Lightsaber in August
Some memories of warmth in the depths of winter.... Every summer we take a week-long trip in coastal Turkey. Last year, we liked our trip so much, that we decided to repeat it, almost exactly. The following is a log of both of the trips layered on top of one another. Photos are also from both trips.
FOÇA / PHOCAEA
After the car ferry from Istanbul to Bandirma, the road to Foça runs through the province of Balikesir. The first notable stop-off, which we hit mid-morning was the Manyas Bird Sanctuary. Last year, when we left Louisiana, I lamented that I had not seen a pelican, and to my astonishment, the bird sanctuary was full of them, standing out in the water. There is a tower there with binoculars for viewing them from afar.
In the province of Izmir lie two different Foças -- the Old and the New. Our destination was the Old, known as Phocaea in ancient times. The center of town is built around a harbor full of fishing boats and then a long promenade along the water. Looking out, there is a collection of islands with connections to Greek mythology. For anyone who has been to the more popular Turkish seaside towns like Bodrum, Foça is surprisingly low-key and uncrowded. The harbor is lined with restaurants, but when you come to the end of them, you realize you might be able to count them on two hands.
The wonderful thing about the town is that there is nothing to see. There is history there but very little evidence of it. The harbor curves again, and after a walk around the one and only ancient site, one comes to a second harbor full of sailing yachts. Between the two harbors, one walks along the seaside beside a series of niches in the rock which were once a sanctuary for Cybele. Today they are full of green, brackish water, cut off from the sea water on the other side of the walkway. Atop these same rocks is the site of a temple to Athena, but when I finally discover the path that leads to it, through a narrow space between the supermarket and a restaurant, I find a locked gated area with a public school inside. There is a sign indicating that I am in the right place, and when I look into it further it turns out that the citizens of Foça are planning to demolish the school and erect the temple anew. In the second harbor, there is a monument to the ships built by the Phocaeans -- the first Greeks to make long-distance travels by sea -- which doubles as a bike rack. On one of the outlying islands called Orak, there is a collection of jagged, barren rocks believed to be the sirens' rocks in The Odyssey -- their voices possibly inspired by the cries of the monk seals that still live there.
I get as close to these places as I need to on a sunset tour of the bay with a grilled fish in front of me. Other pleasures of Foça include the old ice cream shop on the promenade, just at the end of the street we stayed on, with its Cretan mastic ice cream. I opt for the mysterious "blue sky," (known as "blue moon" in the American Midwest) which has a flavor that I cannot quite place but seems like it should be the default flavor of ice cream. By day, when it isn't crowded, we take seats outside the ice cream shop. At night, we walk the length of the promenade, ice cream in hand. There is a wooden pier along a long stretch, ending at the city beach, which is full of people with their folding chairs having a drink beside the water. We stop at a bench to listen to a guy playing OK Computer-era Radiohead on his trombone.
I spend every morning reading William Faulkner beside our hotel's pool with a cup of coffee before breakfast. One summer it is Absalom, Absalom! and the other Light in August. The breakfast comes straight from the garden of the hotel's owner, in the village of Kozbeyli, fifteen or twenty minutes away. One day we make a trip there and pick figs and vegetables. Julia's favorite thing about the hotel is the tables on the patio beside the pool, which are cross-sections from logs with glass fit into them. The wood is full of nooks and crannies perfect for hiding the old Star Wars figures that we brought back from the U.S. Each morning and afternoon we take a swim in the pool, and Julia is finally learning to kick and to use her arms. After gaining some confidence, she takes off her water wings and announces, "I don't need these." She pushes off from the step at the shallow end and sinks right to the bottom.
INTERLUDE IN ASSOS
Our friend Shellie, who was one of the first people I met in Istanbul, moved to a village near the ancient city of Assos a few years ago. Assos is on the way from Foça to Bozcaada, and so we stopped by for an hour or so. We drove through the narrow streets of a sleepy little village of stone houses, several in need of repair, to the very last one, overlooking a valley. Shellie took us first to the village house, which like all stone village houses I have seen in this region, are comprised of just a few small rooms but keep wonderfully cool in the summer. Beside the stone house, though, she has a second, modern house with a high timbered ceiling and a loft. We sat on the front porch, looking out at the valley below, which brought to mind something between California chaparral and the Texas hill country, and I kept expecting to see cowboys on horseback. I make a note to try to come back here for a bit longer in the future, and then we are off.
BOZCAADA / TENEDOS
Bozcaada, one of the two coastal islands that still belongs to Turkey (the rest were ceded to Greece in the 1920s) had always been a spot of mystery to me. I remember Oya and I trying to arrange a trip to stay at the Hotel Kaikias years ago but then abandoning the idea when no one wrote back to us. There was a seaplane that flew from the Golden Horn to Bozcaada for a summer or two, and again I thought about making the trip, but then it ceased service. From land, the island is reached by a small car ferry that leaves from the town of Geyikli. Upon making the crossing, we arrived in a harbor overlooked by a castle. The other landmarks in the skyline include the clock tower above the Church of the Virgin Mary and a single hill that rises behind the city. The island was once known as Tenedos. In The Iliad, the Greek fleet stops here on their way to Troy. Today, looking across the water from the castle one sees little but wind turbines.
The island is famous for its vineyards more than anything, and we tasted wines from four of them: Ataol, Talay, Corvus (the only one I had ever seen in Istanbul) and Amadeus. Each winery has its strengths, some only using the native grapes of the island like vasilaki and others branching out into other varietals. The island is blessed with unique soil which makes the wine what it is. I doubt there is any other island on earth with six different wineries on it -- and being in a predominantly Muslim country like Turkey, it is that much more surprising. The island does not feel particularly Turkish, even though the Greek population must be all but extinct. The mezes had held onto their Cretan character, too. The hotel where we stayed, Kaikias, did not feel at all Turkish, with its white lobby with vines hanging through the skylight and the dark, wooden Greek furniture tucked into every corner, the icons and old books in cases along the walls, and the smell of beyaz sabun -- a white soap different from the Arap sabunu used in every stairwell and entryway in Istanbul. There always seemed to be a bit of sand on the floor, and the wind always seemed to be coming down the hallways.
At the back of the island is a beautiful, sandy stretch of beach called Ayazma Plaj (as in the Greek "hagiasma" -- a holy spring), where we spent the better part of a day. Julia and I built sandcastles, and I spent some time snorkeling, not finding anything more interesting than a sea urchin. At sunset, we drove back across the island, past fields of grapes, retracing the many forks in the road as the island took on a golden glow.
THE GALLIPOLI PENINSULA
As we made our way back up the mainland, we stop to have a roadside picnic and cut one of the melons that we bought at a roadside stand. At the edge of a grove of pines there we found a water fountain with a long trough where we wash the melon, only to be assailed by maybe two dozen goats that emerged from the woods, kicking up dust and then crowding around the fountain for a drink. They disappeared as quickly as they had arrived, with the same sound of a clanging bell that had accompanied their arrival.
We stayed a night in the city of Çanakkale, where we saw an old friend of Oya's, and then took a ferry across the Straits of Dardanelles to the Gallipoli Peninsula. The long peninsula was the site of one of the key battles of the First World War and holds an important place in the Turkish popular consciousness more than 100 years later. To see the battlefields properly would probably take a full day or two, but we needed to be back in Istanbul by evening and so we headed straight for the peninsula's southern extremity and the memorial to fallen Turkish soldiers that stands there. This is one of those structures everyone in Turkey is familiar with: four enormous squared stone pillars supporting a massive square block. It has something in common with the Anit Kabir, Atatürk's mausoleum in Ankara, with its flat façade and row of narrow squared columns. In fact, they were built back-to-back in the 1940s and 50s and are probably the two key pieces of momumental architecture from the Turkish Republican era, regardless of your politics. I don't know exactly what the visit meant for Oya, but I imagine it is something akin to the trip I took to Washington, DC in seventh grade when I saw the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The trip back north up the peninsula and then on toward Istanbul warranted a few stops for local desserts around Tekirdag (Turks always know what each town in their country is famous for) and then onward to Istanbul.