Anadolu Ekspresi- Across Asia Minor

Justiceiro

Well over a decade ago I came across a reference to an ancient, abandoned city on a lonely plateau, sealed off from human contact by warring nations, abandoned and forgotten for centuries. Sounds like the beginning of an Indiana Jones movie, right? (The first three, not the last one. That one stank.) How often do you get the chance to see an actual lost city, Actually cut off from the world, stuck in a demilitarized zone? Sets the heart racing just thinking about it, doesn’t it?

The place I am talking about is called Ani, and was once the capital of Medieval Armenia. I honestly can’t remember when I first heard tell of its existence- but at the time it was practically impossible to get to. It’s on the border between Turkey and Armenia, so close that the end of the archeological site is a sheer cliff face with a minefield at the bottom. When I first heard of it, it had recently been opened for a sort of tourism, with the added tourist-unfriendly features of having to get special permission from Ankara to visit (which would only happen, if at all, after months of bureaucracy) and being accompanied by an armed escort. Awesome, right? I determined that, come hell or high water, hook or crook, I would get to that place. Not right at that moment, of course, because I was in school, living on the other side of the world. But it stuck in the back of my mind.

Having recently moved to Europe, land of six week vacations, I thought once again about my long deferred dream, and came across some good news. While the border remains closed, and the minefield is still very much active, the site is open. Only for a few hours a day, and after a stern lecture from the personnel warning you not wander off, or make hostile gestures towards the Armenian bunkers on the other side of the gorge, but still… it’s reachable. I had to go. I was kind of disappointed about missing the armed escort bit, but I figured I should go now, before they changed their minds and locked the place down again.

So I armed myself with my new 5D mark II, packed my giant Kelty, walked down to the Mannheim Bahnhof, and I caught the train. This is the story of that journey. It contains midnight train rides, tourist traps, balloons, skilifts, friendly kurds, the search for Noah's ark, pigeon contests, a great many inappropriately porny moustaches, and goats. Lots and lots of goats. Or perhaps they were sheep. Details.


These are sheep. But there were also goats.


Well, the second half of the journey, at least. I have yet to complete the Balkan Express thread I started a while back, so I’ll reserve the European part of the trip for when I round that one off. Which I will do, I swear. Let’s begin in another Ancient Capital, the greatest city of the Levant, the new Rome, once the seat of both Basileus and Caliph, Istanbul.

Justiceiro

If you take the train from Bucharest or Sofia you’ll arrive at Sirkeci Station, the terminus of the old Paris-Constantinople Orient express. It's not exactly what you might expect. Ottomans weren't Arabs (and, in many ways, not properly Turks), and their architecture was entirely unexpected- to me at least. Of course, the train station belongs to an era when the once mighty empire had ceased to dictate terms to the princes of Europe, and had fallen prey to Europe's imperial designs, and its influences, both benevolent and malign, in everything from finance to Architecture. But even at it's weakest moments, when it was least able to resist the intrusion of "western" culture, it always put its own spin on things. Even the buildings.




Sirkeci Station at night


Walk out the front door and you are directly into the heart of old Istanbul. This is the best way to go, if you can manage it. My love affair with Istanbul was cemented forever in the winter of 1996, when I arrived for the first time at around seven in the morning. No sooner had I walked outside into the early dawn fog (the weather is capricious here) than the first of the day's call to prayer began. As I walked up the hill toward the blue Mosque, a single muzzeinbegan to sing in Arabic that God was great, and prayer was better than sleep. He was shortly joined by another half dozen, then a few minutes later some dozens more, until finally the majority of Istanbul’s near 3,000 mosques added their voices to the sound drifting through the fog. Eerie, and magical.


Even without fog, it's pretty damn magical

[/FONT] Istanbul is probably my favorite metropolis on earth, after New York (of course). It’s a photographer’s dream, this city. Bazaars, Mosques, monuments going back thousands of years, I’ve been here half a dozen times and barely scratched the surface.


Ya'Allah! Do I spend a lot of time talking. Allow me to let some pictures speak for themselves. (in the next post, there's a word limit, so I have to cut this up a bit.)

Justiceiro

New Galata Bridge, with ever present fishermen



Galata Tower, built by the Genoese to guard their trading concession



The Tünel (built 1875) linking the waterfront with Galata Hill






Underwear Shop, Istiklal Caddesi



Food must be guarded from friendly, often overfriendly, cats





Of course I had the Double Ottoman. Who wouldn't?



The Mehmet Effendi Coffee Store- $1.50 per 100 grams, delivered still warm from roasting and grinding into your hands.











Is it just me, or does that guy look like this guy, from back in my Uzbekistan travelogue. Freaky, right?




Sulimaniye Mosque





I usually stay at a place in the Kumkapi district, about 10 minutes walk from the Aya Sofya, called the Hotel Turkuaz, an old Ottoman house. It's relatively cheap (35 euros a night for a double), has the flat out best doss house breakfast in Turkey, and an extraordinary number of cats in the courtyard.


Hotel Turkuaz



Istanbulis

Istanbul is a pretty unique place, and Istanbulis,its inhabitants, are as well. Up until the 1930s most of the city was actually non-Turkish- principally Greeks and Armenians. After a long and bloody war of Ottoman Succession (more about that later) Greece and Turkey exchanged their populations, so that Turks living in Greece and Greeks living in Turkey basically switched countries. Strangely, for traditional European nationalism, language or "ethnicity" (which has often been a fluid concept in the levant) weren't used as the criteria for determining who was a Turk or Greek. Rather, religion was the defining characteristic. So Greece ended up with a lot of Turkish speaking Christians, and Turkey with Greek speaking Muslims. Neither country wants much to talk about how these people came to exist (as they both tried to "build" their respective nationalities) and they seem, sadly, to have become assimilated linguistically.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that Istanbul is now a primarily Turkish (and Kurdish) city, there are still a number of the old groups around, and even Turkish Istanbulis are quite different from the rest of Turkey, and each other.

Some of them look conservative:





And some of them don't:





Some look European:





And some don't:





And some, well, some I just can't explain:



Well, it's late. Over here at least, and I have to prepare for a massive feijoada party tomorrow. Bean stew and a bunch of Brazilians. Also, I still have photos uploading to Smugmug. So I'll continue with Istanbul and points east tomorrow.

GlassDarkly

Very nice set, I really like the one B&W of the subway car with the woman in the window, also the one with the woman with the white scarf getting the stink eye from the covered lady. I hope I can travel there some time in the future.

Justiceiro

Being as that both your narrator and his chief financial officer had only three weeks to cover a lot of ground, and had been to Istanbul on many occasions, we decided to spend very little time there on this occasion. Ani is, after all, almost 1,000 miles from the city. Turkey is an extremely large place, and we had only three weeks to explore it.

Nevertheless, the Anadolu Ekspresi doesn't leave Istanbul until 10 pm. So we had some time to kill. The first thing we did, naturally, was to hit the tourist hotspots on the Golden Horn (old Constantinople).

We were there in early April, which is both a blessing and a curse. To the good, there aren't quite so many tourists about- in May the city starts to get overrun. This means, however, that the army of touts that roams the Golden Horn has fewer targets of opportunity to distract them. One can feel like a goldfish thrown into a school pf piranha.


The Blue Mosque Ensemble

We were immediately set upon by a number of gentlemen wishing to sell us fine Turkish carpets at the lowest of prices. The most clever of them was frank enough to admit that "we won't cheat you as much as the other guys." That's something I suppose.

On dealing with touts and assorted blackguards

Let me take a brief pause from things photographickal to impart some advice that I have developed from my long years of traveling about the Levant. Most Western tourists, particularly those from high context cultures such as the United States and the UK, have difficulties dealing with the hard sell technique of the bazaar. The experience can be so negative that many of them run screaming from the city and hole themselves up in their hotels, swearing never to return. This is understandable, but unfortunate.

I tried in the past many different strategies: speaking an obscure language and pretending not to understand English (doesn't work. They speak everything, even Hungarian), carrying on in my super polite Anglo-Saxon way (doesn't work. You WILL end up in their shop should you employ this strategy), feigning death (partially effective, but time consuming and the ambulance crews don't find it amusing), exploding in long suppressed rage (effective, but not worth it), pretending to be German (also effective, if you can pull it off, but if you do it long enough you might actually become German).

The best way to deal with them is to tell them that you have been coming to Istanbul for years (even if this is false) and you have to meet some friends from the Uni over in Üskudar. Also, mention that you already have a carpet and that you normally buy them from Selim in Dogubeyazit. 1st off, very few people know about Dogubeyazit (pronounced doh-ooh-beyazit) unless they have been there, there actually is a dude named Selim who sells carpets, and the prices in the east are a fraction of the cost in Istanbul. Remain friendly, they'll remain friendly, and they will give up and even be pleasant. Remember, they aren't being aggressive by their own lights, this is how business is done there. Name-Dropping, theatrical gestures, etc., it is all part of the game. They enjoy playing it, and so will you, if you give it a try.

Once armed with your new haggling techniques, hit the Bazaar, and lay waste unto the opposition.

Carpets



Don't fear buying a carpet. They can be had for reasonable prices, if you get out of Istanbul. Even in Istanbul you can sometimes find reasonable prices. Keep in mind that "reasonable" doesn't necessarily mean cheap- hand made carpets take hundreds of man hours to put together. Granted, wages of the folks who make them are pretty low, but you aren't getting a 10 foot by 15 foot carpet for less than four digits, anywhere.

The brighter the colors, the more likely they are to be artificial. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as artificial dyes are often better than natural ones in many respects, as I discovered whne my cleaning lady kept putting an old Maghreb rug I have in front of a giant window- it faded pretty quickly. Now it looks old, which is great if that's what you want. Me, not so much.

If the material is shiny, it is either artificial fiber (the one artificial thing I am categorically against) in which case you are dealing with a total con man, or it is silk. Which costs, even in the east. Wool is duller and rougher, much stiffer, and a great deal cheaper. 15 years ago you could pick up silk on the relative cheap, but not any more. Except in Uzbekistan. But that's far away.


Selim's Reasonably Priced Kurdish Rug Shop, Dogubeyazit

Pick at the carpet a bit, the finer, smaller, and more numerous the knots the finer the workmanship, and the longer it should last.

Don't futz about with buying antique carpets unless you are an expert, or are at one of the super reputable shops where they wear suits and serve you champagne instead of apple tea. These guys don't tout in the market by the way, and most don't even have signs for their shops. They don't need to advertise. I've been there in the company of an extremely wealthy local that I know, and even they dropped massive coin, so this is out of my league. Then again, if you're a Leica snob, then you have too much money anyway.

At the end of the day, you should ask yourself if you would be willing to pay the asking price for the rug, and the story of your buying it, to be in your house. If so, buy it.



For fruits, veg, and colorful pictures head up to the massive open air bazaar behind the Fatih mosque. It's huge, and strictly local.

FlyNavy

Wonderful pics and narrative. Thanks for taking us along.

Justiceiro

We didn’t buy much at the bazaars this time around, mainly due to the fact that we had three weeks of hard slogging ahead of us. We did decide to hit a nice fish restaurant, as we would be heading inland for the rest of the trip. [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]After dinner, and still with half-useless tongue due to something called "Traditional Ottoman desert", which seems to be pistachio based Janissary napalm, I headed over to Eminonu to catch the ferry to Haydarpasha. [/FONT]




The crossing is usually pretty smooth (depending on the weather) but it was freezing cold, as Istanbul was in the 50s, fahrenheit. The ferries, however, do have copious supplies of the cheapest tea in town- 50 kurus (about 25 cents) per glass.


[FONT=&quot]Haydarpasha is a fantastic train station. All trains to Asia depart from here, as there are no train bridges or ferries across the Bosphorus. I would love to show you pictures of the building, which was a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm to the Ottoman empire when the two were a-courtin’ shortly before the First World War. Unfortunately, due to some issues with my wolverine data dump, this is impossible. I lost an entire afternoon of photos. I guess I’ll have to shoot it again the next time that I am in Istanbul. Here’s an image blatantly ripped off of Wikipedia:[/FONT]

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[FONT=&quot]It’s pretty impressive. And it's more or less comfortable inside, with a heated waiting room, surrounded by train posters. One of which was for the Tehran Express. Twice a week, from Haydarpasha to Iran. Visas are a bit hard to come by for Americans these days, otherwise I would have been tempted. The station could use a better restaurant, and the PA needs work. Every announcement was interspersed with Turkish rock music from a radio station inhabiting a nearby frequency.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]The Anadolu Ekspresi (Anatolian Express) is a beautiful train. Most of the trains in Turkey are inexpensive and comfortable. The Anadolu has lovely two person bunk compartments, as well as a shower at the end of the wagon. It runs along a pretty high quality track at some nice speeds (there is a faster train, but it isn’t a sleeper).[/FONT]

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[FONT=&quot]The compartment even has a sink in it. An of course, there is a restaurant car.

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Your faithful narrator samples the decidedly un-halal beer

The only real problem with the trains is that the TCDD (Turkish Railways) rarely publishes schedules (at least out east) and that they are slow. The rails were built by the Germans to get agricultural products to market, rather than move people (this was back in the Imperial times). So they weren't to keen on tunneling, which was expensive. They go around mountains as much as they can- locals joke that the Sultan must have paid them by the kilometer.

Another odd thing, and this is true in Central Europe as well, is that the rail network only makes sense in the context of the old empire's borders. For example, if you want to go from Sarajevo to Belgrade, you pretty much have to go through Budapest. Why? Because they were both part of the same empire. Likewise, from the Southwest (Kurdistan) to the Mediteranean coast the quickest route is via Damascus. That all used to be one polity, but now you have to take a milk train through some very rough territory.[/FONT]



[FONT=&quot]When the empire fell the vast majority of the Ottoman rail network lay outside Turkey- those areas that were served were along the old Berlin Baghdad railway.
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[FONT=&quot]Turkish rail network in 1919
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[FONT=&quot] The TCDD (Turkish railways) did build access to the interior of Anatolia, to a degree, but these were constructed with a view to providing strategic ability to defend Eastern Anatolia against the Soviets, rather than passenger coverage, and money was tight. The upshot of this is that there are a few lines that run east to west, but there are almost no direct north-south lines. Complicating this is that, due to terrorism issues in the 1980s, the TCDD stopped printing regular schedules of train in Anatolia, and never really resumed. So finding out when and where a local train is going is difficult unless you go to the station and ask directly.[/FONT]


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Nevertheless, the Anadolu is at the very least reliably scheduled. After a beer or two, we awoke in Ankara, in the middle of nowhere. Which happens, strangely, to be the capital of Turkey. At the time it was selected as the capital, in 1923, It was basically a cow town, or rather sheep town. Until the 1930s the town was known as Angora, from whence we get the name for the extremely fine quality wool which was its principal (and pretty much only) export. Sure it had had a glorious past, there are few places in Anatolia, civilized for the last 7,000 years or so, that haven’t. But the glory days of Ankara (known as Ancyra to the Romans) were well and truly past[/FONT]

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[FONT=&quot]"Old" Ankara
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[FONT=&quot]At the end of 1923 Turkey was still recovering from a hard fought war against the Colonial powers, who had been trying to grab chunks of Anatolia for themselves (principally France and Italy) as well as the Greeks, whose invasion in 1919 eventually penetrated deep into Anatolia . Ankara, at the time a “town of no importance” with a population of 35,000 people, was chosen because it was remote, and not as vulnerable as Istanbul. Even with a command post so remote from Greek sources of supply, and the interference of the rapidly declining Ottoman sultanate in British occupied Istanbul, the Greek armies advanced as far as the Sakarya river, less than 100 miles from Ankara. There, their advance was shattered and they were eventually expelled entirely from what is now modern Turkey. Nevertheless, even as Turkey emerged into full sovereignty, they did not feel that their borders were secure. Thus Ankara remained, and remains, the capital. It is now the relatively unlovely second city of Turkey.[/FONT]


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[FONT=&quot]Unlovely it may be, but the locals are friendly
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[FONT=&quot] Ankara is worth a visit for two reasons: the Museum of Anatolian civilizations, and the Anit Kabir, the tomb of Kemal Atatürk. About which more in the next post.[/SIZE]

Ed911

Thanks for the tour. Really well narrated. How did you become interested in the area?

Nikolai

Enjoying it thorouhly, partner! Looking for more! clap

FlyNavy

More, more more, Please!

Justiceiro

Ed911 wrote: »

Thanks for the tour. Really well narrated. How did you become interested in the area?

I've been going to Istanbul for years, the first time was in 1996. Basically because I was studying in Budapest and didn't have the cash tor eturn to the US for christmas. (Back then a round trip ticket from Budapest to Istanbul was around $100). Went once, then I was hooked.

Justiceiro

Ankara Central Station

We arrived, having slept comfortably, at the Ankara Gar at about seven in the morning. I wanted to hit the Ataturk Mausoleum first (The Anit Kabir) in order to get some good morning light, but the grounds onlz open up at about 9. So we bought three simit (sort of a semi-sweet sesame coated bread ring) for 1 lira- the cheapest price yet- and sat on a bench outside the park grounds eating those and some amazing string cheese we had purchased the day before in Istanbul.

The Anit Kabir

Anit Kabir means "memorial tomb" in Turkish, and is a giant mausoleum set in a park complex covering 700,000 square meters. The park itself is full of trees and shrubs, and though well tended, has a look balanced between "garden" and "wild."

The mausoleum itself is built in what is called the "second national architecture movement" style. This style is similar to the pared down Art Deco one find in, say, Rockefeller Center, and is massive and decidedly monumental, fitting the personality of the man whose final resting place it is.

If you visit Turkey, and don't know who Mustapha Kemal Ataturk is, you'll soon find out. The founder of Modern Turkey, his image is everywhere and public buildings are engraved with giant quotations from the man, even though he died in 1938.


copied from Wikimedia

Ataturk's legacy is dark, inspiring, and above all complex. To understand the continuing adoration of the man, it is necessary to understand the state of things during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The Empire had endured for centuries, almost 700 years had elapsed since a local Turkic Gazi, Osman, had united his clan, and then carved a state out of territory taken from the Byzantines. By the middle of the 14th century the Ottomans had penetrated well into the Balkans, replaced the Byzantines as the primary power in Asia Minor (taking Constantinople itself in 1453) and incorporated the Danishmend, Seljuk, and other Turkish emirates of Anatolia into a state that spanned two continents. Having taken the New Rome, they saw themselves, consciously, as the heirs to Roman power int he Levant. Their sophisticated military shock troops and tactics were impossible for Europeans to resist, and by 1529 they were laying siege to Vienna. Eventually, the Ottoman empire encompassed the entirety of the Balkans, All of Asia Minor, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, and even the Crimea. Until the 17th century they had no real rivals for power, prestige, and wealth.

But by the beginning of the 20th century, all of this had changed. Egpyt had broken away, predatory European powers had taken Egypt and North Africa, and constant rebellion in the Balkans had rolled back Ottoman frontiers to the gates of Constantinople itself. Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire, in the eyes of its subject, remained apparently immortal. The Sultan-Caliph claimed authority over all Sunni muslism, and held sway over the holy places of Islam. What wasn't obvious was that the Empire's integrity had mainly been supported by the fact that the European powers couldn't agree on how to divide the spoils of "the sick man of Europe."

Ottoman defeat in World War I resulted in the occupation of Istanbul, Greek Seizure of the Troad, Italian occupation of the Mediterranean coast, French incursion into Cilicia (Antioch, Urfa, and Antep) and Armenian occupation of East Anatolia. Imperialism was still in Vogue, and "Turks" were to be reduced to tutelage and Imperial domination, confined to a state that was little more than the Black Sea coast and Ankara's surroundings. The Sultan agreed to the humiliating treaty of Sevres (the Levantine version of the Versailles treaty) in 1920.



Mustapha Kemal, a young officer born in what is now Thessaloniki, Greece, was sent to take control of the Ottoman 9th Army, which was restive in the provinces, and which the Sultan feared would not lay down arms.

Kemal, instead of bringing the army to heel, took control of it and began to fight the forces that were partitioning the country. He was sentenced, in abstentia, to death. Keep in mind that he was leading the shattered remnant of a defeated army against the greatest Imperial powers of the day. Victory was unimaginable. Nevertheless, he managed to force out the Europeans, who then urged on Greece as their proxy. The Greeks attempted to overrun Anatolia, But were eventually ejected as well, after Kemal and General Ismet Inonu destroyed their army at the Sakarya.


Mustapha Kemal and Ismet Inonu

Mustapha Kemal's steely determination and will power bordering on obsession singlehandedly saved Turkey from being swallowed up. Truly, he was the "father of the Turks" (Which is the meaning of the name Ataturk).

I'm probably running up against the word limit, so we'll discuss the troubling aspects of Ataturks legacylater, when we meet a group of people who are not so fond of him, the Kurds.


The road to the mausoleum, guarded by soldiers and reproductions of Hittite lions



The Mausoleum itself, with honor guard










Inonu's sarcaphogaus

jasonstone

really enjoyng this trip thx

Justiceiro

After traipsing for most of the morning around the Anit Kabir, watching the daily wreath laying ceremony, and observing the eerily authoritarian marching style of the honor guard, we walked through Ankara to the citadel. built on a natural lava outcrop in the oldest neighborhood in town.


post-Roman recycling

The Citadel itself is a bit dumpy, surrounded by refuse and chickens and not open to the public. The view over the town is good though.



After completing this arduous, but touristically necessary task, we descended back down the hill to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. This is truly a hidden gem of Turkey, and an absolute must see. The exhibits cover the periods from neolithic (8000 BC) to the end of the Alexandrian classical age (500 AD or so).



Visiting the museum quickly impresses on you a number of things; namely, that though European civilization, from the standpoint of those of us from North America, is quite old, it just scratches the surface of the historical record that runs truly deep here. The last 50 years or so of archeology have shed much more light on the ancient world in Anatolia than previously existed, and revealed that the societies that inhabited these places were incredibly old, wealthy, and sophisticated; reaching a level of cosmopolitan complexity we used to associate only with Egypt, Uruk, Baylon and the like, who were their contemporaries.


The Hittites



These were probably the most "internationally" influential of the Anatolian peoples, getting numerous mentions in the Bible and forcing the powerful Egyptians into ceding large amounts of territory to them after the Battle of Kadesh (1258 BC). Thereafter, the Hittites were one of the few people the Egyptians treated as cultural equals, which can be seen by the particularly respectful mode of address in the treaties drawn up between them. metalworking skills were particularly fine, it is possible that the Hittites were the first people to smelt iron, giving them an enormous military advantage.



Hittite Standard


Their wealth is attested to in the quality, and sheer number of grave goods discovered in the region. Keep in mind that this was some 4-5,000 years ago, Europeans at the time had nothing comparable going on.







They also had an advanced and complex bureaucratic state structure- thousands of clay tablets recording not just peace treaties and matters of state, but land deals, divorces, and the like have been recovered. The Hittites were highly literate people. They even, on occasion, took a baked clay tablet and baked an "envelope" around it before ti was sent through their postal system.



Letter with Envelope


The Hittite empire was eventually destroyed in the 14th century BC by a mysterious group known as the "Sea Peoples," who wreaked havoc all across the Eastern Med. Neo-Hittite states sprang up after the tide of the Sea Peoples receded, but they never came close to recapturing their old glory, and new peoples such as the Phrygians, Lydians, Urartians, and others came to dominate the scene by the time we get to the classical era.






Bronze Tablet from 1235 BC detailing a treaty between a Neo-Hittite ruler and his rebellious cousin





A "Phrygian cap" which became, through a rather torturous route, the iconic symbol of the sans-cullote during the French revolution.


drinking cups, probably late Hittite

Justiceiro

Cappadocia
My intention was to travel throughout Turkey by train but, for reasons mentioned before, that proved impracticable. So from Ankara we caught a bus to Goreme in the Cappadocia region (approximately 4 1/2 hours, 13 euros). As the sun went down we traveled through an incredibly desolate landscape, almost entirely devoid of trees. The land can certainly support trees, and we witnessed what seemed to be a government plan to plant some by the road, but 8,000 years of continuous habitation and, particularly, grazing goats and sheep picked the landscape clean millenia ago.


Central Anatolian Landscape

About the only things you see between Ankara and Goreme (our destination) are sheep, steppe, and a number of large lakes- often so large you can't see the other side. We followed the shoreline of one for near on an hour. There are hardly any people around.

The Geology of Cappadocia

We had a stroke of luck and ended up falling in for a while with an American tourist who was a geologist. He explained to us how Cappadocia came to have such a distinctive look, dominated by hundreds of thousands of wadis and "fairy chimneys" (called "hoodoos" in the United States.





It seems that about 30 million years ago, a trio of stratovolcanos in central Anatolia went through one of the most violent series of eruptions of that era. between the three of them they threw out a layer of ash about a kilometer thick, filled with an assortment of harder basalt rocks.


Hasan Dagi, one of the stratovolcanos


Over the subsequent few million years the ash solidified and contracted into a band of stone called "tuff"- ironic really, as it isn't terribly tough. This band is one of the deepest (150 meters) and most widespread (thousands of square kilometers) tuff layers in the world.


Rockscape with various layers of Tuff

Often the tuff is heavily laced with iron, copper, and sulpher, lending the rocks colorful hues of red, yellow, and green. Over time, erosion tended to wear the tuff away, but in places where their was a heavier ejecta mixed in with the Tuff (like basalt boulders) this stabilized the tuff underneath the harder rock- it remained while the surrounding tuff wore away. Hence the hoodoos. Think Bryce Canyon, but on a much larger scale.


Fairy Chimneys


Unfortunately, my shots from my walk through the Goreme open air museum (more like a hoodoo park really) have been lost through the vagaries of technology (data transfer issues). To anyone making this trip, I advise investing in a number of high capacity cards. No sense in investing money to make the trip, and then skimping on the hardware. Lesson learned in my case, but a painful one indeed. It seems like the higher quality of shot, the less likely it was to survive. Oh well.

We got up early in the morning at our hotel, and took advantage of one of the many balloon tours available. I'll post some shots of those, and then cover the rock churches and local history in the next post.


Goreme, from our hotel (which was in a fairy chimney)



Balloons over Goreme





your faithful narrator reflects upon the currentness of his life insurance






A Wadi

Nikolai

Wicked!!! thumb

johnbriner

Excellent set, Justiceiro. Felt like I traveled back in time while looking at these photos. Based from these shots alone, it appears that those places have a lot to offer to travelers. I would like to go there as well.

Reverb

Awesome. I have been to Istanbul but you have reminded me of the many places I still need to go to in Turkey.

lzfoto

Awesome trip! Thank you for taking us along...the pictures are so vivid and so amazing...you cacn actually feel like your their and feel the dust and the musky air.

Justiceiro

Cave Churches
A few more rock formation shots....








There, now that I have satisfied Dgrin's rock addiction (I know, they aren't orange. Work with me) let's get back to the story.


Contrary to what Rick Santorum would have you believe, Christianity is under no threat of extinction in America. Believe me, I live in Europe, I know what a post religious society looks like. The US ain't it.

Nevertheless, there was a time when Christianity was regarded as a dangerous, subversive, evil-hippy kind of religion. Wiccans and other assorted neo-pagans do go on about how tolerant Paganism/polytheism is, or was, and they have a point- of sorts. Polytheists are, by their very nature, not typically vexed about different people having other gods. After all, they have quite a few of their own.

So you worship Perun the thunder god? That's cool. I've got my own god of thunder, I call him Jupiter. Maybe Perun (or come to think of it, even Thor) is really Zeus/Jupiter, maybe not. When I am in Rome, I'll sacrifice to Jupiter. When my legion is camped out among the savage slavic Boemii, I'll throw in a few goats for Perun as well. Can't hurt.


Do not mess with this dude when you are in his house... err, primeval Bohemian forest?

Anyway, the Romans were pretty tolerant. About religion. Anything even approaching disrespecting the state? Not so much.

Demanding worship of deceased emporer's isn't really about religion per se. I doubt even the most hardcore polytheist really thought Caligula was a deity. The man tried to make his horse a consul, for the gods' sake.

Refusing to bow down to the statue of the Emperer in the temple was a political, as well as religious act. Desecrating the emperors' statues was pretty much a general signal that the uprising was in effect. Welcome to the hippodrome! (that joke works best if you say it in Flava Flav's voice.)

So Christians were all kind of problems. They claim to love everybody, so they refuse to fight (undermining the combat effectiveness of the 23rd legion, check), said that everyone was equal in the eyes of heaven (totally promoting social discord and making good manservants even harder to find, check), and they refused to bow to the statue of the Emporer. Clearly, these guys were Parthian agents. For sure.

Needless to say, because Tacitus already said it, Rome's favorite tactic for dealing with restive peoples was like shock and awe, only without the restraint. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. "They made a desert, and called it peace." So Rome tried to kill the Christians off. So how does this relate to our journey through Anatolia?

Cave Churches

As mentioned before, it is kind of hard to control Cappadocia. It is basically a hundred thousand square kilometer Bryce Canyon. So Christians literally took to the hills. The Romans had a tough time finding them, much less killing them. They couldn't even effectively tax the Cappadocians. And if the Romans couldn't figure out a way to tax you, man, you were well hid.


IRS Audit! Anybody home?

Cappadocia was, for centuries, the center of the Christian faith. Not only did people carve houses into the soft rock, but giant cathedrals as well.


Smallish Cave Church near Goreme




Goreme Open Air Museum


Photography is forbidden in the best preserved churches, which are in the Goreme Open air Museum. I stuck to this rule, because, despite the fact that I am rocking a 5D mkII with massive ISO capability, if I popped off, everyone else would have done so as well. In fact, many of them did anyway, and camera flashes are dreadful for frescos that have survived Romans, Iconoclasts, and Muslimization. It turns out that Larry the Dentist from Boise with his new Superflash digicam is a greater threat.


But.... OK. When I was alone, I snapped a few. But with no flash. So I am still a good person. Unfortunately, these are the B-team frescos. The really good ones are under constant guard.


The three magi approach Jesus in the manger


notice the faces, removed by pious Muslims, or Iconoclasts.



These guys even built underground cities, capable of holding 5,000 people, with food supplies for three months. They even had stables for horses. When a ravaging army arrived, they would just head into the warrens, and wait them out. We visited one, called Kaymakli.


Kaymakli Food Storage



If you tried to follow them in, they would retreat down a long tunnel and seal it off with a giant stone door, openable only from the other side. Oh, and while you were down there, they used a hidden side tunnel to sneak around behind you, and close another one of these doors- sealing you in. It takes a long time to starve to death in the dark. Life was rough back then.

The Ilhara Valley

The last thing we did in the Goreme area was to visit the Ilhara valley, a cool oasis of trees and birds in a steep and winding canyon with a rather brash river at the bottom.





At the end of the valley, we stopped at a riverside restaurant for a late lunch, where I ate trout off of a sizzling hot pan, and had the best bread I have ever eaten outside Uzbekistan.

Then we went to an old abandoned Cave monastery, where one of our fellow travellers, who was blind, negotiated the steep climb, a climb that made me on occasion nervous, like it ain't no thang. Impressive. His wife would describe in vivid detail everything they were looking at. It does one good occasionally, to think about how valuable our normal abilities are, like sight.



In front of the Monastery there is a nice old Seljuk tomb.

Nikolai

Another rock-solid installment (pun intended:-)

Justiceiro

Our Adventures in Kayseri
East from Cappadocia, tourism drops off pretty sharply, as do (to some degree) tourist facilities. There are literally hundreds of potential places to visit in the vicinity- mount chimera, where flames have been burning from volcanic vents since who knows when (the first written records are from Pliny the Elder), the knot that Alexander cut at Gordion at the outset of his invasion of Persia, the list goes on. Unfortunately, plans to have Ken Burns killed and to take his job having come to nothing, I still have to work for a living. Granted, in Europe, so I work a lot less than Americans do, but my vacation isn’t in fact unlimited. So I had to make some tough choices, and set off on the road for Ani.
From Cappadocia east there are several routes, by rail and road, to the border. We chose to take the north/central route, following the rail line. We knew there was a rail head in both Kayseri and Sivas, and chose Kayseri as it was somewhat closer and less touristy.
The bus to Kayseri left, as all buses in Goreme do, from the central square. It was quite late, so we had a bite to eat while we waited for our coach to arrive. Should you need to eat in Goreme, I would advise you to avoid the “One-Way Café” should you have any alternative (as it was so late, we did not). I chose the “typical Cappadocian” dish of stew baked in a ceramic jar. The jar is supposed to open with the tap of a small hammer, but the waiter had to basically bludgeon mine into pieces in order to extract the lackluster stew. Which at that point was full of ceramic shards. All this for 10 euros, a King’s ransom in Anatolia. After our “bus” (which turned out to be a Ford Transit with a driver from Kazakhstan named Achmed, and we the only passengers) showed up, it ferried us to Nevsehir, and then we caught a real bus to Kayseri from there.

Achmed didn't really speak English, but that didn't stop his non-stop efforts to communicate. From him we learned some interesting facts.

-In Kazakhstan, a mechanic earns $250 a month.

- Obama is a Muslim (lots of people in the area believe that, but count it a good thing, unlike some of my compatriots).

When I doubted Obama's Muslimness, Achmed told me it had to be true. Because he saw it on the internet. Well, that's that, I suppose.

A note to travelers using any guides printed before 2007, the otogars (bus stations) are no longer where they are supposed to be. Our Lonely Planet told us that the bus station was a mere 1.5 kilometers from the city center (that’s like a mile). So we decided to walk. What we did not realize is that, about 2 years ago, there was a Turkey-wide move to get the otogars out of the city centers, as congestion added huge amounts of time to inter-city travel. Now most bus companies offer a free shuttle service to the center from the otogar. It turns out that the Kayseri Otogar is about 6 miles out of town. We walked, and walked, and walked, and then we walked some more
Eventually, we stopped at a small convenience store and showed our map to the Turkish guys working there. They reacted in horror and gesticulated wildly. I had no idea what they were saying. Now, I believe it is something like “Dude, the center is miles away, get a taxi, are you crazy?!” But I just smiled and nodded. They gave us bottles of water, which they refused to take any payment for and waved us into the night, in the General direction of the main square.

Another 30 minutes later we encountered a group of about 8 teenage boys. They appeared concerned with our physical wellbeing they led us through a bunch of alleys and open lots . Throughout this whole time they kept whispering to each other, and looking at my shoes. I don't know if it was because my shoes were so unusual, or because they had become quite stinky by this time (my boots, which had faithfully carried me through Burma, Uzbekistan, and across America, were in the final process of giving up the ghost). I recognized only one word, Tramvaj, which the Lonely Planet knew nothing about.

There was indeed a tram line, but we didn’t have a token, and there was no machine to sell one. However, the tramway official took pity on us and let us board for free. From there, it was a fifteen minute ride to the center. The moral of this story? Buy an up to date travel guide, and use the free shuttle service.

Here is Kayseri at night:





And finally, our hotel room. 15 Lira per night. Bliss.



Our hotel. the Hunat Oteli, was right behind the Hunat Hatun Camii complex off the main square. It was full of ancient men in the lobby (which was small and very old, but spotlessly clean) hanging out and, I assume, kvetching. The proprieter, Omer, is quite kindly, and told us first to sleep, and then pay the next day. We were happy to oblige.

Justiceiro

Waking bright and early the next morning, we ventured out to see Kayseri in the daylight.

The first thing we did was hit the tourist information center about 100 meters from our hotel, near the main roundabout next to the Hunat Hatun complex- featuring a mosque and still functioning public baths.



The tourist info center is only helpful if you speak German. All their brochures are in German, and the guy working there speaks German, but not English. This isn't that unusual in Central and Eastern Turkey. In Istanbul, English is the second language of choice, but throughout the rest of Turkey it's the good old allemand which will get you around. Germany is Turkey's biggest trade partner outside the Levant, and the main destination for emigrants. We would often run into ancient codgers in places like Kurdistan who would happily address us in German and tell us how they spent 35 years working at the BMW plant near Mainz or something. Fortunately, I speak German, so it wasn't a problem.


Kayseri Clock Tower

Again, Kayseri is around a billion years old, and continously settled even back unto the ancient mists of time, like when Larry King was a kid. It used to be called Ceasarea Cappadocia, and was the Roman provincial capital for a bit. This doesn't mean much to the modern traveler, as most evidence of that period is long gone. Or in the Pergamon museum in Berlin.

The city's glorious apogee was reached during the 13th to 14th century, under the Seljuks, whose capital it was under a number of Sultans with names like Kilij Arslan. Who'd fight that guy, really. If your tiny principality is attacked by a dude name "Kilij" just surrender already. He's named "Kilij."

On the nature of Turks

It might be appropriate here to get into the fact that there are, or rather were rather a large number of very different people styling themselves as Turks. The Ottomans, of the Osmanli tribe are the Turks that are best known in the west, and were used as bogeymen to terrorize recalcitrant youths for many centuries throughout Europe. But "Turks" is a word originally used to describe a language family rather than an ethnicity- this language family or urvolk spawned a number of tribes that would hurl themselves out of their Central Asian home (still called Turkestan) and descend on various parts of the middle east and the ancient Oikoumene.

There a still a lot of Turks around that we don't consider "Turks per se, although their languages are typically mutually intelligible. Some Turkic speakers live as far north as the Polish/Belorussian border (there must be an interesting story there).


Turkic Speakers around Asia. They even got to Siberia.

Thus references to people like the Danishmend, Azeri, and Seljuk Turks. These people had slightly different forms of Turkic language, and were eventually incorporated into the Ottoman Empire (except the Azeris) so they lost their distinctive identity, although Turkish regional dialects in Anatolia and Thrace (such as Gagauz) are not descended from "Turkish" but from other Turkic languages that melded into standard Turkish.


The Seljuks

The distinctive ethnicity of groups like the Seljuks is long gone, but their architecture is entirely different from that of the Ottomans. Denoting the relative lack of Byzantine influence (compared to the Ottomans) it has a decidedly more "Asian" feel.

the Seljuks were quite the big deal back when Osman's tribe were herding goats around Bursa. In the 13th century they ruled most of Anatolia and styled themselves as "The Sultanate of Rum (Rome)." Everybody wanted to claim the mantle of Rome, it seems.


The Seljuks at their beefiest

It was the Seljuks who really broke Byzantium as a Levantine power, at the battle of Manzikert (1071), which John Julius Norwich (the preeminent historian of the Byzantines) said was "the death blow, though centuries remained before the remnant fell." Eventually, succession problems split the Empire into smaller Emirates, which were eaten up piecemeal by another Turkish tribe on the make, the eventually more famous Ottomans.

Seljuk Architecture is renowned for its concentration on fine mausoleums and tombs, and its general pointiness.


Your faithful narrator attempts to rock it Kilij style

The Seljuks did build quite a few Mosques and Medressehs, but these are not nearly as grand as their soaring and graceful Ottoman equivalents. Granted, the Ottomans did a lot of cribbing from folks like Isidore of Miletus and other famous architects of the Greek tradition, and they were also mightily blessed with geniuses like Mimar Sinan (more on him later). The coolest Seljuk Stuff are their tombs and Caravanserai work, the Caravanserai being more or less a medieval truck stop. You could stay for free for up to three days, it had a mosque, and also doubled as a fortress.


Caravanserai in the Kayseri area, heavily restored. How do you know its Seljuk? Because it's pointy!

Remember that virtually anything pointy is Seljuk, and it is easy to impress your traveling companions with the breadth of your architectural knowledge. What? That pointy thing over there? Late Seljuk. Clearly.

Justiceiro

The first thing we did after perusing some German travel brochures was to head for the Bazaar. That should pretty much be standard procedure anywhere in the Levant. Look for the Kapali Carsi (Covered Bazaar). Every city has one, and it is pretty much the main shopping event.

Kayseri doesn't get that much tourism, but it is actually a relatively wealthy city due to its manufacturing, so there are locals with money. As the giant gold souq testifies to. Aslo, a lot of the shops sport fancy western brands, or weird imitations thereof.


This is part of an ongoing project to document the spread of Lusomania throughout the Muslim world, by photographing my hetero life partner with Christiano Ronaldo. If you want people to love you, just shout "Simao!" when you meet them. Don't ask why. They will understand and reply likewise, and likely hoist you upon their shoulders. Unless they are Galatasaray fans, in which case, screw those guys.

Kayseri is also famous for Pastirma, which is basically a sausage made without pork. Given that the goodness of pork is the only thing that makes sausage tolerable, I would advise avoiding this.


That mosque over there? Clearly early Ottoman, not Seljuk. Why? Not pointy.

Remnants of Kayseri's non-Muslim past still endure, such as this Christian church.

You can tell which buildings were originally Churches due to the layout. If it is a cruciform building, it was definitely a church, even if it now has a minaret attached. Also, as the practicalities of worship are different, structures purpose built to be mosques have great open spaces where common prayer took place. Christian worship centers around the pulpit, where the sermon and the eucharist take place. Muslim worship centers around the Ulema, praying in the direction of Mecca, together in a group.


The Ulug Bay mosque

Seljuk Mosques typically go for width, rather than height. The "center" isn't the center of the building, its the mihrab, a niche that indicates the direction toward Arabia, and the muslim version of the pulpit is the minbar, from where an imam would preach. But the minbar is always on the edge of the space, often in a corner, whereas in churches the pulpit is usually in the center, or at least in the front. This is, incidentally, how you know the cathedral in Granada wasn't built by Christians. It has a Mihrab.

I'm pretty sure all this is accurate, but await confirmation from Awais, who is the Dgrin expert on all things related to Islamic architecture.


Studying the Quran


The minbar in the corner of the Ulug Bey Mosque


Chillin' outside the mosque


One more, for those who love this hat as much as I do

After a few hours of wandering around the city we stopped for a tea at one of Kayseri's many bakery/cafes. Turkish tea is absolutely lovely, strong, yet mild. Also, it is hard to find scotch.



Eventually we found the famous Doner Kümbet, or "revolving tomb." It is at a roundabout as the city peters out towards the mountains, next to a giant cemetery. It's rather unusual for a Seljuk tomb as it has panelled sides that are decorated with intricate motifs.



Shortly beyond this one can find an excellent view of Mount Erciyes, one of the volcanos that created the Cappadocia region.



Returning to check out the graveyard, a subject that is a perennial favorite of mine, we were accosted by a sudden snowstorm of great intensity. All day the weather had been turning colder and colder, a reminder that Central Anatolia is quite high, and can be bitter cold even in April and May. If you visit outside of high summer, bring layers.




You promised me a SouthernEuropean vacation!

Nikolai

Lesson learned : pointy = Seljuk!
Aswesom stuff, bro!

schmoo

This is another example of why Ryan's one of my favorite peeps! Keep it coming.

Justiceiro

Thanks Schmoo. That means quite a lot coming from the Dgrinner who has made the awesomest (don't let my students know I used that word) trip on the Journeys forum. I still seethe with jealousy when I look at your Chernobyl pics.

One last piece of advice before we leave Kayseri. If you happen to get hungry while in town, I would recommend dropping by a placed called "Aspava Izgara & Doner." As you walk down the main drag from the train station to the center of town, it will be about 10 minutes away, on the right hand side of the street. Try the Beyti Kebap, best thing I ate in Turkey.


The Author Contemplates stealing his CFO's food

Actually, I had the Iskender, but I stole serious helpings from Bebezinho's plate of Beyti, often after comically inept attempts to distract her.



All this for about $8.


There is a train from Kayseri to our next destination, Erzurum. However, the train leaves at 2:30 AM (it is a night train from Ankara) and takes 18 hours to get to Erzurum. That would put us in about 7 PM assuming no delays, and blow the day for taking pictures other than from the train. There is a bus that leaves at 11 PM, and gets you into Erzurum about 8 in the morining. After weighing our love of trains with our love of actually seeing stuff, we opted for the bus.

Justiphon's Autobusis, or "The Bus Trip up Country"

We were already pretty high up in the Cappadocia region, but as we advanced towards Erzurum we truly entered the upper regions of the Anatolian Plateau. Our bus was super modern and comfortable, and included all the amenities such as reclining seats, video screens playing the latest Turkish soap operas (very popular throughout the middle east and, strangely, Bulgaria), and a temperature and time reading. By the time that I drifted off to sleep I noticed my ears popping and that the temperature outside had fallen to -10 celsius. (14 degrees Fahrenheit). These are apparently normal temperatures in mid April.

When dawn broke and we awoke, this is what we saw:



One usually thinks of the Muslim world as sandy, with a great many palm trees and people who look like Omar Sharif, but from my experience much of it is snow bound most of the year around. I was immediately reminded of when we crossed the Kimchak Pass in Uzbekistan, but with almost no one on the road.

Snow was about a foot deep when the bus dropped us off at the outskirts of town (Anatolia, being sparsely populated, tends to lack the airport sized Otogars that are the norm elsewhere in the country).



This is skiing country, extremely mountainous and with winter lasting seven months of the year.



The first thing we did was head to the Gar to see if there was a reasonable train to our next destination, Kars. Turns out it is a relatively short 4 hour hop, and very convenient from Erzurum.



We then set of to meet the family of one of the Turkish exchange students that I teach in Germany. She graciously hooked us up with her uncle, who is an ex-English teacher, so I expected a little shop talk and a bit of a tour perhaps. Instead I got the full on Turkish Hospitality Experience. They took us everywhere, including a hamam at an excellent ski resort hotel, a great lunch, coffee enough to drown all the fish in lake Michigan, and wouldn't let us drop a single lira for any of it.



They also introduced us to the local specialty, Cagi Kebap, which is lamb on a skewer that one eats rolled up in something like a flour tortilla.



I am not such a fan of lamb, sometimes, as it can taste like chewing pennies. But when it is done right (and it rarely is) it can be excellent. This was the best lamb I ever had. All told, the whole crew of six of us ate 24 of these along with various meze (Turkish tapas, more or less) and Ayran all around, and the whole bill was 48 lira. That's right, about 30 dollars. Each skewer costs about 50 cents.


Your faithful, but slighty creepy, narrator eats lamb kebap with the prettiest girl in Anatolia.



Look at that Frothy Ayran!

After lunch we went down to the Ataturk University where my students father teaches, and passed by their brand new ski-jump facilities, amongs the largest in the world (they just held the winter university olympiad here this year).





There are lots of winter sports facilities at the University, although some of them have a purpose that I was absolutely unable to identify, such as this thing:



After the Uni, we set about to see the Seljuk and Mongol monuments. The Mongols held this place for a few years (after the usual sack and mass slaughter, etc.) and then realized that it was way to cold, even for them.


Pop Quiz- which empire built this, Ottoman, Seljuk, or Mongol? Hint: it's pointy.

The Seljuks had come, wisely, to a deal with the Mongols by capitulating absolutely when they first showed up on the horizon. That was a wise move. When the fearsome Ogedei died, however, the Seljuk Sultan decided that not only would he no longer pay tribute to the Mongols, but that he would invade their Georgian territories. That was an unwise move.

The Mongols showed up and offered Erzurum the opportunity to surrender (I picture this being stated in a Vito Corleone kind of way). Apparently, the locals "bullied the Mongol ambassador." So the Mongol commander, Baiju, promptly sacked the city and offered the usual capitulation terms of "Slavery or death? Just kidding... It's death." He was merciful, however, in that he let the Seljuks hold on to half their kingdom, which was a better deal than most people got.

Here are two examples of Mongol architecture in Erzurum:


Twin Minaret Medresse, they iconic symbol of Erzurum




Twin Minaret Medresse Interior


The Mongols borrowed a lot from Seljuk Architecture, hence the confusing intimations of pointiness, however, not pointy enough to be true Seljuk. OK, enough with beating the dead pointy horse.

Next Up, Kars! The most depressing city in Anatolia! So awful that the only novel ever written about it is a story of a rash of teenage suicides. Having visited, I have to say I understand why.

Nikolai

Mmmh, lamb... If done right, one of the best meats I ever had (and, as anybody who traveled with me can attest, I know my meats rofl)
Ryan, those pages of yours are awesome! bow

NeilL

Wow what an exciting post! Thank you! I enjoyed the latter sets especially, which have a kind of patina, an inertia of life visible in everything - human time and continuity, despite the turmoils of history - which is strongly sensed. But the uniqueness of Istanbul is unchallengable!

Neil

NeilL

Nikolai wrote: »

Mmmh, lamb... If done right, one of the best meats I ever had (and, as anybody who traveled with me can attest, I know my meats rofl)
Ryan, those pages of yours are awesome! bow

Nik, you haven't lived - and I know what heresy it is to even suggest that *you* might not have - until you have eaten naturally raised Australian spring lamb!

Neil

Justiceiro

Kars
Kars is perhaps the most unloved city in Turkey, particularly by Turks. It is stark, and cold. The etymology of the town's name is uncertain, it could come from the Georgian word kari, meaning gate, or the Turkish word kar, meaning snow. Both would be appropriate, as it is winterbound for most of the year, and is a key strategic chokepoint of northeastern Anatolia.


It's history is long (first mentioned in print around the time of Christ by Strabo, the Greek geographer) and, with few brief respites, almost uninterruptedly violent. It's dominant feature is its citadel, which has been stormed by virtually every nationality to come this way; Armenians, Georgians, Turks, and Russians.


The Citadel squats over the city

With the exception of an Armenian church (this was originally an Armenian city, and for a time the capitol of one fo their warring states) and a few Turkish relics, the main architectural theme of the city is a heritage of the Russians, who occupied this place from 1877 until 1921. The center of the city is like a run down, nightmarish version of a Bohemian Spa town, with late imperial, low slung buildings.

We arrived late at night and went directly to the University, where our Erzerum friends had secured us a room for visiting faculty at the Vetrinary school. Other than the military, the university seems to be the biggest thing going in the town.


View from the balcony of our faculty apartment

We eventually discovered that there is a dolmus that runs from the Vet to the center for about $0.75, but not before paying 10 euros for a taxi to get in. One does not find the friendliness here that one does in the rest of Turkey. Everyone seems to be here for some reason that is unfortunate.

This is probably due to Kars' isolation. The border has been closed almost uninterruptedly since 1945, when Soviet armies threatened a post war invasion of Turkey. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Armenian invasion of Azerbaijan prompted the Turks (for ethnic reasons, as Azeri language and culture is extremely similar) to close the border in 1993, and it has remained shut since. So despite the fact that Kars lies on the high road from Central Asia to the Levant, that road, for the foreseeable future, goes nowhere.

So why come here? Number one, its desolation is interesting. Further, it has a few interesting pre-Turkish monuments of its own, and is the jumping off point for visits to Ani.



It was here that we saw our first ancient Armenian religious structure, the church of the holy apostles. Built in 940 AD by King Abas, it is now a mosque.




view of old Ottoman baths from the Citadel

The Citadel is reachable after a long climb, and affords some very nice views of the surrounding area, but is the stomping ground of kids who will relentlessly follow you, pester you, and beg for money. They become quite sour when not given any. Again, this is the only time in Turkey that I encountered this sort of nastiness.


You can climb around inside most of the abandoned structures, including the old hamams.


Interior of abandoned hamam


All in all, the best things to photograph are down by the citadel, mainly the old Armenian church, the stone bridge, and the castle itself.





Another attraction of Kars is that it has one of the best restaurants in Eastern Turkey, suprisingly, in the Otel Kars, a renovated 19th century Russian mansion. Had I not been at the Veterinary faculty, I likely would have stayed here. Reasonably priced, and it serves alcohol






Getting to Ani

I have the name and phone number of a guy that will drive you to Ani, which isn't handy at the moment, but which I will post later. There is no public transportation to Ani, so a minibus of this type is pretty much your only option. Going to the tourist office is a waste of time, as they speak absolutely nothing but Turkish, and will give you the phone number of the one guy who does this anyway. You can also arrange it from your hotel, but the guide the LP mentions is the cheapest, and the experience was quite pleasant and easy. We hooked up with two other tourists, a journalist from Singaport and his wife, and each couple paid about $35 for a round trip. You can pay more and get a guided tour, but this isn't really necessary. The trip to Ani takes about 2 hours.