Story: Turkey Through The Back Door

TURKEY THROUGH THE BACK DOOR

The scene at the Old Greek House in Mustafapasha, Turkey, is straight out of the Arabian Nights—almost. A belly dancer, hips swaying to the rhythm of drums and tambourines, approaches me as I’m seated cross-legged on the antique-carpeted-floor. My fellow travelers whoop as the dancer reaches out one hand and beckons. A bit unsteady from my two dinnertime glasses of Cappadocian wine, I stand, and with encouragement from the crowd, start wiggling my hips. My partner smiles seductively and dances a circle around me.

A fantasy come true? Not exactly. This particular belly dancer is not an exotic Middle-Eastern temptress, but a 60ish Turk named Ahmed: he’s bald, with bad teeth, and his breath smells suspiciously like raki, the popular Turkish liqueur. His circuit complete, Ahmed wiggles his belly in a goodbye gesture and moves on to his next victim.

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Tell people you’re going to Turkey, and odds are the first thing they’ll ask is “is it safe?” Maybe because most of Turkey’s 75 million inhabitants are Muslim—or maybe because of “Midnight Express”—there is a basic assumption that Turkey is dangerous for Americans and should be given a wide berth.

Personally, I wasn’t worried about safety. I had no intention of trying to bring home any opium as a souvenir, and from what I had read, Turkey seemed safer for tourists than Chicago or New York. No, I was excited about seeing the mosques and palaces of the Ottoman sultans alongside ancient Byzantine churches; about enjoying the spectacular weather and scenery along the Mediterranean coast; about visiting Roman ruins that rival those in Italy.

My bigger worry, frankly, was the amount of time and energy needed to plan the trip. Twenty years ago, no problem: but now, in yet another concession to middle age, I had to admit that I didn’t want to trust to serendipity that I’d find charming hotels, connect with like-minded travelers and make delightful discoveries along the way. I wanted to pay someone else to take care of all of that for me.

Happily, a few minutes on the internet revealed that Europe Through the Back Door, the company owned by PBS travel guru Rick Steves, offered tours of Turkey. I’d used Steves’s guidebooks on several memorable European adventures and had always subscribed to his travel philosophy (see sidebar). So I swallowed any lingering misgivings about taking my first-ever organized tour, sent in my check, and resolved to be open-minded about spending 13 days with a busload of strangers.

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The tour begins in Istanbul. Our first meeting is in the late afternoon in the dining room of the Hotel Obelisk, with its sweeping view of the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus Strait that separates Europe from Asia. We sip tea and nibble on dried apricots as we take turns introducing ourselves and explaining our reasons for coming to Turkey. Our group of 25 ranges in age from Jim and Marilyn, a spry pair in their eighties who are trying something mellower than their typical vacation of scaling mountains; to pediatrician Daniel and his wife Adriana, a 30-something couple from Chicago.

Our guide, Lale Surmen Aran, is an Istanbul native who loves to expose foreigners to Turkey’s history and its people. She leads us on the short walk from the hotel to the Blue Mosque, a graceful combination of domes and minarets that was built in the 1600’s. We enter—the women donning headscarves—and Lale gives a brief introduction to the Muslim faith while all around us worshipers kneel and bow their heads to the floor. From the mosque we stroll to a nearby garden restaurant for our inaugural dinner. As I sample a dolma, I look up into the twilight and watch a pair of seagulls float by silhouetted against the mosque’s minarets, just as the evening air is filled with the muezzin’s haunting call to prayer. Welcome to Turkey.

Over the next couple of days, Lale leads us on a journey through some of the seminal events in world history. When it was known as Constantinople, Istanbul was the capital of the eastern Roman (or Byzantine) empire for more than 1000 years, until the Ottomans captured the city in the 15th century. We spend a morning in the spectacular Hagia Sophia, which was completed in 537 A.D. and remained one of the greatest churches in Christendom until Mehmet the Conqueror converted it to a mosque upon capturing Istanbul in 1453. Later, we visit the nearby Topkapi Palace, the home of the Ottoman sultans for hundreds of years (and the setting of a 1964 thriller starring Peter Ustinov). There we learn what life was really like in a harem, and also hear more than any of the men in the group ever wanted to know about the palace eunuchs.

Istanbul is renowned as a commercial center, and many of us spend our one free afternoon there at the Grand Bazaar, a covered catacomb of thousands of merchants peddling everything from Turkish carpets to Turkish Viagra (a mixture of figs and walnuts, as far as I can tell).

I accompany my tour-mate Rosemary as she shops for kilims (a thinner, less-expensive version of a carpet). We enter a shop and immediately the young proprietor brings us apple tea. I sit and sip while he shows Rosemary a dizzying succession of textiles. He praises those created by hand with natural dyes and with what he describes as love, dismissing those woven by machine and colored with chemical dyes as artless and not worth considering.

Despite the informative presentation, Rosemary does not appear ready to hand over her credit card. Our young host now shifts sales techniques, gazing into Rosemary’s eyes, taking her hand, and asking her to join him for a night she’ll never forget in Istanbul. Never mind that her companion is a few hundred yards away sleeping off his jet lag; and forget the fact that she’s probably twice our new friend’s age; he is gently insistent that he and Rosemary are meant to be together. He persists for awhile until he finally accepts the fact that charm or no charm, Rosemary ain’t buying.

We depart Europe in the late afternoon, boarding a chartered boat for a cruise of the Bosphorus Strait before we disembark on the Asian side of Istanbul, where we will catch an overnight train into the Anatolian heartland to Turkey’s capital, Ankara. As a veteran of many sleepless nights aboard European trains, I have brought sleeping pills, so in the morning I emerge from my couchette well-rested and ready to sightsee. My compadres apparently have had a more difficult time—bleary eyes and complaints about the lurching nature of the ride predominate. We eat breakfast as we roll through a landscape of grassy brown hills reminiscent of Idaho and Eastern Oregon.

Our first destination in Ankara is the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Housed in a beautifully restored 15th-century market building, the collection is an amazing glimpse into ancient human history, from Paleolithic and Neolithic times through the Hittites and Phrygians (of whom Midas was king.) At one point as Lale is describing the one-of-a-kind Bronze Age metal artifacts in the display cases—idols, ear plugs for the dead, frying-pan-shaped water mirrors—her cell phone rings, and she effortlessly travels a couple of thousand years to the present. A few staccato bursts of Turkish, then she hangs up and leaps back into antiquity. The scene strikes me as a perfect microcosm of Turkey.

The other major sight in Ankara is the mausoleum of Ataturk, Turkey’s George Washington. A general in the Ottoman Army, he became a revolutionary when the allies threatened to carve up Anatolia after World War I, and he spearheaded the formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. It was Ataturk who instituted the use of the western alphabet, who insisted on a secular government, who banned polygamy. Though his methods were often violent, he is the most important and popular figure in modern Turkish history. The mausoleum is a celebration of Turkish nationalism, and includes a museum presenting the official spin on modern events.

We spend the next three days in the charming rural region of Cappadocia. Best-known for its strange geologic formations (known as fairy castles) and its ancient Christian churches carved into the porous volcanic rock, Cappadocia is a perfect “back door” travel experience. Our base is the little village of Mustafapasha: there isn’t a hotel big enough to accommodate all of us, and since I am a runner, I am assigned to a pension called Lamia’s (www.lamiapension.com.tr) that is perhaps a mile away from the main hotel. I couldn’t be happier. My room is beautiful. Lamia—an artist as well as a hotelier—has decorated the stone walls with an eclectic mix of photos, paintings and woven wall hangings, and of course the floors are covered with gorgeous Turkish carpets.

In Cappadocia, we visit a carpet manufacturer and also a pottery studio: though Europe Through the Back Door minimizes the shopping stops so predominant on other tours, these are included because of their cultural importance. More to my taste, we have lunch in the home of a local Turkish family, and we also take a memorable morning hike through an ancient canyon of multi-story cliff dwellings that we dub “Fruit Salad Valley” because of the wild grapes, apples, and walnuts that grace the biblical landscape. As a nightcap, we enjoy the aforementioned evening of belly dancing and music with Ahmed.

By now, I am becoming a tour convert. I am learning far more than I would have on my own, I’m enjoying my fellow travelers, and though the days are packed, I’m relaxed thanks to the freedom from logistical responsibilities. Best of all, every day includes a few of the quirky little adventures that make trips memorable, adventures I feared might be lacking on a tour.

The next of these occurs in Guzelyurt, a village whose claim to fame is that its little church-turned-mosque was supposedly the venue for the first Gregorian chant. But to our bus driver Mesut, Guzelyurt’s main attraction is a barbershop he frequents every time he comes to town. Never mind that Mesut is bald: his enthusiasm for the shop is enough to convince my tour-mate Ron to get his hair cut there. I go along to document the procedure. My favorite photo is of Ron breaking out in a sweat as the barber uses a flame to singe Ron’s ear-hair. All ends well, but Ron and I agree that it is probably ill-advised to take haircutting recommendations from a bald man.

The last several days of our trip are primarily spent along the coast. In Antalya, we take a day cruise on the Mediterranean: the weather is perfect, and we dive into the warm water for a leisurely swim to a nearby island, where we can gaze at the mountainous coastline. That evening we enjoy a classical concert in the magnificent Roman amphitheater of Aspendos: for a moment it is easy to imagine we are in ancient Rome, until we realize that all around us, people are speaking German. It turns out that this part of Turkey is a popular vacation spot for northern Europeans.

Southwestern Anatolia is home to many incredible Roman ruins. Ephesus was once the largest city in the empire outside of Rome, and its theater and restored library are justly famous, but Lale also takes us to the lesser-known but just-as-impressive ruins of Afrodisias. Here, free from tour buses and souvenir stands, I take a jog on the floor of the ancient stadium and run my fingers across a sculpture of Aphrodite, the city’s namesake. Another highlight is the nearby hot spring at Pamukkale, where we swim in a warm spring-fed pool littered with fallen marble columns.

On our last night together in Kusadasi, a resort town on the Aegean Sea, we dine at an outdoor café and say our farewells. Many in our group will take the morning ferry to the Greek islands, while others—myself included—will fly back to Istanbul and then home. On the walk back to our hotel, we hear loud music and whoops from a waterfront restaurant—a Turkish wedding party in full swing. By now, we are well-trained Back Door travelers. Without a second thought, we invite ourselves in and start dancing with the locals.