Cappodocia

Friday - Saturday: Cappadocia:
Overnight bus trips are a pleasure to be enjoyed infrequently but we arrived in Urgup safely and comfortably after a drive through rain squalls, stops at brightly lit bus stations bustling with passengers and hucksters and the juddering of rough sealed road to be picked up and driven to yet another bus depot by the local taxi bus to be delivered to the local tour group to begin our tour of the region. We left our overnight traveling companions, an Australian vet on sabbatical and two young Japanese girls en route to London to learn English at the terminal in full expectation that at some stage our paths would cross as we explored the region.
Breakfast was at the Cappodocia Palace Cave Hotel where we waited for the group to assemble. The tour took us around the rock formations or fairy rocks of the Devrent Valley which were formed from the erosion of volcanic tuft laid down some 40 million years before under a thin layer of basalt which had allowed erosion to wear the tuft into weird and wonderful shapes.

The soft rock is easily carved and dug into so the area had encouraged early man to settle in the caves while in later times Christian mystics had sought solace in the caves while carving out small churches and monasteries for themselves.
The Goreme Open Air museum has preserved the small, decorated churches designed more for small group worship and solitary mediation than for the masses. The churches are often dedicated to Saints whose memory and cause of martyrdom have long disappeared in the distant memory of religion. Who, for example, could instantly recall anything about Sts. Barbara, Onuphrius and Thomas?

Our guide informed us that St.Onuphrius was a woman who, on the death of her husband, had been so pestered by men that she had prayed to God that she be relieved of such annoyances and was rewarded for her piety when she awoke to find herself bearded as a man. She then became a mystic and took to wandering the world naked and celebate. She ended up in Cappodocia after being befriended by St.Thomas the Doubter who bought her to the region because he was taken by her piety and abnegation of physical pleasures.
Given that St. Thomas the Doubter had achieved fame by doubting Christ’s resurrection until Christ proved it to him his doubting capabilities must have begun to fail him if he could accept as a man what was represented in the cave paintings as a naked woman. Perhaps he was incredibly short sighted?
St.Barbara was apparently made a saint on the strength of her father being struck by lightning when he was about to sacrifice her because she had declared herself a christian.
I suppose that if one is prepared to believe these stories then all things are possible although I think the strain of living in isolation and in constant contemplation might have been a contributing cause.

We also visited a local pottery owned by the Galip family. The owner, dubbed the Einstein of Pots, showed us how he threw pots using a Hiitite kick wheel which was fascinating especially the speed and accuracy of his throwing.

We were ushered into the pottery showroom where Joy & I promptly identified the most expensive plates at $5000+ each and, despite all attempts to persuade us to buy, left our wallets fixed deeper in our pockets in spite of our hearts urging us to buy.

After further sightseeing of the weird and wonderful stone carved homes and villages of the rock citadel of Uchisar we were taken to our hotel in the Ayvali village, the Gamirasu Cave Hotel. The hotel is several kilometres from Urcug and hidden in the cleft of a narrow valley and was apparently once the site of a 12th century Byzantine monastic retreat.
We were welcomed and ushered to our room carved from the rock where we tidied ourselves up after our long bus trip and all day touring.
The dining room was filled with an excited Hong Kong tour party who, once they’d finished eating, were ushered out on an evening jaunt by their tour organiser leaving the dining room to us and a small family group dining with the owner.
Two local folk-singers appeared and serenaded us, a growing audience, with plaintive love songs accompanied on their lute and guitar.

On return to our room we found the room lit with candles and two glasses of wine for us - we could have been on our honeymoon in all the ambiance!!
In the morning I walked outside the room to see where the hotel was located. The cleft in the cliffs had a small stream trickling through it and a path leading deeper into the valley inviting a purposeful hike if we had been staying longer. All around was evidence of the carved building that had taken place over the centuries in the area.
The hotel, I discovered, had a Byzantine church that was, until recently, used by a religious community and an ancient winery that produced wine for the restaurant and to which we had been treated the night before.
The setting was idyllic and left us wanting to stay longer, to sample the cuisine, the hospitality and to fully explore the village and countryside instead of hurrying on.
Breakfast was held in conversation with two young Indians on break from their jobs in Bahrain before we were picked up and taken into town to begin our second day of touring.
While we waited for the tour group to assemble I stood and watched the village come to life. A local stall holder setting up his roast chestnut stall, a couple of dogs wrestling on the roundabout, shopkeepers rolling up their shuttersw and elderly women, clutching shopping bags, ambling to the store for the morning bread. All very Turkish Dylan Thomas.
Once our group was complete - a Japanese couple with their three year old son, four Japanese girls, a group of Korean women, a Phillipino couple and us- we headed off to explore South Cappodocia.

The tour took us on a 4 km walk through the Rose Valley. Here the rocks were carved into pigeon cotes and, where early Christian mystics had settled,into chapels and churches to be reached only by athletic climbing.
The valley floors were put to use with grapes, quinces and apricots being farmed on every available space. In the harvest time when the farmers would be working the land the scene would have been very romantic but, for us, it was contemplation of the landscape and the power of erosion.
The walk ended in a village set amongst rocks which was settling into slow decay as the cliffs into which it had been built collapsed and destroyed the homes that had been carved into them over the generations.

From here we drove to Ortahisar for lunch in the Cappodocian Culture Museum then onto dive 40 metres underground into the cave city of Kaymakli.

There are reputed to be over 200 of these cities throughout the region. They were begun in prehistoric times and had been progressively developed through the centuries by the Hittites, Early Christians and others until Roman times.
The inhabitants had developed a sophisticated society and living systems in their quest for security underground with communal kitchens, wineries,stable, living quarters and churches in the warren of tunnels and caves.

From here we drove to Pigeon mountain where we had a great view over the township below and watched an enterprising stall-holder snare trade with a sign advertising Turkey’s Natural Viagra (dried apricots). The queues of eager gentlemen of all nationalities from tour buses were testament to the power of suggestion.


We rounded off the day with a visit to a carpet cooperative where we resisted buying a silk on silk wall hanging, that had taken our attention, with extreme concentration and effort.
Then the flight back to Istanbul.

Journey through the Ruins

An interpretation of The Horse outside the archeological site

Tuesday: Troy to Kusadasi:
Troy was a brief trip from our hotel but we had to compete for the site with three busloads of Koreans and Chinese which meant that we were getting four or more guides in three different languages talking about a particular part of the site or else just as one was framing up a shot someone would stand right in the centre of the frame to take their group shot of happy people with the ruins behind them.
The road to Troy was marked with kofetesi vying for attention - even one with its own wooden horse outside!
Troy itself is a small archeological site compared to those we’ve seen in Jordan, Italy, Greece and other parts of Turkey. However the site is the focus of mythology and history that forms such a large part of our cultural literary heritage that it becomes bigger than it is. It is, though, a confusion of excavations, of histories and stories that it becomes something like emptying a plastic bag of a jigsaw onto the table only to find that there are five different 1000 piece jigsaws in the bag and no illustration of what one is to recreate from the pieces.

The history of the excavations made fascinating reading especially the meglomania of the German, Schulimein, who rediscovered Troy in the late 19th-early 20th century. To divorce his Russian wife in order to marry a Greek woman on the strength of his belief that Greek sounded beautiful when spoken by a woman reading the Iliad certainly shows the sort of man he was.
Brad Pitt's Horse of Troy
We left the others of our small party at Cannakule and took a local bus to Izmur and on to Kusadasi before our visit to Ephesus and Pammakule.
The bus trip took us along the Aegean coast through olive groves and rugged hills in brilliant sunshine for much of the afternoon. We passed through one small town with a sign outside its cemetery advertising overnight camping available. Either someone was very hopeful or else the sign erector hadn’t thought too much about placement.
A lot of the buildings along the road had that half finished look of families waiting for the next generation to build and move in above while others appeared as complete holiday villas waiting for the summer influx.
We arrived at Kusadasi to find that our driver to take us to our hotel had been waiting at a different bus station 20 km down the road - a result of mixed messages between agencies apparently.

Once we had sorted out our locations we were transferred to our Hotel-The Charisma - where we looked out over the Aegean towards the Greek Islands. A view that made us wish we were travelling in the summer as the sea looked incredibly inviting.
Wednesday: Ephesus:

The tour of the ruins of Ephesus was another highlight of archeology. The city had been an important trade port for centuries as well as being a focus for the worship of the mother goddess - Artemis and the reputed place where the Virgin Mary died and the centre of the early Christian church with St.John, St Paul and the Councils of Ephesus all working and meeting in churches there.

Artemis - the mother Goddess

I found it interesting that the city had been the centre for the worship of the mother goddess centuries before the advent of Christianity and that St. John had deliberately taken Mary there after Christ’s death and that she was reputed to have died there especially after witnessing the veneration given the Virgin Mary over Christ in European countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy. The connection between the two would not be a coincidence in the establishment of a credible religion based around Christ in Roman times.
The city’s ruins show the flow of power struggles between city states, expanding empires, religions and changing geography across the centuries. Here the Greeks, Romans, Goths and Ottomans built or destroyed buildings or documents as they moved back and forth across Turkey in the quests for power.

The Brothels of Ephesus knew something about advertising. This sign says follow me to pleasure.

It was interesting to note that vandalism wasn’t confined to the Goths for the early Christians, much like some of the fundamentalists we see now, had spent time defacing sculptures and paintings in the drive to “purify” the city and remove the signs of earlier beliefs.
Many of the remains reminded us of Jerash we walked around in Jordan last year. Especially the performance areas and the statuary that would have dominated the streets and walls of the city.

The Library of Celsus reminded us of the facade of the Treasury in Petra with its soaring columnsa and facade set against the hills of the city.
From Ephesus we visited a leatherwear factory and carpet - kilim workshop. The Carpet workshop gave us a history of the different regional carpets so we had a better understanding of the work we were constantly being shown and blandished to buy at different times and places throughout the region.
Thursday: Pammakule and overnight to Cappadocia:
With a bus load of travellers we set off for Pammakule - a three hour trip through olive groves and farms interspersed with villages in varying stages of vitality and industry. Nearly every viable village shop along the way was decorated with a Turkish flag and a picture of Ataturk. The Parks were also dotted with statues of heroic soldiers performing gallant deeds on battlefields as well as statues of Ataturk.
The houses along the road side were a confusion of pinks, greens, blues and ochres with tiled rooves bowed with the weight of years almost as though they had been there since the beginning of the time.
We arrived at Pammakule- Heriapolis after a substantial lunch at a restaurant and were ushered through the necropolis that surrounds the city and through the gates of the ruined city.

In Roman times the city was, like Varanasi in India, the place to die for it was reputed to be the gateway to Hades so that anyone buried there would have a guaranteed entry to the afterlife. The stories about the cult of death here told us by our guide reminded me of Devenish Island in County Fermanagh where the Abbot had ensured the popularity of his graveyard by burying a portion of St. Paul’s thumb in the cemetery then charging the wealthy huge sums to be buried near it so that on the sounding of the last trump their souls would be sucked up along with that of St.Paul as his thumb quested to rejoin the body before entry to heaven. A great selling point if you can persuade people to believe in the product!
Heriapolis would have been a large city at its peak - probably 150,000 if estimates based on the size of the theatre are accurate. The City was also the centre for the cult of Peresphone and the associated oracle who, after bathing in the hot pool, chewed laurel leaves and was led to the vent under the temple of Apollo to breathe the noxious gases that emanated from Hades and then to provide riddled answers to questions from the locals about their lives and activities.
From the city we walked down the calcium terraces to the present township below where we whiled away the hours over food and beer before the overnight bus to Cappadocia.
Standing in the Pamakkule pools

Turkey February 2010 - Day 1-2

Turkey February 2010

Saturday 13th: Arrived in Istanbul to be driven to the wrong hotel much to the embarassment of the Tour Company. Our hotel - The Hotel Byzantium - was in Sultanhamet very close to the Hotel Park we stayed at 11 years ago.
We took a wander to a close Bazaar and around the neighbouring streets bustling with hustling restaurant criers begging for trade as people huddled by in the evening drizzle and chill.

On Sunday we headed off on Joy’s primary mission to find leather poufs for members of the family. Once found we headed for the Grand Bazaar with the aim of prowling the alley-ways and stalls of the souq only to find it was closed on Sundays! We’re too used to Qatar with normal business on Sundays.

As we walked around the Sultanhamet area we ran into our Bin Mahmoud neighbours - Vince & Andrea - who were also on tour in Turkey. We had an apartment reunion beside the shoeshine stall where Joy later relived our last visit and the numerous requests to clean her boots by having her boots polished.

We revisited the Haga Sofia and the Blue Mosque then headed back to our hotel through the grounds of the Tokapi Palace where couples were passionately celebrating St.Valentines Day in a manner that would bring out the morality police in more conservative Islamic states.
Once we had eaten at a very pleasant restaurant we got ourselves organised to head off on our Tour of Turkey with its first stop at the traditional ANZAC pilgrimage site - Gallipoli.
Monday: Gallipoli and beyond:

Our tour left at 7.00am headed for the Darnanelles and Gallipoli battlefields and cemeteries. Our group consisted of three Australian girls on mid-term break from their jobs in the U.K., our Guide and driver on the five hour drive with a stop at a roadside kofitesi for a breakfast of lentil soup and coffee then along the coast of the Sea of Marama and Thrace to the lunch stop before the tour of the Gallipoli National Park and the museum at Kabatepe.
Here the fronts of World War I that forged decisions that gave NZ an identity in the world even though it took till 1947 before we had the nerve enough to declare total independence from the UK.

The cemeteries are monuments to the futility of war and the sacrifice of an entire generation of men from a country of less than a million at the time. The memorials at Anzac Cove, Lone Pine, The Nek, Johnston Jolly and Chanuk Bair for the dead of both sides believed to be buried somewhere on the peninsula dot the landscape recording losses from towns and villages across Australia and New Zealand. The ages of the men range from 14 to 40 all killed in the attempt to capture the strip of land,with the trenches no more than 8 metres apart, in a bungled campaign.

One can’t escape from the fact that this battle front is as crucial for Turkey as it was for New Zealand for the memorials to Kemel Attaturk and the Turkish war dead tower over the area as well. The Turkish memorial is named the 57th Battalion Memorial to commemorate an entire battalion that was wiped out during the campaign. Our guide said that one major secondary school had no graduating class from 1915 as all had been killed.

From Gallipoli we took the ferry to Cannakule for the night before visiting Troy and the memorials from another long ago campaign to capture the Dardanelles for strategic purposes even though mythology declares it was to rescue a beautiful woman from the dastardly man who’d captured her from her husband.

Catch Up Posting

Where has the time disappeared to?I can't believe that I last updated the blog at the beginning of last month!!
I know I started with good intent to write up the blog every fortnight but a month plus is getting ridiculous.

This past month has been busy, a convenient excuse,but for some reason January-February have been busy months at work with the prospect of the two week semester break this month as an incentive to keep one's nose to the grind-stone.

The Advisory work has seen us pushing ourselves to deliver the training and programmes in the school more intensively as the staff are willing to experiment and try activities to initiate the reforms in education. Our team has,according to our SMA, achieved more in this semester than they could last year... this is probably because the administration of our school is keen to see the programmes develop and the students succeed and therefore actively encourages the staff to contribute to the work we are doing.

Over January we set up an inter-school debate competition - at the moment between Ahmed bin Hanbal and Abu Baker Asdeeq but with possibilities to include other local schools if we can get more support from Qatar Debates. There is willing as we were able to host two Debate coaches from the NZ University team for a two day workshop session to encourage our boys to look at debating as a means to improve their English. We are looking forward to next semester when we can revive the inter-school competition and attempt to develop the competition to involve the neighbouring schools.

Cognition also welcomed the NZ Debating team to Qatar in February when they arrived to take part in the Qatar hosted International Schools Debating competition. As of writing the NZ team is running fourth in the competition according to The Peninsula newspaper which seems to be the only paper comprehensively reporting on the debating competition.

We also had some good news when after the January Doha Debates recording session one of the boys from our school was contacted and invited to join the BBC, Qatar Foundation and the Doha Debate organisation in New Delhi to observe and,maybe, participate in the outside debate at St.Stephens College in February. The boy was selected on the basis of his confidence and articulateness when he challenged the guest debaters at the recording. We are looking forward to both hearing of his experiences and,perhaps, seeing him on screen when the debate is shown in March.
As well we have had a series of outside workshops to attend on organising the Library, developing further policies and operating procedures for the LRC (Library) and others informing us about the training programmes Cognition has been running this year that will have an impact on our activities in the schools.

On more personal fronts: These past months have seen the long lines of migratory birds that are a feature of the Gulf winter stretching across the early morning and evening skies. These birds appear from the Northern winters into the warmth of the Gulf each year and settle onto the mangroves and the coastal waters of Qatar and in formation each day ribbon themselves in the grey sandfilled air as they head to and from their roosting areas. As I sit at the traffic lights on my way to work at 6.00 every morning I watch these lines pass across the roof tops for minutesat a time.

We were informed, when we went out to the International Falconry competition in the desert beyond Al Khor, that these lines of migratory birds become the prey for the trained falcons the local Falconry Association members train and use.

The Falconry competition was held out in the open space of the desert, 70 kilometres from Doha, with participants from other Gulf states exhibiting the power of their birds in a series of events that we could see, as specks on the desert floor, from our vantage point in the grandstand and exhibition area the Association had built for the event. We were able to see some of the action through the telephoto lenses on our cameras.

The birds were released from a hide several hundred metres from a lure twirling man and then swooped at 200kph down from the sky or at low level across the ground onto the lure.The rules and scoring system wasn't explained to us so the esoterics of the sport remained a mystery.

We,however, were able to handle some of the birds the young men and boys were parading around the exhibition area willing to show off to anyone who showed interest in their pets.

The Competition was also a show case for Arabian Horses, Saluki Dogs and prizewinning camels.. although none of the horses or dogs were in evidence when we were there despite the advertising indicating that we would be able to see these animals in action as well as the falcons.

The same day we journeyed out to the Falcons the local paper carried a story that a local camel breeder had turned down an offer of QR25 million for one of his animals by another enthusiast fromthe UAE. The camel owner said that he would not be willing to part with a symbol of Qatari heritage for any amount of money.

We had heard reports of camels changing hands for 2 to 5 million QR but a figure of 25 million QR was out of the ordinary enough to attract the attention of the newspapers!

So it is now mid semester break so Joy and I are off to Turkey on Saturday for 10 days to complete the tour we'd promised ourselves 12 years ago when we first embarked on our overseas travel adventures. That trip will be the subject of our next blog.