Two Minutes in Turkey

Summing Up

2009-07-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

Time to put this great adventure into a kind of overall context.

Since I don’t really have a home, per se, I don’t have the comforts of a home (or my favorite stuff) to pull me back emotionally from these trips.

And that makes getting on planes and being gone a long time work out much better for me than most.

It does not mean I don’t miss my friends, who have become, essentially, the two places I call home, Seattle & Portland.

(There's a third important place, but it's one I don't call home: The Road.)

That said, I’ll just observe that any day that begins when you put on a money belt and a photo vest has got to get really awful in some fundamental ways to be a bad day.

Cheap Thrills

Well, it was great seeing all those places, and meeting all those people, but I need to admit that one of the highlights for me was getting the Turkey reports picked up and posted on the www.iwasinturkey.com web site.

Turkey

As I learned to say in Turkish,

Turkey is very beautiful, but the people are even better.

And that began, of course, with the first two we met—Chetin and Jale. They offered up their home to us, Chetin’s the one who came up with the car, he’s the one who took two or three days off work to make sure we could get out on the road, and we kept thinking how lucky we were to hit such great people the first shot we had at it.

But we weren’t merely lucky: people in Turkey are that nice.

Often, when I was lost in a city, I’d stop in some shop and ask, in my dreadful (but much-appreciated) Turkish

Good day. Can you tell me please where X is?

And they wouldn’t tell me.

They’d leave their shop, walk with me to at least the first intersection, sometimes the second, and sometimes whistle up some pal down that street to take me in tow.

And I can’t tell you how many times I was offered part of someone’s breakfast or lunch, or fruit, or the universal chai.

Not to cast aspersions about the Greeks— it’s a different culture, after all, but only one person has offered me food here; on the other hand, no one’s tried to sell me a rug, either. . . .

I think if I had to live outside the US, I’d start the where-do-I-want-to-live list with Turkey.

Kim and I have already started talking a little about working out a way to bring photographers here. We have most of the itinerary mapped out already.

Best City

The best city I was in is pretty much Istanbul— it has everything, including some great, old, almost-village neighborhoods and all the big mosques. And bombing around on the water busses with the normal commuters was a treat.

Best Place: Turkish for Lap of Luxury

The nicest place we stayed was the Ephesia, in Kuşadasi, south of Izmir. That’s where we were given the rooms and meals by a friend of a friend. We shot a bunch of pictures for him for his new development, and I hope he’ll be able to use them. Here’s their URL: http://www.ephesia.com/

If Kim and I put the photo safari together, we’ll be staying there for a couple of two-night stops.

Since I averaged just less than $20 a night for lodging, this place was far above the norm. but even if I hadn’t been traveling so close to the ground, it would have been a real highlight.

Crete

Crete was also a terrific place, but the people seemed a little more guarded and distant (hell, if you’d been invaded as often as they had, you’d be guarded and distant, too).

But it was also pretty good practice for the 2010 trip, which is looking like Tunisia, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Provence. Two new countries— maybe three. No Vermeers. Bombing around on islands. And only two languages to deal with: French and Italian.

Athens

Athens was terrific, but would have been better about 15 degrees cooler. The last month of the trip, I was dealing with temperatures that were about a month early in the year.

This is a terrible picture, and the last of the 7774 I took on this trip, actually, but it shows the Acropolis from the roof of the hotel where I stayed. It’s a shot from the roof and not from my room, but how cool is it to look up from neighborhoods in the city and see this?

When I was bumbling around trying to find the flower market, I was paying a lot of attention to my city map and the street names up on the sides of buildings, and I saw a young woman standing in the middle of the street taking a picture.

What was there to shoot?

Ah, merely the Acropolis. . . . .

Biggest Downside

Other than being away from friends for three months, the biggest problem with the trip was weather. The three days of rain early on weren’t the problem that the heat was toward the end.

Especially the last three weeks on Crete and the week in Athens, it was too darn hot. High 80s (at least) during the day for almost a month. And here and there in Turkey, especially the last third of that trip, it was getting so warm that I had to adapt to the heat.

The heat limited how long I could stay out and shoot or prowl around much more than my age did.

I have noticed, even though I’m in somewhat good shape from all the walking all the time, that I can handle only about 6-7 hours before I start to droop and need to find shade and a seat and maybe some cold water and food.

But too much cold water leads to other facilities I need to find. . . .

And I met some pretty hardy travelers— they are the real pros at this much more than me. I stayed pretty safe, while they went 3-400 miles further east in Turkey than I did, and one of them is in Syria right now, learning Arabic.

And there’s a couple here, the Barcley’s, in the Athens hotel, who sold their home in Alberta, put everything in storage, and are taking a year off to travel. They’ve already been to Syria, Egypt, Jordan, some Greek islands, and are off to sub-Saharan Africa next, then to Thailand.

Their travel reports are at www.barclaystaw.blogspot.com, I think.

So while I now have about half the countries that Arnie Panitch and Don Feller have on their Life List, and less than half of what Mary Feller has, some of the people I met on this trip seem like the real adventurers.

The Last Miles

The flight yesterday, from Paris to Chicago, was about 200 miles less than I drove in Turkey.

Yertle the Turtle

And here’s your intrepid (well, maybe trepid at this point) reporter, slightly out of focus

in the hotel room in Athens, with all the gear— 41 pounds of hold baggage plus the laptop in one hand and the camera gear in the front back-pack.

Pretty travelled out, at least for now, down to the last belt notch, needing a new pair of shoes-- this pair is giving out after 16 countries-- and eager to catch up with his friends and family.

Report 50: The Last Report

2009-07-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

One Last Snipe

One thing I wanted to see before I left Athens was the Flower Market, which isn’t far from the Central Market I hit my first day here, but I may have not been there on the right day, or ???, because your local Fred Meyer garden store has five times the flowers this one lone little nursery had. . . .

The Historic Athenian Cemetery

I did score pretty well at the large (and still currently used) cemetery, and I suppose if I’d really wanted to see flowers, I could have got straight there. . . .

But one of Robert’s Rules is that sometimes, it’s not what you know, it’s when you know it. . . .

So I got to the cemetery and was pretty immediately adopted by some nice woman

(who must be a cousin of the old woman in Turkey who walked me through the local ruins and then whistled up her daughter to bring the stuff to sell tourists) because it became pretty clear pretty immediately that I was just in time for the tour.

She started out showing me the tombs of all the patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church, then the marker for Melina Mercouri and her husband, the director/producer of Never on Sunday, Jules Dassin.

Well, his full name was there, but she was noted only as Melina, with no last name on the marker, which seemed a real tribute to her fame and prominence in Greek popular culture.

But then I remembered a (previously unreported) detail of the last full day in Crete, when I’d gone out to the city walls to see Nikos Kazantzakis’s (author of "Zorba, the Greek" and many other works-- came close to getting the Nobel for Literature, but was black-balled by the church) burial place— and it’s on a parapet and looks out across the city to the harbor, and there’s a pretty good-sized plaza around it—maybe 1,000 square feet or so, and a raised slab about the dimensions of a large dining room table, and a simple wooden (pretty straight tree branches, rather than milled lumber) cross—but here’s the really special component: there was no name at all near the monument/burial site.

Now that’s fame. . . .

But there was some great light and shadow at the cemetery, and I’ll be playing with these images over the winter to see what they’ll look like in black & white.

Cats Everywhere

It’s a coincidence, but cats form a kind of set of bookends to the trip. In the Kuzguncuk neighborhood of Istanbul where Chetin and Jale live there are scores and scores of feral cats, although a lot of the shopkeepers put out food for them, and we saw them in the dumpsters all over the place.

Well, the old cemetery (not the ancient one, but merely the old one) is also full of cats:

Don’t Forget to Pay Your Rent

And I was out exploring, snooping around the place looking for capturable images, and at one point could down into the work-yard of the place, and saw this:

I don’t know if these people’s relatives didn’t pay the rent one month, or if there’s remodeling or new construction, or what, but these folks have clearly been kind of evicted and even, a close scrutiny reveals, somewhat rearranged. . . .

The Schliemann’s Last Home

And here’s the burial vault of Heinrick Schleimann (Troy and Mycenae) and his Greek wife Sophie, who was 30 years junior to him, but became his full partner in the (I hesitate to call it) archaeology, but you know what I mean.

Feeding Pigeons

After the tour guide went back to work, I noticed a little procession of people in front of me, so I stopped looking for photography opportunities and followed them at a distance.

The person in the lead seemed to work or the cemetery, as he was carrying a large sheet cake, and at the end of the ceremony after the priest blessed the already accomplished interment, with a swinging, smoking censor, chanting, praying, and all the normal (what I refer to as the marketing the product) foofraw, he took some of the cake (maybe a large tablespoon’s worth, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and cast some down in the little marble house of the mausoleum, and some more up on the roof.

The pigeons appreciated it, I’m sure— both versions. Almost as soon as all the people starting walking back to the entrance, there were a half-dozen pigeons eating the cake crumbs.

Day 87, Tuesday, June 30

Coins Everywhere

I started out the AM at the Numismatic Museum, partly to see the coins (boy, were there a lot of coins), but mostly to see the building, as it was the home of Heinrich Schliemann, the explorer/looter/plunderer of Troy and Mycenae.

You remember, the guy who found this:

And the house was a trip. It was decorated with all the expected ancient Trojan/Mycenean wall paintings, ceiling decorations, mosaic-looking floors, and it was almost a palace in terms of décor if not size— although it was three full floors about 200 yards from the big square in the center of the city.

There were even a couple of coins there of the subject of my favorite poem, “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” Mithradates, the king of Pontius.

He’s the one who took little doses of poison to build up immunity and protect himself from poisons, which was the normal mechanism of royal succession in Pontius in those days.

The New Acropolis Museum

The old museum up on top of the Acropolis, which has been in operation for about 140 or so years, has just this last week been replaced by a wonderful new, state-of-the-art world-class museum down at the level of the rest of the city.

This just opened late June, so it was in the papers and on TV a lot.

And it’s not just great exhibits (all the really great old stuff, including the Erectheum porch supports [5 of the 6 maidens/columns that support the porch roof]) but old pieces of the frieze— and right where you can see them, too, and not 50 feet up in the air.

But of course it was built over an old neighborhood that they excavated when they built the building, and they worked the building so you could still see what was down there.

This is the main entrance, and there’s not only an open space

but the platform you walk in on is covered with plexiglass, and you can see through it to more of the ancient city.

And they have put dots on the plexiglass, I’m guessing, so you don’t freak out
while you are walking across the top of it.

They did the same thing inside as well, with some exhibits that look like little troves of hidden objects, or places where pigs were killed and votive offerings were put under the floors of new-built houses.

Metro Stop Museum

And when they built the Metro system, or at least extended it, for the Olympics, they found all kinds of stuff, and the Acropoli Metro stop has some really gorgeous exhibits that many museums would love to have.

Socrates Was Here

There is more conjecture than history here, which runs along the lines of

Well, these cells were used for people who were arrested or convicted during this period, and Socrates was arrested and convicted during that time, and so this must be where he was incarcerated.

But here are the images, anyway.

The View of the Top

And on the way back to the Metro station from the Socrates cell, I cut through the woods rather than take the big 3 Km pedestrian promenade which I’ve been wearing out since Sunday, and found these shots of the Parthenon without the apartment houses or most of the construction equipment in sight.

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Day 86; Monday, June 29

Scaling Peaks

I spent the day up on the two big hills in the city: the Acropolis in the AM and Mt Lycabettus after dinner.

Better Late Than Never

Although I was still recuperating from the heat and the long hours over the weekend, I wanted to hit the Acropolis early.

I have been trying to come home a day or so early, partly to miss a 24-hour Chicago stay, and its expense, but mostly because if I get home at least one day early, I can attend the Freethought Fourth of July picnic in Seattle on Friday, the 3rd.

It’s a great chance to get some more feedback from the conference and to visit with some people who will be there who are important to me.

So I had to hit the internet this AM at the hotel to see what the schedule change news was— it was disappointing— but by the time I put the laptop away and got my gear and headed out (and went the wrong way on the Metro) it was 8:30 before I actually started up the hill.

And I was about 500 meters up the trail and I knew I was already too late—I heard some woman ahead of me telling her pouty trans-pubescent son:

“If you are tired, Jeremy, you can just take a nap when we get
back to the ship.”

So the cruise ships’ tour busses were already converged, although it was only the first disgorgement, so I thought it wouldn’t be too bad.

The Play Wasn’t a Turkey— It Was a Goat!

This is the theater down at the SE corner,

on the way up to the top, where the great tragedies were put on— and here’s another goat story for every one.

The word “tragedy” comes from the ancient word for “goat,” since the earliest plays were more religion and superstition than drama, they’d sacrifice a goat to appease whatever made-up deity they all agreed was in charge.

The Acropolis

The Acropolis (means “city on a hill” or “citadel”) started out as the whole city, then as walls were built in larger concentric circles as the population got larger and larger, the old center became the sacred temples and seat of government.

But you can see here the original fortress element of the place— it’s already on some pretty steep rock and then they build walls up on that

and restrict access with big strong gates— which were guarded by the night watch and all that.

Once you were in, you were in for the night, and if you were out it was just too bad for you.

A couple of social history detours here:

The first is that the word “curfew” comes from Medieval French and means to “cover the fire,” which meant that you had to extinguish any fires that were still burning.

The second is the honor that involved “Getting the Keys to the City,” which we don’t do anymore but I remember seeing newsreels of people like Lindbergh and Eisenhower and other famous people getting the (big, fancy, totally ceremonial) key to New York City, for example,

Well this goes back to guarded gates at night, but if you had the (actual) key to the city (gate), you could come and go as you pleased.

Construction Project: 2,500 years and counting

This is taking longer than The Big Dig, in Boston. . . . .

Well, with Greece in the EU there’s lots of Euros now for big cultural restoration projects, and in some ways, this one may be the biggest one of all.

About half of the Acropolis itself is a construction zone—

you can’t go inside any of the structures, as they are all roped off and hard-hat areas, and full of fork-lifts

and cranes

and some pretty beefy equipment.

And in spite of the cranes and the noise and the people from everywhere there are many little quiet, shady spaces where not much has changed for a great long time.

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees Off

And it was pretty packed up there and hard to get pictures of the buildings without a bunch of people standing in front of the building, facing away from the building, having their pictures taken by their friends (or even strangers).

I have never gotten this very common aspect of travel photography: you come 7,000 miles to see something, you turn your back on it, you block much of the view of it with yourself, and you have someone take your picture.

Help me out, here, people.

I was last here 49 years ago and in many ways it’s much better—safer walkways, for example, but that would still never pass on OSHA test--

But this is one of the great acres in the history of Western Civilization, even if it’s full of other people who have the absolute temerity to be here when I planned to be here.

The View from the Top

Here’s the next place I went—The Temple of Olympian Zeus and Hadrian’s Arch.

And beyond it up to the left a little you can see the track that was built for the 1896 (resumption of the modern) Olympics, which I remember visiting when I was here when I was 18.

(I know some wise-ass will say it was right after those first Olympics, or right after the first modern Olympics, but no, it was in 1960.)

How Do You Get from Zeus to Jupiter?

Well, it was Zeus, Father of the Gods, and that reads as “Zeus, pater” in Greek— simple, huh?

Susan Strikes, Again

And I hit the best private museum in town later this afternoon, and shot a bunch of folk costumes and the like, mostly for Susan, my wonderful Balkan travel partner.

Lycabettos

This is the highest hill in Athens, and although the light didn’t cooperate fully, here’s what it’s like looking down from up here.

The Last Weekend

2009-07-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

Day 85; Sunday, June 28

This has been a very busy weekend.

Today I headed out to see the weekly flea market, the Keramikos cemetery, then the agora, the old marketplace of Athens, neither of which I got to see when I was first here.

I could have taken the Metro but wanted to take the bus as you can see more above ground, and on the way into the old cemetery (of course) I had to ask for directions a couple of times, then the bus driver must have thought I was looking for a place halfway across town (or maybe it was my execrable Greek) so I got sent off the bus almost a Km too soon. . . .

But I got lots of help after that from the wise women of the neighborhood

and stumbled into where I wanted to go in the first place,

Athens’s Biggest Flea (Market)

I almost bought these two books (but I didn’t want to haul them around all day in the heat); can you read the titles?

Cemetery Museum

Cemetery

This is the city end of one of the most sacred roads in ancient Athens—

Hadrian’s Library

And this obviously ancient piece of terra cotta edging attached to some really old cement

was just lying there waiting for a nice airplane ride to America . . . . but it’s still there, of course.

Agora

The name of the old market place is still used for the word “market,” and you etymologists will also see it in the root of “agoraphobia,” the fear of being outside.

There are a couple of lovely big buildings on the grounds, and lots of windy paths and old ruins. . . . and some more recent churches, and it sits right below the Acropolis (we get acrophobia— fear of heights— from that one).

Where Are the Lions When You Need Them?

And there’s a big hill near the agora and you can walk up there and look down on it

and so I did.

And I get up there and here’s three little boys throwing rocks down over the side of the hill (there are paths down there where people are walking) and I spoke sharply to them and told them to stop.

And their parents, who spoke English, asked why and I told them.

And then we got to talking cameras and lenses some and then one of the parents said, pointing out across the city:

“I don’t see how you can see all this and not rejoice in the glory of God.”

And I said, “It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

And we were off. . . . .

So we danced through all the standard arguments and I finally asked them if they thought the Mormons were right, and they said no, they prayed for the Mormons to come to the true faith. Then I asked them if they thought the Jehovah’s Witnesses were right, and they said no, they prayed for them to come to the true faith. And lastly I asked them if they thought the Catholics were right, and they said no, they prayed for them to come to the true faith, too.

And I asked if they thought all the other religions were wrong except for theirs, and they said yes, and then I said that I wasn’t so terrible as they might think— I was only one religion ahead of them.

As I left they were praying for me, but not, apparently, for anyone who got beaned by their kids throwing rocks down a steep hill into trees and paths.

The Agora Museum

And this was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in a museum, I think.
Here it is

and here’s what it’s for.

I’d been out just over 6 hours by then, so I headed back to the hotel (Metro this time, and only one stop) and took a nap and got a rest and wrote most of this.

But I didn’t want to waste the whole evening, so I went back out with the camera for the evening stroll, but this neighborhood, as I said earlier, is kind of gritty and scruffy, so I wasn’t out long.

Sorority Rush

I did see what looked like a kind or sorority rush party— lots and lots of hopeful-looking young women (somewhat scantily clad, I’ll admit) standing around the street intersections just kind of smoking and sometimes talking to each other and sometimes to the men who seemed to be walking past.

There were older women there as well, not quite dressed the same way, but not moving up and down the street like most of the shoppers.

Maybe they’d already done all their shopping for the day.

Day 84; Saturday, June 28

Saturday— the Archaeological Museum

After the energy cost of Friday I needed to rest more than I usually do, but there were some things that I never got to see when I was here as a kid (the summer I was 18 I spent a month here— I won a competition in the Civil Air Patrol in Washington, and was here for a month with four other state winners of identical trips— there were 130 winners from the US) and I really wanted to see them.

The first was the Archaeological Museum, which is about a Km from the hotel where I am, so I went up there in the late morning, spent same time there, came back to rest in the hottest part of the day, then went back in the evening.

And, just like the first time I was in the Louvre or the National Gallery in London or the Art Institute of Chicago, it is such a thrill to actually see something you have read about and seen pictures of for years.

The Trojan (Archaeology) Wars

Until about 140 or so years ago, the whole business about the Trojan War was thought to be mythic, with no actual historical connection.

A rich German business man, Heinrich Schliemann, who taught himself to read ancient Greek so he could tease out more location clues thought differently, and set out to find the actual city of Troy.

And he did.

His source materials were The Iliad, which was about the last few days of the war, and The Odyssey, about Odysseus’s ten-year trip home (he’s the one who thought up The Trojan Horse).

There were nine cities there, like a nine-layer cake, but in his zeal and pig-headedness and all that, he pretty much plowed through the first five cities to get to the sixth, which he thought was the right age and all that.

He wasn’t right about that, but that’s a different story.

Then he took all the good stuff to Germany.

Then he attacked other sites in the big peninsula that forms the south third of Greece, the Peloponnesus, and found equally wonderful stuff, including what he called the Mask of Agamemnon, the leader of all the Greek forces at Troy.

Agamemnon was the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Helen, whose abduction started the war.

Well, the mask is now thought to be a king’s mask, but there’s no connection to Agamemnon.

Here’s some more stuff from the Mycenean site in southern Greece.

Elegant Technology

These are cores and blades, which represent a huge leap forward in lithic (stone-based) technology.

Normally, you’d take a piece of obsidian about the size of a softball and thwack it with a hammer stone, normally something like granite (that won’t shatter like the obsidian does) and work away and pretty soon you have a chopper or a scraper or a spear-head that’s shaped like a fat leaf and has about a foot of cutting edge— the outer edges of what’s left.

And in the process, you wind up with a lot of very sharp but not very usable flakes of obsidian on the ground.

But core and blade techniques are different.

The cores

are prepared as columns, and then the tops are cleanly snapped off—now you have a column about four or five inches tall with a very flat top.

Then, if you put the point of a piece of deer antler (or goat horn) pointing down against the outer edge of the flat top, and give it just the right tap, the flake that splits off is a two-edged knife blade which is the length of the core. Then you move the antler a little, tap it again, and get another knife blade. And again, and again.

Here are the blades that result.

And you wind up with yards and yards of cutting edge from the same amount of obsidian you would have only gotten about a foot of cutting edge using older technology.

That may not sound like much, but some of the obsidian came from hundreds of miles away sometimes, and making more efficient use of it was a big deal.

So here’s more stuff from the museum.

Including George Washington.

This is the oldest glass I know I’ve seen— it’s carved out of crystal, rather than actually created glass.

And about 20 years or so ago, some sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck, and it was full of sculptures- bronze and marble, so these made a really big splash in the world of archaeology.

Zeus (or Posiedon) here is about 7 feet tall.

And here’s the other great piece form the shipwreck—the jockey.

I got the abs—now where are the chicks?

And this poor whatever it is seems perplexed and frustrated—did all the work to get the six-pack abs but something went a little wrong somewhere.

On the way to the museum I sought out the local daily market, including the fish souk, the vegetable souk, the bread souk, and the butchers, souk, and the flower souk, which I’ll hit in the AM on Monday.

Everything But What I Came Here For

2009-06-27T22:41:00.000-07:00

Day 83; Friday, June 26

Yesterday and today, Thursday and Friday, I spent managing the trip rather than actually travelling, so no pictures until you get down to the bottom two-thirds of this report-- the part about Knossos.

I had to change the travel schedule from Crete to Athens, tried to move up the coming home date a couple of days (I’m still working on that one), got packed up (consolidating, finishing the food I’d been eating out of the little fridge in the last hotel on Crete), swapped out a couple of paperbacks for new ones— the thrills were pretty much non-stop.

And the long day today—turning in the rental car, waiting for the plane (there’s an air traffic control work slow-down), getting reprimanded by the chair police, and then having a somewhat typical adventure once I got off the plane.

I had all the luggage (this is where I confess to buying a new gym bag) on me— I looked like Yertle the Turtle just got evicted: big backpack on the back, school back-pack on the front, carrying the laptop courier bag and the new (how did it get so full so soon?) gym bag.

So I got the bags at the Athens airport and was planning on taking the Metro right to Omonia Square, then walk the two blocks to the hotel.

Well, Metro wasn’t running to the airport today, because of a minor construction issue, so I went to wait for the bus. Once it arrived (I hadn’t planned on the bus, of course) I learned that I couldn’t give money to the driver, I had to go to a kiosk and buy a ticket.

But the closest one was out of tickets so I had to go to the next one (about a hundred more feet away but I’m probably carrying 50 lbs of stuff, and by the time I got back to the bus it was Standing Room Only, and so I stood for the 55 minutes it took to come into town, still wearing the big back-pack as the bus was so full there was no room for it on the floor and no racks or luggage, either.

Then a two-stop Metro ride (up and down flights and flights of stairs) and then the two blocks to the hotel, and now it’s 5 something and I was supposed to eat at 3:00, but the plane was late. . . .

Just another day in paradise.

And, hell— I could be home, which after 83 days is starting to sound better and better.

Well, it’s a Greek Homer, if not the Greek Homer

And walking through the lobby of the hotel in Crete last night, before they had the live Greek music and Cretan cuisine special weekly dinner (for all their German guests) I saw Homer Simpson in Greek.

I could hear the music last night from my room as my balcony overlooked the little dining area at the end of the swimming pool.

Very nice, although I was wondering what the Greeks would do for nightclub and entertainment music without “Never on Sunday” or “Zorba, the Greek.”

Achtung! Achtung! You Will be On-board— Schnell!!! Schnell!!!

And at the airport today, waiting for the plane, about 80% of the flights they called were to cities in Germany, so I’m guessing it’s not unlike the Japanese tourists who come to Hawaii on a Japanese airline, stay in Japanese hotels, go on all-Japanese tours, and never really leave the all-Japanese compounds.

Because I certainly didn’t suspect that 80% of the tourists I saw were German, but from the flight calls this AM, that was clearly the case.

Day 81; Wednesday, June 24

Knossos is a Knockout

I spent the day up at Knossos, which is the single most important archaeological site on the island, and has significance across all of Europe.

It’s trans-European importance is that it’s the earliest European civilization (rising 4700 years ago— only 400 years younger than the very first Egyptian civilization)— technically (a subject introduced earlier in these ramblings) when you get from just a bunch of farms to cities— rulers, priests, administrators (which means writing), usually enough surplus to have soldiers rather than just the farmers coming running with their pitchforks when there’s trouble, and of course soldiers need sergeants and lieutenants and captains and generals. . . . .

And to reinforce control, there are ceremonies and dedications and rituals and such and then all the attendant rules and proscriptions based on the people with the power holding on to the power— in ancient Egypt, for example, it was a capital offense to possess a calendar, because then you, and not just the priests [who had the only legitimate pipeline you-know-where] would know when the Nile was going to flood again. . . .

So there’s not a lot of information on the Minoans before they got here— or even where they are from, although there are a couple of clues.

The very earliest places (Vasiliki, near Aghios Nicolaos— see the June 21 Report) are oriented to the four cardinal directions much as people in the near-east orient their buildings, and the Greek word for East is “Antolia,” which sounds a lot like “Anatolia” (central Turkey) to me.

But when they got here, they got really successful really fast, and were building palace complexes by 4,000 years ago.

Two of their major crops, grapes and olives, don’t take much work until harvest and processing, so that freed up a lot of people to do other things.

They brought stone tools with them (I saw some elegant micro-liths in the museum today at Arhanes) but started making copper, then bronze, tools. The major palaces were built near the sea, so the inference is that they were heavily involved in trading and seafaring.

The trick in the photos today is that there were about 20 tour busses in the lot by the time I left (only two or so when I arrived right as it opened) and getting pictures without throngs of other tourists in them took some dancing.

I’d also like to rescind the rule that people from the cruise ships wear really bright colors ashore, so even if there are only a few of them even way in the background of your pictures, they really stand out clearly. . . . .

And there’s a big problem here that will never be reconciled. The original big-name archaeologist, Arthur Evans, of Oxford, in his own vigorously held (thoroughly English) opinion about what each building was for, rebuilt/re-created/imposed upon the site (he would say “restored”) walls, rooms, roofs, columns, and even though later scholarship has refuted some of his theories, his cement wall and column and staircase “interpretations” are the most easily understood parts of the palace complex.

And certainly the building that he did protected much of the rest of the place— roofs protecting walls and floors from the weather and tourists.

They do give a complete sense to the place, but they aren’t always correct--

This barnacle-sharp rock, by the way, is alabaster, as in

“Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.”

And the amazingly sharp little stalagmites are the result of millennia of rain.

It is, apparently, a kind of marble, but the erosion by the elements suggests a very different hardness index, among other things.

The Grand Goat-A-Rama

2009-06-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

Report 47

Day 80; June 23

I spent much of the day Monday getting up to and then around the Lasithi Plateau, which was a pretty special place.

Road Signs

I mentioned the road sign system recently, and here’s a double example:

I’ve been trying very hard to just read from the top line in each case, just as a way to get more used to operating here in Crete.

Sometimes it’s pretty confusing, as the Greek letter Ξ can be a Z sound, an X sound, or a CH sound, or even a kind of Norwegian throat-clearing H sound, but the letters are usually a lot more straight-forward than that, even if they have an odd look to them.

And there’s a clue about pronunciation that does not exist at all in Turkish or English: the accented syllable’s vowel has an accent mark over it.

Even Older Than Me!

On the way up (here’s a view of the coast back behind me to the north-east; I especially liked the look of the islands in the light)

I saw this old (trust me on this one) woodcarver who had a little display case of pretty poorly carved wooden spoons, which I really don’t need, but I did get a set of salad grabbers from him that looked a lot more polished and finished than his spoons did, so I figured he made the spoons himself and got the salad grabbers from a local source where they pound them out in a factory.

But the sign next to his stool, which was next to pile of shavings, said he was
107 years old, and even if he wasn’t, he looked it. He was 40 when I was born, which puts him being born when Teddy Roosevelt was president— the year before the Wright Brothers changed the world . . . .

And the sign could well be a year or two old itself. . . .

And I’m guessing this was his wife, who was very sweet, but she could have been his mother.

She gave me an orange,

which I ate later, and here she is about to hand me the salad tongs I bought.

And here’s the two of them in front of the spoon cabinet.

More Linens— But I Was Strong!

Up on the plateau I stopped in a town to check the place out and shot some of the standard Cretan table runners they all sell up here.

The goat-like animal (the main design element) is a kri-kri, the wild goat of Crete (that also show up in the old cave art from here) as well as standard flower motifs and some tree-of-life designs.

As you see, the designs are pretty standard, but the colors shift a little. And some of these are reversible.

California Dreamin’

This guy owned the local restaurant— I thought when I first saw him that he looked more Californian than Cretan and I learned he’d worked as a Merchant Mariner all up and down the American coastal ports, mostly running to South America and back.

Dancing Around the High Plateau

The Lasithi Plateau is inland about 25 Km from the north coast, and 40 Km or so from the town (Agios Nikolaos) where I stayed over the weekend.

It’s where the surviving Minoans hid out and preserved their culture when the Dorians moved onto the island.

I headed out pretty early, avoiding the new national four-lane road and staying on the old roads all the way.

There were lots of little villages on the way up into the plateau, and then lots of them around the outer edge of the plateau when I got there.

Some pretty typical village scenes ---

And this goat didn’t have a chance dealing with its very determined owner. . . .

Plateau Geography

Think of a coffee cup about 15 Km or so across, with the level of the coffee about 4/5 of the way up the cup.

Now change the cup to a ring of hills, and the level of the liquid to really flat farmland, growing wheat, goats, and potatoes.

Historically, there were about 20,000 windmills up here to move the water around but only a few of them remain,

mostly in front of tavernas and restaurants, although I did find one that was pulling water up into a big cement trough, which then headed, via PVC pipelines, out into the fields, where there was a lot of drip irrigation.

It’s about 50 Km around the perimeter of the ring road, and (of course) I wound up doing about 2.5 laps.

Chasing the Rice Truck

As I was going through the villages there was a guy in a loud-speaker truck selling rice and wheat around the circuit, and I must have seen him about a dozen different places, but I may well have put more miles in up there than he did.

Goat Central

So as you will already have realized from last night’s frantic e-mail, I wound up with way too much goat hair, as I thought I knew someone who could turn it into yarn, although I don’t really have anything I want to have knitted for me. . . .

But even before I realized all that, I was kind of listless up there— I mean it was pretty but I just wasn’t fully engaged, so I invented a quest: I decided to try and track down a bunch of goat hair by just pulling over to the side of the road when I saw people, especially the old black-dress grandmothers, more to meet them and have an adventure than to get the goat hair.

So I started in asking people and getting sent up to the next village and then asking again. . . .

And I finally hit this restaurant I’d been directed to and visited with the woman who ran it and she said she had a farm and had goat hair and it would be at a very reasonable cost (it was eventually for free) and don’t you think you’ll want at least 10 kilos worth (22 pounds!!!).

Her husband was working at the farm and wasn’t available for a couple of hours, so I took off, completed the circuit around the plateau, went to the open-air museum (and visited with the old woman weaving on an even older loom all about goat hair), hit the local natural history museum, finished the total circuit (so I’m now on the second full lap), and went back to the restaurant.

You Sure There’ll Be Enough Goat Hair?

Her son guided me to the farm, calmed the killer dogs lunging out to the ends of their chains to greet me, and then we hit the open-air goat-hair warehouse.

There were about eight or ten really big gunny-sacks lying about, stuffed full of goat hair (and other natural goat products), standing about 4.5 feet tall and a couple of feet across each.

And the kid seemed kind of miffed that I only wanted less than half of one of the bags.

And it was also pretty clear that the other natural goat products added some real punch to the goat-hair experience (especially this AM when I went out to the car, where the goat hair had been in the hatch-back all night). There was a true, rural Crete piquancy to the car this AM. . . . . and it was neither oregano nor sage. . . .

So I went bombing back to the open-air museum hoping the old weaver was there so I could ask her about how to wash and dry the damn stuff. I mean, I know what wet dogs smell like. . . .

And I got the Goat Hair Washing 101 outline, and headed out of the valley—

All the previous travel was counter-clockwise, but after leaving the open-air museum, I headed clockwise up to one of the three exit roads. Most tourists up there hit only part of the loop, as they come in one place and go out another, but very few are as thorough as I am, logging about two-and-a-half full laps before I escaped up over the rim of the hills and down into the coast.

Heading Back to the North Coast

I saw these old windmills up on the rim of the plateau and thought they were worth some climbing around.

I’m going to play with these in Black and White when I get home.

And just so the whole story gets told, I sent out the e-mail last night, and this AM went through all the responses and no one I know even knows any spinners— quilters, yes; spinners no.

I did get one e-mail from a close friend of almost 30 years who said that if I was driving around Crete looking for goat hair for spinners and weavers I didn’t even know, that maybe, just maybe, it was time to think about coming home.

So I found a place this noon to get rid of the goat hair. But it was a great adventure and a terrific way to energize yesterday up there, dancing the goat-hair dance on the high plateau.

Postal Excesses

At home, going postal has one sense— here it’s quite different.

I had a couple of liquor boxes worth of table linens and stuff like that to ship home, and since they weighed only about 7 kilos total, and the 40-kilo gym bag cost me about $140 or so to ship home, I figured that these two would be a real bargain.

Not the case.

I was reminded of friends’ complaints that framing my photographs cost more than the photograph itself, and I’m having the same experience at the post office today.

The two little packages cost €91 to ship, so I’m guessing that anything over 6 ounces costs a bundle regardless of weight, and then there’s a sliding scale based on weight. I’m guessing that the first pound (half-kilo) cost about $50 or so, and that’s some spicy meat ball.

More Adventures on Crete

2009-06-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

Day 77: June 20

Internet Café/Pool Hall

Last night I went looking for an internet café so I could check e-mail and send the most recent Crete reports, and I’m walking on the street where the hotel is back toward the town center and I hear this very welcome and very lovely little click sound from a place I’m passing, and I look in and there’s a pool table, a real billiards table (no pockets— very special) and five guys playing cards and some other guys (almost all in their 40s and older) watching soccer or playing some kind of Tetris on one of the six computers around the room, and I’m in there like I belong.

And the first thing was I got asked if I wanted to join the card game, and I thought that was a really bad idea, financially.

They set me up with power and the password and don’t charge me, and I check e-mail and download some messages to answer back in the room, and I come back later, launch the reports, answer the messages, etc., get invited to play some English Billiards, all very nice.

Moseying through the Museum

Hit the local Arco Museum and the package express early this AM in Sitia—I’m on the north coast of Crete and as far east and north as I’ll be on the island.

One of these experiences was much better than the other.

The museum was small, but had lots of really good stuff in it, although I could have used more explanations in English.

The more you know about something, the more interesting it is, and here’s a chance to learn more about this great civilization, the Minoans, and there just wasn’t much on the little cards, although there were lots of unique things, like grave goods, to look at and wonder about.

I did learn that the dates I’ve been generally including about the Minoans have been off— I’ve been sharing that they were the predominant group on the island (true) from about 4000 years ago until about 3250 years ago, when the local Greek island volcano blew up pretty good, and the resulting tsunami(s) and fires ended the great classical period of Minoan history (also true).

Ironically, the fires were a real gift to the archaeologists, as they burned (fired) the clay writing tablets, hardening them so we can read them. Without that firing, the tablets would have turned into dust and two whole languages (Linear A and Linear B—written in a kind of farmer plowing pattern—the first line is left-to-right, the second line is right-to-left, and so on.

I have read about Linear A and B since I was in college, and today I got to see some of the little clay tables with the text on them. Very cool.

Well the dates (4000 years ago) were for the start of the great palace-building constructions, but the Minoans go back almost 2,000 years before that, so we’re talking almost 6,000 years here. That’s almost 250 generations.

Farmers to Rulers

This bloviation got longer than I thought it would when I began it, so I’ve moved it down to the bottom of this report.

It’s some sociological/psychological/anthropological wonderings on my part about how people moved from just a bunch of farmers together in a valley to one of the families emerging as the local rulers, and then hauling in all the religious trappings (the gods want me to rule you— they told me so) to support it.

One of the nastiest books I’ve ever read through is The American Heretics Dictionary, taut little aphorisms about the state of the world from an almost anarchistic/leftist worker (rather than law-and-order capitalist) point of view.

They used a lot of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary definitions, so it’s pretty elegantly anti-establishment.

In The American Heretics Dictionary, one of the definitions of religion is that it’s an institution that keeps the poor from eating the rich.

Anyway, the current state of rambling about this topic is down at the end of this report.

My Next Gig Is an Appearance on Martha Stewart, or

Susan Strikes Again!

I have some more cloth loot to bring home— stuff I have purchased since I shipped the gym bag home and I have gotten some boxes at the local market to pack the stuff into. (The local post office doesn’t have boxes for sale.)

These are mostly table linens and surprisingly, are for myself— this must be some kind of late male-menopause nesting urge— since the only table I have is in a storage unit. . . .

But I saw this stuff and it appealed to me so I snagged it:

I attacked the plastic bags full of table runners and a table cloth and all the wool and goat hair I’ve been scrounging and got it into a couple of boxes and contained it with a roll of wide scotch tape and it’s all now packed and wrapped and labeled but the local post office is closed until Monday so I saw a DHL-type delivery outfit, took the boxes in, weighed them (about 15 lbs for the pair of them) and found out it would cost €200 to ship it home.

Yikes!!!

So I’ll be hitting the post office Monday AM— the gym bag (they said 88 lbs, but I’m not sure I really believe them) cost only about 60% of that to ship.

More Minoans I

Agnes— Open the Museum!

The first place I hit on the road was Hamezi-- I stopped to see the little ethnographic museum there, and after navigating some pretty narrow streets, walked up the steps in the town from the main square.

The museum was locked, but there was a guy a couple of doors down working on replacing a door, and he called to his mom, who lived across the street from the museum, and mom made a couple of phone calls without result, then told me, “Pende, dehka letto” (5, 10 minutes), and headed down the stairs.

Well, about ten minutes later, here she comes, followed by the docent/ owner, who unlocked the place and showed me around.

There was a blacksmith shop display in one room, an olive press in another, and a two-room cottage display with beds and furniture and dishes and about what you’d expect in one of these villages about a hundred or so years ago.

Very sweet.

Hamezi Minoan Site

Outside town was a Minoan villa/fortress, rare, as it’s the only oval one, which may have been dictated by the topography of the site— although I’ve seen lots of others in similar kinds of places, and they aren’t oval at all.

Here’s the view toward the north, looking back at the town where the little museum is and the sea beyond.

I also saw a couple of rare falcons, who nest on a nearby island but who hunt in the valley below the ruin.

Oleander

The guidebooks generally suggest that there’s too much concrete in this part of Crete, and it’s not as pretty just or motoring along (with some big exclusive-looking hotel complexes here and there) but all over the island, including here, are these almost-tunnels of oleander, and often in three shades, not just the two you see here.

And there is oleander all over the place here--- it’s a delight.

More Minoans—II

I went out to a great place called Vasiliki, a very early Minoan site most of the way to where I was going to stay at the end of the day.

There is another really big place near here, Gournia, and I thought if the weather was more moderate I’d stop on the way into town, but it was terrifically hot and so will hit it early in the AM.

But Vasiliki is hardly visited— I knew about Knossos and the other big sites, but didn’t know about this one until I read The Rough Guide to Crete.

It was locked, but I am, as I have stated here more than once, a trained police officer, and I searched around for clues about how I might still be able to get in the site.

There was a rental car out on the road— and this was the end of the trail to the site, and I hadn’t seen the people, so . . . . they had to have gotten in somehow.

And it wasn’t too long afterward with some pretty serious sleuthing involved that I discovered a cleverly camouflaged way to enter the site right next to the locked gate.

You must be Chinese!

And when I went in and climbed up to the top of the little area, here’s a couple sitting in the shade (no dummies here—it’s at least 90, I’d guess) and I went up to them and said, in my best tourism lingua franca

Kali spera Bon jour Guten Tag

(Greek, French, and German for “good day,”)

And the man said, “You must be Chinese!”

Well, that was pretty clever of him, and I told him so, and his name is Geoff, and the lovely woman with him, Hannike, was from Holland, and they live in southern Spain, near where I’ve been on a previous trip, and we visited for a while, and he asked me how I knew to come out to the place.

I told him I’d read about it in The Rough Guide to Crete, and he got this really big smile on his face, and said that he’d written it. And later, when I checked, there was his picture, right there in the back.

So I told him about the reports I’ve been writing, and gave him the web-site information, and he’ll take a look at it.

I told him I’m not interested in a job (they are cutting back anyway—subsequent [every three years] editions of the travel guides will be somewhat smaller, he said) but I would certainly like to be a resource of some kind for him—

I don’t expect to hear from him right away; it’s his birthday, and if a lovely Dutch redhead had flown in to spend a week or so with me for my birthday, I’m not sure I’d even go outside. . . .

But I do hope to hear from him. Even if they just used a photo or two— what a kick that would be!

He said that they get some pretty interesting comments from readers of their books when their trips are over— they also have a really hard time keeping information current, as museums renovate or change hours (the dance I danced at Aghios Triados coming to mind: the guidebook had one time right and the guy I gave the terra-cotta shard to up at Festos had the other time right, but they also each had one wrong).

He said he got a complaint on Amazon’s comment page for their Rough Guide to Spain: (Sounds like Americans, but could also be Germans or Austrians, I guess— there’s really no geographical limits to whiny, self-centered, fatuous twits.

“We went to the Alhambra,” the complaint read, “but the hours you had were wrong, and we had to wait a whole hour for it to open with nothing to do.”

And someone had responded to that post by suggesting if they couldn’t find some interesting way to occupy an hour in Granada, Spain, that maybe they just ought to stay home.

Vasiliki

(I went back out this (Sunday) AM to see what it looked like when it wasn’t 90+ degrees and the sun wasn’t beating down) and here are those images.

You can see from this picture that they need to bring some sheep or goats out here to expose some more of these wonderful walls.

So Lovely, So Careless

And finally, a little social anthropological research.

I was parking the car up the street from the hotel here in Ayios Nikolaos, and walking along the sea-wall looking at the water, and saw these amazing sights:

I mean they look intelligent, but they are both incredibly forgetful and absent-minded, and someone ought to do something.

I studied the second one later, quite deliberately, when she came out of the water, and will report that she put on her shoes first, and then a hat, and then a top. . .

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

This is a subject that I clearly need to get a better grasp of, put my finger on somehow, and perhaps get to the bottom of, sociologically, of course.

I’ll just say if I ever thought I was still in Kansas, this pretty much took care of that notion.

I’ll keep you posted— further reports on the way at the speed of light.

How Do You Get Kings When You Start with Farmers?

So here’s a question I’ve been trying to answer, going back to when I took Anthropology in college, and later when I taught it at Terrace.

One of the great revolutions in human history was the invention of agriculture.

Before ag, we were hunters, fishers, gatherers, which meant we were nomadic, following the seasons in an area, hitting the rip food when it was ripe, then going to the next place.

If you are nomadic, you can’t afford to have much stuff, because you have to carry everything from place to place.

There was a kind of transitionary phase between gathering and farming, and that was herding— and that’s about when we domesticated dogs— some where around 8,000 years ago. And I’m not current of the research, but I’m sure there are lots of connections between herding and farming---

Of course, you can see how herding provides some safety net between gathering (very chancy way to earn a living) and farming (another chancy way to make a living, granted, but a lot less chancy than gathering).

“Say, Jethro—did you notice this year's wheat grows better where we kept the sheep last year? Hmmmmm.”

You can milk the animals and eat the animals and make clothes out of their hair, although then you need some kind of lowest-possible-level technology— a back-loom, for example for making the cloth, rather than some big, complicated (heavy) standard loom.

But in a gathering society, everyone is pretty even— there may be some better gatherers than others, or better hunters than others, but it’s pretty egalitarian.

And everyone has the same job: all the women gather (about 80+% of the food, by the way) and all the men hunt.

One change you get when you settle down and start to farm is that you get to have lots more stuff, because you are in the same place all the time.

And lots more children— now the children aren’t a burden, scaring away the game animals, or having to be tended when you are out getting dinner; you can just send them out to weed or keep the crows out of the wheat.

And you start to have specialization of labor. Since 10 gathering families can usually feed about 10 gathering families, the economy is pretty stagnant.

But 9 farming families can feed 10 families, so pretty soon you get some specialists— metal working, for example, would emerge pretty early as it requires tools and training, so now you have one guy making the plows and shovels and planting dibbles and rakes. . . .

And then pretty soon you have a harness maker— making all the reins and harness equipment so you can use animal power to plow with.

And then a carpenter of sorts, who knows how to make things from wood, so he makes all the plows and tool handles and works with the harness maker at first, probably, to make yokes . . . . you get the idea.

But then, and this is the interesting part for me, and I’m not sure we really know any of this anyway, there were two other (originally may have only been one. . . .) specialists that emerged--- one was priests and the other was the rulers.

So you have little farming villages all over these hills and in these valleys oven now, here on Crete, that historically were about a day’s journey on foot apart (just think about what that means in terms of selecting marriage partners—have to be outside your village, generally, but not so far away that you couldn’t know them. This, obviously, is the environment that produced arranged marriages).

But I’ve been in these little isolated villages, and you can drive to them now and they go to the local big towns once a week to shop, or the loudspeaker trucks roll through. . . but even now—even with telephones and TV and trucks and bus service-- these places are pretty remote--

I stopped in one place here the first day I had the car and was asking about a place to stay, and was told that maybe, in Pergama (near the olive oil factory) there might be places to stay.

This was a young woman who worked in a taverna where the tour busses stopped for lunch, and she said, “Gee—I don’t know about Pergama—I mean, it’s at least a half-hour a way,” saying it like it was a really long way and she’d hardly ever been there.

But I don’t know how one family starts to amass the power in a little farming village and eventually becomes the ruling dynasty and has the force to order palaces and big courtyards and all that to be built.

Except there’s a short cut that could well be the standard pattern.

Nomads can always steal from farmers— as in The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven— and nomads are probably better fighters and tougher, too— they live on the road all the time.

And nomads often have group leaders, where farmers usually do not— and when the nomads take over a valley full of farms and kill or enslave the farmers, someone who has been in charge of the nomad band would probably want to keep right on being in charge.

So this could be the standard pattern— it’s what the Hebrews did.

What their accounts tell us is that after forty years of wondering in the desert after the Egyptian enslavement (there’s nothing in the Egyptians’ records about any of that, by the way, and the Egyptians wrote everything down) they got to the land of milk and honey and killed all the farmers who’d built the farms and were already there.

As I suggest, I could be the standard pattern. (I’ll e-mail all this to Geoff, the Rough Guide guy, as Cretan pre-history is his specialty, and what got him out here in the first place, and that led to the guide books. . . .

I’ll be reading a lot about this when I get home— thinking about this farmer to god-king sequence has piqued my interest pretty well.

A Five-Ruin Day (if you count my innards and me separately)

2009-06-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

Day 76; Friday, June 19

Well, here’s the little room in Myrtos

I had such an adventure in for a couple of hours early (1:30 until almost 4:00) this AM.

It’s a nice room, and here are a couple of views from the little balcony

But the big adventure was Phase I of totally swapping out all my intestinal flora (using both Mode A and Mode B) for a new batch, which I’m guessing I’m developing today. . . .

I was up in the mountains looking for ruins yesterday, and filled a water bottle in one of those fountains where it just flows clean and pure (?) right out of the hills.

And I figured that by day 75, I’d be safe.

Not even close.

More Minoans

If you don’t count the biological warfare battle I clearly lost, the day’s first shoot was at a little Minoan site about 2 Km from where I stayed.

Here’s the town from the ruins, for example

And here’s some more of the ruin.

And (this makes me a little nuts, which is whey I’m sure I keep mentioning it— there’s all these little treasures all over the damn place.

Here’s a little collection that (I’m guessing here, obviously) some one collected at the site recently, put on a flat rock, and then (perhaps) photographed.

And it would be so cool to have some of these little treasures—real things, made and used by real people, almost 4,000 years ago— that’s 160 generations.

But at least when I left them, about 9:00 AM today (it was already getting pretty hot), they were still all there.

More Minoan (open-air) Museums

Just up off the road, about 200 meters from the main coastal highway, was this great place---

And, once again, two more delicious artifacts---

(The round one is the handle of a pot or jar, I’m guessing)

And more than the two really great ones

The latter one is a metate, the trough part of what you grind wheat into with a little rolling-pin rock.

The more you have used it, the deeper it gets.

I kept looking at this one, wondering about the weight limit on carry-on bags. . . . .

Saw a couple more roadside shrines worth shooting alongside the road—this one is pretty good size— the bottom of the roof line is right at six feet from the street level.

Then I hit a Minoan country villa—

Here are the steps leading up into the place

Next stop was a great Roman acropolis— at Praissos

Here’s the view of the second acropolis below the first one—

I could see 71 wind turbines from up here on two different mountain crests.

And now I’m in Sitia, the NE corner of my jaunt around Crete.

I’ll be poking around here in the AM, then heading west starting about mid-day on Saturday.

Headin’ For the Hills

2009-06-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

Day 75; Thursday, June 18

I’m on the south coast of Crete,

working my way east, then I’ll head north and then west back to where I got the car— Iraklion.

I stayed in Ano Viannos last night, after a real circus of confusion. I stopped at the only Rough Guide recommended place, but it was full. The woman who ran it, a delight named Maria, said I should just head down the road a little to Kerakotambos’s place, and I could stay there. Just right down the road.

So I spent about 20 minutes looping through Ano Viannos without finding that place, and only seeing one other place (a hardware store with rooms to rent upstairs, but the place was locked— siesta time, I suppose, and it was above her up on the main road, not below), so I figured I should just head east to the next town, as I couldn’t find a place to stay in town.

I headed out along the main road and about 4 Km later, hit the big Cretan Massacres Memorial— this is the most striking of the many village memorials to all the Cretan hostages the Germans shot for reprisals in September, 1944. This one is much more stylistically like the ones in Central Europe at the big, well-known camps like Buchenwald or Auschwitz or Tieresenstadt.

But the light was really harsh— it was now about 5:00 PM and it was at least 90, so I got out the map and discovered that Kerakotambos wasn’t a domatia (room rental place) but the town down on the coast about 9 miles away.

So as I headed back through town to get on that road, the hardware store was open and I stopped and €20 later, I had a room for the night.

So early in the AM I loaded up to head back to the memorial to shoot it in the better early light.

There was an old man

by the side of the road with a bag of bread from the bakery, so I gave him a ride up the hill to the massacre memorial— where I stopped to shoot

and he got out of the car to take the side road from there up to his little village about a Km away.

On the way up to the memorial I noticed a hillside olive orchard in the slanting early light, so I went back to shoot it,

and then headed back east again, my original direction (although as you read these adventures you might well think that the notion of “direction” and the way I travel have little to do with each other. . . .

And so now you know why I went by that orchard five different times.

Kato Simi

And up off the main cost road a dozen Km or so is an ancient Shrine to Hermes and Afrodite so I went up there, even though I was warned in the guidebook that it would most probably be locked.

They were right, but I had it all to myself— me and a couple of wild goats.

Here’s the town on the way up here to give you a better sense of what you see from the hills above the coast. This was another of the town where the men were murdered by the Germans during the war. There were five or six local villages that suffered the same retaliation for the same event.

On the way back (on a different road, of course) I found these five abandoned, pretty identical roofless buildings and I thought at first they were from the great Greek-Turkish population exchange in the 1920s, but these are so identical that I now think they were part of some industrial idea that didn’t work out.

Introducing Hizzoner, The Mayor

Here’s the unofficial mayor of the town I’m now in for the night—Mirtos.

Loot— Glorious Loot

I got the place to stay pretty early, then headed up into the hills on a big loop looking for some sheep or goat bells, as I have been pretty well captivated by that sound as I prowl these ancient sites (and more ancient hills).

I struck out, but I did learn where to get them, so early next week I’ll be filling up another gym bag, I’m sure. . . .

In this little hill town

there was an abandoned lot full of stuff,

and one of the things was this pithoi— a huge, terra-cotta storage jar. I’ve seen these all over the museums and ancient sites, although I’m sure this one was from the local garden store, as it had been pretty busted up and even spray painted when the old wall was re-painted

so I figured it was ripe for some level of liberation.

And inside the thing, there were some shards (broken pieces) and I snagged one and plan to bring it home.

I’m sure it’s modern, as I’ve seen them in gardens and lots of garden shops, but I got the part of the rim that included a handle, so although it’s a small piece, compared to the whole thing (four to five feet high) it has two of the primary elements.

More Memorials to More Reprisals

And in many of these little villages—this one had maybe a thousand people in it now, there were more of these statues with lists of names on the base or background, and by now you already know the story.

There were 45 or so names on this one alone.

Other memorials indicated that 500 or more were shot all at once—just rounded up somewhat randomly— any boy over 12 or so and every man they spotted, or dug out somehow, or found hiding in the woods— rounded up, taken to the village square, and shot.

This one was September, 1943, and I thought this detail, showing the Cretan’s left foot,

was particularly telling.

The Industrialization of Death

These memorials bothered me a lot more at the individual level, I think, than even the two camps I’ve seen in Germany: Belsen, where Anne Frank (who would have been 80 earlier this summer) died, and Dachau, outside Munich, the first concentration camp.

The camps eventually exterminated 11,000,000 people (Jews, Russian prisoners, Roma, homosexuals, Communists, the insane and the retarded, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many others) and were, essentially, the use of industrialization to accomplish mass murder.

If WWI was the industrialization of death for soldiers, WWII was the industrialization of death for civilians.

But each person’s role in the death camps was like parts on an assembly line, and the jobs were disconnected: some people moved the victims into the gas chambers, others turned the wheels that introduced the gas, Zyklon-B, others emptied the bodies out of the chambers, others wheeled the bodies to the ovens, others burned the bodies, and still others distributed the ashes.

But here, in the mountains of Crete, there was no industrial-level disassociation. The soldiers who rounded up the villagers to be shot did the shooting.

They were personally connected, at least for a little while, as they looked at the people who were about to die by their direct actions.

I’m not saying we should feel sorry for the soldiers who did these terrible things, just following orders, after their comrades were killed, and I don’t really know what I’m suggesting, except that death at the individual level seems a different experience than death at the industrial level.

If someone has some thoughts about this, I’d sure like to hear them.

The Middle of Crete

2009-06-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Language Skills

The landlady was sweeping her patio as I went by heading out early so I told her the following— all in Greek!

I share this little story not to prove what a (I was going to use another couple of words in here, but this is a family show) clever user of languages I am, but the exact opposite: to show that a bare minimum of local words can communicate a lot.

(This was all, by the way, without notes: I didn’t get out the safety net of the cheat-sheet in my photo vest or even the G-E/E-G dictionary.)

Good Morning.

I’ll be checking out about 10:00 AM.

First, I’m going to do some shooting at Aghios Triados, then I have to go to Matala to hit the ATM to get some cash to pay you.

I trust that is fine with you.

Was it this grammatically perfect?

Of course not!

Did she get the message?

Well, I’m pretty sure she did.

Here’s the much more literal translation:

Good Morning.

Goodbye 10:00 AM.

One – photos Aghios Triados.

Two, Matala-- Euros.

OK?

See—it’s not that tough. Anyone reading these stories could bomb around here linguistically just as I bomb around on the roads.

It’s no big deal. . . . .

Lock It and Lose It

As I unlocked the car to leave after going back to pay the room rent, the little lock plug slid inside the door and fell to the bottom between the door panels.

Not very convenient--- I looked at the map and there were four Hertz offices on the island--- none near where I was or where I was headed.

Then I leaned through some clever sleuthing, mostly involving reading roadside mileage indicators) that the place I got the car 5 days ago was only 35 miles away and it was the closest.

And it was getting pretty hot by then, too hot to be outside looking at Minoan ruins (when I went by Festos [where I was shooting last evening] on my way out of town, there were 8 tour busses and about 80 or more cars in the lot).

So I figured it’s only an hour or so away, I’ll bomb up there, get it fixed, and come back in time to hit Gortys when it’s cooler.

Long detour on the way north across the island, some real guff from the Hertz guy, although this same problem had happened to many other rental cars) some short snipe hunts on the way back (on a different road, of course—I’d already been on the first one) and so I’ll see Gortys in the AM—as I planned, when it’s cooler.

Striking Out Twice in the Same At-Bat

I went by this little museum I wanted to see in Arhanes, as it was 4:00 and pretty hot again (north part of the island, still) but it closes at 2:30 and was also closed all day today Tuesday), so I’m glad I didn’t waste more than about 20 minutes looking for it.

Use Up All Your Olive Oil— Fast

Driving north and then back south across the center of Crete really brought home what a high percentage of arable land here is in olive trees, so you need to do your part to consume all you can: stir fries, salads, marinating, just slather it on whatever you want to taste better—

And you need to be really diligent about this, because there are whole container ships heading your way with more . . . . .

Language Skills II

Your turn

Here’s a sign I shot along the road mostly for fun but to point out a little cultural language twist that’s amusing.

This is an advertising sign out in front of a road-side diner, and it’s advertising three items:

The diagonal word spells out “Souvlaki,” which is shish-kabob, I think, either on a plate or in a pita. I’ve only been eating out of markets, so am not up to speed on menu items.

The top word is easy—they also have “Coffee.”

The second word is where the fun is— it says, “Toast,” but what they mean is not just heated bread but a toasted cheese sandwich or a burger—“tost” can also mean a sandwich on a bun rather than on bread or in a pita.

This was also the case in the Balkans last year—it took some getting used to when you saw “tost” on a menu or reader board like this.

More Shrines

This is another of the roadside shrines, the ones that cost about a grand to start with, without the column.

This one was more typical than the other one I shot to indicate what you get for almost $1,000, and went over next to it to give a full report on it, and the top of the cross on the main, central dome, is about 6’2” above the base.

Christos! It’s him again.

This is the second version of how you can drive 15 miles only going to a place that’s 3 Km from the main road.

This version explains how you can drive by the same sign 9 times in less than a day.

Act I, Scene I

Elena: Christos! It’s him again.

Christos: You mean the crazy American who took a picture of our café sign?

Elena: Yes.

Christos: So how many times does this make he’s driven by our place?

Elena: Nine.

Christos: Naaah—Can’t be.

Elena: Christos, it’s nine. I kept track.

Epilogue: Elena is correct, but I’d like the chance to defend myself.

You drive by the first time just heading down the road, when you see the sign you think might make a little chapter of a report.

You drive back, shoot the sign, but there’s no room to turn around right there, so you have to go a little further west to turn around.

You drive past it going east again— that’s # 3.

Then that night, after you write up your report, you head into the nearest town with an internet café (the one just west of the café with the sign), try to answer some e-mails, and go back to where you are staying. That makes 5.

The next AM, since you are out of clean clothes, you bundle everything up, take it back to the internet café town (as it also has a laundry), cajole the woman to do your stuff in one day rather than three, and head out (east again) to the big local Minoan and Roman ruins. (Everybody get 7?)

And then, of course, after shooting the sites, you certainly have to go get your laundry— and that’s how you pass the café sign nine times in about 24 hours.

Act I, Scene II

Elena: Christos: Why does he keep driving past our place?

Christos: I think he likes it here.

Elena: I don’t think so, Christos. If he liked it here,
he’d just stay here.

Gortys

The big Roman city here, and the reason I hung around, was Gortys, a huge complex with an acropolis, temples and theaters, lots and lots of walls, and etc.

Then the Christians lost some early martyrs here (the town I stayed in last night was Aiyga Dehka [the holy ten], named for some early and over-eager [in my mind] adherents), about a hundred years or so before Constantine allowed the religion to be practiced openly.

Following Rome’s fall, and the emergence of the Byzantines (the early form of what we now call Eastern Orthodoxy) ore down all the Roman (now, of course, heathen) temples and put churches in their place—and sometimes just tweaked the building some, much as the Muslims tweaked the churches to make them mosques where they captured territory.

So I started at the temple complex, moved up to the acropolis, then found the walls and temple sites among the olive trees.

For me, one of the more interesting things I discovered here was shards of terra-cotta--- unglazed, but fired, clay— by the tens of thousands.

I shot some pictures just to show you how much there was lying about, and to reassure you, it’s all still lying about.

This may be too many pictures of terra-cotta shards for your taste, but I wanted to clearly make the point that there are tons of this stuff just lying around on the ground over here.

In the olive grove near Gortys, the farmers plowed the ground shallowly just to keep the weeds down, and there were thousands of terra-cotta shards all over the field.

Here’s one with my hat included to show you the scale

I also added to my little trove of goat hair and fleece— which I found where the local goats (who live just below the acropolis) would take naps among the trees and shrubs when they were turned loose up there.

I got about enough to make a pretty hard-packed hardball today, so now have about three wadded-up XL Tee-shirts worth.

I can just imagine going through the G-E/E-G dictionary like mad with some Greek Customs Officer at the airport. . . .

“Well. I thought the goat hair was a better souvenir than an ashtray shaped like the island of Crete.”

Maybe I should get another gym bag and just mail the damn stuff home. . . . .

Another Early Reveille

2009-06-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

Day 72: Monday, June 14

I woke up pretty early again, so headed out to see what I could see in the early AM light.

Turned out the answer was Not Much, although I tried to track down some ruins and drove through lots of local little villages, not taking many pictures, but out having a great AM.

But Where Are the Cows?

I did learn that some archaeological sites marked on the map have a resonance with the old joke about the grade school kid who turns in a blank piece of paper to the art teacher.

The caption at the top of the page reads “Cows Eating Grass”

The teacher asks where the grass is, and is told the cows ate it all.

The teacher asks where the cows are and is told the cows aren’t dumb enough to hang around where there’s no grass.

And at these sites, it’s often where something was rather than where something is, which is a notion that got reinforced this AM when I was searching for something called Vivi, near Pombia, and none of the Pombians (including the cops) had ever heard of it.

Finally a guy they found who spoke some English told me that the cows had eaten all the grass and had left. “Nothing there,” he said; “all gone.”

I’m saving the two big places for early this PM when the light will be ideal, so after about five hours of deliberate aimlessness and criss-crossing the immediate area, I went to the big Ethnographic Museum up the main road a little ways.

A really nice museum— once you found it. There were signs in Greek and English out on the highway, but once you got to town you were on your own. The Rough Guide said it was behind the church, so I walked around the church a little, asked a woman from the neighborhood and there it was.

To GPS or Not to GPS

I found myself thinking about GPS some more. . . .

I mean, it would remove the need to get out and ask about a thousand people per trip where something is--- including me-- which would mean even more solo travel— not having a thousand people try to help you, but it would certainly be more efficient.

And I guess the up-side of being on the road in a place (or two: Turkey and Crete) for three months is that you don’t really have to be terribly efficient, and you can foodle around and get lost and get people to help you and have thousands of little “Where the hell am I?” conversations with people, and that’s a terrific part of the rich experience of travel.

But I’d certainly use it in big cities, getting into and back out of the places--- trying to find museums, for example.

In Cannakale, Turkey, Kim and I did about three different three-kilometer laps looking for the big regional museum before we found it.

We’d head west on the main road into town and the sign would say “Ethno-graphic Museum” and point right, and we’d turn right and there wouldn’t be any more signs but there were divided streets (so no U-turns) and one-way streets, and after running out of town when went north where the sign pointed, then heading back east, we’d come back west, hit the same sign, and turn right again. . . .

And in the first block, across the street, with the sign on the building hidden by all the damn trees, and the grounds blocked by the solid row of cars and trucks, was the museum. . . . .

As a person who thinks in systems, I’d make a couple of little changes to the antiquities signage policy.

First of all, within a kilometer, I’d put the distance on the sign (some few places do that, at least here in Greece), so it would read

“Ethnographic Museum .3”

And then on the fence of the place itself, maybe every 25 meters or so, I’d just have a sign (in the same color scheme as all the antiquities signs all over— white or yellow letters on brown signs) that read

Ethnographic Museum

It may be another aspect of the 95% environment I’ve seen (and commented on) over here a lot.

Ethnographic Museum

The museum here was a really good one, especially for a regional one, and good exhibits and traffic flow and organization and all that, and all the little explanations were in Greek and English and large enough to read (a big plus).

And it had old looms and rugs and farm tools and bee-hives and donkey saddles and costumes and weapons and enough things that you could just about equip a village--- you could round up some people who wanted to live traditionally here on Crete, give them all the gear, and send them out. They’d have all the gear they needed.

Playing the Palace

After a little nap back in the room where I was avoiding the hottest part of the day, I hit Festos, the biggest Minoan site on this part of the island— it was a palace complex---

One soccer-field size Grand Courtyard, wide staircases for ceremonies, actual place buldings, store-houses . . . about what you’d expect for a regional capitol.

And I’d delayed long enough that there was hardly anyone else there and the light was pretty good, too.

Here are the (pretty typical) fields in the plain below the palace complex.

Arrested at the Airport?

Back in the NE corner of the place I was nosing around, and saw a piece of a terra-cotta jar on the ground about two thirds the size of my palm.

It was part of the lip of the jar which would have been a foot or more in diameter, based on the curve, and had some design on the outside in addition to the shallow parallel grooves on the inside from the potter’s fingers.

I washed it off with some of my water and it looked even more interesting to me.

There was a group of American high-school students (one from Portland) being shown around by an English archaeologist, and I asked him if he thought it was authentic, and he did, so I took it to the entrance and showed it to a staff person there who spoke a little English.

I told him exactly where I’d found it (I’d photographed it and marked it on a map of the place) and he said it was authentic (about 3750 years old) but that it had virtually no value as there were lots (and lots) of such items in the drawers in the headquarters of the Italian archaeologists on site, and that he’d probably just put it back out on the site.

I said I brought it up to him to prevent it leaving in some tourist’s pants pocket, and he said that the authorities at airports, etc., look for such items.

He couldn’t give it to me to take home as he had no authority to do that, but that if it were up to him I could just have it.

You Sleep in a Fish?

After getting the business of the pottery shard dealt with, he asked about my trip and where I was from and how old I was all that.

After all that, he asked where I was staying locally.

I told him I had a little domatia in Kalimari, about 5 km. away.

He asked incredulously, “You sleep in a fish?” and then said “Kalimari” again and make eating gestures.

It was then I realized my error, and said “Kamilari” and that seemed to make a little more sense to him. . . .

And here’s the actual place-- €23 a night, so about $60 for two nights. Very new, very clean, and it’s a three-star room (shower pan, shower hose bracket, and a fridge).

Current digs

It’s the corner room at the top of the stairs— there’s a nice balcony and windows on two sides, standard Greek Island colors, and there’s a market and a taverna with wi-fi across the street.

The Hole in the Wall (well, maybe the Narrow Street) Gang

It’s also where the local gang hangs out every night, next door to the market, outside another taverna (no tourists at this place and no damn wi-fi either). You pretty much have to sit next to the outside wall, in a narrow, and traffic (such as there is) goes by very slowly on the narrow little one-lane street.

Here's what the gang hide-out looks like without the gang-- in the AM.

And here’s the neighbor woman in her garden across the street (and behind a garden wall) from the gang.

Early Mornings

2009-06-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

Day 70: Saturday, June 13

My Wake-up Call

A noisy, expensive room here in Rethymno (at least by Turkish standards), but here’s the view of the sunrise reflected in the window of one of the two doors that open onto the balcony about 6:05 this morning. . . .

And here’s the scene from dinner last night— salad and view of bay. . . . .

And the room is only (only!!! Yikes!!!) about $44 a night.

The downside is that this is the main road along the beach, so there’s lots of traffic, including the semi-finals of the Horse’s Ass Olympics—one team on really noisy motor scooters (I think they get extra points for carrying, rather than wearing, their helmets).

The other team is the vapid twenty-something men who have turned their cars into stereo systems, and have the (incredibly) misguided notion that everyone for kilometers around wants to hear the (pretty dreadful—in a line I’ve used before, it sounds like an avalanche with a drummer) sounds (I will not call it music) roaring out their open windows.

I have seen the bumper stickers (they don’t have those over here at all, by the way--) at home that say,

If the music is too loud, you are too old.

But I might amend that to say,

If your manners are that bad, you shouldn’t have a car stereo.

The world over, I think “macho” is the Portuguese word that means “teeny weenie.”

And here’s the scene a few minutes later, straight out over the roofs of the outdoor cafes on the far side of the read.

Bombing Around in the South Hills

So I’m out the door by 6:30, heading up into the hills

south of Rethymno.

The first place I wanted to see was a Minoan necropolis (cemetery), which I thought would look great in the early AM light—and I was right, but I was on the wrong side of the fence, and the gate was locked, so I took off to see some other places I’d marked on the map.

The first was Argiroupoli, a well-thought out destination (well-marked things to see, thoughtful explanations, free W-C) so I spent some time there walking around.

The city was built a top an old Greek city, Lappa,

but they are doing a lot to retain as much of the old sense as they can.

Lots of doors over here have this really great intense, but faded, blue

Here’s the mosaic floor of a Roman bathhouse,

Cool, but a Visual Nightmare

I realize this may be the worst image of the whole trip— power lines, bad light--- but here’s the cool part. This is someone’s outdoor cooker, across the street from his house, and standing there you can look down a pretty steep canyon through some olive groves to a small river.

Pretty nice.

But the really cool part is the two antiquities he has just kind of sitting there— how many of you have segments of the tops of two Roman columns on your Weber?

Well, Well, Well

This is the old town well—the town backed the right side once, anyway, in one of the Roman civil wars, and the payoff was that they got a well dug and cisterns built, and you know the Romans were engineers more than almost anything else—the arch is a Roman invention, for example, and aqueducts. . . .

And the system is still in use and still works.

This is the historic place where people got their water.

Really Good Loot

They'll Go on my Weber

When I was walking around the town, I noticed that lots of people, especially up in the older part of the village, up high, were working on some remodeling projects of various sizes, which was nice to see.

Some of the places up there could have used a D-8 Cat although the archway up into that part of town, up where the mosaics were, was way too small for anything much bigger than a Bobcat front-loader.

Anyway, up next to one of the little dumpsters like they have all over both places (Turkey and Crete) I’ve been this summer (actually over much of the hill), was a pile of construction rubble and busted stone and old cement and wood and wire--- you know the drill.

Some of what looked like some pretty old stone, and other places where a bucket-full (or several) of the modern corrugated-brick building blocks they use here instead of cement blocks had been dumped (Lord, is he ever getting to the point?), I scored a couple of really cool things.

They are just old-looking (not as old as me, I’d guess, although that’s now getting up there pretty good) shards from terra cotta garden pots, but they look really old, and that’s the cool part.

Here they are.

And I certainly plan on pretending, when I get home, that they are old, although I really know they aren’t.

If I thought they were old, I would have taken them to the local officials, but I figure the homeowner knows better about what he cleaned up out of his yard and building project than I do.

Smell That? Smell What?

Back when I smoked, I used to get really bad colds, several a year, and so lived for about a week during each cold on Afrin, which I’d shoot up my beak whenever I couldn’t breathe. About every 20 minutes.

You may remember when I was teaching, even though I hadn’t smoked for awhile, still getting bad colds and snorting the stuff in class. Terrible manners on my part. . . . Sorry about that.

And Afrin is something like 2% hydrochloric acid, which is why it works, but consequently, I can hardly smell anything. Sometimes a blessing, not always.

But the sage and oregano they grow around here is so concentrated, and so extra pungent, that I could smell the fields of it as I drove by in the early-morning still air.

So I can imagine what a person whose nose worked normally (or even just worked) would experience over here.

Quite a delight, I’d guess.

Lost and Found

And I was going back and forth between all these little places, doubling back (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and one of the times I wound up back in the same place again just after I’d left it) I noticed something on the side of the road I hadn’t seen either of the other two or three times I’d gone down the same little stretch of road.

There was what looked like a small, very furry animal (we’ll just say “sleeping”) between the edge of the pavement and the start of the weeds, but there was no real animal form to it, so I turned around and went back (on purpose this time) and it was a bunch of wool (hair— whatever you call it) that had been kind of sloughed off a goat.

And up the road a little more, there was a little more, and the same thing a third time, so I have some pretty cool real stuff to bring home: about a softball’s worth of goat hair when I get it squeezed into as small a space as I can squeeze it.

Ankara’s Original Claim to Fame

By the way, in a flashback to the Turkey trip, and I know some of you crafts-people know this, before Ataturk picked Ankara to be the capital of the new Turkish Republic (for a break with the old, sleepy, graft-driven, somnambulant Istanbul), Ankara’s only claim to fame was the quality of the hair of the special goats they had bred there for centuries— Ankara goats, which got westernized into “Angora goats.”

Rock Tombs

I saw lots of rock tombs in Turkey— mostly Lydian, as I remember, but these

are Minoan, the people who ran the island between 4,000 and 3150 years ago.

And these (back at the place I’d started at this AM but was locked)

are also Minoan, but are cut into some pretty hard rock, by the way, so I expect these were not for everyone. . . .

This is a lovely spot; it’s now an orchard, olive trees everywhere, and lots of birds making lots of music as the morning turned to afternoon and it got hotter and hotter.

Step Right Up---

Special Prices Today on Little Roadside Shrines

And up the road from where I saw the wool, there was a pretty good-sized construction yard, where you could buy cement and lumber and all that, at both the residential and commercial level, but they also had a big supply of the little road-side shrines—

People put these up where people died in accidents, or where they didn’t die, so it was clearly due to the inter-cession of some saint, and there’s icons in there, and olive oil, and wicks, and wick-holders, and lighters, and pictures of the gruesomely departed or miraculously saved.

Some look like houses, but most look like churches, and they are pretty solid (they have to withstand weather, of course) and made of some ceramic, I guess, or some ceramic-cement mixture---

I went into in the supply yard to see what the little doofers cost--- and was amazed to learn they cost almost $1,000 for the smallest ones.

This one is an older one, but you get the idea— the whole thing’s maybe five feet tall, and about 12-15 inches square.

Water and Light

Finally, last night, I was down by the shore (there’s a 15-foot seawall, but a few sets of stairs, too) and the sun was going down around the point to the west, so I walked out on the rocks where the tide was coming in (although the seawall was in the shadow of the Venetian Fortress, the sunlight was still hitting the rocks fifty feet or so north of the wall) to see if I could get some surging-tide-hitting-the-rocks-in-the-dying-light pictures.

More Crete

2009-06-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

I stayed back down at the coast on Thursday night, as you know, since the woman at the olive oil place said it was the closest town that would have places to stay.

So Friday AM, I headed back up into the hills.

This is the view from up the hill from the town where I stayed.

Olive Groves in a Stony Land

There was something pretty timeless about the groves of olive trees up here as I crossed into the higher country from the coast, and the old stone walls certainly added to that sense.

Here’s a view south on the other side of the road.

More Pot(s)

The first place I stopped was the ceramics-specialty town, Margarites,

where I didn’t buy any ceramics, but did meet this really nice, serious photographer French woman, to whom I should have given my business card.

Damn!

She was very nice and we had a very nice little Franglish conversation. She lives in the part of France I’m hoping to visit next year, Provence.

Here’s someone’s grape arbor that seemed particularly restful—

And some other scenes in the town.

Eleutherna and Lovely Sound Effects, Too

I was in the old Greek complex at Eleutherna next,

But as you can tell from the pictures, the place was closed— it was an active dig, but there wasn’t any one around.

This was the acropolis (citadel) of the place, most of a Km away

and while I was up shooting the acropolis, some guy down in the little valley below me was moving his sheep and I could hear the wonderful sound of the sheep bells from almost 200 feet away.

Lovely.

Arkadhi Monastery

In Cretan history, this is a pretty sacred place.

It was a monastery (there are lots of them here) and during a Turkish repression of (another) rebellion, 1866 this time, hundreds of local people came here for safety.

Thousands of Turks attacked for a couple of days, and finally broke through the gate and were in the courtyard when the powder magazine blew up, killing many of the villagers and many, many of the Turks.

The local version is that the explosion was ordered by the local archbishop.

Anyway the Turks were so angry they killed all the remaining villagers.

The place is a rectangular two-story building, maybe 100 by 200 feet, the outside of which is the walls of the place, with the little church in the open courtyard center. It’s now full of flowers, mostly roses, and is lovely except for the tour busses.

I was arriving as the two there were loading up to leave, and left most of an hour later as the next two pulled in.

This woman was a feature of the place.

And on the way to the next place, I saw the most amazing thing!

A haystack moving all by itself. . . .

Honest, Officer-- They Told Me it was Oregano. . . .

Finally I went to a town called Maroulas, which has specialized in herbs and herbal remedies for tourists. . . .

There was some old olive processing equipment

and some wonderful flowers on the houses.

Great View— House Needs a Little Work

Finally, here’s an example of an unfinished house— it’s for sale, and has a great view, and is awaiting the final story. . . .

Adjusting to Greek/Greece

2009-06-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

The old (really old—it’s a Trojan War joke—I mean, you know any jokes older than that?) joke was

“Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts”

But some clever wag amended it to

“Beware of Gifts Bearing Greeks”

General Crete Stuff

Crete, or at least the capital, Heraklion, presented one of the most fascinating first impressions on the whole trip: none of the toilets I saw had seats or lids, just bowls.

Well, it’s certainly a kind of change from Turkey, where as you know, there are mostly porcelain holes in the floor with helpful, but somewhat redundant, foot impressions—I mean if you can’t figure out what the hole is for or where you feet have to go, maybe you’d just better stay home. . . .

The Turkish approach makes a great deal more sense than the Iraklion approach--- talk about your basic Thigh-Master bathrooms!

For the first two full days, anyway, Crete has the worst of both options.

Finished and Unfinished

You’ll notice, if you came here, while it’s like Turkey in many ways, it’s also different.

A lot of houses are similarly unfinished--- blocky, all cement-and-rebar first two stories done with rebar sticking out of the columns that will be extended when there’s more funding from cousin Spiros in Chicago or cousin Nikos in Detroit, or . . . .

Discouragingly, in some of them the lower sections of the columns are already flaking away and losing little (looks like rough pieces of bark having fallen or been stripped from a tree) poorly made sections. . . .

Looking around though, you’ll see this is a much more finished place (although not quite totally finished) than Turkey. It’s a lot tidier, if that’s not too prissy a term.

Language Shifting

I was getting pretty used to Turkish— bombing around in it with my language sheets just like I blundered around the country, but the switch to Greek has me bumbling much more.

I can remember the Greek phrases for Hello, Yes, No, Please, You're Welcome, OK, Thank You, Good Morning and Good Afternoon from when I was here on my very first big trip in 1960, and the few days Susan and I spent in Greece last year certainly reinforced them.

But it’s so much harder to find them in my brain after two months of Turkish. . . .

Languages are so much harder when you are older— and the ten I dealt with last year (with ten little language sheets) were tough enough---

But after two months of gradually getting slightly comfortable bombing around in Turkish as I was bombing around in Turkey. . . .

Now, talk about flopping on the beach like a trout. . . .

The Agony of Anogia

I stayed Wednesday PM in a town in the hills of Crete called Anogia.

I stayed in the upper town, the new town, where the domatia (rooms) and banks and post office all are, but the lower old town is pretty unchanged, so I’ll be going down there later to check it out.

In WWII, some partisans kidnapped a German General not far from here, so they (there really are good reasons why people hate Germans) rounded up every male inhabitant within a kilometer or two from the village who was over about 12 and shot them all in the main square, about 50 meters from where I am.

The women re-created the old embroidery and crocheting handcrafts in order to make a living with no men around (although even now I’ve mostly seen the women do all the work and the men mostly do all the sitting around) and now that’s a re-established tradition here, 60+ years later.

When I walked down to the edge of the cliff between the upper and lower towns, I could see some old women with white hair dressed all in black up on their balconies overlooking the main street and who appeared to be the right age to have been suddenly widowed in August of 1944 during the reprisal.

I stopped at the memorial (which is just down the street) and there were three dates on it and lots of names: the dates were 1823, 1867, and 1944.

The first Greek War of Independence (from the Turks) took place in the 1820s— Byron, the poet, died assisting the Greeks, and 1944 was clearly WWII, and, of course, 1867 was another uprising against the Turks, and since 17 British soldiers were killed by a Turkish mob fearing their rights (much lower taxation rates, for example, for Muslims) would be lost under independence, the British hanged 17 Turkish ringleaders and created a government that slid slowly (and much less violently) toward Greek independence, which occurred at the end of WWI.

I’m Way Too Old for All This (Damn!)

In the space of about an hour this AM, I got invited into four women’s bedrooms, and then later, this afternoon, I got called “sweetie” a couple dozen times.

Well, the women inviting me into their bedrooms seemed to average about 287 years old, although that’s probably good, because trying to keep up with some young cutie could probably burst all my remaining gaskets. . . . if I even lasted that long. . . .

This was down in the lower part of Anogia (see below), and I’d stopped there because of all the linens and such hanging outside the houses,

and the old women sitting in chairs next to the road, so I grabbed the camera, got out, and started walking.

I was in one shop and there were four women in there, and they asked me to sit in a chair, and when I did, I was as tall as Maria, here, holding up a table runner.

And I got many more positive responses to “Photo OK?” than I thought I would. Even with the success of Turkey, I was a little hesitant the evening before asking these old men

with the black headbands and pants tucked into boots and furious mustachios (See “Zorba, the Greek” which was filmed here in the middle-sixties using mostly locals to see what they were like), but this AM I did OK.

As I shared recently, I’m not nearly as fluent (the word “fluent” is a vast overstretching of what that word means) in Greek as I am in Turkish, where I maybe have about 60 words at some level of command, but I have tried to learn the words for “handsome” and “beautiful” and “distinguished” to start to work up to the ones I want to shoot.

Parachute Invasions

The WWII Battle of Crete Museum was closed when I went by, so I’ll be hitting it as well as a couple of other places back in Heraklio at the end of June after I turn in the car.

Crete is interesting militarily for an interesting policy shift between the combatants.

The Germans took Crete away from the British pretty quickly and efficiently with a classic vertical envelopment, which started with paratroopers dropping on an airfield, capturing it pretty quickly, then the already-in-the-air troop transports landed, and in a couple of hours, the Germans had a potent force on the ground, and pretty much rolled up the British defenders.

But here’s the irony: the German vertical envelopment was very successful, and the Allies, much impressed, stole that page from their play-book. The Allies mounted more and more, and significantly larger, parachute drops throughout the war, including Sicily, Normandy (Band of Brothers is about one company of one regiment of one of the American Airborne divisions, the 101st), Holland, etc. The last mass jump of the war, for Operation Market-Garden, (two complete Airborne divisions—almost 25,000 troops as I remember) was a bust, but that’s a completely separate issue.

Many more jumps were planned and within days (or sometimes hours) of being carried out, but often the ground troops were over-running German positions faster than the airborne plans could get made or implemented, so many of the drops just didn’t happen.

The Germans never used paratroopers as the advance troops after Crete.

It Wasn’t the Hittites that Invented Drama. . . .

I got back from my walk down to see the memorial and the sunset, and discovered that the overhead light in my room didn’t work.

So I took my G-E E-G dictionary down to the managers of the place I’m staying (“pensiyone” in Turkey, “soba” in the Balkans, but “domatia” (as in “domestic”) in Greece.

And there’s the old guy- 75 or so, and his wife, and she did all the work to show me the room and check me in and all that while he sat in the shade, but a burned-out light bulb is clearly a really big deal, because he shoos her inside their part of the place and tells me to follow her, which I do. And the room I enter is full of same pretty lovely fabrics—crocheted edges on table-cloths, cross-stitch embroidery, etc., etc.

And she gets her glasses and I show her the word for “light” in the dictionary, and she tells him and so we all go upstairs, and he takes charge, of course, and flips the switch (in some kind of grand manner) in my room and nothing happens.

Se he tells her something which takes lots of words, and she teeters off to steal a light bulb from an empty room, and has to go downstairs to get the key and then come back upstairs and then stand on a little desk chair to reach the bulb, standing on this rickety-looking chair with her arms over her head as she’s short and it’s hard for her to reach the bulb, and all the while he’s standing next to me, taking up space in the universe for no apparent reason, and calling out to her every 30 seconds or so in a way that sounds like he’s issuing instructions telling her either what to do or to hurry. . . . .

Sound Trucks

In Anogia this AM (Thursday), I saw a variation on the weekly markets I so enjoyed (and enjoyed shooting) in Turkey.

In this system, in the villages apparently too small for a big even weekly tent set-up, changing villages every day, making a one-week circuit, there were about four or five full-size pick-ups coming through loaded with various vegetables, and the drivers hawking their wares with PA systems on the trucks.

And this, interestingly, in a little town where it seemed, about every little shop that wasn’t selling hand-crafts was a little grocery. In the 300 meters or so of the street through the upper (newer) town, there must have been a dozen little markets.

Harsh Lands, Sometimes Harsh People

I went to a cave today, which was pretty cool— in more ways than one, being 61 degrees down there, rather than the 90 or so it was everywhere else--

But this one had a local history as well. During one of the wars between the Greeks and the Turks, when the Turks appeared the locals all went to the cave for sanctuary.

And after some palavering, the Muslim commander started blocking air access to the cave, and every night, the local Greeks would open up more.

So he sent some emissaries down to negotiate, and then a few hours later, angrily set huge fires which suffocated all the people inside the cave—-- almost 300 of them.
The skeletons were discovered years later, apparently.

And before you jump on the Turks here, or the Muslims, you should probably know that the locals shot the two armistice/capitulation emissaries. . . .

Olive Oil

On the way back out of the little town where the cave is I saw a bunch of signs about a local olive oil operation, so stopped in to learn what I could.

I learned all about virgins and extra-virgins so I’m now the expert in those nuances. . . .

The Process

You take the olives, leaves, etc. that you shake from the tree into a net and grind it up in (historically donkey-powered,

now diesel-powered) grinders.

Then you put the slurry in a mesh bag and press it pretty significantly, (the mesh bag is in the bottom of this big squeezer)

and the oil and water get squeezed out and the leaves and pits and all that stay behind, and the oil is lighter than the water, so you slowly strain it out like those two-level gravy separators. . . .

The woman who kept calling me “sweetie” runs the place, and does the oil for her own trees, as well as almost 400 other local growers, for which she gets part of the oil.

It takes about 5 kilos of olives, pits, leaves, etc., to make 1 kilo of oil.

She feeds the leaves to her sheep and, of course, eats the sheep, and burns the crushed pits in a kind of (world’s smallest pellets) pellet stove during the winter.

She’s from Massachusetts, grew up in Alabama, and came back to run (and modernize) her father’s operation here. She said that when she moved to rural Alabama and was telling her new classmates where she was from, about 40 or so years ago, many of them thought that was a foreign country.

And they could have been more right than they knew.

Virgin olive oil comes from the first, very gentle pressing of the mush of olives, leaves, and crushed pits.

Extra-virgin just means that the acid content is below .08.

Cretan Digs

And here’s a 4-star room (on my scale, anyway) in the coastal village of Balί on the north coast.

It gets one star for the fridge (not even counting the rest of the kitchen!), but it’s a three-star bathroom.

One star for a shower pan, one for a place to hang the flexible shower head, and the third because you don’t have to use your knee to hold the lid up off the seat.

I have graduated, it seems, to real toilets, but often here, as in Turkey, they’re at the 90 to 95% efficiency level. They work and all, but the tank is too thick or the seat is too far back, and, well, I’m sure you get the idea.

Cruisin’ around Crete

2009-06-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

Written on Day 69, Friday, June 12

The weekend and Monday were the hardest three days of the whole trip, and Monday was by far the most demanding.

The weekend, as you read in the report just below this one, was spent in Istanbul, spending 16 hours bombing around the town, mostly by foot, sometimes on the tram, with four trans-continental (cool, huh) boat rides, and a couple of bus rides in the heat.

Monday was a tough travel day, the most demanding day of the trip so far, and coming on top of the heat and enervation of the weekend, a real trial.

Took a cab to the cross-Bosporus catamaran, then rode the boat to near the airport, then took a cab to the airport. No big deal. Except all the stuff from the car, much of which had stayed in the car overnight when I was in sleeping, was now jammed into the four bags and I was, of course, having to tote all four barges and lift all four bales all at once.

Charles Atlas--- Here I Am

I just now (Thursday AM) mailed the gym bag home full of loot, and I need to share with you that I was really feeling my age, having to lift and heave and lug (must be where the word “luggage” comes from) the damn thing around, thinking it weighed maybe 40 pounds or so--- it’s the one with all the gifts in it.

And when I have the luxury of two trips, such as when changing hotels in Iraklion or loading the car from the second hotel, I’d put the big backpack on normally, then put the gym bag across my shoulders, and really feeling the weight, thinking I was getting pretty weak and feeble. . . .

Certainly feeling weak and feeble.

Well, I might well be getting weak and feeble, but no bully better try to kick sand in my face at the beach when I am with some cutie, because I just hit the local post office to mail the thing home, to get rid of it, to make traveling lots (read LOTS) less difficult logistically, and the gym bag didn’t weigh 40 pounds, it weighed 40 kilos! That’s about 88 pounds!!!

Jack LaLanne has met his match!!!! Boy—some old guy throwing (well, hoisting, carrying, and pretty awkwardly at that) 88 pounds of gifts across his shoulders. . . .

But still--- 88 lbs!

Hah!

And now, to return to the program in progress. . . . .

And they don’t make you take off your shoes in the security lines over here, but they do insist on the belt, and I’ve lost about 10-12 pounds, I’d guess, and the image of a guy almost 70 standing in an airport with 50+ pounds of gear and his pants around his ankles does not bear even thinking about.

And there were five different security lines to go through. Two in Istanbul and three in Athens. I think there were five, although it might only (only???) have been four. A pain in the drain in either case.

So I got to Crete, after a four-hour layover that stretched to almost five, then flew south across the Mediterranean, turned right at the north coast of Crete, and landed.

Beverly Hills

I’d chosen the left-side window, so could look at the north coast as we turned east to land, and it looked something like Beverly Hills if it was moved to a poor country. There were hotel compounds, clearly fenced off from the rest of the area, full of tennis courts and bright-blue twinkling swimming pools, and up in the hills across the main coast road, which I’ll be heading east on in a couple of weeks or so, the unmistakable shapes of multi-cul-de-sac housing enclaves— gated, it’s my guess.

The rental car wasn’t ready, which I engineered to be OK, as I didn’t need the damn thing in town and I was going to take it easy for a couple of days and recuperate, so I took a cab to town, got a place to stay (more costly than Turkey, that’s for sure— about $30 for what I’d expect to pay 30 Lira (about $18) for in Turkey.

And I rested and I bombed around town.

I went into a bookstore to get a Crete travel book—books are pretty expensive over here: one travel guide was almost $40—would be about half that at home.

Greek Treasures at the Archaeology Museum

One of the chief differences so far between Turkey and Greece is that Greek women have bosoms and cleavage and some great (volleyball) butts and even waists—here’s a prime exhibit at the Archaeology Museum

that I snuck a shot of from the hip---

I mean Turkish women may have all those qualities, but under (apparently) many layers of clothing. . . . . but even after just a couple of days here in Greece, I can rejoice in the freedom these women have to dress like this. . . .

There were other wonderful things to admire in the museum as well— although the place is all-but closed for a major renovation, and only a small part of their extensive collection, including all the really good Minoan stuff from Knossos (just down the road) is on display.

Zorba Was Here

I was talking to the woman who ran the bookstore— trying to shift from Turkish to Greek—and there was a sound system in the place and the music was the theme from Zorba, the Greek.

It was filmed here, the last scene on the coast west of where I am now, and the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, was born here in the town (Iraklion) where I am, and he’s buried here, but they didn’t like him much when he was alive, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lambasted the middle-class pretentiousness and jingoistic snobbishness and ignorant arrogance of the upper mid-west, based on Minnesota mostly, and now has theaters (the Prairie Home Companion’s home stage is the Fitzgerald theater), and film festivals, and arts festivals, and performance centers named for him.

Well, they hated Kazantzakis enough here that the church (don’t get me started here on the political connivings of the publicly pious) ex-communicated him, then did a bunch of back-room politicking to deny him the Nobel Prize. Hypocrites. Bastards. And with the succession of fascist governments in the 70s and 80s in Greece, he didn’t even live her the last quarter or third of his life.

Much like Mozart— if you go to Salzburg, in the western part of Austria, all you will hear about is either Mozart or The Sound of Music. But as soon as Mozart could, he was out of there (about age 7, I think— had the original stage father, by the way) and never came back again as I remember.

The Adventure by Bus

So I walked around and rested and went out and walked around some more, and decided at the far end of a “lost-again” walk to take the bus back to the center of town.

So here’s a bunch of guys sitting around a café in the heat of the afternoon, and one of them directs me to the local mini-mart— maybe the size of a VW camper— and I buy a bus ticket and then the guy makes sure I’m standing at the right place around the corner to catch the bus.

And the bus comes, past the café first, then turns the corner to get to me, and I see the guy coming around the corner motioning to me that this is the right bus and I should be on it. Pretty nice.

And the bus driver has a knob on the steering wheel, what we called in high school a necking knob, because if you had one, you could steer with one hand and perform some complicated but delicate (at first, anyway) gropings with your right hand on whatever willing damsel chose to sit right next to you in the car. . . .

Political Graffiti

There was some graffiti in Istanbul (some of which attracted Kim visually, but with my cop background, it was really hard for me to got past the vandalism to the visual quality of it) but I hardly saw any (or didn’t notice any) in the rest of Turkey, except in Iznik (Nicea).

Not so here.

I have hardly seen a building (including churches) without (pretty apparently political) slogans all over them, but I thought this one, in English, obviously, was worth sharing.

Wednesday AM, I took the bus out to the airport, got the rental car, and then spent about an hour fighting my way through the traffic (Iraklion is the capital of Crete and has about 160,000 people in it and during the time I was coming back from the airport to the hotel they were apparently all in their cars in the center of town) and trying to learn where I was, then trying to get where I was going, befuddled (betrayed may be closer) by one-way streets and all that.

But I finally got on the road, and am now about 40 Km from Iraklion, up in the hills, looking for Minoan sites.

Minoans

The Minoans were the dominant group, from 2,000 BCE until about the time of the Trojan War (1250 BCE) when they got pretty much wiped out by earthquakes and Tsunamis.

There’s even some scholarship that suggests that the same earthquakes and resulting tsunamis are what brought Troy down-

Gee, Dad— you mean they made up the business about the horse?

Yes, son, and a great deal more than that. . . .

So the Minoans lived here twice as long ago as when we re-set our calendars.

Tylisos

Here are some pictures of a place I visited today---

Three pretty good-sized houses, although (once again) the rooms in these places seemed really teeny.

I put my hat and camera case (a 128-tape-cassette carrying bag) in the picture to give you a sense of scale.

This is the entrance to one of the three houses I saw today

I could really sense that actual people lived here, raising their families, grieving losses, celebrating birthdays, struggling, conquering--- just what we all do—

And they walked into these hallways and into these rooms and sat down and had dinner and visited and tried to get along.

The more I travel the more I think we all face the same storms, internal and external, and we are far more alike than we are different, but the ways that make us different are very interesting.

Enervation

It’s now about 8 PM on Thursday PM (10 AM for you at home—just add two hours and switch to the other half of the 24-hour clock) and it’s just now cooling off to where I could be out in it again.

I’ve been heading out early, toughing out the heat and the travel and the new language and all that as much as I can, then finding a place and hunkering down for the afternoon, thinking when it cools off, I’ll go back out.

But sometimes, I’m so tired and it’s still too hot out, and I don’t get back out, even though that was the plan.

I’m at the coast right now, and it’s cooler, but I’m pretty much shot, and I’m thinking I did the trip backwards. Spring was late in Turkey this year by about two-and-a-half to three weeks, and I might better have planned it coming here to Crete first, then heading NE to Turkey.

But one of Robert’s Rules is that it’s not always what you know, it’s when you know it. . . . .

So here I am trying to wring the most out of it that I can.

Closing More Loops

2009-06-11T06:10:00.000-07:00

Day 63 & 64; Saturday and Sunday, June 6 and 7

Death at the Toll Plaza

On the way back into the city, on the toll-road, when we all fanned out to get in lines to pay, there were a bunch of guys hawking wares to the drivers right in the lanes: flowers, little snacks—these are the cinnamon and sesame seed bread circles, essentially big, soft, single-loop pretzels that you can get about every 15 feet in Turkey—

Closing More Loops

This loop was a much smaller loop than the big loop of 7,400 Kms. from Istanbul to Istanbul, but it had some odd, quirky, connections.

I headed into town both days all weekend, although it was pretty hot and I was tired, because I didn’t want to think, some time in the future, that I’d been a half-hour away from one of the great cities in the world, and hadn’t gone there.

I had a friend in college who pretty vigorously pursued women in much the same fashion, and explained his apparent lack of concern about their external attractiveness this way:

When I’m 87 years old, and drooling into my oatmeal an the home for the elderly helpless, I’ll never forgive myself if I thought there was a woman I could have gotten into bed but didn’t.

And you could probably make a pretty good case that we all felt exactly the same way, he just being more thoughtful and philosophical about it. . . .

Well, I guess I’m the same way but for other kinds of experiences. . . .

Closing the Turkish Loop—Part Two

The second loop that closed for me this last weekend was at Eminonu—where most of the little passenger ferries come in from the Asian side of Istanbul, where the old-city bus routes all begin and end, and there’s a tram stop, and (of course) lots of vendors in the plaza and also crowding the almost 40-foot-wide pedestrian walkway under the street and the tram tracks from where the boats land you to shops and little side streets--- it’s a great space.

Almost all our Istanbul adventures began and ended there, and it was kind of the doorway to the city for Kim and me, and then just me.

It’s the plaza where the flag seller gave me the little Turkish flag patch that I had on my photo vest--- and I’m going through the plaza on my way back through the Spice Market and there he was— my flag guy, and I went up to him and pointed at the flag, and we just had a really sweet, very special moment there between us.

And in the plaza, here’s one of about a dozen people (almost all the others are much older Muslim woman, selling bird seed to feed the pigeons.

And remember it’s about 90 out there, and no shade, and cement/stones all around him, and he has a hat, a long-sleeved shirt, and a suit jacket on.
Of course, the Bedouins, who know something about heat, wear lots of clothes in the desert rather than a very few.

But no suit jackets.

After being here, and at St. Mark’s Square in Venice, I’ll just suggest that most major cities in the world would be improved with a few nesting pairs of Peregrine falcons. . . .

Special—Today Only—Seventeenth Century Medicine

Here’s a sign at a stall in the Spice Market--- one of at least a half-dozen shops in a row---

And here’s a photo of The Professor, Dr. Suluk him (her? it? them?) self.

Yes, friends, it’s leeches—the real thing.

Step right up— Who’ll be the first to buy today?

Closing the Turkish Loop—Part Three

Saturday was a sojourn into Istanbul, partly just to go there, as I explained, and partly to find an Arabic calligrapher to write some friends’ names (I had a list of about 10) on some special fancy-border card stock like the ones I got for my grandchildren in Granada, Spain, in the Moorish market three years ago.

I’d been trying to track someone down to do this all through the trip, and about all I heard was, “Istanbul, Sultanamet (the oldest neighborhood).”

So on Saturday I headed to Sultanahmet and went up to the Grand Bazaar, as there’s a booksellers’ souk up there and I figured that was a good place to start.

And I found a guy pretty quickly-- seems he’s a famous Arabic calligrapher, and has a little school where he teaches Arabic calligraphy, and he also has this little stall where he sells old books.

And he asks me my name and gets a piece of printer paper and starts to work with an old, scratchy reed pen, and then he starts talking about the price--- he wanted well over $30.00 each--- and “special hand-made paper” and all, and then “only $30.00” each, and I’m still walking away, and he’s lowering the price to $26.00 each but I’m gone.

I mean the people on the list are all pretty important to me, but there are ten of them . . . . And on this trip, so far, what he wanted was about what I spent for lodging for most of a whole month . . . . .

So I just started walking back down the tram tracks toward the Blue Mosque (which Kim and I saw together on our first day in Istanbul a couple of months ago) and started asking “Neh ruh deh Arapcha ad yazarkin?” which is the (phoenetic) Turkish version of the question, “Where is there an Arabic calligrapher (literally, “name writer”)?”

Well, after most of an hour, and it’s pretty hot out—almost 30, so upper 80s at least, and after some interesting box canyons I was directed toward, including a hammam (Turkish bath joint) I’m walking past the very first place (here’s another loop closing) Kim and I went on our very first day in Turkey (the underground cisterns from “From Russia, with Love”), and there’s a guy sitting under a patio umbrella, right where we waited for the cisterns to open, with a sign that says, “Ottoman Calligraphy— Your name in 1 minute.”

So I plop down and we haggle over the price (you can bet your very last cent that it was less than $26 each) and we agree and I give him the list and he starts and I go over to the nearby chai stand and get him some chai and sit back down and he’s working away and telling me about his father who was a famous Arabic calligrapher and who taught him, and he leans toward me and says, “I’m a retired policeman.”

The End of the Line, or

Woo woo for choo choos

Later, I walked through the park

below Topkapi Palace, on the way to a place of pilgrimage for a very good friend in Portland— my bunkie on the Alaska cruise, John.

John is an extreme train aficionado (that’s a Spanish word, from which we get the word “fan,” that means “whack job”).

So I went to Sircikje train station and shot some pictures for him, and snagged him a couple of real souvenirs, because this is the station that was the eastern terminus for the old Orient Express run that started in Paris.

Here’s what the engineer saw in the last 100 yards of the almost two-thousand mile journey.

Here’s the exterior where the passengers entered

Here’s the waiting room

And here’s the picture I took as a subterfuge---

I got down on the actual track-bed at the very end of the run, made a big show of taking this picture, knelt down to do it, and grabbed a couple of rocks from the actual track-bed.

Now I don’t have any sense they were there during the great train runs of 80 or so years ago, but that doesn’t matter. They could be. Like the obsidian point that terrible wicked fiend snaffled at Ҫatel-Hoyuk— probably made by a grad student, but all the same, I’d love to have out-snagged her. . . .

They could have been there for that long, you never know, and they certainly come from the right place, and you didn’t get them at some souvenir stall.

Here are some shots from the museum inside the station.

And here’s the station-master’s desk.

And more from outside.

Sunday’s Meanderings

Details

Fearless, but Premature (or Immature)

The third of the three big mosques here in Istanbul, Sulimanye, is closed for some pretty major repairs, there’s scaffolding all the way up three of the minarets— about 100 feet or more, I’d guess, so Kim and I hadn’t even gone up there two months ago: we hit the Blue Mosque and Aiya Sofia and that was about it for mosques.

But I had some time and didn’t want to go back to places I’d already seen, so I hoofed it on up there, and stumbled into something pretty good.

As I got close, I could see the big corrugated steel six-foot-high fence around it, but I snuck behind a bus shelter and clambered up a five-foot stone wall the construction fence was on top of, thinking I might be able to peek over the fence and see something.

Well, your fearless, intrepid explorer could see people walking around inside there, and if he’d made a more thorough survey of the street 50 yards past the bus stop he was sneaking around behind, he’d have seen the construction pipe-gate was open and the main doorway through the walls was open, and . . . .

I hit the cemetery first,

and then bombed around the area some, got inside, talked to some people,

had brunch (my 11:00 meal), and snaffled myself a piece of the place. It’s a construction site, right, and so there’s little piles of rubble here and there, and so I now have a piece of the Sulimanye mosque in the gym bag of loot I’m about to mail home.

Then I headed back to the tram line through another corner of the Grand Bazaar.

Speed Backgammon

I had downloaded the rules for backgammon, and even played a few games with a good friend in Portland before I come over here, thinking I could find some old codgers sitting in the shade on an afternoon and sidle up to them, and start to shoot them some, and then kind of know what to do if I got invited to play.

Hah!

When Anne and I played the game, it took about 15-20 minutes per game, and I’m not sure we still had the general movement of the checker-doofers right---- but we did have the doofer placement just right, because it looked just like the diagram.

So the first games I saw being played, I kind of lit up, sidled over, and then slunk away.

First of all, there are as many different ways to play the game as there are people who play it.

And second, stopping to kind of figure out where to move how many doofers and which doofers and from and to which number of long triangles. . . . well, I’m sure you get the picture.

But to give you the clearest picture, I stumbled into a couple of guys playing on Sunday, and took some photos of them (finally solving the mystery of why the camera had been acting up) and they were blasting through games pretty quickly.

I timed the last game I watched and it took 130 seconds!

Two minutes and ten seconds.

Final Turkish Stuff

I saw this shot Sunday, and in some ways, if you only had one image to share that told a little story about Turkey, this one would certainly be a finalist.

The Turks are the friendliest people I have met as a group, and this is one of the great countries of the world.

There are a couple of things that I’d change about the place, and two seem pretty parallel.

Smoking

Smoking is a huge problem; I don’t know anything about their health-care system, but I do know there aren’t many older people. I think I have already reported that only 7% of Turks are over 60, and I’d guess smoking is one of the big reasons for that. And not only do a lot of them smoke, they seem to smoke a lot, too.

Litter

And they not only lay waste to the insides of their bodies, but to their cities and country-side as well. Not the worst I’ve seen, but this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been, and there’s way too much litter.

The government is working on these two issues— I’m seeing a few anti-smoking signs and posters in the big cities, but the Lonely Planet guide-book admits there isn’t a lot of impact yet.

I’ve also seen some recycling bins here and there, and so some big changes are on their horizon. It will take a while though, to create a generation of little Anti-Smoking and Anti-Littering Nazis (the school children) to start to nag the parents into a kind of sullen submission as we have done here.

And even at home, there’s an interesting shift I’ve experienced.

Fifteen years ago, when an MD asked if I’d smoked, I’d admit, “Yes— for about seven years, but I quit in 1964.” ”Great, great, that’s wonderful—good for you” they’d say and I’d feel pretty good.

Then about 7 or 8 years ago, the response shifted. “Hmmmm. Seven years, eh?”

And now, when I say “Seven years,” I get this shake of the head and a “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

C’mon here! It was 45 years ago.

Gender Equality

The third issue, I think, is gender equality/equity, and it will be interesting as Turkey and the other eastern and south-eastern countries come into the EU as they deal with the social consciousness of the north-western Europeans.

This will be a huge conflict inside the country and inside families.

I’m not sure why Americans travel to Western and Central Europe pretty casually, then skip right over the Balkans like they didn’t exist, but land in Greece pretty easily.

Then they skip Turkey (only a half-million Americans travel here every year) and head to Israel.

And they are ignoring two of the great travel destinations—almost no MacDonald’s restaurants, Hilton hotels, etc., although there are lots of ATMs and wonderful, interesting places to see and some really terrific people to visit and get help from. . . .

So you go down this street and then turn right. . . . “

I’m at Eminonu after the nine-hour Sunday walk around Istanbul, heading back to the Asian side for the last night in Turkey, and here’s the woman ahead of me as we walk toward the boat ticket building.

And I don’t know what’s in the huge cardboard box; it can’t be terribly heavy, because it would break out of the box, but she’s partially stooped over struggling with the load whatever it is, and wearing şalvars (shalvars), the almost-skirts I saw everywhere.

This is the last of the 5,881 images I took in Turkey, and it seems the right one to end with.

Closing the Turkish Loop

2009-06-05T06:31:00.000-07:00

Day 62, Friday, June 5

Closing the Turkish Loop

I’m back in Istanbul, after 7430 Km, or 4,644 miles.

The point-to-point straight-line distance between all the cities in the projected loop was about 2,350 miles, but as I got ahead of my projected calendar, toward the end of the trip, I added some more cities, and not necessarily in the most efficient way, either.

Roman Glass

I walked a couple of kilometers (partly through the biggest local park) to see the Archaeological Museum, and for me, one of the highlights was (as usual) Roman glass.

When I was near Fethiya at the site of the abandoned Greek Village, I got some old glass demi-john stoppers from the local women (read: tomb robbers) and I got some replica Roman glass items at Bodrum in the castle/ museum.

But it was a real treat to see glass that old—not only the age but also the elegance and beauty of the items separate from the age. (These are no-flash, mostly in-the-dark images— sorry about that.)

For me, it’s right up there with old stone tools, poppies, and that’s probably all I should list on a family show. . . .

The Ekmek Kid

On the way through the park, I saw a gaggle of high-school kids (mostly girls, one guy) walking toward me, and as I got close, I said, “Good Morning” in English, and then I said, “Merhaba den America, (Hi from America)” and they all stopped and we started talking and I got the normal questions: What is your name? How old are you? What is your job?

Then the kid, who has some bread in a bag (I’m guessing as a mid-morning snack--- a big skinny foot-ball shaped loaf of bread over here is maybe $ .30) and he’s talking about/explaining the bread and I said, just about all in Turkish, without notes--- I don't know the Turkish word for thinking about, so I had to resort to Tourist Pantomime---

“There are yeh deh choke guzel bayan burada (7 very beautiful women here), and you are talking about ekmek (bread)?”

And the girls all exploded in laughter, and it was a great moment.

And he may be known as “Ekmek” from now on.

Koza Han (Silk Warehouses)

Then I went through the old warehouses for the silk merchants, which were built originally to support the local mosque, but which became the driver of the whole town, as this became, as I’ve said, the end of the Silk Road.

I spent a couple of hours or more in there, just wandering around, talking to people, and checking out the place.

One of the shops was full of snip-suits, and this

may be the best picture I got of them— the one with the kid in it from Konya wasn’t this clear in terms of the actual costume.

Here’s a shot of the passageways through the place— it’s maybe 3 or 4 acres in here—actually, there are now 4 or five of these big hans (warehouses) and the office space the accountants needed, and the caravansaries for travelers and animals to sleep in and the whole required infrastructure.

And, of course, over one of the main passageways, the all-but inevitable image of Ataturk and a couple of flags.

I may have mentioned that his image is probably in about 80-90 percent of business places—calendars, posters, etc.

Ninety-five Percent

I’ve talked before about the culture here and about how they get most, but not all, of whatever, and Dawn, the goddess of the pensiyon in Goreme, Cappadocia, also spoke about that a great deal.

If you were to apply just one word to this place, it would be, I think, “unfinished,” but here’s an example of not quite getting it vs. not quite finishing.

Cumalikizik (Huh? How’s that again?)

On the way out of Bursa, I went back east a little ways to check out a place called Cumalikizik, described in Lonely Planet as a unique, historic, traditional village, but which was a bust. They don’t get much wrong, but this was one of them.

The pastel colors were only on a couple of houses, the place was full of tourists, there was no real plan to the place, nor was there any effort (other than the tourist-stuff gauntlet) to work with the situation.

And it was raining and the right was pretty grim, or maybe I was ready to rest for a day or so.

Please Stand for the Recitation of the Nicean Creed

“I Believe in . . . . .

I hit Iznik, where I thought I’d spend a half-day, but which proved to be a disappointment, as the old Roman walls, city gates, theater, and very early Byzantine church were trash- and graffiti—strewn and it was hard to get pictures that showed the place without also showing what I didn't want to see (or share).

They have some real treasures there, and more than many other cities do, but they aren’t handling them well at all. They are missing a solid bet here, and in a big way.

This is also the home (or the site, anyway) of some pretty basic Christian (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) dogma. This city was originally called Nicea, and in the 4th century was the site of the first ecumenical conference which came up with the wording of the dogma.

I can remember at the big Lutheran church, just west of what’s now James Village (Trader Joe’s Albertson’s and Half Price Books) at the main Lynnwood intersection, when we all stood and kind of mumbled through it every Sunday.

One thing that used to get me, as I shared the experience at the time (I was 12 and maybe a year from self de-frocking myself right out of the congregation), was thinking that this was pretty important stuff these people were all saying together, and it had less shared excitement that reading the free-appliance want-ads. No excitement, no emphasis, no inflection, even. As a-tonal and mono-tonous as you can imagine. (Garrison Keillor would say “. . . as Lutheran as you can get,” right about here).

And I thought— is this as excited as people get with what they believe at the core? And then I thought— maybe they don’t believe any of this any more than I do. I mean, it’s really not very believable. And pretty soon after that, I was out of there. I just couldn’t believe that people really believed all that. Because I realized I didn’t believe any of it.

Generations of Women

I did catch a grab shot of this peasant woman, worn out (and bent over) from a life of toil in the fields, and her sixty-something daughter helping her walk to the market. I don’t think her head’s much more than about 40 inches from the ground here.

And much of what I could think of was the men all sitting in the card-rooms and domino and backgammon parlors and her not even able to walk on her own.

And about a minute later, in the same place, a different generation entirely.

But Iznik was a disappointment--- and so instead of staying there, I headed north, figuring on staying somewhere east of Istanbul, checking out the place, e-mailing Chetin (the car guy) and his wife that I was close, and then getting back to Istanbul tomorrow.

But I flipped the map over to the next fold, learned that I was only about 100 Km from Istanbul, and headed west, ending this part of the great journey.

I’ll have two full days now in Istanbul, the whole weekend, then I’ll fly to Crete on Monday.

Housekeeping

I spent much of today writing this, downloading and selecting images, unpacking the car, checking that I had all my gear, then packing everything up to see how much I might have to leave behind when I fly to Crete.

I got almost everything packed in there except for a couple of Value Village golf shirts and the novels I’ve already read on the trip.

I have room for a few more toothpicks, but that’s about it.

But it’s a comfort to know I’m still somewhat portable, after two months on the road spread out in the space of an entire (albeit somewhat small) car.

I probably won’t write any more reports about Turkey unless I have some good adventures the next couple of days in the city— but if I stumble into anything worthy of note, you can certainly expect that I’ll be throwing some words and pictures at it.

If not, the next report will be from Crete in a few days—maybe Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.

Purses in Bursa

2009-06-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

I’m in Bursa, the end of the Silk Road, and the bag I brought to bring loot home in is full now, so either I get a bigger bag in Crete, or I limit my Crete souvenirs to photos and stories.

I headed out pretty early (6:30) this AM as it was really hot yesterday, and hit the old market area where the silk warehouses were and where the up-scale and silk markets are today.

The Great Mosque

But I was there before most of the merchants were there, and only a very few were only starting to set up, so I visited the recently restored big old mosque (Ulu Camii),

The twelve columns are all painted with draperies in a tromp-l’oile manner, along with the incredibly lovely Arabic calligraphy on them and on big (really big—flag sized, if that helps) on the walls

They left one of the columns un-cleaned to show what it was like before the restoration.

There were some other interesting details to report as well.

Here’s a magic-marker notice in the place, and what interested me as the English Teacher and social observer was that “Allah” was in red (just like the believers at home capitalize “he” and “him” and “his” when referring to you know who.

But all the punctuation was in red, too— the carets over the letters, for example.

I can understand the Allah part being in red, but not the punctuation.

This is the mihrab,

in the center of the wall that faces Mecca, which we always think of as east, but that’s only from our point of view.

In northern India, of course, the mihrab faces west, and here in Turkey, I’d guess it’s mostly ESE or so.

I prowled around some more, and shot a little around the mosque

before I came back to the hotel about 9 for breakfast--- about as meager a breakfast as I’ve been provided.

A hard-boiled egg (standard over here) some (actually only about 8) olives, a big basket of bread, no sliced tomatoes or cucumber (also normally part of breakfast) and some little Denny’s Strawberry jam-sized packets of a local cheese spread.

Normally the breakfasts in hotels are buffets, so you can snag some good stuff and I can get enough extra for maybe half the brunch I eat about 11, but not today.

Cats

I saw lots of (I’m guessing) feral cats all around the mosque this AM near the butchers’ souk and the butchers put out little scraps from their trimming and all that, so the cats eat pretty well.

They might have had a better breakfast than I had. . . .

Once More into the Breach, Dear Lads

Then I went back out about 11 to hit the big sites at the east end of the old city where I’m staying.

On the way, I spotted this guy reading the paper, and was struck by his squatting up on the wall

(now that I’m old, I think of knees a lot— when I was younger, I just realized, upon reflection, I also thought of knees a lot, but they were almost never mine)

but obviously, this works for him.

If that were me up there, you’d need a tow-truck with a cable to lift me up from there and an ambulance to take me to the hotel. . . .

And in the middle of a city of 1.8 million people with traffic and shops and very urbane city life flowing all around me, there were dozens of guys pushing carts like this (selling cherries, mostly or plums [think Granny Smith plums maybe 2/3 the size of a golf ball]).

And up by the mosque, later,

The first afternoon place was the Green Mosque

and the other was the Ethnographic Museum.

The third, the Green Tomb, almost the size of a mosque, was close for a complete restoration.

On the way back, I snuck of shot of this woman in the severest of all the traditional Muslim wear I normally see over here.

As I passed her, I could hear she was on her cell phone.

And there are little silk shops near all the big tourist places, of course.

And moms with kids, too.

Mosque Architecture

They are really good at integrating circles and squares over here as they build mosques, and I thought I’d try to explain it so you can get a feel for what they are like inside.

Think of a 9X9 Pyrex cake pan— and a mixing bowl about 12 inches or so across.

Double the height of the side walls on the cake pan to about 5 inches or so, and double them again to 10 inches, then enlarge the area so it’s about 24 by 24 inches with 10-inch high outside walls.

Turn the mixing bowl upside down and center it over the cake pan.

Now imagine putting four equally spaced columns in the cake pan to hold up the bowl.

Then add 8 up-side down coffee cups around the center bowl (all but the center square of a tic-tac-toe game) and add some more columns to support them. They aren’t usually as tall as the center dome (mixing bowl).

You’ve just made a mosque.

This mosque was about 180 feet square, had twelve columns almost ten feet thick and 60 feet high, and there were 16 domes—the center one had a big window at the top to let in lots of light.

I just realızed I have not explaıned the tıtle of thıs, or about the knee repaır goop I trıed out later, but I´m ın an ınternet cafe (no wı-fı ın the hotel) and there are 31 letter keys and all kınds of other surprıses, so I´ll ınclude that later.

The End of the Silk Road

2009-06-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Day 59; June 2

I hit the big pedestrian promenade last PM ın Kutahya (here’s the big public fountin in the town center)

and then the park, hoping for lots more families and such, so I could shoot the kids and then maybe the grandparents, but it was mostly younger people cruising on foot, and not very visually interesting.

So I was out and around Kuthaya this AM, hitting the big mosque and Archaeology Museum,

There’s an old fountain building

right next to the old mosque (you have to wash your hands, face, and feet before entering [and usually upon exiting] the mosque— I have seen men stop work in a shop to put down their rug and pray rather than going to a mosque (that’s just fine—you are expected, though, to actually show up on Friday about 1:00 PM) and they go through the washing motions)

and lots of old guys hang out there through the day.

They also hang out in and just outside of the card and backgammon parlors—unless this is an informal meeting of the Kutahya Rotary Club

Also in my wanderings, I found (got lost and blundered into, if you need the whole truth) the shoe-repair souk, and I realized what an advantage it is to have souks. If all the shoe-repair places are on one street, it’s pretty easy to find them, plus the competition should pretty much keep prices low.

This guy

(one of about 15 on one side of the street in one block—and no other shops of any kind in the block on their side of the street) charged me about 3 Lira ($1.80) to re-sew about 4 inches of the stitching of both shoes.

I figured out that I wore these shoes last year on the bıg trip with Susan, and this year, and at home in the meantime, so they’ve been in 16 countries so far, and that’s more than most people get to, so I wanted to take care of them.

Another Rug-Mobıle?

And speaking of Susan, she’s apparently put some kind of female spell on me, unbeknownst to me, last year in the Balkans.

All the presents I fetched home last year except, I think, for a couple of pillow cases for Teryl, who prints the pictures I sell, were pretty cool stuff—often pretty manly stuff--- not the wussy cloth-based loot Susan kept acquiring.

In fact I referred to the VW Golf as the Rug-mobile, as the back seat was piled to the bottom of the rear windows, and then higher than that, mostly with (really girly) fabric and folk outfits.

Well, I may have to turn in my Real Man ID card, as I have a gym bag full of loot I got this year, and (hold on or sit down) it’s almost all full of fabric stuff. Some little pieces of quilt cotton, purses as gifts, place mats as gifts, and the big carpet-square-based donkey saddlebags. Of course, the fabric is helping to protect some of the little stuff I’ve wrapped in the center, but there’s a lot of fabric-based gifts I’m schlepping along in the car.

You’d think Susan was traveling with me again, except if she was, or if anyone was, I wouldn’t have wasted most of an hour getting oriented around Bursa this afternoon.

Other Souks

But here are a couple of shots from the kids’ toys souk and the fabric souk.

And here’s a shot from the sheep-carcass decorating contest. (I kid you not. How could you make this stuff up?)

(Sorry about the reflection.) This is the aft half of a sheep (or goat) hanging in a butcher shop, and there’s a cloth rose pinned to its back and another one, we’ll just say) under its tail. . . . .

I saw more than one of these in more than one shop, so it’s not just one butcher’s bizarre fantasies being displayed here.

The Long, Hot Summer(´s Day Drıvıng)

Lots of upper-body-workout mountain miles today, and although I came close to a snipe hunt (there was a hot snipe area marked on the map, and I stopped in the town to ask about the ruins, and he just pointed up the road), there was no brown ancient site sign to follow, so I just kept heading toward Bursa.

But I got a little sniped here in Bursa--- I followed the Şhehir Markesi (city center) signs all along the highway into town, which were paired with a brown sign that said Big Hill (Buyuk Dag) and then the sign only said Buyuk Dag so I kept going, and then couldn’t get turned around for about 6 Km (divided highway with a tram in the center) and then I got back to the center and apparently just missed the parade as there were cars and people everywhere.

I wasn’t doing all that well, and then realized I’d not had my normal 3:00 lunch, so tried to work my way out of the old center (through a huge funeral with guys all-but fighting to carry the green (Muslim colors) flag-draped coffin through the streets to the cemetery. There must have several hundred men following the coffin, and a clutch of younger, more active men pretty irregularly taking turns to carry it along.

So I got out of there, stopped and ate, started feeling better, and headed back into the maelstrom of the old city.

I got really close, then stopped and asked a cabbie to lead me there, which he did.

I’d looked at a couple of places earlier, but even though they were listed in Lonely Planet (at the top of their listings, where the cheapest places normally are) they’d been recently upgraded and remodeled, so they were about twice as much as I’m used to paying, plus it was another 20 Lira or so to park. Per day.

So where I am now, about 300 yards from those places, and right on the edge of really old silk markets, spice markets, really old mosques and the like, is only 40 Lira ($25) bargained down from 55, plus they threw in breakfast and I’m parked for free right in front of the place.

Bursa was (literally) the end of the old Silk Road that led all the way to China, until some fiend smuggled out some silk worms (a capital offense in ancient China, of course) and started a huge silk industry here in Bursa.

If those silk caravan guys got as lost as I did on the way into town after walking here from China, the history of the world might have been different.

It got up to 31 today (I have only three cross-points for Fahrenheit to Centigrade: 10 is 50, 15 is 60, and 28 is 82), so it was a little warm, plus it’s a little muggy, to boot.

More Later

Lost in Poppy Fields

2009-06-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

Day 58, June 1

Afyon Muze

I started out today (Sunday) at a lovely little museum in Afyon and it had some wonderful stuff: Neolithic (stone tools cultures), then Phyrigian, Hittite, Greek, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman, and you know the rest: all the usual suspects.

I could only shoot pictures out on the grounds.

but there was some great loot inside.

The biggest tourist attraction in Afyon is the acropolis (citadel) but it’s 700 steps up there, and no road, and so I cranked out the big lens and you are getting a closer view than I did---

Turkish Army Post

On the way back through town (remember there’s a huge Army presence in almost every town, and in larger towns like this one, there’s more than one such little 1-2 acre compound).

Few have this level of security, though, like the one I wrote about a few days ago, but couldn’t shoot.

Here’s a shot of the guard post right on the main road to the next big town---- think of 99-E in Sellwood or Aurora Ave N going through Greenwood but with sandbags and guys with some pretty good weaponry--- tanks and such in the parking lot out back and a lot of Keep Out signs .

And some pretty forceful No Parking or Stopping signs all along the road in front of the place.

Those are sandbags on top of a neck-high cement-wall the soldiers stand behind wearing flak vests and carrying some pretty good firepower.

We are further from the un-rest in extreme SE Turkey than we were in Cappadocia, and while I saw similar compounds out there, and all over the country, they didn’t have the extra security of the little cement walls for the soldiers at their guard posts.

More Poppies

There’s something about the colors here, or the combination of colors, but I must admit I spent much of today (Sunday) on the back roads looking for old citadels and fortresses and more of the opium poppies.

Three Vignettes of Village Life

Sh*t Balls

I was driving through a really small village today on the track of more old stuff, following the signs to the ruins, and I drove past a bunch of mud-brick homes, barns, stables, all with dirt roofs, and (remember I’ve hardly been drinking at all over here) there was an old woman in traditional dress squatting by the opening into the cow barn and at first I thought she was making mud bricks with lots of straw in them and then I saw the stable wall of the neighbor’s around the corner, and it became pretty obvious even to me what kind of big balls they really were.

Oh, My!

You can see the new “loaves” atop the stone wall.

Rug Cleaning

In another village, it seemed to be clean rug week--- here’s the wall of the local cemetery and the newly cleaned rugs are hanging over it to dry—

And the cemetery is out on the road out of town near this. . . .

which is the only one of these I’ve seen on the entire trip.

Cleaning Sacks in Dőğer (DUE yer)

And in another small village, Dőğer, at one of the numerous water sources---
the village will have several little fountains, not decorative, usually, just a wall with a pipe sticking out of it and troughs in front or to the sides for the water to flow out.

Here’s what they generally look like.

I saw a dog frolicking in one last week, but this, today, was new to me.

There were two middle-school aged girls walking up and down in the run-off troughs, which in this case were about two feet wide and a foot deep by 15 feet or more long.

And there were lots of plastic gunny sacks, about as big as a medium gym bag I’d guess, in the water and they were kneading them by walking back and forth on them and through them (like the old grapes-stomping cliché) as the water flowed slowly along.

When I went back to confirm that what I’d seen was what was happening, they got out of the troughs and stood together, all-but hiding behind the structure where the water was coming out. They were clearly anxious and very twitchy, so I was pleased I’d left the camera in the car.

Redundancy

There are geese in all these towns, too, hundreds of them, as the goslings are all a few weeks old and going everywhere with the adults.

I didn’t shoot them (they were pretty dirty from cooling off in some pretty good-sized mud puddles) but I did see this extreme example of redundancy
(which was one of the qualities in almost all my students’ [high-school to police academy to corporate]) writing I harped on the most.

Field Workers

I’ve shown you the women working in the fields all hunched over,

before, but here’s the other side of that kind of work that I hadn’t been able to capture until today.

I get the strongest sense of the bonds that come with shared hard work as these women always eat (normally in a circle, if there are fewer of them) in tight bunches like this.

And, like the garden we had in Edmonds, these all have one row and a path and another row and a path. Nothing like the intensive gardening some of us commit at home, with a wide band of plants (maybe up to three feet wide-- twice as wide as the gardener’s reach in from one of the paths) and very narrow paths.

That way you are using the massed crop plants to crowd out the weeds and you aren’t walking on the soil the plants go in. Very efficient, but pretty OCD in a way. . . .

Again, over here, the bigger than a normal garden (but still human- rather than animal- or tractor-powered) planting areas are much more like tiny farms: with much less yield per acre for what amounts to some pretty labor-intensive crops.

And again, all the market stalls and greengrocers sell exactly the same stuff.

No Nudists Here (Damn)

I have talked about how covered up the traditionally-dressed Muslim women are— either in the country or villages, or in the modern cities, where the putty-colored or dark flat-blue ankle-length coats do the job, but I haven’t mentioned the men yet.

Almost all the older men wear some kind of cap or hat, invariably a long-sleeved shirt, maybe a vest or a sweater, and a sports jacket or suit coat—even on tractors or often working in the fields.

Updated Street Photography Goals

I realized the other day that while I’m getting better at asking about and shooting street portraits, all the results seem to have come out of the Fine Art of Mug Shots School, so the next goal is to get people to do more than just stare straight into the camera.

This man stopped to visit with me as he was cycling past the last poppy field this afternoon. He told me all about the mound behind the field, where some gold crowns and other pretty cool Phrygian artifacts had been found.

It was one of those wonderful Turkish, English, German, Italian conversations.

These valleys are full of these little hillocks, and few of them have been excavated, so there’s lots more to find and lots more to learn out here.

Here’s the last opium poppy field, which I shot because the colors were different— the light (normally a brilliant white) ones are almost lavender and the purple ones are much lighter, too, and not the intense purple of the ones in the previous couple of days.

Tonight’s Digs

And finally, here’s what you get for $15 in Kutahya, a half-block from the big pedestrian stroll-way in the center of town.

There’s a big regional bi-weekly market here on Wednesday, and I have laundry to do, but I’ll also try to see if there’s regional markets in near-by towns before then, so I can hit them and leave here Wed AM—if not, I’ll leave Wed noon, heading for Bursa.

The Government Was Right After All!!!

2009-05-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Day 56, May 30

The Government Was Right After All

I have a news flash for all of you, especially all you conspiracy (JFK, 9-11, UFOs, Area 51-- you know who you are) wackos who are stockpiling guns and food in caves in Montana---

Thinking you don’t (and shouldn’t) trust the government----

Well you are about to get rocked right down to your socks.

Stay tuned, and be ready.

A Stack of Storks

I headed south toward Afyon this AM, and not far from the town where I stayed last night a flock of about twenty storks flew across the road at about 30 feet, went into a big spiral and started riding the thermals above a field to about 500 feet or so when I left them to their tasks and continued down the road.

(Remember, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

And later, on the way to the big acropolis, I snagged a stork as close as I ever have—

Snipe Again: or The Greeks Were Here Before Me

When Susan and I were in the Balkans, we were pretty diligent about following all the brown archaeology site signs off the main road to wherever they led.

Only they never led anywhere, at least anywhere that we could find.

I’ve had much better luck in Turkey, generally, until today.

Three Km from the road, the sign said, and I hit this tiny village and the sign in the village pointed up the road and said 3 Km, and I went more than 5 and never saw a damn thing.

Here, Snipe! Here, Snipe!

But there were some poppies back on the main road to console me.

And here’s some more women working in the field along the road.

Back to Church

I hit a great old mosque that was being restored, and had some great stuff to shoot.

Here’s a sign I thought was pretty funny--- a FGCC (Failure to Grasp the Core Concept) example.

A beautiful ceiling in the medrassa (parish school)

And some great old doors.

Poplar Birches?

There are lots of pretty lovely trees here that look like slightly smaller versions of the poplars we have at home although, as you see, the bark looks like a birch tree, although the bark is a little greyer than our paper birches at home.

And it's not all that odd-- poplars, birches, and aspen are all in the same family.

The next article after this one is the one about the government—so be warned.

I bombed around some back roads looking for this fortress this afternoon, and it’s the last of the carved-stone fortresses I’ll see--- from here back west and north to Istanbul, they’re all standard stone-block construction rather than the scoop-out- the-soft-rock versions from Cappodacia and here.

And here’s the carved façade of the tomb where the local pasha was buried.

It’s maybe 75 feet tall.

Here’s a detail

And here’s the view from the top--- that’s cows down there, by the way.

Pot One Day; Heroin the Next

If you anti-government extremists are ready, here we go.

You are about to get the ride of your life. . . .

The government was right!!!

Remember when they said that first you get hooked on marijuana, and the next thing you know you are running heroin straight into your veins. . . .

Of course, we can also say that almost every alcoholic started out drinking milk, so you have to be careful about making inferences.

Well, think about it: yesterday I got pot, and today I’m in the middle of a field of the really good kind of poppies. . . .

The government here licenses certain farmers to grow the potent opium-producing poppies (they are almost all pure white with maybe 1% of them purple) and they sell the opium base to pharmaceutical companies to make opium-derivative drugs.

So you can put this in your underground newsletters and on your far-out web-sites and see what your fellow crazies have to say about it.

So, you want buy pot?

2009-05-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

Day 55; May 29

Turkey Time Warp

Up and out early in the little town that the D-K Turkey Guide thought was a real prize, but it’s not a big market town (in spite of the name Baypazari--- “Pazar” is where our word “bazaar” comes from and usually means “market,“ but perhaps “Bay” is the Turkish word for mediocre).

It’s a nice town, and I enjoyed walking around in it, but there wasn’t much to shoot---

The usual collection of stuff spilling out of stores onto sidewalks,

but nothing terribly interesting.

except shovels.

Shovels

You may not have expected a report on shovels, but you would have been wrong about that.

I’ve been hoping to catch a picture of the shovels here as they have these very interesting (and much easier on feet or shoes) cross pieces for standing on to put more oomph into the digging.

And clearly, you can also buy just a replacement little platform, too.

Another way they are smarter than we are.

I did sneak a couple of street shots to show you a couple of cultural things.

Here’s a very typical older woman doing her early AM shopping. I wanted to share what most of the older local women wear. In the cities, rather than towns or villages, they are more apt to wear ankle-length long coats.

And here’s a cultural change picture—not a great shot at all, but it shows three young women--- two dressed in a pretty standard western culture outfit, the third a little more traditional and the older generation wearing traditional clothing.

You just kind of wonder how many of the current cohort of twenty-something young women will wind up dressing like the older women dress now.

When I hit the main square about 6:30, it was full of the little local busses (dolmus) and they were just about exclusively full of traditionally dressed women (some with huge loads of stuff in plastic gunny sacks almost the size of a traditional bale of hay) and there were about 35 guys clumped by age, generally, standing around on the sidewalks.

And I watched for a while, and the busses pulled out for all over the region, and the guys just hung around smoking and visiting for over an hour, until after I went in to eat breakfast and pack up to go.

I was talking, E-T/T-E dictionary out and being used on both sides, with the young (modern dress) woman at the hotel reception desk about the social situation.

She got to the word on the T-E side that meant “rural.” Then the Turkish word that means “traditional.”

So I wrote

“Istanbul/Ankara 2009

Baypazari 1750”

on a piece of paper and she agreed.

There used to be a joke that ran like this:

“We are about to land at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Please re-set your watches to 1973.”

but this is a lot more than that.

Put ‘Er There, Pardner

I headed out across country, mostly south then west, through some pretty Wyoming landscape—some green fields, some rocky hills

but I’m pretty sure I never saw a marble quarry in Wyoming.

And I got caught in another traffic jam.

So, you want buy pot?

And I’m bombing along, going through a little town called Sorken, and here’s all these people tending some pretty odd fires—and it’s about 80 to start with.

There were about three different fires with different groups of people tending them, and were about 800 square feet each— 20 by 40 and so I went back.

Well, of course, it was the women tending the fires and the guys supervising

and they were firing terra-cotta pots.

And so I’m schmoozing with them in my 80 words of Turkish and the Tourist Pantomime and I learned they fire them like this for about five hours and then the pots have to sit for about a week, and then get sold at the little stand down by the road.

And yes, I bought (a) pot.

Pretty cool.

When I got the pot, the kid who spoke the most English said,

“Thanks, very thanks,”

which is probably way ahead of where my Turkish is even after almost two months.

At a larger town, where I ate lunch, there was a really old mosque, and I was the only one in there, and it’s got wooden posts rather than the standard masonry columns.

More Authentic Stuff

And on my way into town I drove past something in the road that looked like a scrap of a rug, but I did a double-take, turned around and drove back to check it out as it seemed a little more than a scrap.

And there was a guy standing there by the side of the road, and I figure he’d lost it off his truck, and he’d gone back to get it.

But when I went back, circling past it again, he hadn’t moved and he’d had every chance — no traffic except me orbiting the thing, other than the big truck that drove over it on its way past, so I pulled another U-turn and stopped and scooped it up.

And this is it.

It’s about 1 by 3 feet, and is made from old rug scraps, and each end is double with an opening in the edge facing into the center, so it’s a kind of donkey saddlebags, except the ends are pretty flat, so there’s not a lot of room for a lot of stuff.

Here’s one end,

and here’s the other.

And here’s about what you get for $25 in Eskisehir, Turkey. There’s a nice three-star bathroom, too, and wi-fi in the room.

Homage to Susan

As I was bombing along in the hills today, I went past a very old Muslim cemetery that was full of irises, and I remembered the drizzly, rainy Saturday last year when Susan and I were coming back from Mostar, in Bosnia, and had just finished shooting some kids and a huge wisteria in this town along the road, and we're just hitting the road again when she starts sliding the car to the side of the road, hitting the turn signals, down-shifting, and braking all at the same time.

"What?" I said.

"Muslim cemetery," she said. "Full of irises."

So were out in the damp weeds and wet grass shooting irises for almost an hour.

It was great.

And finally, a couple of what I’d call “workshop images” to round out the day.

A Road Day (But What a Road!)

2009-05-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Day 54; May 28

It’s a couple hundred kilometers from Ankara to Beypazari, where I am now, which is a little market town in the hills, so most of the time today was either trying to determine the way out of Ankara, see King Midas’s tomb (!!!) and make my way via some great back roads up here, where I’ll be hitting the big outdoor market in the morning. . . .

Go In and Out the Capitol

As you might remember from a deliberate reading of these reports, I don’t mind getting lost—after all, Robert’s Rule Number Two of Travel is just that: Get Lost!

And out in the country, that’s a pretty good plan. But not in big cities. The worst couple of hours of the trip last year was trying to navigate Plovdiv and Bucharest, although we weren’t lost in Bucharest, we certainly were in Plovdiv.

And today, it took almost an hour longer than it should have to get out of Ankara. Ah, well, I’d rather be lost in Ankara than know where I was in Auburn. . . .

I’m pretty good at travelling by the seat of my pants, and bombing around, but I’m the least effective getting in and out of major cities. For the Central Europe trip in 2011, a friend is loaning me his GPS, so I’ll have it on for getting into and out of the big cities (Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Krakow, etc.).

Once I got to Ankara on Sunday PM I just parked the car and never used it until this AM when I headed out— I walked, took the bus, took a dolmus, rode the Metro, etc. That’s how I normally handle big cities— drive in, park, use mass transit, drive out again.

So I think the GPS will be a big help— I looked into it this year for this trip, but apparently there are only about a dozen GPS locations in the systems I could get at home for the whole of Turkey.

Here’s the old castle at the top of the hill from the roadway---

I’d normally keep the bus and the road out of the picture, but I wanted you to have the scale. That's one of he dolmuses, by the way.

And here’s a house I saw where the colors caught my eye

The people who lived here were washing their rugs--- garden hoses running, young women on hands and knees scrubbing them with brushes---

And the boss watching them

Bon Appetite!

Yesterday PM, as I headed to the train museum, I grabbed a Doner Kabob, a Turkish Hoagy, essentially, and was walking toward the Metro stop and eating and this guy running a pretzel stand said “Bon Appetite!” to me, so we started talking in English, French, German, and some Turkish.

I stopped to visit because I always try to lead with Turkish, and often, as I’m trying to remember the phrase as I walk into a store, for example, the clerk just beats me to it and says, “Hello.”

How can they tell?

This is him and his pal.

Didn’t Look All That Golden to Me

The country around Ankara (220 miles ESE of Istanbul, 135 miles due south of the Black Sea) is where the Phrygians lived and there are two myths connected to them.

The first is all the King Midas and the golden touch business--- and the second is the Gordian Knot legend surrounding Alexander the Great.

(A significant ox-cart involved in choosing a king had been tied to a post with an intricate knot which remained for decades (whatever) in the palace of the kings, and was apparently too intricate to untie.

In 333 BC, while wintering here, Alexander the Great attempted to untie the knot, but could not. So he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, the so-called "Alexandrian solution".)

Well there’s no tangles of string or cords or whatever on the ground here, but there is a tomb (actually scores and scores of them in the area, mostly unexcavated) under an artificially created mound about 75 feet high and 250 feet across, and someone was buried under there in about 1750 BCE with some pretty good loot, most of which is in the big museum I visited on Monday, and almost all the kings in the area were named Midas, so . . . . .

The local museum was really good, but got invaded by a phalanx or three of high-school noise-makers.

Time Warp—The Cold War in Turkey

And on the way out of there (on the back roads to here) was a really big Army post. With many watchtowers about 25 feet high, lots of guards on duty with lots of firepower, tall fences around the whole thing, and kids’ playgrounds inside the fence.

And tour busses.

And at the gates, there wasn’t just some kid with a machine gun, the kids with the guns had flak vests on and body armour and were inside little blast-proof structures (think of a 5 foot tall circular snow fort with a narrow entrance only in the back) and for obvious reasons I don’t have any pictures to show you, but it looked like Checkpoint Charlie about 30 years after the fact.

A Great Back Road

Or

"Don't Throw Me in the Briar Patch, Bre’r Fox"

I chose to take a back road out of the Midas area to got up to where I am, and it was about 50 miles or more of great countryside (looking much like standard American West high plateaus--- some green, some brown, some irrigation, gently contoured land with some rocky outcrops---

and poppies.