort of tunnel and climbed around like spiders, only realizing our danger when we came close to falling.

Now it was around 4 o’clock, and we had to return the car to Rodos by 9. We sped back across the island with one more stop to make on the east coast, south of Faliraki. Lindhos was a postcard town of white houses wedged in a rocky valley between the spire of the ancient acropolis, crowned with yet another fortrezza, and a sky blue cove, divided from the sea by a long spindle of rock, with a sandy beach. It took us some time to navigate the town’s alleyway gridwork, as any signs pointing to the acropolis seemed to direct us first through a maze of tourist shops and pubs with English football games on a schedule out front; but eventually we found the right set of stone stairs.

The fortress closed in fifteen minutes when we reached the entrance, and they let us in only on the pledge that we run. We exercised our backpacker’s constitution and cobblestone footing as we sped up stairs and through passages cut in the rock, across fields where marble curdled up between the flagstones, and finally up a long Rocky sort of step to the highest point, where the columns of old Olympian temples stood between us and a far view of the world. If all days could go like this, what you would see, and at such low cost!

We arrived home in twilight and made another dish of mousaka, this time with a bit more experimentation, so it took even longer than the first batch despite our experience, yet it was also very good. We met an Aussie girl named Mel while eating, and she joined us at a shisha place around the corner for some peach-flavored smoke. The cafe sat alongside a deep ravine, and on the other side more restaurants and bars climbed up the wall, so it looked strange and alien. The house music of our venue competed with the techno of another and became very obnoxious. We bought beers and went out to the main square to sit on a grand staircase to nowhere that young people commonly occupied, until we got tired early and went back to sleep.

I did not do much the following day but read in a nook of the wall surrounding the Grand Master’s Citadel, accessible by climbing a fence into a graveyard of Roman statuary, and play poker with the three remaining Aussies, since Adam and Mel had left; and on Monday walked around and worked on that Istanbul chapter, time consuming for the both of us. That night we made souvlaki with pork shish kebab, tzatziki, onion, tomato, and french fries or chips. Peter, the venerable hostel owner, and his wife who instructed us thought it looked very authentic, but could not try any because it was the Day of the Cross and a fasting holiday. We shared some with a new arrival, Hire from Japan, and after ice cream he and a Kansas girl named Noel joined us for Uno.

We played a variant of Uno first introduced to me by a German in Skopje, where anyone with a matching card can toss it onto the pile and throw off the sequence at any time. Noel taught the rules of Speed Uno, which we called Spuno, and played with us and Hire until very late. When the courtyard light went off, Craig first wore his headlamp, and then hung a flashlight from the bough of a tree so it illuminated the table. Noel went to bed and Hire wanted to, but Andrew resisted: “When else will you play Spuno with three Aussies, an American, and a Japanese, in a courtyard, under a flashlight hung from a tree?” he asked rhetorically.

Soon we changed this arrangement even more by switching the flashlight to signal or rave mode, so that it flashed on and off every half-second. Cards appeared on the table in the dark spaces, and it was impossible to check your own deck. We all strained our eyes and laughed so much that Peter came out to yell at us. The new rule was that whenever anyone threw down a Wild +4, it became strobe time, or Struno. This was a horrible idea and we all went to bed with nascent headaches.

I woke up the next day with a new debit card and no inkling where to take it. I had ticket for the Marmaris ferry for 4:30, but after that my future was in the clouds. Bodrum, ancient Halicarnassus and the party capital of Turkey, was a possibility; Fethiye, a small coastal town, another; and Olympos, ancient hippy enclave of tree huts and eternal flames, a third; or I could head back to Istanbul to retrieve my package, or see something else along the way. The world is your oyster, said a wise man, because that’s all the world is.

In Marmaris I bypassed the tourist district for a more Turkish one, found a bank, and walked to the otogar. Buses were about to depart for Istanbul and Fethiye, and I chose the latter. I had a brochure for a pension there called Ferah, and when we arrived in that strip of a seaside town at around 10 I walked through the Turkish district, the marina and its accompanying tourist sectors, and found the place in the dark. I slept in the dormitory on the top floor, which had open windows along one side and bunk-beds along the other and nets strung across the tin ceiling.

I spent the next day, a Wednesday, finishing that Istanbul chapter, getting a haircut and shave, and orienting myself in the town. In the evening I came back to the hostel and invited a group of travelers to dinner: my roommate, Tim of Australia, an artist named France from Montreal, and two women from Wisconsin, Deborah and Jordee. We went to the fish market. Fish are displayed in a ring at the center, and the customer choses a fresh-caught fish and points to a restaurant, which cooks the fish and adds a salad and bread for five lira. We shared sea bass, salmon, and prawns with some Turkish mezes, dipping sauces used as appetizers, and left full.

The next day I took a dolmuş to Saklikent Gorge. Heeding Nick’s warning, I wore only a shirt and swim trunks, and brought only a pen, paper, and enough money for a bus back. There a chalky river has gouged a path through marbled rock. Maybe I should not have worn my flip flops. One of these came off as I crossed an icy tributary which met the river just up from the entrance, but luckily an enterprising Turkish boy dove to grab it and charged me one lira for its return.

I pushed my way up the torrent, and did my best, despite the gray opaqueness of the water, to stick to the shallow areas created by mounds of gravel and scree. Behind a waterfall, the cave continued on into darkness. The walls of the crevice did not form a solid ceiling over the river, but came close enough, like teeth, so as to block out much of the sun’s light. Look up and see only misty sunbeams that pierce the stones. The walls were cracked and smooth like the hide of an African beast and billowed out about the water line that carved them. In places I climbed up rocks or wedged myself into narrow spaces to proceed up the river’s tiered passage, into eddied pools beneath small fountains, until I came to a place where lack of skill and footwear prevented any further progress.

That evening I ate more fish with Deborah and Jordee and wrote in a notebook, and the next day the three of us went after breakfast to Kayakoy\once a city of 3500, a Greek town abandoned during the population exchange of the 1920s. To see how quick a modern town falls into ruins scarcely distinguishable from those cities of antiquity over which we seek enlightenment in remonstrance, this humbles the modern man, who thinks himself so advanced. How quick would our cities fade? Leave a city empty and alone for a year and see what happens to it: a rejoinder of the wilderness, which restores itself to full meaning in a fraction of the time it takes an urban sprawl.

I broke into the city by climbing up walls and running around in my tough new Tevas, and rendevoused with Deborah and Jordee past the entrance and its sleepy warden. We looked through that remarkable valley town, and then followed a trail up past the old cathedrals into the mountains.

Yet what cause do I have to repeat the following scenes? for we had a guide! These directions were written by a traveler named Fergus Cunningham in October of 2005, in a handwriting so scrawled and on a paper so water-stained it looks at first glance like a missive from the Civil War.

To those who want to do this walk―allow at least 2 ½, 3 hours. Dolmuş to Kayakoy. Enter village by ciaff shops. Head up path to 17th Cent Church. Carry on up path. If you reach an old well you have gone the wrong way. Retrace steps back 30 meters and head up slope to your left heading southeast. You will find some way markers painted red and yellow (& sometimes white) like this = on rocks etc. A short Climb up will take you to ridge; continue in SE direction with views of sea straight ahead. You should have a valley on your right. Continue to first viewpoint looking West over bays and islands. Continue to next viewpoint shortly after. Shortly heareafter the path is more confusing on a slope and loose rocks. Head down the slope in a southerly direction if miss way markers. If lucky you will meet a well marked path that leads further down and across the valley bottom. This zigzags up to a partially open area. Watch out for the correct way markers. You know you are on the right path if you pass an old tomb on your right. Continue with valley on right in SE direction along easy-going path that eventually heads down & a viewpoint over Ölüdeniz lagoon. Zigzag downwards and the last section scramble down to the fence of the resort. Go right to end of fence, through gate (or over it), through the resort to the road. Follow road and it should be “Ölüdeniz Caddesi.” The road goes on to the beach (about ½ kms). Dolmuş back to Fethiye by bars/shops.

NB: This is part of the gLycian Wayh but the way markers can be confusing/misleading. Do not trust red & yellow markers in an arrow direction like this ^. They almost always point in the wrong direction. Older white pointed arrows are more accurate. Retrace steps if you do not find markers and you will find them eventually… Watch out for goats, and don’t step on any snakes.

We followed these directions verbatim and came by their instruction past secret coves and over forested hills to the lagoon we sought. On the beach we swam in crystalline blue water, and looked up into the heights of the hills where paragliders fell and swirled on thermals, with bright colors to their sails.

What next? I asked myself, over the fruit and yogurt salad I devoured after returning.

Further along the Lycian coast from Fethiye is Olympos, a hippy enclave with tree houses and a great field where natural gas emerges in flaming spouts; and east from there on the Mediterranean coast is Antalya, the great battleground for British and German socks-and-sandals tourists. The Germans leave towel on chair at 6, breakfast, and return to find a fat Brit has removed their towel and sagged into their chair. “Oh where could mein towel haft gone?” they ask their friends, loudly and in English. This sounded like a horrible place, and the only stories from Olympos included mention of dysentery, so I chose a third option: the sea.

And hurry, hurry, off they rode
__As fast as fast can be;
Hurra, Hurra, the dead can ride,
__Dost fear to ride with me?
—Burgher

I had to be in Marmaris on Thursday to catch a ferry to Rhodes, and in Istanbul whenever my last packages arrived; and looking for something to do in the interrim settled on Bergama and Selçuk. I bought a bus ticket and relaxed on the four hour trip south, so much so that when the bus pulled over to let me out, I did not register that it was on the side of the highway, near a sign that said, “Bergama,” with an arrow. I crossed the road and started walking.

A taxi driver waited for me under a billboard, either called out by one of the bus drivers or aware of their tactics, and said, “Where you go?” I told him, without stopping my gait. “It’s seven kilometers.” I expressed my happiness with considerable irony. “You must take taxi.” I told him I was penniless and kept walking.

I saw a bus station without busses and eventually caught a ride in a painter’s pickup truck to downtown Bergama, and wandered around there asking people about the hostel I’d picked out, until I found an entirely different lodging called the Athena Pension and got a bed for a reasonable price. The city had the look of an old Ottoman town, with downtrodden white buildings cropping from the ruins of Roman glory like a returning jungle.

That night I made pasta, substituting some red pepper and paprika paste for tomato sauce, which the Turks have yet to discover. It was good and spicy. I chatted with the Welsch couple who had arrived the same day, and made a bet that three girls who wandered in were from California. I knocked a few lira off the price by foregoing breakfast, and while I self-consciously nibbled my own bread and cheese the next morning at the well-laden breakfast table, I learned that the three girls were from Michigan, halfway through a week in Turkey. One of them had picked up in Istanbul a Turkish boyfriend—or rather he had picked her up—whom she was nearly sobbing over, preempting their separation.

In Turkey and Greece, holiday affairee is considered a worthwhile and productive profession for young men, who glide in on freshly debarked white girls like a hawk on a dove. Their pick-up lines are infamous—”Hey you look like an angel;” “Do I hear angels? Is this Heaven? Is this Paradise?” Most just spend a week with their vacationer and see her off at the airport only to meet another arrival, but some of these gigolos, less ethical than their cohorts, get girls to pay for them to travel around, or to give them money for a sick relative. I did not observe the Ottoman and his Michigani harem long enough to determine which degree of pimp he was.

You can see the ruins of Bergama, which the Greeks called Pergamon when they ruled the world, from anywhere in the valley where the modern city is sited. The tiers of stonework cling to a high, step hill, and sprawl across its top in squares and temples. You can take a bus, but I was too thrifty for that. Instead I walked uphill util I found a road, and followed that to a goat path, which I climbed slowly and with an eye for ticks until emerging at the Temple of Hera.

I walked across the remnant rubble, and did not worry about the grains of antiquity my sandals scraped away. If everyone did it, there would be nothing left for children’s children; but the wind, too, scrapes up chalky atoms, and the rain washes those into the dust, and one day the continents will collide and sweep the whole thing under, though we’ll be long gone by then.

The road up the hill led past exposed clay pipes, Roman brick and mortar, and the monumental stone of Hellenistic construction. There was a house still mostly intact, with paint on the walls and mosaics on the floors. The dirt road became a stone one near the theater, which sat 10,000 in a great nook of the mountain, and a tower behind the nosebleed seats had a stairway to the Trajanaeum at the peak of the Acropolis. Seven Corinthian columns still stood of the shrine’s dozens, and 22 of those that support the encircling stoa. Without was the wide court of the Forum or Agora, and across that a view over lakes and plains, and the ticketing office where less able tourists pay to enter the city.

At the bottom of the hill I broke into the Red Hall, the temple built of brick by Trajan for Sarapis and other Egyptian gods. The Christians used its many windowed hall, six stories high to worship Christ. Under the Turks it fell to ruin, and the Muslims maintain only a tiny outbuilding for their Red Mosque. From within the ruins you can see clearly the nave and narthex, the templon recess in the far end, and the height and structure of a once grand cathedral. I felt like Indiana Jones exploring the uneven ground inside. Under the altar was a deep cistern, closed off by metal grates, and to either side were towers with stairs that curved up to the top, though only the first two sets remain of eight suggested. Angry crows nest at the top, and around the remnants of statues of saints and emperors that decorate the arches.

That night I sat around with a cocky Texan and a sleepy Chicagan, and the next morning partook in the great breakfast. There were sliced melon and peaches and olives, bread and rolls, yogurt and honey and kaymak, preserves and chocolate spread, greasy borek rolls, sweet cakes, and fried eggs with tomato and feta, and when I was stuffed I transferred myself via bus to Izmir and Selçuk.

I had to be in Marmaris the next day, yet still wanted to see the touristy sites around ancient Ephesus. I thus rushed to the Homeros Pension, recommended by the Welsh couple, and had the owner drive me out to the entrance of Ephesus, the overpriced and overcrowded city. The Texan I met in Bergama suggested that the crowds mirrored those that filled the city in ancient times, when it was the seat of a Roman governor, but I retort that this is only true if that city was peopled by sunburned old Brits and shuffling Japanese tourists.

The ruins were magnificent beneath them. Below the theater’s 25,000 seats, on either side of the road, were two great junk yards. Bits of rubble were organized into neat rows by type—grave stones here, there the shafts of columns, there the pediments and capitals, there the eves of rooftops—broken by a gridwork of pathways.

I took a dolmuş back into the city and with the last few hours of daylight visited the Museum of Efes, to see the many-breasted statue of Artemis that once graced the altar of a Wonder of the World, and the statues of Romans and Greeks that followed the Lady of Ephesus into the stone dump of history. The pension offered a glass of wine on the rooftop terrace to see the sunset over the distant Aegean. I sat there reading Black Hawk Down, even though John Keats’ Endymion would have been more appropriate, and met an elderly couple of sailboaters from Ohio, who sold their house and gave away their dog and moved to Cairo.

Sandy had been recently hired to teach English to Egyptians at the American University, and her husband Larry would find a private job doing the same. Their stories were very interesting, and I got their contact information for when I came to that city. The dinner served on the terrace beneath the roof was soup and bread, stuffed green peppers with cream, aubergine, grilled chicken with rice, with vegetables and salad, and with watermelon for desert.

Before leaving for Marmaris the next day, I walked up to the ancient site of the Temple of Artemis, knowing full well what I would see. There was the outline of a great building in the excavated earth, and a single 60-foot column standing of the 127 that once did. It seemed a composite thing, made of bits of a dozen other pillars. Earthquakes destroyed it the year Alexander was born, and Christians took out the slowly recombinant replacement eight centuries later. Pieces of it went into houses and walls and the Hagia Sofia, and to the British Museum, so that the Ephesians retain only a token of their efforts.

I also saw the temple of Saint John, where the Baptist is buried, and arrived in Marmaris three hours later. The port occupies a bay rimmed by islands blue in the distance, and by high sloping hills covered in trees that seem tropical. I walked in from the bus station and around the marina to the old town, dead in the afternoon, and geared towards the yacht crowd. My ferry left at 5, but I knew only that it was called the F/D Yviskos and had to argue for a long time with the officials to get them to recognize my reservation and let me on the boat—a spaceship hydrofoil that rode on two skis. My relief at getting aboard made the unexpected €15 port tax, the choppy seas, and the Madonna concert video which played for the duration of the trip much more palateable.

I am not ordering you to fight. I am ordering you to die. In the time, it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place to defend this country.
—Atatürk at Gallipoli

In Moldova, while looking at my SD card in another person’s camera, I noticed that all my pictures from Varna north were in black and white with but a single color extant, usually some shade of green. It looks very artsy, but I’d prefer pictures in full color.

Like these one-color photos and their Schindler’s List style, I tend to pick out at a glance the most important aspect of a place and paint a broad picture using only that. Both of us — Camera and I — must broaden our palette if the truth is to be told. For me, it is a simple matter of effort. Camera, however, may require for his improvement some technical expertise greater than either of us possess, or someone who can navigate blindly his settings and change back whatever photo filter I managed to activate.

Ah, well! I will endeavor to compensate for his retarded functions. May we together paint the whole picture.

To speak Turkish to a Turk, even place names at a bus station, you must speak perfectly. “Çanakkale,” I would say, then, “ÇanAkkale, ÇanakkAle, ÇanakkalE, ÇenEkkale,” until one of those clicked, and the Turk said, “Oh, Çanakkale!” and I said Yes.

Leaving Üsküdar I watched the checkered masses of heaped buildings in indistinct tiers; multi-colored, spotted with laundry and rooftop gardens, with rust and grime, with graffiti and billboards. This was Asia, I reminded myself. We crossed north to Europe on the Bosphorus Bridge, and exited Istanbul through its suburbs. After a long drive we crossed the Hellespont on a ferry. The waters which Darius had whipped for destroying his pontoon bridge were today quiet.

Now this was long drive, delayed by traffic, and in the meantime I enjoyed the luxury of Turkish buses, which provide coffee and snacks, and read a book. This is a good time to talk about books. Reading is a major pasttime of travel, and on long trips that hunger must be satisfied largely by either purchasing Penguin classics or used books, or by exchange in a hostel library, which is usually full of novels about cops and various crimes and romances. You read what you can get. My own experience is a good example:

To start out my post-theft collection, I bought Cold Mountain from a gypsy in Varna, and traded that in Ukraine, where I also picked up a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for Murakami’s Kafka On the Shore. I traded Dracula with my friends in Istanbul for Lolita. Kafka On the Shore swapped places with a satisfactorily violent Viking novel called Sword Song in a small Trojan hostel library, and Sword Song ended up exchanged for Black Hawk Down on a shelf in a Pergamese pension. Now in Rhodes Black Hawk Down went for The Alchemist, which after its quick read went for Iain M. Banks’ Inversions, which went for The Fall of the Roman Republic, a Plutarch collection. I only finished the first of its lives, that of Gaius Marius, before trading it in Fethiye for Rob Roy, quoted in the last chapter.

Çanakkale is one of those places like Sparta or TK where unrelated locals tenderly embrace an adopted ghost — in this case that of a Trojan. Each store sells horse figurines and swords and helmets, and the Trojan Horse prop from the movie Troy looms over the harbor.

Troy was, as you know, in ruins — seven layers of them, including the Roman and Hellenistic cities that Heinrich Schleimann tore through to get at the pre-Homeric strata he favored. I looked at the mounds that were once temples, and sat on sponsored benches in the shade near the southern gate that the Horse went through. The wind that brought wealth to Troy also brought Achaean ships and Roman ones, raiders from Arabia and Turks from Central Asia and tourists from everywhere; it brought silt to fill in the beaches, so you can scarcely see the wine dark sea from the hill of Ilium; but I was not really in the mood to contemplate dead things. This and a general lack of interest shed the Anzac Mecca of Gallipoli from my itinerary.

There were two Brits on the dolmuş who said things like, “I’m intrigued,” and talked about someone named Harrington, in patrician dialects I would have thought satirical if I heard on television. I finally did talk to them in the parking lot after seeing Troy, and asked when the bus was coming. One was from London, and the other from Oxford. “Oxford!” I said,—”a very posh place, the Brits would say.”

“Yes,” said Oxford, “they would say that,” and he looked away. I eavesdropped on the way back to Çanakkale: “The image I had in my mind,” said London, “was a kind of rough sandy strand, covered with weeds, and Troy on a little hillock over that strand.”

Suddenly I found myself anxious to leave the White Tourist Circuit. This circuit encompasses the UK and Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, and West Germany, with pockets in Greece and the Cyclades and along the western coast of Turkey. The principal fauna are sunburned Brits, pissed Aussies, carefree Kiwis, lecherous Germans and Swedes, and faux-adventurous American backpackers. Its main exports are smugness, stale conversation, artificially inflated facebook friends lists, and digital photographs. If you seek truth, go somewhere else.

I returned to the hostel, and went with a German girl named Caroline to get kebab and ayran. Her dad had lived in Greece and said that, “Greeks are Turks who think they’re Italians.” I found this very amusing and true. The Greeks are certainly more Levantine than European, in their mannerisms, ethics, and hospitality.

The Ramazan drummer that night went right under the open windows of the dorm room, a glassed in studio at the hostel’s top level. A loud call to prayer followed, and then it was Saturday. I wandered around the city, not wanting to go to Gallipoli or spend any money. There was a drone of powerwashing and boat engines and Saturday morning palaver, and I read a book in the park of the naval museum, among the salvaged cannons and the husk of a German U-boat.

The seductive love of narrative, when we ourselves are the heroes of the events which we tell, often disregards the attention due to the time and patience of the audience, and the best and wisest have yielded to its fascination.
—Sir Walter Scott

The previous post on Istanbul covered most of my broad observations of the Turkish race, so that catching up to where I am now in my trip should be painless, and will require a haste for which the Reader and I should be equally grateful. To synopsize, after leaving Istanbul I traveled by bus to Troy, Pergamum, Ephesus, and Marmaris, by ferry to Rhodes and back, by bus to Fethiye, by sailboat around the Lycian territory, and by night bus back to Constantinople, to retrieve my final package. I will get into the details of this trip in short order, but first we have to conclude my first visit to that city.

There I was stuck, waiting for packages, and planning the next stages of my journey. On Sunday I went out for a fish dinner with Gavin and Nellie and Nellie’s brother Ned and his Turkish wife Oya.

We had salad and cheese and drank rakı with our levrek and çipura — sea bass and sea bream. We added water to turn the clear anise-flavored liqueur cloudy white. Gavin, Nellie, and I bought a bottle of it after we finished eating, and then several beers over the course of half as many hours. We met Steve and Carrie at a sports bar, where Steve was dressed up in the canary yellow Fenerbahçe jersey to support the Kadıköy team, and also met a Virginian teacher whose name I cannot remember. With his guitar in hand he went back with us to Gavin and Nellie’s apartment, along with ten beers.

The following day was dedicated to recovery. Nellie made coffee and omelettes, and might have felt better since she went to bed when we got back at 1 a.m. Gavin said, “You went to bed too early. Jonnie, when did you go to bed? Three?”

“Yeah, three,” I said.

“That,” replied Gavin, “was smart. Three is a reasonable hour. Midnight is an unreasonable hour… Five is a very unreasonable hour.”

“Did you drink all those beers?” I asked.

“We were just going to finish that one I opened for you, but yeah, I guess we did,” said Gavin, and he put his head in his hands. “I know this is cliché,” he added, “but I’ve never felt like this before.”

The next day, the first of September, a sad rain ushered in autumn, but cleared up enough in the afternoon for us to cross over to Eminönü and Beyoğlu. We looked at the piles of red pepper and of tea leaves and Turkish delight in the Spice Bazaar, then took the funicular up to the middle of the İstiklal Caddesi and stopped at bars and book and record stores. Down one stairway lined with posh cafés we came to the interesting Faik Pasha Caddessi, and took that back up to near Taksim, where we got kebab from Adana Dürüm.

After losing my bag, I mailed home an assignment for my living-vicarious parents: to retrieve and mail a list of essential items. By this time, two of the three packages had arrived in Turkey, but could not be delivered to my friends’ office as requested because the declared value was higher than Turkey’s limits.

Following a long Ottoman tradition, Turkey remains a leader of frivilous tariffs and taxes, and the Turks impose a modern backsheesh on any business or item coming into the country. For packages, the rule is that anything over €100 in value, including declared value and shipping cost, incurs a tax of 10 per cent of that value, and must also be retrieved in person from the central post office far outside the city center. Nellie’s name was on the package, and she spoke more Turkish than I, so on the twelfth day of my visit we went out to this post office with a sheet of directions and heads full of misinformation.

Picking up a package in Turkey is something of a spectacle. The post office runs entirely on ledgers and calculators, and I would not be surprised to see an abacus or two floating around. The way things proceeded, we brought the package slips to the workers in the mail room, waited a half-an-hour, checked the contents of the two boxes, got a photocopy of Nellie’s passport from a temp worker who ran upstairs to make it, had a woman calculate the amount of my backsheesh, registered this amount with a post official in a ledger, payed the tax, registered that we had paid the tax, helped compile a stack of documents as thick as my finger, and finally left with my two packages.

Now I rearmed myself with the following: A fleece sweater, a large camp towel, a flashlight, a compass, a charger for my camera battery and iPod, a first-aid and sowing kit, anti-malarials and pills for dysintery, a silk sleeping sack, new socks and boxers, and a pair of Teva Omnium Leathers, which are rafting shoes, good for the climates I’m going into because of their support, protection, and ventilation, and with socks and inattention they kind of look like real shoes. These new items come in addition to my two T-shirts, plaid shirt, jean shorts, swimming trunks, camera, and iPod — which since Varna have been my only accoutrements.

Two packages remained to arrive. One is a care package from my aunt, and the other contains an Acer Aspire One netbook, a cheap $250 one for writing on. I left for Troy without them, and in my absence last week the netbook appeared inexplicably and without backsheesh at my friends’ office. The blog should become more regular after I retrieve it from Istanbul.

The Reader will notice that the dateline for this post occurs before any of those journeys listed at the beginning; this is because, for my own records, I set the date to whenever the last completed action took place. This particular post, for example, written from Fethiye on September 22, is dated for September 3, the day after our postal adventure. According to Joanne Jacobs, a blogger retired from writing op-ed pieces for the San Jose Mercury News, who told me on the sailboat that blogs must have content posted consistently and recently, my blog should be a failure.

To compensate the Reader for the generous perusal of this ungregarious blog, which could be best described as “over-ripe,” I provide the following.

I hesitate to share these recipes only because I jealously, even hubristically, wish to make them myself on returning, and to reveal them as evidence of the great and glorious treasures to be earned abroad; but then this whole blog is just such a revelation by proxy. I tell all the good stories without any of the benefits of listening faces lit up in wonderment or mystified with disbelief, without hearing a single laugh or gasp. What’s one more secret shared among friends?

Ayran

• 3 cups yogurt
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tsp salt

Now some people say that ayran is just salty yogurt, but it’s that and also a delicious drink, especially good with things spicy and savory. Only plain Nancy’s yogurt has the right consistency and flavor to make this milky beverage. The above amounts make a lot of ayran, but provide a good ratio for reference and can be changed to taste. Blend the lot, and the finished drink should have the consistency of a smoothie.

Tzatziki

• 1 500g cup of Greek yogurt, 10%
• 1/2 clove of garlic, grated fine
• 1 small or 1/2 big cucumber, grated coarse
• Salt
• Olive oil

This recipe comes from the instructions of the owners of the Rodos Youth Hostel and was made under their guidance, although they could not taste it because that was the Day of the Cross. Grate the garlic and the cucumber in the way described and mix it with the yogurt. Add lots of salt and olive oil. Great with bread, crackers, fries, fish, or on a pita or gyro. Total yogurt works best if you can get it, and make sure it’s thick.

Greek Moussaka

• 4 eggplants
• 2 tomatoes
• 2 potatoes
• 1.5 kilos of mincemeat
• Spices: oregano, paprika, thyme, salt, pepper, olive oil

I made this in the same Rhodian hostel with four Aussies, in proportion to our appetite and without the guidance of the hostel owners. They thought us idiots until they saw the finished product, which they had not expected to be edible. The recipe we improvised differs substantially from most moussaka, in that we replaced the béchamel and cheese sauce that normally forms the top layer of the dish with mashed potato, and in the sheer depth of our food, which resembled a core sample when served.

The recipe combined two layers. At the bottom of a dutch oven we mixed the fried mincemeat with diced tomatoes and sliced eggplants, lightly grilled or broiled with olive oil, as well as the spices, which I leave to the chef’s discretion. The upper layer was mashed potatoes with more spices, also already cooked, since we did not have an oven. We heated the three-inch thick combination over the stove and served it hot and ate it all.

Ancient Roman Fish Sauce

Says Seneca: “Do you not realize that garum sociorum, that expensive bloody mass of decayed fish, consumes the stomach with its salted putrefaction?”

This fermented fish sauce fouled the air of Byzantium, which in the later years of the Empire was its chief consumer. Its production is only for the brave. I had a recipe from a museum but misplaced the photo. The following one comes from Gargilius Martialis’ De Medicina et de Vertute Herbarum. Obviously you can vary the amounts if you can’t eat 35 quarts of the stuff.

Use fatty fish — for example, sardines — and a well-sealed (pitched) container with a 26 to 35 quart capacity. Add dried, aromatic herbs possessing a strong flavor, such as dill, coriander, fennel, celery, mint, oregano, and others, making a layer on the bottom of the container; then put down a layer of fish (if small, leave them whole, if large, use pieces) and over this, add a layer of salt two fingers high. Repeat these layers until the container is filled. Let it rest for seven days in the sun. Then mix the sauce daily for 20 days. After that, it becomes a liquid.

TURKISH POLITENESS: Reticence, Courtesy, and Frankness of the Mussulman — Men Who Will Not Lie Or Cheat But Protect Their Women And Their Dogs.
—From The Pall Mall Gazette of June 24, 1878

When I arrived in the Sirkeci Train Station in Eminönü, the sun had risen but it was still early in the morning. Businesses opened their doors, shopkeepers swept off their porticoes, and the kebab shops loaded up great cones of compressed meat onto the döner ovens, although few people were eating as Ramadan, Turkish Ramazan, had just started. I changed dollars for lira in the cobbled streets near the Spice Bazaar, and took the ferry Hamdi Karahason across the Bosphorus to Kadıköy to Asia. Rocky fortressed islands and towered shipping galleys loomed in the hazy Propontis, the water dark with the Black Sea’s sulfurous sediment.

Ah, those first steps on a continent. When Alexander took them, he lept from the stern of the first boat, like the ill-starred Achaean Protesilaus, and planted a spear in the strand to declare himself Lord of Asia. I did not have a spear and was too busy looking at the Turk Balloon to do anything like that. It looked like a green apple, off on the western end of the old bay of Chalcedon, over some cafés to which it was tethered, and would rise up fifty feet in the air with a few dangling tourists before lowering again.

I arranged to stay with the American couple I ran into in Varna, and met Gavin and Nellie near their office for lunch at a kebab place. Out of polite respect for the fasting Mohammedans, we ate upstairs on the terrace: spicy Adana-style kebab and good ayran, a yogurt drink, with a shot of some neon fruit drink to close the meal. It is a Turkish custom to provide a complimentary gift at meal’s end, a happy reverse of the Western tip. They wait until you call them to take an order, and snatch away plates the moment you finish, or often before.

Like the Greeks the Turks possess a generous hospitality, especially towards foreigners, and even security guards and janitors will impose themselves on a troubled and confused looking tourist. They especially love to help cars back up or move around obstacles, however slight or simple the maneuver. Behind the moving car they wave emphatically and shout, “Gel! Gel!” — Come! Come! The Turks exhibit a peculiar trait called samimiyet, which means truthful but is better transliterated as well-meaning frankness or blunt candor. Tell them you bought something, and they insist indelicately that you paid too much. They could have gotten it for a much lower price.

Most follow the Ramazan fasting, although not so many attend prayer services six times a day. Even in secular Istanbul you’ll see cafés full of people around empty tables. Some kitapsiz, people not of the book, will eat and drink as normal, and look down on the pious and their religious obstruction of Progress with the same contempt as Western atheists hold towards the believers.

When Atatürk shaved his mustache, took off his fez, slicked back his hair, and put on a suit, the rest of the new and secular Turkish Republic did the same. He is the nation’s founder and messianic superhero, and they will not tolerate insult. The country wet so far as to block YouTube because a Greek put up a video questioning Atatürk’s sexual orientation. They have filed charges against a number of Turkish journalists for anti-nationalism or for insulting the nation or its hero. This restriction of speech, which Mustafa Kemal would most likely and ironically resent, as well as the Turkish treatment of Armenian and Kurdish minorities and of women in the eastern provinces, are what keep Turkey from the European Union.

The presence of women is supposed to soften social intercourse, yet the Turks, who do not admit women into society, are the most courteous people on earth. They are not born poets like the Arabs and Persians, they have but little taste for art, and they will not smirk to obtain a favor; but they are simple, serious, brave, and grateful.
—Ibid.

Sunday I woke up much too early to a strange practice of the Orient: the Ramazan drummer, who plays discordant beats on the stretched skin of his rotund instrument at 3:30 to awaken the faithful wives and start them cooking. The men rise at 4 to eat, and the Adhan, the call to prayer, comes loudly at sunrise, around half-past. From then until the sunset call approaching 8, no food or water or cigarette may pass Muslim lips, until the moon is new again. The faithful even avoid swimming, where saltwater might seep onto the tongue slick as sin, and cannot consummate their marriage during the same daylight hours.

To begin my tourism, I took a ferry back over to Eminönü, Fatih, Sultanahmet, Constantinople, Byzantion, or whatever the hell it’s called, and walked up the cobbled hill past the walls of Topkapi Palace and the dome of the Hagia Sophia. A park and fountains lay between that Byzantine monument and the Ottoman one built to rival it: the Sultanahmet Camii (pronounced Jahm-ee) or Blue Mosque. It was smaller than than the cathedral, more artful and less engineered in its technical graces, and was when it was build the only mosque with six minarets except the one at the Meccan Ka’aba. These towers broadcast a mournful call to prayer, to which the minarets of Ahmet’s Tomb across the Hippodrome offer dueling accompaniment.

I took off my sandals and entered the Blue Mosque through the tourist gate in the rear courtyard. I sat in the rear on the red carpet. Beyond the starry glitter of lights hung low and the four elephantine columns that supported it loomed the roof, which I will describe momentarily. I wandered on up the hill through the deserted market stalls about the Grand Bazaar, all gates shut, and under the aqueduct of Valens, and heard the afternoon Adhan about the time I returned to the University square along Ordu Sad.

The Muezzin lured me with devotions into the large mosque called the Beyazit Camii, past the men that washed their feet in the courtyard fountain, and inside to a fenced dais in the rear, set aside for visitors. Lights hung here, too, suspended from swirling frames and contained in beakers low over the heads of standing worshipers on the red carpet. In unison they dropped, all of them and the priest facing a niche at the far wall, into a bow, then rose, and then dropped again to their knees, face lowed in submission to the divine and inhuman, until they rose and departed.

Here and in the Blue Mosque and the Şehzade Camii, I felt the same impulse to look up that one feels under a starry sky. As in every mosques, the domed roof echoed the pitiless heavens of Arabia which so humbled Abraham’s children that they developed three confessional faiths as enduring tributes to their imperceptible and omnipresent desert God.

Checkered arches straddled the wide columns to support great domes decorated with abstractions and Arabic lettering that seemed to me equally abstract, but with a devoted concourse of design and adoration, an order that can be felt but not understood. The arabesques, in florid ovals like flower-buds and rayed circles like suns, were at once geometric and natural, of Heaven and Earth. Great white spaces separated red, blue, and black devices, like sky and cloud. Colored glass windows glowed with sunlight and bore the same characteristics as the paintings. Scribbled Qur’anic writing stood out in gold and white on the walls and on great discs suspended in the corners. They spelled out the names of God and the Prophet.

Neither of us are very religious, but as TE Lawrence pointed out, we English-speakers really missed out on poetic devotions when we chose such an ugly word as God for the Deity. Instead of taking from the French mother the glad title Dieu, English inherited the guttural Saxon father’s Gott. Far better are those distant relations: Latin Deus, Italian Dio, Spanish Dios, Greek Theos; and especially the unrelated neighbors of the Semitic family: the Hebrew Yahweh, Jehovah, and Elohim, and in Arabic the Ninety-Nine Names of the Qur’an, which all refer to Allah. Such glorious ornaments, and ours so mean.

Says the Muezzin from the minarets: “God is great, God is great. I testify that there is no God but God. I testify that Muhammed is the Messenger of God.” What ugly words, these of the Adhan, no more poetic when sung than when spoken; yet when trilled in the native tongue in a fit of faithful passion, what then can be more transcendent or closer to the Metatron?

No wonder the temples and iconography of the German, Lowlander, Austrian and Briton is of such insipidly simple prospect next to those artful consecrations of Latin and Greek and Levantine, curved and glorious as heaven and earth. What can the Protestant prayerful expect when their greatest religious word is so hideous in composition and brevity? To decorate such a word is to paint a ramshackle gold.

Oh, my God! what fools we mortals be!

As to street dogs, they are chartered nuisances, who snap, snarl, fight over offal, and bay the moon at nights; but they must not be kicked. To be treated like a dog in Turkey is to be treated with much forbearance; for the Mussulmans think it enough to give a dog a bad name without ill-using him.
—Ibid.

As with most neighborhoods in Istanbul, and in greater Anatolia, the streets of Kadıköy maintain a happy population of stray dogs. My friends call them the Moda Hounds, after that neighborhood that they most frequent. They roll together in ferally cunning but quite personable packs, sleep on street corners while pedestrians step over their fat guts, look both ways before crossing the street, and wear colored tags on their ears to mark some treatment or surgery. They are castaways, born free, without collar or license. Their care is communal and voluntary. Neighbors give out leftovers and watch out for them.

For whatever reason, perhaps for what Melville termed their “sagacious kindness” or maybe because they cannot be responsible for their own destitution, I mark sadder the desperate poverty of a dog than the same circumstances in a man; yet some dogs seem adept at managing their own affairs, even moreso than most men.

On my last night in Varna, when I was eating with friends at the seaside seafood restaurant Nord, a dog came up under our table, which was on the edge of a platform over the sand. He lay down with his head on his crossed arms, and looked up at us with drooping ears and sad eyes, a look so perfectly pathetic it could only be practiced. We tossed down salmon and cod, and the dog took what he wanted and left what he did not like, then stood up and moved one table down to repeat the same performance. Some gruff looking black dog came up, and our busker-hound and his friends barked him away, as well as an old gypsy woman selling flowers. This was his territory!

Moda Hound turf is down near the waterfront in a green park. There encamped under a copse of oak you will find a great council of the fat and flea-bitten muts and their various allies and dependents. They allow people they like to pass through unmolested, or even to sit in the grass and watch the sunset, but can smell evil and bark wildly at those who canine instinct condemns. They congregate and exchange news with collared domestics, while their owners sit apart on a bench.

A clan of cats live among the piled rock barrier between the park and the Sea of Marmaris. Whenever the rock cats venture out from their salty caves and chambers, the Moda Hounds chase them back, but will not cross the divide. Cats fill the streets and alleys and rooftops of Istanbul, and their lusty cries echo across the city at night. People care for them just as much as the dogs, by putting food and water where only a feline could reach it. There is, in particular, a blind old grandfather of a cat who the other cats make respectful room for around the crowded conflict of the food tray so he may eat his fill.

In a similar feat, a mangled goose lives near the Kadıköy Fish Market and patrols flightless those odorous streets, guarding the stalls from cats in exchange for tokens and tribute. The Kadıköy Goose is a fowl of such magnificent fame and celebrity that he makes appearances in Istanbullu music videos.

Most times of day the Moda Hounds and other dog clans are ubiquitous in scattered teams of two or three, and in their activity do not impose on human society, asides from piles of excrement on the sidewalks. In the dawn’s earliest hours, however, while everyone is still asleep, the Moda Hounds take to the streets en masse in riled and playful frivolity. Then the city is theirs.

This impassiveness of mien is the Turk’s chief weapon of defense. It guards him from enemies and bores, and, mating with the silence which is congenial to his lazy, dreamy mood, it often excites the wonder of a stranger.
—Ibid.

The Muslims break their Ramadan fasting with a great banquet called the Iftar. They wait for the mournful sound of the Adhan at the sun’s last red glimmer with forks and knives poised over plates of food. I broke my own fast at my friends’ house in Kadıköy, and brought some Efes pilsners to the Mexican Night they hosted.

Of all that I miss in my homeland, Mexican food is at the top of the list. Burritos, tacos, enchiladas, and tomales do not exist in Europe, or exist in such a warped and unsophisticated form as to disgust those who have tasted the real thing. Here, however, we young expats (and one Turkish girlfriend confused by our nostalgia for the tortilla) ate good burritos with meat and beans, and with Spanish rice and real guacamole! Gavin tuned his guitar, and since Steve from Georgia had his own and Carrie from Tennessee sang gospel, together they played folk and bluegrass, until the Ramazan drummer came by and we all went out to stare.

The next day I met Gavin in Taksim Square, in the neighborhood north of the Golden Horn called Beyoğlu. We weaved through the crowds on the İstiklal Caddesi, the broadway there, and broke off into the warren of side streets lined with cafés and restaurants and bars, to visit the sixth floor Üçnokta Teras and enjoy the views, and to Adana Dürüm for cheap çiğ köfte (pronounced chi keufte), the yogurt drink ayran served frothy from a tap into a pewter mug, and Adana-style döner in a wrap with paprika and hot and sweet peppers. Çiğ köfte is traditionally served with raw mincemeat, kneaded for hours with spices that supposedly cook the meat, but the government has since banned places from serving it that hazardous way without a license, and so ours had eggplant or pilaf instead.

The Turks have very good fast food, döner kebab and çiğ köfte included. Compared with German kebab, the Turkish döner is in general blander, without spicy or garlic sauce like in the German stalls, or the tasty Greek blend of yogurt and garlic and cucumber called tzatziki. Within the country it varies by region: Adana kebab from the city near Syria uses more Middle-Eastern spices, and Erzurum kebab, which comes from a city near Georgia and Armenia and the Kurdish territories, employs tender cuts of spiced lamb.

We ate that at a restaurant in Kadıköy on Wednesday night — the cağ porsiyon, with two kebab skewers and flatbread, yogurt, salad, spicy vegetable relish, delicious ayran, and a lahmacun, a pizza sort of thing on thin bread that you roll and eat like a wrap. Then came bittersweet Turkish çay tea, and a feeling like a bursting Turk Balloon. Later I ate a holy fig from Mecca.

Turkish food, as you can sense, is delicious, ranked alongside French and Italian as the best in the world. Kebab with savory chicken or lamb; sweet and savory börek pastries; pilaf with meat and grease; rolled lahmacun; and pide, a sort of Turkish pizza in the tapered shape of a lemon or, more accurately, a canoe. One night we went to Sun Pide and got massive plates of the stuff, with salted meat of every sort but pork and with cheese and even an egg on top. Gavin’s description of “gut bomb” would be adequate only if you refered to something with a high nuclear grade, using the densest Plutonium.

Kaymak is somewhere between butter and cream in the genus of spreadables and is delicious with honey and almonds. For cheese, the Turks have many varieties. Some is creamy as butter, some hard like feta, some sweet and some spicy, but all variations come from great buckets labeled beyaz peynir, or white cheese. What you end up with is something of a gamble. The Turks enjoy their ayran yogurt drink with dinner, but not usually with breakfast. They think yogurt makes you sleepy.

But I digress, and my gluttony is showing. It’s time to turn back to something less deadly sinful.

On our way down to Galata Tower, the last remnant of the Genoese ramparts of the European Quarter north of the Golden Horn, Gavin and I stopped in a few bars including an indie rock establishmen called Peyote, where on the trellised terrace Turkish proto-hipsters sipped beer and wrote on notepads with fountain pens and listened to the DJ play post-rock. The Turks have something of an independent music scene, especially in Istanbul, but all of them appreciate a motley collection of bands, including Depeche Mode, Leonard Cohen (which they pronounce phonetically), Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Placebo, KISS, and Metallica.

Now dispel some misonceptions of Islam in Turkey, at least in westward Istanbul, where kitapsiz Muslims drink beer and play rock, and where girls go out in modern fashion. The Turks are still learning to handle this progression to uncovered and liberated Turkish women, and perhaps with less alacrity than unshackled Westerners of the Free Love generation. The change here was greater, and their culture shows.

A young woman walks into a Turkish bar (A) alone, and is mobbed, leered at, plied with drinks, clicked and shppph-ed at, and approached in every sort of manner short of the tackle; (B) with her boyfriend, and is ignored, noticed only for as long as it takes to determine what Facebook calls her Relationship Status, after which time she fades entirely from the scenery. Libidinous as they are, the Turks are honor-bound to respect the ties of romance, at least publicly.

Perhaps the annoyance of this, and the severity with which some Turkish women treat their styling, has led to the recent and secular resurgence of the hijab head-scarves, among women who disapprove of the requirements placed on their appearance by Westernization. The feminists re-shackle themselves!

Gavin also showed me some of the hip streets in the hive, the bars called Synergy and Fermentation and other words chosen at random from an English dictionary, and the brothel alley where, when it’s not Ramazan, cooing prostitutes will dangle out the window. We went through the street of TV repair stores and passed the Tower, and then we took a ferry from the Russian waterfront of Karaköy back to Asia.

Turks never become openly aggressive unless you insult their women, their mosques, or their street dogs. You may wink at a Christian woman if you please — that is her business or her husband’s; but neither that liberty nor any other must be taken with a Mussulman woman… The best thing the Frank can do is to walk past without making any impertinent attempt to peer through the veil, for the women might squeal and arouse the whole quarter.
—Ibid.

The calls of Turkey give it life. The eskicis push carts of junk down the nicer streets and call out for more donations, which they will sell for scraps or to antique shops. Other cart-pushers cry, “Simit!” with glass cases full of the sesame-coated bread rings. Vendors and restauranteurs call, “Buyurun! Buyurun! Buyurun!” — Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Turks whistle a noise like shppph-shppph-shppph to call over stray cats for a scratch. One could say that nowhere else is the blossom more prized than in Turkey: gypsies wave bouquets of flowers at those disembarking from the ferry and shout, “Bir milyon!” — One million. The old continue to think in the hyperinflated lira from before the economy collapsed in 2002. One-million of those equal one New Turkish Lira.

Gavin and I took a long ferry across the Bosphorus and then up under the bridges of the Golden Horn to the large and pious district called Eyüp. This is on the south bank of the Horn, on and past the hill that once and still does support the great Theodosian wall of Constantinople. At the feet of the hill lies the Eyüp Camii, the mosque where one of Muhammed’s disciples lies buried who died in the Arab assault on the Byzantine capital. It is the third holiest site in Islamdom, after Mecca and Medina.

The surface area of exposed skin on girls, especially about the arms and legs, in Turkey serves as a thermometer or a sounding for affluence, tolerance, modernity, and secularism in a given neighborhood. Kadıköy could be judged progressive, and Sultanahmet may be called liberated by the swaths of pale-faces in immodest shorts and sleeveless tops. The Eyüp quarter, and especially the two poorest neighborhoods we passed through, called Fener and Balat, proved the opposite.

As we passed the seat of the Byzantine Patriarchate and the Church of St. Steven of the Bulgars, a church prefabricated in cast iron and sent to the city like an Erector set, we went up into impoverished suburbs of sparse buildings and stores, where most women wore full black burkas with only the eyes and nose showing and all the rest wore long sleeves and head-scarves. Even the men dressed modestly, and some wore long coats and skull caps despite the heat.

Two street urchins guided us up to the top of the hill, to the Roman wall and the Orthodox Chora Church with its well-preserved mosaics, and then we climbed back down into Fener to see the Patriarchate of Istanbul, the de jure head of the Orthodox religion. In the Church of St. George we met an Italian gentleman named Leto who walked with us and told us about how the Greeks were parasites, although he had to search for the words. He was from Milan and like all of the Northern Italians looked down on any nationals, and especially at certain regionals of his own country, less industrious than his. However after we stopped in some Catholic church run by a Turk and drank vials of holy spring water, Leto left us. He had no interest in the infidel.

We came to the Eyüp Tomb, where the Arab hero lay buried and where Ottoman Sultans received the Sword of Osman on their coronation, and where we felt intrusively out of place among the crowd of Muslims in the midst of pilgrim devotions. They held their hands out and bobbed their heads in mental chants.

When we left, we decided we were hungry and looked for something to eat. This is difficult in a pious neighborhood like Eyüp during Ramazan. Some stalls were open, but nobody patroned them. They seemed to only be preparing for the Iftar since it was already four. However we saw one kebab store that seemed functional and went behind a curtain into a dark courtyard. There were two families, mothers and children, enjoying happily some dürüm and ayran, and also four men who ate theirs guiltily and alone. We decided, as we Christians enjoyed our right to keep eating, that this must be some secret sanctuary for the irreligiously hungry. The more severe the religious practice, it seems, the less severe the furtive offense.

We passed several boys, age seven to ten, being led around this neighborhood by doting fathers and groups of family and friends. The anxious youths wore regal imperial outfits and capes, with silk scarves that say Maşallah! — What wonders God has willed! They were on their way to be circumcised, and then to spend the rest of the day in bed receiving gifts.

Our tour ended at the tip of the Golden Horn, at a hillside cemetery near which the Turkophilic French author Pierre Loti made his home, and drank Turkish coffee on a scenic terrace and tried to make the coffee grounds into auspicious patterns but only made a mess. Then we walked back down and took a ferry home.

The next day we went out again to the Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace, two sight-seeing magnets that Gavin had managed to avoid over the nine months he lived in Istanbul. The Hagia Sophia is very impressive. The twice-sacked interior lacks much ornamentation, but the remaining Mohammedan discs and Orthodox iconography make it more of a relic. The austerity highlights the engineering feats of the building: the immensity of the dome, and its lack of visible supporting columns. Those are hidden in the walls, aided ingeniously by archways in supporting the heavenly roof.

The scaffolding of restoration work filled a quarter of the interior, but we moved around this to see the circle where Emperors received the crown of Rome, the site of the altar, and the box where the Sultan sat during Muslim prayer services. In the corner near the narthex is a pillar with a hole in it at shoulder height. If one puts a thumb inside and twists the hand around and finds that finger mysteriously damp on removal, then one’s wish shall come true! The copper around that hole is dark with the hopeful swipes of greasy hands, and there is a line of tourists ready to finger this grossest tradition and have a pornographic picture taken of them doing so.

Upstairs we saw Viking graffiti on the banisters and the balcony of the Empress in the back and old painted saints near the ceiling, and in one corner I was surprised to find the tomb of Enrico Dandalo. The Venetian Doge, who diverted the Fourth Crusade to Byzantium, who though blind and a nonagenarian led his troops onto the city walls, and who is single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Constantinople, the victory of the Seljuk Turks, and the rise and enrichment of the Most Serene Republic! — that hero of history has for a tomb an unremarkable slab of marble with his name and date carved in it, in a corner of the greatest monument of the imperial city he ravaged, while other Doges who ruled inconsequentially own towering equestrian statues in the piazzas of Venice. The Turks, whose victory he facilitated, removed his bones and fed them to the dogs. Posterity is a capricious wench.

Back in Topkapi Palace, Gavin and I passed through the public parks of the outer courtyards, and at the inner gate we tightened our belts and ignored frugal instincts, and payed the exhorbitant ticket price demanded by that tourist fulcrum. We looked in a dozen cubic sitting rooms and audience halls, carved from wood or decorated with porcelain tiles of the Near and Far East, and looked out from garden terraces onto the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. There was a garage full of carriages, and a small room with the clothes of the Sultans, who were comedically short.

In the mythic treasury were kris knives with emeralds as big as chicken eggs furnishing the pommel; carafes and flasks and jars for rouge and paint made of rock crystal, jade, and silver; mirros with frames of gold and lines of rubies and emeralds; medals of knightly orders and honors with lines of diamonds; glass and gold cases of emeralds and star sapphires; gilt candlesticks from Mecca with thousands of diamonds; a thousand examples of the finest craftsmanship and the richest materials.

In a different vault we saw the motley and amusing assortment of religious relics: the Sword of Osman, the sword and bow of the Prophet, and the swords of his followers; tufts of Muhammad’s beard in vials of glass and gold; Moses’ rod, David’s sword, and Abraham’s sauce pan; the arm and skull of St. John the Baptist; keys to the Ka’aba in Holy Mecca, and the gilded drainage pipes from there.

We proceeded into the Harem, which cost us another ticket price, and was so underwhelming and overpriced that I won’t bother describing it. Stick with your fantasies, ye lusty sots, of that pinnacle of man’s animal nature, where every desire is made manifest through wealth and splendor and slavery.

Their regard for truth is so great that they attribute the same quality to others, and are, consequently, easily outwitted the first time. But you must not think to deceive a Turk twice.
—Ibid.

At night, after our Erzurum feast, I went to the English Time office where Gavin and Nellie worked to be interviewed by Nellie’s level one class. Ramazan effectively undermines any attempts at education — the Turks spend the first half of class starved and anxious for Iftar, and the second stuffed and anxious for a nap. I contrived to make the interview interesting by a change in profession. Everything else was the same, but when asked, “What do you do for a living?” I said, “I’m a hunter. A bear trapper. I trap bears.”

My grungy and shaggy appearance lent creedence to this forester’s profession, which was generally accepted by the Turks, as much as an American would accept the story of a Turk who claimed to be a pirate or harem eunuch. I defined bears and bear traps through pantomimes, but had not really thought through my ploy. When the mystified but intrigued Turks started asking how big my bear-hunting team was (I have a more experienced partner), what kind of gun I use (a Winchester hunting rifle), and other detailed questions, it became time to improvise.

Question: How much does a bear weigh.
Answer: Well, I don’t know what it is in grams or kilograms, since we use pounds in America, but an average sized bear is about twelve-hundred pounds. (Nellie helpfully, and contrary to my deceptive intentions, provided a rate of conversion for this, but luckily my guess turned out to be pretty accurate for a young adult brown bear.)

Q: How much do you get for a bear?
A: I can sell the skin for about a thousand dollars, as long it doesn’t break in the skinning. The meat is really smokey and gamey, and I can make another thousand selling that to butchers.

Q: How many bears did you kill before your trip?
A: Umm (I said, with a junior look of embarrassment), I only just started a few years ago, so I’ve only killed thirty bears so far. It was enough to save for a trip, though.

Q: That scratch on your leg, did a bear do that?
A: No, I just fell down. But my partner, though… Well, one time we had trapped this bear, and we thought it was dead, only it wasn’t. We went up to it, and the bear lunged with the last of its strength. Snagged my partner right on the calf, from here at the knee, all the way down to here. (The Turks winced and gasped.) Yeah it was a really bad gash. That’s why it’s important to be very careful, when you’re hunting bears.

Q: There are bears in Turkey, in the mountains. Why don’t you come kill Turkish bears?
A: I might do that.

My interview complete, I left the class to their Iftar break. To teach is difficult enough, but to teach a group of young and rowdy Turks, without sharing their language, first starving and then stuffed and prepared for nothing but napping and contented chatter — that is an unenviable mission.

One of the many characteristics which excite the Turk’s contempt of the Frank is the latter’s mania for putting foolish questions for the mere sake of opening his mouth.
—Ibid.

Army museums reflect peculiar aspects of national sentiment. The German museum in Berlin was mournful and apologetic, the Greek one in Athens emotive and backwards-looking; the British War Museum was somewhat stunned at the loss of naval superstardom; those of the Balkans speak of injured resentment; and the Istanbul Askeri Müze is nothing but pride.

Downstairs I saw a blur of swords and yataghans and qamas and chafrons, the arms of Crusaders and janissaries, and the muskets and rifles and culverins and mortars of newer armies. In one room was a diorama of the siege of Constantinople, with a tumult of sound effects and music and a statue of Mehmet the Conqueror at the side, anxious for his triumph. The upstairs was more propagandic. Exhibits included Atatürk’s Salvation War, the Cyprus Peace Operation, the Armenian Issue (With Documents to prove Turkey’s guileless innocence), and the Korean War — where a sole Turkish brigade “proved that Turks are still a force to be reckoned with.”

That same day, before visiting the museum, I saw the Rumeli Hansari, the complex of rotund and hollow fortress towers and great walls that Mehmet built on the Bosphorus upstream from Byzantium before taking the city; and after I went back down from Taksim Square to the Galata Tower, across the Galata Bridge, and uphill to Sultanahmet. In the old Hippodrome the Istanbullus held an Iftar festival after sunset. Musicians played Eastern melodies on a small vertical fiddle with a mournful sound, on a sort of recorder or ocarina, and on the dulcimer. Around the field’s circumference and the courtyard of the adjacent Blue Mosque stalls sold Qu’rans and crafts and food at festival prices: gözleme potato crepes, lokma donuts, candies, and Turkish coffee cooked slowly on hot coals. A group of Turks marched around with a box that had a fire hose in it and beat a drum rythmically.

Friday in swim trunks I took a morning ferry across the Propontis to the Princes’ Islands, so named for their usual charges of recalcitrant heirs of Byzantium — and incidentally Leon Trotsky. Of the nine islands, four are large enough to warrant a ferry stop, and of those I went to Heybeliada and walked about, and to Büyükada, which simply means Big Island.

I climbed south up the thickly forested hill behind the port and passed a massive structure of decaying timbers, four stories and as big as two city blocks. The windows and supports were cracked open, and the place looked cold and haunted. I found out later it was built as a hotel in the 19th century, converted into a Greek orphanage, and is the largest wooden building in Europe.

Down that hill, I came into a depression at the center of the long island and a parking lot filled with horse-drawn carriages. I had some tea at a restaurant and then followed a cobbelstone path up a second, steeper hill. Some tourists rode donkeys, and others rested regularly on benches overlooking the beaches of Büyükada and the Victorian houses along the Propontis shore. They tie white wish-making ribbons to every stump and staggered evergreen shrub. The ancient Church of St. George and a panoramic vista occupy the rolled summit.

I enjoyed this, then climbed down and followed the road along the western side of the island, stopping at a small beach between the luxury houses to swim in the sea, and returned to the port for a late ferry. A fleet of seagulls, wheeling and noisy, followed us home. Girls made their boyfriends buy simits and packages of crackers and held them to the wind, while seagulls swooped in to grab the wafer.

Turkish tradesmen seldom make fortunes, but they have not yet reached the high culture which consists in selling shoddy; they do not cheat you, nd they scarcely ever become bankrupt; so that on the whole they may claim to believe that Allah sends them as much prosperity as they need.
—Ibid.

On Saturday I set about seeing the last few tourist sites on my list and took a ferry to Fatih. First I went to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, where the Turks display every bit of antiquity they could dig up after the nineteenth century rampage of English and German collectors, including a great collection of Heinrich Schiemann’s rubbish from the fields of Troy. The culture of Ionian and Levantine Greeks becomes their own: Ilium a Turkish city, and Mehmet the Conqueror a Trojan avenger. After taking Constantinople the Sultan wrote to the Pope in Rome that after millennia justice had finally been done upon the Achaean nation for destroying the city of the Latin progenitor Anaeas.

The greatest part of the collection are the Sidonian tombs discovered in Lebanon and extradited by Osman Hamdi Bey to Istanbul, including the famous Alexander Sarcophagus, which holds someone else’s bones but bears the King’s likeness in relief. The conqueror himself was entombed Lenin-like in a glass coffin in Alexandria, had his nose broken when Augustus kissed the mummified corpse, and was, somehow, lost to the surges of history.

From Topkapi, I walked up to Sultanahmet to visit the Basilica Cistern, under a hill near the Hagia Sophia. A vendor in a vest and little fez removed a rubbery mass of dondurma Turkish ice cream from the bucket in the display case by the tip of a lance, and whirled the thick stuff around until it stretched like silly putty, so far it looked as if it should snap. He shouted, “Oh my God!,” and then replaced it to the stand and waited, occasionally prodding at passer-bys with his lance, which had a plastic ice cream cone at the end.

Aqueducts from the Belgrade Forest fed Justinian’s massive water tank until it was sealed up and forgotten late in Byzantium’s history. 336 columns taken from old temples and buildings stand in twelve rows of 28 like a grove of trees under arched brick bowyers. Two have for strange bases large blocks with Medusa heads, one turned on her side, one inverted. The capitals are mostly of the plain Doric or acanthus Corinthian orders, and the scavenged columns are occasionally mismatched, with an upper half wider than the base of the shaft. One has whorls like knots on a tree and another obscene wishing orifice.

Red lights illuminate the trunks and the shallow water, the glittering coins, and the flicking Gollum fish, pale and blind — doubly-so by the constant camera flashes. A slippery stone walkway circumnavigates the room under coffee can street-lamps, and triumphant elevator muzak plays over echoed voices.

To discover such a place! To be there alone with a torch and whispered thoughts for company. The terrible solitude, the fear of unknown darkness, the cthonic depths, the secret waters. According to the story, a scholar named Petrus Gyllius, researching Constantinople a century after the conquest, found locals drawing up buckets of water through their basement floors, and fishing for carp there like Eskimos do in the ice. He entered the chamber through one such entry point, but when he reported the find to the Ottomans, who considered standing water unclean, the Turks used the pit as a dump for rubbish and corpses.

Now all that is swept away, but there is an equally noxious ad for Miniaturk in one corner, with a movie and a model of the tourist trap, and in the other corner are the candlelit tables of a café and fast food restaurant.

I left that humid domain and went to a crowded one: the Kapalı Çarşı — the Grand Bazaar. The 58 covered streets hold 1200 shops in new quarters painted yellow, blue, white, and red, all around the old oven brick bazaar, a series of domes and arches. As everywhere, the Turks segment and categorize their shops into lanes for metalworking and leatherworking and other crafts, and into districts for wedding dresses and electronics repair, which creates dramatic competition. You can find anything there: worry beads, key chains, bad art, urban prints, Turkish rugs, Turkish flags, leather shoes, leather bags, leather jackets, cheap clothes, football jerseys, head scarves, silk sarongs, chess sets, tea sets, copper wares, gold watches, “we won’t, stop shit, everybody move.”

It is a great place to spend money, take pictures, and get lost in, in the right sort of mind and while watching your valuables; otherwise you will only get a headache.

“Hey brother, you want some jacket?” “I can give you a beautiful scarf for yourself. For your mom!” “Hey man, where you from? America! Hey John Wayne, wanna buy a rug?”

Young hearts be free tonight, time is on your side.
Don’t let them put you down, don’t let em push you around,
Don’t let them ever change your point of view.
—Rod Stewart, “Young Turks”

Look around the bay, from your bench on the ferry as it crosses the Bosphorus late at night. Start by looking westward to Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque in Europe. The Byzantine church looms fortress-like under the floodlights, the Blue Mosque celestial, with lights strung between the six minarets to issue some Ramazan greeting.

Turning in a circle you see the walls of Topkapi and the activity of the Eminönü waterfront, marked by the Yeni Camii and the mounded Süleymaniye Camii with their glittering minarets, the Galata Bridge and its neon underbelly. On the other side float the kitchen boats of small wharf diners that roll on the wake of ferries passing down the Horn, and their sure-footed sailor-chefs continue frying fish and boiling corn and cooking potato crepes. Fishing poles that glint when cast line the bridge like the spearpoints of Byzantine wardens. On the opposite bank of the Bosphorous are the neon facades of Russian-run clubs on Karaköy’s waterfront, with the Nusretiye Camii on the right end.

From there the hill rises to the illuminated Galata Tower, with fire in its high windows, and higher climbs the İstiklal Caddesi of Beyoğlu to Taksim Square under searchlight maniples that close on nothing. Below them spotlights give the marble of Dolmabahçe Palace a yellowed hue like old parchment, and the corporate skyscrapers of the Levent district dawn brightly behind. (I visited that quarter to resolve a banking issue and found it to mirror Houston.)

Now look to the right, north up the Bosphorus, to Beşiktaş, to Cırağan Palace, and to Yıldız Grove, bald of lights. The Ortaköy suburb is a line of marinas and stone houses and a Golden Mile of nightclubs. Then comes the Bosphorus Bridge, the Ortaköy Camii dwarfed by its modern pillars. Green and gold lights run along its suspension cables, forming jagged lines like teeth over the channel.

The bridge brings your eye to Asia, to a coast of stale balconied buildings in devout Üsküdar, once called Scutari. The district’s shoreline bends out toward the Golden Horn directly across the Bosphorus, with the minarets of the Şemşi Paşa Camii at the northern corner, and Leander’s Tower on an island, Kız Kulesi, off the southern. Now the eye skips across the ill-lit dockyards and industry of Harem and the gridwork buildings of Selimiye and the barracks where Florence Nightingale toiled to save casualties of the Crimean War, and on to the next monument: a German built palace, a neoclassical gift from Kaiser Wilhelm. The palace occupies Seraglio Point, along with a ferry debarkment and the Haydarpaşa Train Station, its rail lines faced south-east towards Ankara.

Seraglio Point marks the northern end of the bay of Chalcedon, where are today many ferry terminals with more of the bulky craft, and beyond, the modern apartments and glass offices of Kadıköy. From the southern tip inflates the golden apple of the Turk Balloon. South past Moda is the blackened Sea of Marmara, which twinkles through a slight fog with the wispy lights of ships.

The intersecting waters of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn turn one metropolitan sprawl into three juxtaposed entities, neighborhoods as distinct in character as entire cities: Üsküdar’s piousness, Kadıköy’s modernity, Sultanahmet’s Disneyland crowds, Beyoğlu’s energy, and the oppressive faith of Eyüp.

I would never have seen it all without you, my friends, and am inestimably grateful for your patience and hospitality.

_________________Ah! had I never seen,
Or known your kindness, what might I have been?
What my enjoyments in my youthful years,
Bereft of all that now my life endears?
And can I e’er these benefits forget?
And can I e’er repay the friendly debt?
No, doubly no.
—John Keats