Even Armenian historians disagree on this question. Let us examine some of their intradictory theories while looking into Anatolian history.

1. The Biblical Noah Theory. According to this idea, the Armenians descended from Hayk, great-great grandson of the Biblical patriarch Noah. Since Noah’s Arc is supposed to have come to rest on Mount Ararat, the advocates of this idea conclude that eastern Anatolia must have been the original Armenian homeland, adding that Hayk lived some four hundred years and expanded his dominion as far as Babylon. This claim is based entirely on fables, not on any scientific evidence, and is not worthy of further consideration. The historian Auguste Carriere summarily dismisses it stating that “it depends entirely on information provided by some Armenian historians, most of which was made up.”1

2. The Urartu Theory. Some Armenians claim that they were the people of Urartu, which existed in eastern Anatolia starting about 3000 B.C. until it was defeated and destroyed by the Medes, with its territory being contested for some time by Lydia and the Medes until it finally fell under the influence of the latter. This claim has no basis in fact. No form of the name Armenian is found in any inscription in Anatolia dating from that period, nor was there any milarity at all between the Armenian language and that of Urartu, the former being a member of the Satem group of Indo European languages, while the latter was similar to the Ural-Altaic languages. Nor were there any similarities between their cultures. The most recent archaeological finds in the area of Erzurum support these conclusions very clearly. There is, therefore, absolutely no evidence at all to support the claim that the people of Urartu were Armenian.

3. The Thracian-Phrygian Theory. The theory most favored by Armenian historians claims that they descended from a Thracian-Phrygian group, that originated in the Balkan Peninsula and by the pressure of Illyrians migrated to eastern Anatolia in the sixth century B.C. This theory is based on the fact that the name Armenian was mentioned for the first time in the Behistan inscription of the Mede (Persian) Emperor Darius from the year 521 B.C.,”I defeated the Armenians.” If accepted, of course, this view effectively contradicts and disproves the Noah and Urartu theories.

4. The Southern Caucasus Theory. This idea claims that the Armenians are related racially and culturally to the peoples of the Southern Caucasus and that, therefore, they originated there. It is, however, supported only by the fact that Darius defeated the Armenians in the Caucasus. The Armenians are in no way related to any of the Caucasian races.

5. The Turanian Theory. Some Armenians have adduced similarities of certain elements of the Armenian language and culture with those of some Turkish and Azeri tribes of the Caucasus to document a relationship, but this remains to be proved.

Whichever, if any, of these theories is correct, it is very certain that the Armenians did not originate in Anatolia, nor did they live there for three to four thousand years, as claimed. They have put forward these ideas merely to support their claims that the Turks drove them out of a homeland in which they have lived for thousands of years, but they can not stand up to the facts.

QUESTION 2: DID THE TURKS TAKE THE LANDS OF THE ARMENIANS BY FORCE?

The territory in which the Armenians lived together for a time never was ruled by them as an independent, sovereign state. This territory was ruled by others from the earliest times from which there is evidence that Armenians lived there. From 521 to 344 B.C. it was a province of Persia. From 334 to 215 B.C. it was part of the Macedonian Empire. From 215 to 190 B.C. it was controlled by the Selephkites. From 190 until 220 A.D. it frequently changed hands between the Roman Empire and the Parthians. From 220 until the start of the fifth century it was a Sassanian province, and from then until the seventh century it belonged to Byzantium. From the seventh to the tenth centuries it was controlled by the Arabs. It returned again to Byzantine rule in the tenth century and, finally, it came under the domination of the Turks starting in the eleventh century.

The Armenians living in this territory who remained under the rule of these various empires, could not continuously maintain any sort of independent or unified Armenian state. At the most, a few Armenian noble families dominated certain districts as feudal vassals of the neighboring imperial suzerains, serving as buffers between the powerful empires that surrounded them. Most of these Armenian “principalities” were, thus, simply set up by local Armenian nobles within their own feudal dominions, or by the neighboring empires, who in this way secured their military services against their enemies. The best example of this was the Baghratid family, long brought forward by Armenian nationalist historians as an example of their historic independent existence, which was in fact put in charge of its territory by the Arab Caliphs. Some of the “Armenian” families which assumed the title of principality at this time were, moreover, really Persian rather than Armenian in origin. That they did not constitute any sort of independent nation is shown in the statement of the Armenian historian Kevork Asian:

“The Armenians lived as local notables. They had no feeling of national unity. There were no political bonds or ties among them. Their only attachments were to the neighboring notables. Thus whatever national feelings they had were local. “2

These Armenian principalities existed for centuries under the control of various great empires and states, often changing sides to secure maximum advantage, and thus earning for Armenians often caustic and critical remarks from contemporary historians, as for example the Roman historian Tacitus, who in his Annalium liber wrote:

“The Armenians change their position relating to Rome and the Persian Empire, sometimes supporting one and sometimes the other”, concluding that they are “a strange people.”

It was as a result of these conditions, and then, the Armenians’ lack of unity and strength, their very failure to create a real state, their weakness in relation to their neighbors, the fact that the territory in which they lived was the scene of constant conflict among their more powerful suzerains from all sides, that they often were deported, or moved voluntarily, from the lands where they first lived when they appeared in history. Thus when they fled from the Persians they settled in the area of Kayseri, in Central Anatolia. They were deported by the Sassanians into central Iran, by the Arabs into Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, by the Byzantines into Central Anatolia and to Istanbul, Thrace, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Transylvania and the Crimea. During the Crusades, they went to Cyprus, Crete and Italy. In flight from the Mongols they settled in Kazan and Astrakhan in Central Asia, and, finally, they were subsequently deported by the Russians from the Crimea and the Caucasus into the interior of Russia. As a result of these centuries-long deportations and migrations, then, the Armenians were widely scattered from Sicily to India and from the Crimea to Arabia, thus forming what they call “the Armenian diaspora” centuries before they were deported by the Ottomans in 1915.

The Armenians broke away from the Byzantine church in 451,150 years after they accepted Christianity, leading to long centuries of Armenian-Byzantine clashes which went on until the Turks settled in Anatolia starting in the late 1 lth century, with the Byzantines working to wipe out the Armenians and eliminate the Armenian principalities in order to maintain Greek Orthodoxy throughout their dominions. Contemporary Armenian historians report in great detail how the Byzantines deported Armenians as well as using them against enemy forces in the vanguard of the Byzantine armies. As a result of this, when the Seljuk Turks started flooding into Anatolia starting in the late 11th century, they did not encounter any Armenian principalities; the only force remaining to resist them was that of Byzantium. The Seljuk ruler Alparslan captured the lands of the Armenian Principality of Ani in 1064, but it had previously been brought to an end by the Byzantine in 1045, nineteen years earlier, with Greeks being brought in to replace the Armenians who had been deported. It is therefore false to claim that the Seljuk Turks destroyed any Armenian principality, let alone a state. This already had been done by the Byzantines, and it was in fact the social and economic ferment that resulted which greatly facilitated the subsequent Turkish settlement. Contemporary Armenian historians interpret this Turkish conquest of Anatolia to have constituted their liberation from the long centuries of Byzantine misrule and oppression. The Armenian historian Asoghik thus reports that “Because of the Armenians’ enmity toward Byzantium, they welcomed the Turkish entry into Anatolia and even helped them.” The Armenian historian Mathias of Edessa likewise relates that the Armenians rejoiced and celebrated publicly when the Turks conquered his city, Edessa (today’s Urfa).

An Armenian principality did arise in Cilicia starting in 1080 but it was the result, not of the Turkish settlement in Anatolia, as has been claimed, but, rather, of the Byzantine destruction of the last Armenian principalities in eastern Anatolia, which caused a flood of Armenians fleeing into Cilicia. This principality maintained good relations with the Turks even as it provided assistance to the Crusaders who passed through its territory on their way to the Holy Land, while accepting the suzerainty, first of Byzantium, and then after it declined, of the Crusader Kingdoms, the Mongols, and, finally, the Catholic Lusignan family which gained control of Cyprus. This sort of relationship with “unbelievers”, however, displeased the Gregorian Armenian church, with the resulting internal divisions playing a significant role in the Principality’s conquest by the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt in 1375. In the end, the most significant consequence of this last Armenian principality was the establishment of a separate Armenian church from the one centered at Echmiadzin, which added to the internal divisions within Armenian Orthodoxy which remain important to the present day.

Thus when eastern Anatolia was conquered by Fatih Mehmet II and Yavuz Sultan Selim I, it was taken from the White Sheep Turkomans and from the Safavids of Iran, who had occupied it after the Byzantines had retired; while Yavuz Selim took Cilicia from the Mamluks. In no case, therefore, did the Ottoman Turks conquer or occupy an existing Armenian state or principality. In every case, these Armenians had previously been conquered by peoples other than the Turks.

¹ CARRIERE, Auguste, Moise de Khoren et la Généalogie Patriarcale, Paris, 1896

² ASLAN, Kevork, L’Arménie et les Arméniens, Istanbul, 1914.

Source: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/data/DISPOLITIKA/ErmeniIddialari/ArmenianClaimsandHistoricalFacts.pdf

The problem seems to be that they had automatic ticket-taking machines like the ones that work well in Japan. These don’t work quite so well since they required a human to show people how to feed the ticket in and then remind the user to pick up the stub.

Our plane that was supposed to take off at 1am was still loading at that time. About 1:15 we had a Lufthansa innovation, the safety talk was done with computer animation to make it look like a puppet show. That way it is not surprising that the figure is smiling when he puts on an oxygen mask. A puppet cannot do anything else. It always looked unrealistic when a human put on one of those masks. It always looked unrealistic to have a happy smiling human slip on an oxygen mask to narrowly avoid death. Of course I am joking. We all know nothing can go wrong on one of these planes. But I would have felt better if they had not lost the picture on their safety tape.

The tape concluded we are now ready to take off. But 30 minutes later the plane still had not. I slept. I did feel the takeoff, but my eyes were closed. The plane was taking off about 45 minutes late. I slept another half hour but woke up when they started handing out beverages and “a snack” if you can call a half ounce of mini-pretzels a snack. I had an orange juice, no ice.

The dinner seemed slow in coming, but it was certainly better than what is usually considered airplane food. There was a salad with a nice piece of smoked salmon; the bread had sweet butter; then there was chicken on macaroni in tomato sauce, but it was longer spirals of macaroni. For desert there was a piece of cherry cake and some cheese and crackers. Everything was made fairly well.

Well, after dinner I got maybe a couple of hours of sleep. I woke up in time to see the last ten minutes of the in flight movie, The Rainmaker. I had seen it once already, but it has a fairly rousing conclusion from the moment that Roy Scheider is on the stand. The one problem with the story is that is awfully similar to Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. It basically is the same defense of lawyers. I don’t necessarily like a lot of what goes on in the legal profession, but there are some good films that defend lawyers, starting with Inherit the Wind.

We are now over Cork in Southern Ireland according to the map they put up. Another hour and we land in Frankfurt. I am looking forward to Istanbul with a mixture of three parts excitement to one part dread. It will be a challenge. We have to do things like find a hotel in a country where we do not know the language. I take that back. It will become three parts excitement to one part dread. Right now it is three parts dread to one part excitement. But that will change. Most people don’t travel because there is too much dread and not enough excitement. But as I tell Evelyn, any place you don’s see by the time you die, you never get another chance. I have some idea of the variation of thought patterns that Americans are capable of, but not that humans are capable of.

Evelyn is sleeping on my shoulder and I try to type in the half-light without disturbing her.

They come around with breakfast. It is choice of a Danish or what sounds like a cappicola sandwich. More for health than for cowardice I take the Danish. We have passed over London and are now crossing from Dover to Calais.

I am also wondering if we are going to be able to travel like this in two years. I usually do not believe in Doomsday prophecies. I am betting that the Year 2000 computer problem will be bigger than most people think. There is only a relatively small part of the population guessing how serious it will be. I am just not hearing experts looking at the situation and coming away skeptical. There are lots of technical people concerned, there are a few trying to tell the general public, and the public is ignoring the threat. Well people were frightened of atomic war and it has not happened. People feel safe. The difference is that we did not have an atomic war scheduled for a specific date and time.

We landed in Frankfurt at 8:39. Evelyn and I both found we were nodding off toward the end of the flight. It is actually a fairly short walk to our outgoing gate with no security checks. Another nice touch is a selection of international newspapers you enter each plane. I got a copy of the Herald Tribune. It seems to be a collection of the international news from the New York Times and the Washington Post. I look at the price. For the US Military in Europe it casts $1.20. It cost 300,000 Turkish Lira. Yup, that confirms what I had heard. A quarter million Turkish Lira to the dollar. Turks get used to large numbers early in life, I think.

Well, there is the call for our plane. We are to go downstairs and board a bus. I wonder where the plane is. I didn’t choose airfare to ride a bus, of course. Had I wanted to ride a bus, I would have taken the bus from Newark to Istanbul. The German voices are so pleasant, even in German. I wonder why they are played so nasty in those old war films. “Ladies and gentlemen, please proceed around to the front of the machine guns.” I wonder what it must be like that in all the good adventure films, like The Guns of Navarone, your countrymen are the bad guys.

On the plane we met a nice couple who were going to Turkey on an Elderhostel tour. We talked to them about places they were going this trip and places we had been.

It is funny. I can remember when I was in elementary school I knew I was going in for science and especially math. The teacher would show us slides of her trip to France and I would be bored. I wasn’t the traveler type. There was more fascination in what life was like in a drop of water than in France. I little suspected I would grow up with this hobby of travel and telling others about what I saw. I would probably go to far more countries than my teacher would. But not France so far. When we are old and tired we will go the easy places like France. First it has to be places like the Amazon and Turkey and India. Travel writing came as a complete shock to me. What happened there was when I worked for Burroughs and got a job offer from Bell Labs, Burroughs sent me to see if there was work I would have liked to do in Pennsylvania where Burroughs had some labs. My supervisor wanted me to report certain things from the meetings. Evelyn wanted to know other things. In order not to have to explain three different accounts of my trip, I wrote just one comprehensive account for myself and gave copies to other people telling them to pull out what was relevant to them. It struck me that account was a nice souvenir of the trip so I did it for other trips. But it was mostly for me. A friend was going to Britain, where I had been, and wanted to know what I had enjoyed seeing there. I gave her this illegible trip log and told her it would not all be of interest, but if she skimmed it she would find the parts that answered her question. She read it cover to cover and gave it to her husband to read cover to cover. It never had occurred to me that for anyone who had not traveled with me there would be much interest at all. But I started circulating my logs to friends and family. Big steps forward were the addition of an HP 200LX that allowed me to type the log as I went and Usenet and the Internet to make the logs available. The 200LX do a lot more for me than that. It keeps track of the sites we will be seeing; it tracks time past. I have programs for the phase of the moon and when sunset is. It is an amazingly useful tool.

Evelyn is sleeping and I just took the first picture of the trip, the ground from the plane.

I am a little afraid of what I put in this log since the Turkish government strikes me as being sensitive to criticism. And I am a guest in their country.

Lunch, which was at about 10:50am was a salad of ham slices, cottage cheese, and a cherry tomato; an omelet with mushrooms and a little potato pancake, German yogurt with an American flag decoration. It said “Fruit guaranteed to be from the US;” and something called “raspberry extra jam” on a croissant. Not quite as high a quality as dinner last night. The yogurt was some unidentified fruit and seemed to have nuts.

I slept more after lunch and we landed about 12:35. Now I had been expecting that anything to do with the Turkish government would be officious and very suspicious of strangers. I had considered not bringing my vitamin C because I could end in a drug hassle if I could not prove it was just vitamins. I went to the trouble of encrypting files in my palmtop about Turkish politics so that if they were examined nobody would see that I was carrying opinions against the Turks. So here it came. First there was buying a visa. The piece had gone up to $45, but otherwise no hassle. The man in line stamped my passport. Then to the area where we pick up luggage, except of course we carry all of our luggage. Here it comes, the inspection. A few people had to open suitcases but nobody bothered with us. Perhaps we have honest faces, but I would have thought the backpacks would have made us look suspicious. For whatever reason, Turkish security was hassle-free. We got out and changed some money and got a taxi for the hotel. We asked to be taken to the Berk Guesthouse. The driver said that he knew where it was but called it the Berak Guesthouse. The driver tried to tell us that if we did not have a reservation we were not going to find a room unless we let him find a place. “Every place you go. Full! Full! Full!” We were unconvinced, and it turned out rightly so. There is a season like that in summer, but not the spring. My mother didn’t raise no children who were foolish enough to believe taxi drivers.

Driving we passed a lot of remnants of old Hippodrome wall preserved, with a fence around them to protect them. The Hippodrome was an old Roman racetrack and if you saw Ben Hur you know those old Romans took horse racing seriously. Turkey is a place aware of its past. You see also minarets all over, but they all look pretty much the same. Minarets have a uniform design in Istanbul. They look like pencils with balconies that all look much alike.

Evelyn mentioned to me that I should not call this an Islamic country. Yet as we drove it is clear that there must be something along those lines that should be said. There are two kinds of country you can visit. There are religious countries where the government is brought to you by the same fine folks who bring you the religion. There are secular counties where the government has nothing whatever to do with religion. Of the religious countries there are two types. The religious leaders can be the same as the government leaders, but so what? England is that way. Supposedly the queen is the head of the Church of England. Iran is the other type: “Our political leaders are all of our religion and by the way, Mr. Visitor, you are really supposed to be that religion also.” Secular countries also have two types. One says something like he US says: “We are all kinds of different religions and none control the government, even if we do shut down on December 25.” Then there is the one that says “We are all pretty much the same religion, but we try not to let that affect our government.” That last is Turkey. The vast majority of the country is Islamic. In that sense it is an Islamic country. But the government does not check the Koran to find out how to govern. The Turkish police do not enforce the Koran. Catch me if I say this is an Islamic country. I mean that by majority demographics.

The taxi driver played on his radio American rock. I don’t know if he liked it or if he thought we would. Most of the music you here on the radio here has an Arabic sound.

We got to the Berak Guesthouse and discovered it was almost the same name, but definitely the wrong place. We had to hassle and show him the name on paper. He had never heard of it. But we discovered it was just about a block or two away. We had pronounced it like burr with a “k” at the end. He pronounced it like bear with a “k” at the end. The reason for the coincidence that they were so close is that if you stay near the major tourist attractions you stay in a relatively small area called Sultanamaht after the Sultan who built the Blue Mosque.

So after the little confusion about the name we got to the Berk. I went up to see the room. I never really know what to look for in a room, particularly in a new country. It is never easy for the traveler to know if his hotel room is a good deal or not. In Tokyo we got a really good deal on a room that was about $90 a night and was about big enough that we could spread two pads on the floor for us to sleep on and no private plumbing. On our Southeast trip $55 was really overpriced for a room with two beds and cable TV with remote, a radio, and really good plumbing with free shampoo. By US standards the room here is pretty Spartan for $50 a night. One bed, a chair, a sink, a private bathroom, but with plumbing so primitive that you throw out rather than flush toilet paper. (I knew some places had the toilet paper deal, but this is the first I visited and it is hard to get used to.) I think travel is definitely worth the expense and with the exception of airfare can be done cheaply even to places like Japan. But it also reminds me again and again that in the late 20th century life in America for most people is incredibly comfortable. Our slums are incredibly luxurious compared to how most people in the world lived 100 years ago. I guess it is a matter of what you get used to.

We left our luggage in the room and went out to scout the area. One reason the hotels are so expensive and all together in one group is we are right near the Blue Mosque and Saint Sophia. We stopped at a corner shop for a cool drink. There is easily available Coke and Doritos. We got a local drink at 150,000TL (sixty cents). It turned out to be cherry drink. The brand name is Cappy (but it is really Coca-Cola) and it tastes really good, like liquid cherry pie filling. Prices, incidentally, are quoted in thousands. The woman in the shop said the price was “150″ and that was what the can was what was written under the can in the cooler.

Near the mosques there are a lot of touts hanging around, who are medium aggressive. They come up to you and try to get you to come to their shop or try to sell you postcards, but they do take no for an answer. There are not as many as there were in India and they are mostly just near the really touristy areas. Also if you appear to be lost locals passing will without being asked stop and try to help you.

A lot of things you see are in a blue and green color scheme. Those were the colors of two political parties and they are sort of the unofficial colors of the country, though the flag is red and white.

What can I say about the city? This is the city of the “once-beautiful.” Buildings are of nice design but are not well maintained. Buildings that in many different eras were new and nice-looking are giving way to the ravages of time. Houses are much the same. We walked around and could have gone in the mosques, but I preferred to get caught up on my log before we did too much. So we headed back to the room, stopping at the corner store to get bottled water for the room. We got a big 1.5 liter bottle and a half liter bottle. It cost 200,000TL, (I will use “TL” as “Turkish Lira”) well under a dollar. Evelyn had just had her small bills present but had stuffed them in a pocket and could not find them. The woman behind the counter suggested we just pay her tomorrow. We almost took her up on her credit offer, but we found the small change. The woman probably figures that if American came this far, they are honest. She also generated good will. I will probably pick that store first for buying snacks.

I told myself I wanted to read up first. I did not actually do that, though I did make up some flashcards to get some of the language down.

Evelyn fell asleep and I worked on my log. I wrote a program on my palmtop to act like flashcards, but it was not as good as the real thing. I also scouted the bands on my short-wave but found little of interest though I did find the BBC.

About 7:15 we went out and found a restaurant. For about 2 million we each had a dish and a yogurt drink call Ayran. My dish was kiremit shish. It was called claypot chicken and cheese. It really was chicken pizza without the crust. Evelyn had yogurtlu kebap. That is lamb over yogurt drenched bread.

There are really three parts to Istanbul: Stamboul, Bayoglu, and Uskudar. Take a postcard sized piece of paper and draw in the two diagonals. You have four triangles coming together at the center. The lowest triangle is the Sea of Marmara. Continuing clockwise you have Stamboul, Bayoglu, and Uskudar. Separating Stamboul from Bayoglu is the Golden Horn, a long narrow bay and a port. Between Bayoglu and Uskudar is the Bosphorus. The palace and the great mosques are in Sultanahmet, the region toward the point of Stamboul. It is there we are staying and that is really the tourist section of Istanbul.

Going back to the room we crashed. Slept through most of the evening. At midnight I woke up and worked on my log, but then went to sleep officially. This is a noisy neighborhood.

Rain today. I expect it will rain most of our days in Istanbul. We cannot let that stop us. Our first stop is the Archeological Museum. As it suggests, it is art from the various civilizations that have lived in what is now Turkey. Now most of us would expect to find the name of Heinrich Schliemann around the museum. Nope. Not even a reference that I could see. That actually makes sense for multiple reasons. First of all, in the eyes of the Turks, Schliemann is a thief. He found archeological treasures and smuggled them out of Turkey. Further what did he find? The remains of Troy. (Actually he found the remains of an older civilization, going right past Troy. But why is Troy important? It was made famous in a poem by a Greek. The Greeks are a nasty vicious people, as any Turk knows. Troy? Who cares about Troy?

As you enter you see the chunky god Bes seated on a horse at the door. Because it is all done in sort of a cubist style, it is hard to actually find the horse. Bes’s hair seems very curly. There is a sarcophagus with men and horses in a boar hunt, on the ends there are some nice sphinxes on one side and dragons on the other. Very nice. A sarcophagus on the other side features some very realistic battle scenes. Evelyn points out that while the painting was primitive 500 BC, the sculpture was very advanced and realistic. Much of the art is what we would think of as Greek.

It was strange to see statues of women wearing hoods, but the hoods were empty. It was as if we were seeing statues of the invisible woman. Apparently sculptors would do heads separately and then put them into the statue. That way a sculptor could change a statue of one woman into one of another fairly quickly. Another piece was a bust of a head with snap in noses.

The museum uses Turkish and English equally. Wherever something is written in Turkish it is also in English. Most places we have been are not so accommodating. Japan was not. Sweden was not. I think the Turks assume that few visitors will come knowing Turkish.

There was on allusion to the Trojan War. There was a children’s room with a nice Trojan Horse that children could climb up into. Of course Homer does not talk about the horse. I believe that story came from Vergil who was Roman, not Greek. The route you follow takes you past artifacts following the history through the 15th Century. Perhaps there would have been more, but much of the museum was closed off. Particularly of interest was the exhibit on the St. Sophia, when it was built, repaired, etc. We would be seeing the mosque just a little later today. There is a nice painting of the harbor in the 15th Century including the chain that blocked the harbor. A length of the original chain is there also. I cannot tell if so much of the museum is always closed or if it is just early on a Sunday morning, though Sunday would not be a special day.

There had been a nice piece on the building of the Saint Sophia Mosque. From the museum we went to the actual St. Sophia. Shortly before coming we re-watched Topkapi, but the night before coming we watched From Russia with Love which has an extended segment in the St. Sophia Mosque also called the Hagia Sophia. Luck of Leeper says that we would see the Hagia Sophia on a rainy day. I would imagine it would look entirely differently with the sun streaming in. Instead it is a dark man-made cavern built in 548. It was fairly crowded now and this is not yet the tourist season. Luck of Leeper also says that there would be scaffolding under much of the great dome. The scaffolding itself is something of a marvel. It goes right up to the great dome covering the center and a little more than a quarter of the circle. You see gold-leafed mosaics, but through most of the cathedral they have been painted over. Human figures are blasphemous.

The site had been the location of Byzantium’s Acropolis. The Emperor Constantine wanted it to rival the architecture of Rome. An earlier Sancta Sophia had been built on the same site but destroyed in 532 by riots. This one was completed in 548 and was the greatest church in Christendom until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

The mosque has much decoration in Christian style, most of which is covered up with Islamic decoration. Islamic art is generally non-representational and there are geometric designs and quotes from the Koran on what looks like shields that are stories high.

To get to the upper balcony, which in the Christian days was where the women went, there is a ramp corkscrews up. It is worth the climb to get a closer view of ceiling. There are a lot of groups there now and it is quite crowded climbing, it will be worse in the tourist season, which this is not.

It is nice having all this just a few blocks from the room. After the mosque we went back to room to get water and to write in the logs. From there we went to lunch.

There is a street with restaurants called Divan Yolu. We picked a restaurant, Meshhur Halk Koftecisi Selim Usta that looked good. Something about the restaurant reminded me of a White Tower hamburger restaurant. We ordered Shish Kabap ($2.40) and Kofte ($1.80), we shared a bean salad, and I got a Coke. The portions were small, but sufficient. We put the salad in the middle of the table and both tried to eat it. I don’t know exactly what was wrong with the salad or the fork or perhaps the land had a subsidence, but the salad kept falling off the fork before it got to our mouths. It was quite embarrassing. Here we came to Turkey as ambassadors of good will and instead we were just being messy eaters. At least we did not vomit on anyone. Honest.

From here we went to the Blue Mosque. It is much nicer looking than the other mosque. Outside it is about the same but the interior is far nicer. Sultan Ahmet built it in the early 1600s to rival the St. Sophia. It is not actually blue but has blue stained glass windows.

After the Blue Mosque we continued down the street looking at some other sights culminating in an outdoor market. We walked through looking at goods. We were beyond the areas where the tourists usually go. From there we decided to walk back by a different route and managed only to get ourselves gloriously lost. We wandered around looking at shops and walking. Among the things that are not built to last very well are the sidewalks. In some cases they just put hard tiles on top of dirt banks. Many places the sidewalks are all broken up and pretty messy to walk on. We spent what must have been a couple hours wandering the streets. We began to get clues that we were back in the tourist area. We were pestered by touts trying to get our patronage. Our Odyssey was worth the effort, but our shoes were muddy and we were tired. Finally we found the way to the Hippodrome and from there back to the room.

I worked on my log some more and took another go at my flashcards in the hopes that more would stick. I think that as I get older my memory is not as good. I know the words for an hour or so than they just go away… Well, some of them. More stick each time but then they just fade. It is like writing them on a steamy mirror. It just steams up again.

For dinner we went back to the area near the mosques and Divan Yolu. We picked a restaurant and liked it. The waiter was a Kurd and wanted to know if we had ever heard of Kurds. We said some superficial things about how they lived in the East and had a hard time. I was not sure how touchy a subject it was. I did not go into detail about having second thoughts about coming to Turkey because of the treatment of the Kurds. In any case we had a reasonable dinner, again for about $4 apiece. We are getting much the same sort of things each meal, grilled meat.

We headed back to the room after dinner. Well, there may be more to do in Istanbul, but we haven’t really found it. There was a woman behind the desk at the guesthouse. “Yirmi-iki,” I requested. She handed me the key for 22. “It worked!” I said to Evelyn. The woman grinned. “T’shekurlar” I said to the woman. “You’re welcome.” I am getting a little Turkish. It does not take much. I guess there is the belief that the Turks are and aggressive and unfriendly people. They have a reputation as troublemakers. Well, much of our culture came from Greece. The Turks might actually be among the nicest people in the Middle East. Frankly, if they wanted that title there would be very little competition. Even the Israelis whom I agree with politically I all too often find are pushy and rude.

We tried listening to the short wave. I got a program I really did not understand. It sounded like a strange language lesson. It sounded like a woman was trying to seduce a man with provocative language and then the same thing was said in a foreign language. Was this some strange ploy to make language lessons more interesting? I did not recognize the foreign language, but were they trying to teach people how to make love to a woman in their language? Fascinated I listened on. The announcer came back on, talking in the foreign language. Finally the mystery was cleared up. He said something about Def Lepard. Then played a song with the exact lyrics of the phrases I had heard. They were explaining what the song lyric meant for their listeners who did not know English.

Well, it is almost 11:30 and I am caught up on my log. Tomorrow begins another day. Evelyn has pulled out an article about Jews in Turkey. There are about 20,000 Jews living in Istanbul and who have lived here since they were thrown out of Spain in 1492. Turkey has one of the longest histories of tolerance for Jews. Of course Turkey is all tied up in one of the strangest stories of Jewish history.

It occurred in the 1660s when a demagogue arose from the Turkish Jewish community and had perhaps half of the Jews in the world at that time believing he was the Messiah. The man was Shabbatai Tzevi, a rabbi from Smyrna, what is today Izmir. He was born in 1626 of a wealthy merchant family and early on showed a fascination in religion and particularly mysticism. A bright student, he studied to be a rabbi and became one as a young man, but he also suffered from violent mood swings. Today we would probably call him a manic-depressive, but at the time he thought he was possessed by demons. His behavior became erratic and increasingly strange. He performed a marriage ceremony on himself marrying the Torah. And he claimed he could levitate. He ate non-Kosher food, and he feasted on fast days. Tzevi declared that he was the Messiah but, not surprisingly, could summon few followers. Finally his behavior became an embarrassment and the Jewish community asked him to leave. He wandered the Middle East, being expelled from Salonika and Constantinople.

Traveling to Jerusalem, he heard of another young holy man, Nathan of Gaza, whom Tzevi thought could exorcise the demons that he still at times believed possessed him. Tzevi sought out Nathan and asked to be helped in 1665. Nathan, however, interpreted Tzevi’s presence in a different way. It had been prophesied that the Messiah would come out of a period of great tribulation to the Jews. In fact this was such a period, as just fifteen years before had been one of the great pre-20th-Century holocausts for Jews. The Chmielnitzki Massacre was a furious holocaust in which Cossack troops in Russia and Poland had murdered over 100,000 Jews (out of a world population of about 1,500,000) in the most brutal and painful ways imaginable. Nathan had been expecting a Messiah to arise at this time, and Tzevi seemed to fit the prophesied description. He responded that not only was Tzevi not possessed by demons, but that Tzevi’s occasional beliefs in his own divinity was, in fact, accurate. The two began traveling together proclaiming that Shabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah at last arrived. And where they could not travel, Nathan’s writings proclaiming the Messiah could go. Tzevi’s weird interpretations of Jewish law became what many people took to be commandments from God. Tzevi declared that he would throw the Turks out of Palestine and that the Jews would return there. Tens of thousands of Jews were electrified by his message, particularly after the recent massacres. Jewish communities were split into Shabbateans and non-Shabbateans who violently disagreed with each other. Generally the Shabbateans were the less educated who mistrusted the more intellectual Jews of the community. Rabbis who opposed the new movement might find their houses burned to the ground by mobs of Shabbatean zealots.

In 1666 Tzevi, with many of his followers, sailed for Constantinople to demand from the Sultan the return of Palestine to the Jews. If the Sultan refused Tzevi claimed he would have the Sultan deposed. En route he was arrested and imprisoned at Gallipoli. Through bribery he was allowed visitors in the thousands of loyal followers. Meanwhile Nathan continued to travel and write spreading the word of this new supposed Messiah in imprisonment. Eventually the Sultan decided that even in imprisonment Tzevi was still dangerous and presented an ultimatum. Tzevi could be tortured to death or he could embrace Islam. Tzevi chose conversion and took the name Aziz Mehmed Effendi. The ever-loyal Nathan declared to the world that Tzevi had already given his message to the Jews and had converted in order to spread his message through Islam. This too, he claimed, could be foreseen in the prophecy.

Tens of thousands of Jews were bitterly disappointed in their hoped-for Messiah. To have this hope destroyed so soon after the Polish and Russian massacres was a bitter pill to swallow. Some Shabbateans converted to Islam themselves, others insisted that they should remain Jewish and that only their leader should be Moslem. Tzevi lived another ten years, dying at 50. Nathan of Gaza continued to proselytize for the man he believed to be a Messiah and survived Tzevi by four years. What was essentially a new religion survived into this century. Nazis exterminated a community of Greek Shabbateans in 1943. There is still a Shabbatean community in Mashhad, Iran.

Evelyn has asked me to point out that back when I was in the 6th grade my parents complained I was not studious enough. I would like to think that they have changed their minds, but I don’t know for sure.

Today we go to the Topkapi Palace. I guess now I really am talking Turkey. This is the best known site in the country. Of course it was helped a great deal by the film TOPKAPI about the theft of an emerald-encrusted dagger. It is not clear to me why anybody would make an emerald encrusted dagger. The point of a dagger is to protect you. If you have an emerald encrusted dagger you need to protect yourself. And you need to do it with something a good deal more protective than a dagger. This is like making a fly swatter, encrusting it with sugar and dipping it in honey. Who thinks of these things?

The bathroom in our room is full of instruction. “Please put all paper & sanitary waste into the box ONLY.” “ATTENTION! Shower drain is slow. Please TURN OFF the taps when you do not ACTUALLY use the water. Otherwise room may get FLOODED.” Well, I guess it is part of the price of travel. I have seen some strange plumbing but this is the first toilet I have had to use that could not handle paper. Somehow I think a person’s used toilet paper should be a matter for privacy. This is one of the bathrooms of the style that the whole floor is a drain. Usually this means that there is a thick barrier to protect the outer room from getting wet. Not so here. You just have to take a short shower. And afterwards you don’t want to come in with stocking feet.

We went down to breakfast. There are three circular tables, each about a yard in diameter. Each had at least one person and one had a couple. We had to ask to sit at a table already partially occupied. Not really a problem, I suppose. Not compared to the toilet paper situation. CNN was running a piece on finger pumps. These are apparently things you put on the backs of your fingers in order to give your fingers more exercise. I was a little sorry to see this on CNN’s International News. I mean we Americans know how bad the thing that passes for news is, but I hate to see it advertised abroad. I wish we could get BBC news in the US. Few countries have such fatuous stuff as their news. Of course the younger generation is becoming insular. If they watch CNN day and night they would still not know much of what was going on in other countries. Finger pumps are not the most edifying stuff.

After breakfast we headed off to our one and only site of the day, the Topkapi (TOAP-kap-ah) Palace. This was the combination White House and Capitol for almost 300 years. Sultans ruled Turkey from this exquisite palace among palaces. In 1453 Mehmet the Conqueror took Constantinople and made it his capitol. He built this place and lived there until his death. For about 386 years it remained where the Turkish were ruled. The first Sultan was Mehmet II and the last was Mahmut II.

Once again we were saved from the ravages of coming in season. There was just a huge mob coming to the palace, but not as bad as it would be in the summer. In the summer there would be hordes or legions. They have you go through a security check just to get in. I was a veritable pile of metallic objects, and as I expected the alarm went off as I went through the metal detector. I waited to be told to stop or to be asked my name or something. Nobody cared. I guess they just like to know if people are entering with metal on their person like a camera or a stray hand grenade.

There is a separate admission for harem. It costs a million to get into the palace and an extra half million to see the harem. I guess sex sells.

There are lots of cats wandering the palace and a few dogs. The cats are considered a very nice animal in Islamic countries and they are well treated. A dog is thought of as being just a sort of large friendly rat by many. When we were out walking yesterday we saw a girl scream at something she saw. It was a dog walking toward her. To avoid her the dog turned toward a sidewalk only to see us standing there and did not want to come near us so brushed past the girl and ran up the street. The poor dog was only trying to be inoffensive and get out of the situation without coming near to anyone. Humans clearly had not treated her very well in the past. If the girl had panicked it would have been considered the dog’s fault.

Outside the palace the entry point is the Court of the Janissaries. It was there that they would eat. Janissaries are professional soldiers stolen/drafted at age ten. They were rounded up from Christian families and became the personal property of the Sultan in a private army. Most soldiers were soldiers only in the summer months, but Janissaries spent the whole year training and/or fighting. The boys would learn Turkish and Islam. These were the real muscle of the Sultan. They were a force 12,000 strong under Mehmet II, and they grew to about 20,000. Eventually celibacy was no longer required and this led to nepotism and corruption. If they turned against the Sultan they would overturn the cauldrons of their food. When the Sultan saw this happen he knew he had just hours to live. Mehmut II finally ended the system of Janissaries by first fielding a European style army, then provoked a revolt among the Janissaries reorganizing them without their permission. They revolted and he then had the army come in and destroy the Janissaries.

Inside the entrance is a broad tree-decorated grounds. The trees look Mediterranean to me, but I am no expert on trees. We had tickets for the first tour of the harem and waited for it to open.

Now you cannot walk through at your own pace. You can get in only with a guided tour in Turkish or in English. There are signs telling you what everything is, but the guides whisk you past them preferring to explain to you what everything is in their Turkish accented English. This means there is no good way to tell what anything is. I suspect the guides are hired for their knowledge of English and nobody tests their diction.

The West has romanticized the institution of harems. I think that in our imagination the appeal is really a return of a sort of infancy. When one is an infant one is cared for, fed, and pampered with little responsibility except to perform natural bodily functions. One has no freedom, but then it is not needed since the baby can get most of what it really needs. As one becomes an adult a new bodily function is added, that of sexuality. But it is not unwelcome. The harem girl returns to a sort of simplistic infancy. The harem girl gets all she needs in return for doing what is natural to her. So was Picasso. But then so is a cow.

I can’t say I learned a lot about the harem since when our guide said what sounded like “Italian court,” it was really “imperial hall.” The harem quarters did not look very comfortable though one did have some curiosity as to what they were like. One really could have a contest like the one in the joke where first prize was a night in the harem quarters and second prize was two nights in the harem quarters.

But lest you think the harem quarters were too uncomfortable I will add that they were not at the time. After the harem we saw the carriages of the Sultan and Evelyn said they did not look comfortable. In fact they had the supreme comfort feature of that time or any time. They had windows the passenger could look out and see people less comfortable. That has always made people feel comfortable. There are certainly a lot of people who are living lives of luxury by previous centuries’ standards yet who think they are uncomfortable. The reason is that they are not seeing anyone less comfortable.

As we were walking we passed a white rabbit. Honest. I told Evelyn that I didn’t want her following the rabbit. She promised she would not follow it down a rabbit hole. I told her I didn’t want to see her become the Alice of the Palace. (It is a film allusion.)

We continued on to the third court in the palace. Now we were getting to some of the serious stuff. In one pavilion we see the Sultan’s throne. It seems to be made with a smidge more room in the seat for the Sultan who never gets out of the palace and has had a few too many sweets.

Another room has kaftans worn by the Sultan and some of his major ministers. Many are of rich color, either bright or deep like purple. Then we move on to jewels. Objects functional and objects abstract. Many have the symbols of different countries that they would have had at home. There would be Russian Tsarist stars with double-headed eagles, from England they have a cross in red, the jewels from the US spell out “Mazel Tov, Sydney and Bernice” in diamonds. (I was kidding about that last part. Sidney and Bernice would never let their stuff be given to a Sultan.)

Finally we got to the main event. Here it comes movie fans and jewel thieves, the emerald encrusted dagger of Mahmud I. It was a gift from him to someone else, Nadir Shah. Nadir gave Mahmud I a gold throne. So it was a happy exchange except that somehow Nadir Shah ended up dead and Mahmud ended up with both the throne and the dagger. Surprise! Okay, for those who have seen the movie and want to try getting the dagger, here is your update. It is no longer on the Sultan dummy. It is behind glass in the wall. But it is not all bad news. The good news it that it is in an outside wall. And there is something else that I noticed that I am not mentioning here. I will exchange what I noticed for just one of the large emeralds. Take it from me it is a bargain. But I need positive assurances that I will get the emerald or I will say nothing. Look, if I had experience with this sort of thing I wouldn’t need you. One crummy inch-long emerald is not a lot to ask.

We stopped for lunch, which we had at the little restaurant in the palace. It was about what you would expect from a museum restaurant. The lines were long; the food was expensive, at least by local standards. It was cold by the time we could get through line. Still it did not taste too bad and we got a table with a nice view of the Golden Horn, the harbor. We shared a chicken sandwich, a donner kabap, I had a tamarind drink (very nice), Evelyn had apple tea, and we shared rice pudding. One of the rooms that follow has relics of John the Baptist, including hairs from his beard. Right. In this room there is a booth in the corner with a man constantly reading from the Koran.

Then there is the room with relics of Muhammad the Prophet. They have hair from his beard, a letter he wrote, a tooth in a box, casket for his mantle, his bow, and his sword. I am convinced this is an expensive and extensive set of relics. How many of them are really authentic I am less than sure.

Continuing on there is an arms exhibit. Well, every history museum has one, I think. There were arrows, and armor, and swords. Particularly notable was the armor, which was much more practical than European armor. Instead of a whole metal breast that was inflexible they linked overlapping plates like the tail of a lobster. Their helmets came to a point on top and had sides protected by chain mail. I am not sure if the point had a functional purpose or not. Maybe it just made them easier to identify on the battlefield. They had an executioner’s sword in a hinged case. There was a two-handed European sword that looked to be about six feet long. It is hard to imagine that being a very effective weapon. It just seemed too darn big to wield. It was not a big exhibit, but it was certainly of interest. There is something about arms that defines the times a lot better than furniture or clothing or just about anything else. I guess weapons change faster and somehow you can understand the purpose better.

Another building has more relics of Muhammed the Prophet. There are actual footprints edged in stone where the Prophet Muhammed stood. One was from his left foot, one from his right. The faithful are not supposed to notice that his two feet were of very different sizes. I have to say I am not sure why they put both in the same case since it is just inviting skepticism.

Of course Islam is not alone in discouraging a skeptical analysis of religious materials. People all over the world claim to have seen the Virgin Mary. It would take just the barest modicum of curiosity to get these witnesses together with police sketch artists, one at a time to confirm that they really are seeing the same miraculous woman appear to all of them. It certainly would go a long way proving that they actually are all seeing the Virgin Mary. The only reason they are not is probably a lack of faith on the part of the investigating Church officials. They see all these sightings as an aid to faith but they suspect that these sightings are all useful hallucinations.

We pass the Baghdad Kiosk intended to commemorate a military victory. There are some nice domed rooms that overlook the city. There is the home of the Sultan’s Physician. It was a position re-appointed when one physician retired. The sources I have seen contradict each other on whether non-Jews ever held the position. It is either rarely or never. Apparently the Sultans just did not trust a doctor who was not Jewish. The Sultan in 1492, Bayezit II I guess it would have been, celebrated the throwing of the Jews out of Spain. “You call this a wise king who impoverishes his kingdom and enriches mine?” The Jews in Turkey have been persecuted at times in Turkey. They have been heavily taxed, they have been forced to wear strange clothing to set them apart, they have been discriminated against in hiring, but they have never been thrown out. National policy is that they do not have equality with Moslems, but they are a welcome and valued minority. That has been the policy for 500 years and more. By American standards they are persecuted, but they are also accepted and after a fashion valued.

It was now about 3pm and we decided to take a load off our feet. We sit in a tulip garden and write and talk. We were there about 45 minutes before heading home. We passed through the courts with Mediterranean evergreens, then outside. There are groups with guides in French, German, Japanese, Hebrew, and who knows how many other languages.

We stop to get postcards. We buy stamps but two are required and they are more than a square inch. We comment and the postal clerk takes the stamps, tears two off and overlaps them so that only the price of the lower stamp shows. Okay, that works. We smile at each other.

Back to the rooms, a little early perhaps, I put on the radio to 88.2fm. My gosh there really is a local classical music station. I had asked the manager where he was getting the classical music that he plays. More working on the logs.

At 7:00 we went back to the same street for dinner and took one small turn at the end. There was a restaurant called the Altin Kupa. There was a tour group eating there which generally indicates the service will be slow (because there will be a lot of people there) but the food will be likely good (though they may just be giving a free meal to the tour leader). We found we liked what we go. We should say something about how to eat Turkish style. You get a big basket of decent bread. The bread comes in very standard loafs. If you say that a sandwich comes in a quarter loaf of bread, everybody knows how big that is. You have bread with every means and that is a big part of the meal. You use it to sop sauces and it becomes a major starch with the meal. For an appetizer I ordered Haydari. That was a very carefully chosen appetizer. Every other appetizer I knew what it was. This one I had no idea. Sounds good to me. Evelyn got soup and found it to be a sort of chicken rice soup. Mine was yogurt, mashed cheese, and herbs. You sop it up with bread, not unlike what you would do with humus. Yeah. I can live with that. My main course was little chunks of meat in sauce, as you might expect from something called gulashe. Evelyn had stuffed grape leaves. Neither came with starch or vegetable, but there was the bread. For desert we shared a baklava. It was enough to eat. And the restaurant had a nice warm environment with a tablecloth and an oil lamp on the table. With tip I paid 3,050,000TL. That is $12.20. And that was our last dinner in Istanbul, at least for now.

Maybe it was having a pleasant dinner under my belt, but I am starting to get a warm feeling about Turkey. I guess I had sort of formed my opinions based on films like Lawrence of Arabia, Yol, and Midnight Express. Also there was the belief they are considered troublemakers in this part of the world. The people seem a good deal friendlier than I would have expected.

Until now I have not had even a bit of jetlag. I am not this lucky even when I fly to California. I have taken some catnaps in the evening but I guess that I would call jetlag wanting to sleep and being unable, not vice versa. This morning I woke at 5am and was not able to get back to sleep. I am not sure it is fair to call that jetlag since it would have been as likely to happen at home. I have been sleeping to normal times more consistently in Turkey than I did at home. I would be curious to hear what Henry Kissinger did about jetlag, since he seems to have been known for having it not bother him. I don’t really mind getting up early if I can have enough light to see my palmtop. I am going through my first pair of batteries very quickly, but then the palmtop is in constant use. I cannot imagine keeping my log on a Palm Pilot. That seems to be the most popular portable device these days. Even the current versions of the palmtop are not so hot since they have widened the keyboard to the point where you cannot easily thumb-type. But HP can get as many unsolicited testimonials as they would like from me on the HP 200LX. These days when I come back from a trip my log is almost entirely written and typed in. It would make for a very long and for you boring description if I explained everything the palmtop does for me on a trip.

The room is fairly cold. It is something like 67 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the one complaint that we had heard about the Berk, that it is chilly. Also half of the lightbulbs are burned out. Maybe that contributes to the cold. We were all packed up and ready to go by breakfast time. Breakfast was much the same. Good tomatoes. The cheese looks like Feta, but is rather tasteless. After breakfast we tried to book a room for May 16, when we return to Istanbul but the Berk was booked. We asked where else we might try and the owner suggested the Alp around the corner. We tried one other hotel first, but the Alp it was.

From there we lugged our stuff to the travel agent. We let him talk us into a tour of Gallipoli at Canakkale. We were planning on going, of course, but it might be for the best to book a day tour.

We got a shuttle bus to take us to the big bus terminal. On the way I was looking at people and noting the variety of different types that Turks are. More so than most countries that we have visited, Turkey seems to be a melting pot of different racial types. Some Turks could be Scandinavian; some are dark enough to be from South India. We see lots who are just swarthy. Big moustaches are popular, but there are relatively few beards. Particularly in Sultanahmet it is hard to tell who is really Turkish and who is tourist. That is a problem we have in the US, but I had not expected here. (Well, not really a problem, I can get in trouble for saying that. It is just hard to tell.) One more comment on their looks, nobody wears moustaches like the Turks. No stingy little pencil-line moustaches for the Turks. When you are Turkish you don’t wear a moustache unless you are serious about it.

This is really our first trip outside the Sultanahmet area since the first day. Streets could be like Hartford, maybe a little run down, but seasoned with the tall pointed spires of minarets. As you look around, however, there are a lot of once-beautiful places. Some building complexes have broken windows and falling masonry. In the middle of the city are building gutted by fire and just left. There are also a lot of buildings that are in the process of being built, but it is a process that takes many years. That is one form of investment. When you have some money you put it into a building. Same day you will have a valuable building. Until then you may have nothing. Many of these buildings may never be finished.

The Turks seem very fond of small, traveling amusement parks. We see a bunch of them on the roads. At least most of the ones I saw seem to load on trucks and travel. Where we live the amusement parks are mostly more stable, except for the occasional carnival. But it is odd to drive through a metropolitan city and see all the spires for mosques and the occasional carnival.

Our shuttle bus takes us to the Otogar, the International Istanbul Bus Terminal. This is one of the largest bus stations in world and while we are on the outskirts where there is not much happening in the station, you can see the terminal just goes on and on. We climb on the bus and listen to the people behind us. These are Australians and they are real travelers, not like us. They are swapping stories about driving around the Zambezi and Kenya. Apparently they had planned to hike up Kilamanjaro but were too drunk. Pity. I would have wanted to know if there really is the carcass of a leopard near the top.

While we listen someone comes through and takes our ticket. They are telling a story about trying to cross some border on top of a truck. My best travel stories pale by comparison-or would if I tried to enter in the conversation.

The bus pulls out of the station among an entire herd of buses hitting the road. For a while it is bumper to bumper. There is little progress.

The steward-if that is the word-comes around second time asking for the ticket. We had a hard time explaining we had given it already. He did not understand our English. The woman behind said in a thick Australian accent “I gave it to you already.” That he understood. We said us too and he was satisfied.

The steward comes around with same sort of lemon-scented aftershave like stuff so we could freshen up. After that he comes around with packaged cookies and with orange soda. This is apparently a music bus with refreshments.

We are traveling west along the north coast of the Marmara Sea. This takes us through Thrace, the home of Spartacus and the dragon from Dragonslayer.

At 1:50 we stopped for a rest top at a roadside stand. We bought some cookies and crackers for the bus. There was somebody selling grilled kofte sandwiches. Kofte is a lamb meatball in a finger shape. They took a quarter loaf of bread, sliced it open, painted the two halves with a hot peppery sauce, filled it with kofte straight off the grill, added minced onion and lettuce. That was 500,000TL or $2. One of the group labeled it a rip-off and said it should have been only $1. He went back for a second one though. I had only one and Evelyn gave me part of hers because the sauce was too spicy (!!!). If I had eaten any more it would have been unhealthy. But when I am hungry again, I know what I am going to be hungry for. These Turks know how to eat! Actually the Greeks get credit in the US for this cuisine. I am told they adopted it from their enemies the Turks.

Today was the first day we got any sunshine. Unfortunately we were on a bus most of the day. At one point in the afternoon I was actually caught up, but it is tough to stay caught up. I was writing a bit on the history of Turkey to include in the early parts of this log. Coming to Canakkale the last piece is a ferry across the Dardenelles. It gave us a chance to get some sunlight. We talked to an Australian woman of all of 21 who was spending a year just travelling on her own. Greece, Turkey, all over Europe, Thailand, Korea, on and on. She was traveling on the cheap, but really seeing a lot of the world. Australians supposedly seem to go in for these yearlong tours. If they are paying to get out of Australia, they are going to stay out. Interestingly her reasons for wanting to travel paralleled things I had said on my log. She is looking for culture shock and to understand how different people think. I think her year of travel will be more valuable to her than any year I will ever spend will be to me. I kind of wish I had done what she is doing when I was young enough to do it.

We got to Canakkale and booked a room in the Hotel Bakir, the oldest hotel that was recommended in the Lonely Planet. (Lonely Planet is the publisher a series of travel guides. They are indispensable in Asia. With the possible exception of the Rough Guide it is the best. It is by far the most popular.) I think Evelyn likes older hotels if they have some sort of a feel for a previous age. This one sort of does. Our room has a very nice view onto the water. The whole town has a very different feel from that of Istanbul. It is a sunny seaside feel I guess. You just want to sit and watch the rusty boats come in.

There is a restaurant just below our window. A boat is anchored in the water maybe 100 yards away. The room is not well maintained. The bottom of the bathroom door is curling and it is difficult to open. I am pleased to see that there is no little wastebasket next to the toilet for paper disposal. You never know if something like that is standard across a country or just in the first place you see. What is standard the same about this toilet is a metal tube under the seat but over the bowl. I think it is used to clean the toilet or it might be a bidet. This one sticks up a little high and sort of gooses the user. At the last place it was not set so high.

We were told to book a tour for Gallipoli at the Anzac House. We were not told where it was. Next chore was to go out looking for it. It took us some searching around but we found it. Then it turned out that the Lonely Planet cautioned against it, so we went instead to Troy-Anzac where they tried bait and switch to have us book a more expensive tour. No go.

Back at the room we were writing and reading a booklet. Our lobby had some free booklets explaining what Gallipoli was all about. I don’t know if they have them all the time. Last Saturday was Anzac Day. Every year on April 25 the Turks celebrate the coming of the Anzacs. They came to defeat the Turks but instead learned to like them. The Turks show their love of the Anzacs each year and since the Australians and New Zealanders have fought no battles on their own soil; they come to celebrate in Canakkale every April 25. The place fills up with Aussies and Kiwis.

That was last Saturday. There were three booklets. One was from the Australian War Memorial and was okay. The other two turned out to be different editions of a guide published by the Turkish government. I had researched the battle before coming and written an account for this log. I had used the some of the best books I have including Dupuy and Dupuy’s Encyclopedia of Military History. Ironically the best account of the battle I found was this booklet given away free in the hotel. It explains the fighting in more detail than the reader can take in one reading. You don’t generally expect to find good writing in little stacks in your hotel, but these booklets are worth studying.

I also tried to find good radio stations. If there is a classical music radio station, I cannot find it.

Dinner was at a cafeteria style restaurant. It was just okay. I had meatballs in sauce, which I sopped up with bread. Then the toothpick broke in my mouth with the tip stuck between my teeth. I had a heck of a time getting it out. When I did I found it was a piece of wood maybe 3/16 of an inch in length. From now on I will wait and floss.

More reading in the room and then to bed at 10:30. One of the tours offers seeing the film Gallipoli with Mel Gibson the night before. It would have been nice but it really has little historical detail about the battle, if I remember correctly.

I just have film too much in my blood. I tend to go into film withdrawal if I don’t see a movie at least once a week. I rather expect there will be a lot of film references in this log before it is finished.

Today is my birthday. I was up for an hour or so before we had to go. We got a wake-up call. He woman who ran the hotel had gotten up to wake us up. Since we were leaving early and could not stay for breakfast she had made us each a cheese sandwich on a half loaf of bread. She gave us those and two juice boxes of cherry nectar in a plastic bag. This was 4am she was up. Maybe she wanted our last impression of Turkey to be a good one. I cannot believe we in the US treat visitors as nicely. There are all kinds of Turks, but the country seems richly endowed with nice people.

Istanbul gives us a rainy farewell as we get in the dolmus to the airport. We get to the airport and find out the plane is leaving early to Munich. It will just give us more time in Munich.

There is a mob in front of the ticket desk. We have all sorts of strategies for getting through the lines quickly. As a result we are the last through. Well, we are really early for our flight so we have the time. Security is a little worse than arriving by having us go through two different magnetic checks. But it is little more than looking at the passport as far as asking questions.

We sit in the lounge and I doze a little. I am trying to convince myself it is around midnight even though the sun is rising, or would be if it weren’t a gray and ugly day.

We talked to a woman from Denver about bookstores. I hit the plane, getting the news that Frank Sinatra was dead on the way in from a day-old newspaper. I was already dozing by the time we took off. Was half-awake for the takeoff. Then went back to sleep. I did not even notice if it was on time at 12:30am home time. I fell asleep again and woke up around 1:25 when they dropped in my lap a Turkish salad with a little corned beef, an omelet Florentine, some mixed fruit and a couple rolls. Also as much orange juice as I can manage.

It is nice weather when we approach Munich. The clouds are in tall billowy piles. The plane seems to take a path around them and we have a little fun turbulence. We land and have to take a trolley to the terminal. This is our first time in Munich. The decoration has a sort of Erector Set feel with you able to see how things are put together and a lot of open air.

We go to the gate and Evelyn goes off to explore. They bring two older people in wheelchairs into the waiting room. They are not having a good time. It seems he is blind and she is confused. Together they make a whole person. I listen in. They are worried about the next flight. They did not get seats together. It is a long flight and they are worried about being separated for so long. I did not want to act without at least telling Evelyn, but I knew darn well that when Evelyn came back we would exchange seats with them. There wasn’t a chance Evelyn would say no. They were very appreciative. Heck, I just had 24 days almost constantly with Evelyn. And at work we share an office. With so nearly perfect a wife, who needs separation time? But this flight will give us each time to work on our logs.

Once again Lufthansa provides newspapers. I have been out of touch. Okay, there is rioting going on in Indonesia. The rioters are trying to get rid of Suharto. Until now I have been on their side. Not any more. Now I don’t particularly care what happens. It seems they have picked out the ethnic Chinese as being particularly responsible for Suharto being in office. They have drawn this conclusion based on two important pieces of evidence. First, the Chinese are different from Indonesians. Second, some Chinese are wealthier than some Indonesians are. So the Indonesians are burning Chinese alive. Not all the Indonesians, but they are not stopping the ones who are.

Once again Lufthansa is boarding by zone. Zones 1 to 4 are boarding. There are some Zone-6ers a little concerned. I tell them they are going to Chicago.

As soon as you get on the plane, even before take-off they came around with boxes of orange juice. Again I was half-awake by the time we took off. I must have slept for half an hour. That was intentional since I could not work on my log during take-off. When I was awake they served a snack of a drink (orange juice for me) and a pack of kangaroo-shaped crackers called Jumpys made mostly from mashed potato powder.

On the TV they ran a short film about the making of Amistad. They said that filming it required historical accuracy while showing John Quincy Adams standing in front of the Capitol Building complete with the dome it would not get until the Civil War. Nice accuracy.

Lunch was a smoked salmon salad, tortellini a roll, fruit compote, and some nice cheese.

The movie is The Jackal. It isn’t a bad film but with so good a film as The Day of the Jackal being based on the same novel there is no need for this stupid version. The first film is pure chess game. No gunfights, no chases, very little violence. It was just a search for a needle in a haystack and the clever way the needle hides. This is almost a parody of that film.

After, the film juice. And everybody gets a 35-gram bar of Toblerone Chocolate. After the film is a turkey, tomato, and cucumber sandwich. They are constantly either bringing food or picking it up. But I like it as an airline.

Landing was pretty much on time. Well, that’s it. That’s Turkey.

I am very fond of East Asia. But I think Turkey has been the best and certainly the most surprising country not on the Pacific Rim. I like the people, and much of the country is spectacular. It is not always an easy trip but it was one very worth making if for no other reason than to give me evidence against Turkophobe myths.

1998 Mark R. Leeper

Source: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6960/turkey.htm