SEEING THE INSIDES OF TURKEY

When I think of Turkey, I sometimes think of the lush green tea-growing areas around the Black Sea, or the wonderful mediterranean area with the famous "Blue Cruises" and the lovely beaches. Then there is the Aegean area that features not only the very bluest of water and tiny islands, as well as more Greek ruins than you can find in Greece. Cappadoccia looks as if it belongs on another planet, and as you go from area to area you find it hard to believe what you are seeing. And who can ever forget Istanbul, the city whose beauty is sometimes obscured by traffic and potholes and haze from burning brown coal but who nevertheless will let you see what she really looks like if you care. It is hard for me to pick one region over another as my favorite.

But probably the area I am most fond of is an out-of-the way place, a place that few tourists ever go and that Jerry and I probably wouldn't have seen if some distant American cousins hadn't insisted that we contact friends of theirs who were living and working on a military base outside of the old town of Eskisehir southwest of Ankara in central Turkey. Mack and Jean took us in hand and showed us what they had found. The pictures below are from that day, a day we will never forget.

There are a whole series of villages which must once have been the heart of the Phrygian Kingdom of Midas. Kumbet has a Phrygian tomb from the Roman period, with lions carved upon it.

There are Roman tombs and one or two Hittite reliefs which show that the site has a history stretching back at least a thousand years before Midas. Now because we were in this area without a historian or a knowledgeable guide, we didn't really know what we were looking at, other than everything we saw was old, and amazing, and beautiful and took our breath away.

Kumbetkoy (koy means village) was the place where I got a photograph of a lovely lady tending to the white sheet with yellow grain on them in the picture below. I posted that picture in an earlier entry. But below, you can see her day's work. The sheets with black on them were being worked on by two other women. They had big dried sunflower heads, and with a stone they were beating the seeds off the sunflower heads, whichare shown on the bottom right. These women then would spread the seeds out to dry in the intense summer heat. We saw that farming, harvesting, planting and tending were for the most part the women's jobs.

Not too far away from Kumbetkoy is Seyitgazi, where a superb tekke, or convent, crowns the hill to the west of Midassehir. Seyitgazi is named after a legendary Arab warrior in the wars between the Arabs and the Byzantines in the 8th century. In this large facility there is a large communal kitchen, where some of the neighboring villagers were preparing freshly slaughtered lamb for roasting.

According to Wikipedia (and you always take what you find there "under consideration" as to its reliability) the town was named after the 8th century Muslim saint and warrior Battal Gazi who fell in a battle here in 740. A külliye dedicated to Battal Gazi and containing his tomb, a mosque, a medrese, cells and ceremonial rooms for dervishes as well as benevolent services for the community such as kitchens and a bakery was built in 1208 on a hill overlooking the town by Ümmühan Hatun, wife of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev I and further extended in 1511 by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II. The shrine and the adjoining complex remains much visited by visitors from across Turkey as well as by international visitors.



What I do know for sure, though, is that via our driver Ahmet our party was invited to partake in the dinner under preparation. But we still had miles to go before the day was over and we had to head back towards Istanbul, so we had to decline. Actually, I was quite relieved, because I was not yet ready to witness the slaughtering of that lamb which would have provided dinner for us.

I'd guess one reason we were so impressed with this area is that we were very new to Turkey and had yet to see anything except for the big city of Istanbul. In our nineteen months there, we saw a whole lot of amazing things, and I think maybe we saw some things that even topped this, but in my heart, Kumbetkoy and its environs will always be my most favorite part of Turkey.

HOUSING DESIGN IN RURAL TURKEY

Housing, and understanding housing, was such a challenge in Turkey. What we didn't see in Turkey was what in the middle east appeared to be "half-finished" housing (building with rebar sticking out of the top, awaiting another story), which of course is simply a house in waiting for the younger generation to need housing so another story can be added for mom and dad to move upwards and the younger generation to move to the main floor. But especially in the villages, we found intact houses but that mostly appeared to be in a serious state of disrepair. And as a note of clarification, Turkey is considered to be in the Near East, not the Middle East.


Turkey's housing held a real charm to me, and it was hard to make any kind of judgment as to whether any one house was good or bad. We tried our best while living in Turkey to see things simply as "different than" in the US, rather than better or worse. And we just were in no position whatsoever to determine by sight whether people, whether peasants or not, were rich or poor.


So I just kept photographing various houses and enjoying the style, the color, the inventiveness, and the "differentness." The photo below was taken in an area of Turkey just a bit inland from the Aegean Sea. I loved the application of color and thought probably a happy bunch of people lived in this little enclave. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could splash a little bit of color around in our lives and not be thought of as weird?




The central plain of Turkey around Eskisehir (meaning Old City) is dry and full of archeological treasures. It is the area of King Midas. If you like clean lines and very defined colors, you'll like this area a lot. We were lucky to have an American couple as a guide in this area. Mack and Jean worked for the US Government and lived on a military base. They took us to a town called Kumbetkoy where I was able to take some exquisite photographs of old and new things, which I'll share later. But for housing, we came upon this most interesting arrangement -- houses on a small hill with the "mangers" build underneath the houses. There of course was no smog in the area, and my poor camera hardly knew what to do with the intensity of the sky.


One of the most amazing things we saw in Turkey was the use of ancient pieces of decoration incorporated into present day buildings. There is no such thing as a "tract" home in Turkey so whatever is at hand gets utilized some way in the building of homes. At first our inclination was to be horrified that such things as we would consider of "archeological value" would be used in this way, but the practice is so ubiquitous that it doesn't take long to start visually taking for granted that the lovely-designed old Greek or Roman decoration will be recycled one way or another.


The strangest thing I found being used in this manner was discovering a tombstone of an old American missionary who had died in Bitlis (in eastern Turkey) in 1875 being incorporated into the wall of a stall in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. As it happened, I was researching for a book on Americans buried in Istanbul and in spite of this fellows tombstone indicated he died elsewhere, I put him into my book so he wouldn't be lost forever. (A good genealogist doesn't miss a trick!)


The final photo for this entry is probably my favorite. It was taken in a town called Sile outside of Konya in the central part of Turkey. I would have given my eye-teeth to have peeked inside this house, which was built against the other side of that wall. Although hard to see, there is a #3 sign at the top of the door. The occupants obviously wanted to make sure both visitors and mail found the way to the right place. Who would have thought of having a wall for the front of your house!


Near Konya is Catal Hoyuk, which is thought to be the oldest known human community, dating from 7500 BC. The Hittites called Konya "Kuwanna"; the Phrygians, "Kowania"; the Romans, "Iconium" and the Turks simplified it to "Konya."


Sile, not Konya, turned out to be one of our favorite places. Konya is a city; Sile is a village in a stark area. At least it was stark when we were there in the winter (you can see a little snow on the ground) but that area in the center of Turkey is actually the breadbasket of the nation. Workers are mostly connected with agriculture, not industry, and visually it is much, much different from any other area.


As you can tell, we were enriched by our time in Turkey and will have more to share with you periodically in this blog.