January 27th, 2009 
Turkiye 
I have discovered that if you are washing your hands in the bathroom you open the door a crack. It is tough to turn the knob on the door enough to open it and with wet hands it is even worse.
I have a friend who is Romanian and who insisted when I first met her that Dracula was a purely fictional character and no such person ever existed. She left the country before the days of tourism. Nowadays I suspect Dracula is better known to Romanian school children learning history. Basically it was someone outside of the country who made Dracula the most famous Romanian in history.
Nobody is really sure which Pharaoh is mentioned in the Bible. If you look at the history of the Peoples of the Book: Jews, Christians, and Moslems, you find the captivity in Egypt to be a major formative event. But the Egyptians never even noted that the event happened. In Egyptian history it was a minor event and not really worth noting. Now, of course, it is a big deal.
In the region we now call Turkey, a ten-year war with part of Greece is really just another war with Greece. Sure, it may have happened there someplace in history. No big deal. Of course, to world literature it is another matter. And Turkey knows a good thing when it sees it.
Speaking of a good thing, I am getting used to Turkish breakfast. I had bread with sweet butter and honey, a hardboiled egg, some tomato, and juice. We sit overlooking the dock at the boats going back and forth. Every few moment a horse-drawn wagon goes by.
We see some of the people from our tour yesterday go by. They wave to us and we wave back.
We walk to the bus stop about a mile from the hotel. There does not seem to be any schedule. After standing around a while a taxi driver tells us that it will be another 45 minutes or an hour before the next bus. He offers to take us and wait for 5 million. It is probably silly, but we decide to wait for the bus. The problem is not the $20, but we don’t know how long we want to stay. If we want to stay five hours we are not sure.
There are a lot of gruff-looking Turks hanging around, but you know I feel perfectly safe. Across the street from us two men start arguing about something. It looks like they are getting ready to have a fight. To separate them a bunch of other people run in like white blood cells to an injury. One seems a lot angrier than the other and continues to snarl insult or argue his side in Turkish. This goes on for about five minutes but they cannot get close to each other to fight so he gives up and goes away. These are really earthy people.
We sit writing. Across the street a fight nearly breaks out between two men. A bunch of people go in and separate the two men, and the fight is reduced to yelling. I think Turks must just look mean. They are so often swarthy and chunky with big moustaches.
No buses seem to be coming along for Truva or Troy. Lots are coming for Kapez. Two out of three buses that pass are for Kapez. This must be some place, Kapez, judging by the number of people who want to go there.
One driver offered to take us to Troy and wait for us, then drive us back for $20. Evelyn did not like that idea. For one thing we didn’t know how long we wanted to spend at Troy.
I am just afraid we will discover Kapez will mean “bus.” Or perhaps it is another name for Troy. About 10:20 a man came up and asked where we were going. We said Truya. He walked us to a bus. Sure enough it was the bus to Troy. We got on and it was about a 30-minute ride. It is kind of a nice drive with views of the water and the occasional stop for sheep in the road.
This lets us see a little of the countryside. The houses seem small and boxy Mediterranean style. Many seem to need repair. Still it seems pleasant and comfortable. At least it looks that way from the window of a bus. On a nice, sunny day.
We got off the bus at Troy along with a French couple. The price for the ride was just 200,000TL. They seemed nice. The husband picked a wild rose and gave it to Evelyn. As you get toward Troy, there is a large wooden horse with a ladder that visitors can climb. We didn’t. Then there is a one-room museum with a tiny exhibit telling importance of Troy and how it was rediscovered.
Of course there is not just one Troy, there are nine of them on almost the same site. Troy 1 is the oldest dating back to the Bronze Age. Troy 9 is from the Roman era. I still don’t completely understand how a whole city is buried and another built on top in just about the same place. Can there be 20 feet of fill so that one city is totally covered? Are there pieces of the old city sticking up? Suffice it to say that one city is built on top of another. The theater was built in the Roman times.
You walk through the ruins and do not stray from the path. Hard to believe you are really there. Even the Homeric Poets had not seen the real Troy. There does not seem to be a whole lot of Troy 6 left. I think most of what you see is a ramp. The most complete piece is a small theater complete with embanked stage. This is from Troy 9, the Roman period. They also had some columns from the same period.
While we were walking the guy behind us caught up with us. He had graduated from USC about a year before and had read the Iliad in school. He was all excited about being at the actual place where it all happened. We took several pictures of him, he took a couple of us, and we talked. We discussed the ruins, history, Turkish history, film, and dogs. By then we were pretty well done with the ruins and walked out to the road. We arrived at a little before 1pm.
Then began the wait for the bus. We waited and waited and waited some more. Here we were on a corner in the middle of no place. Most of the vehicles that passed on the road were farm implements. If you saw Bad Day at Black Rock, well, this was worse. There was a dead restaurant behind me. I went to ask when a bus might be along. “Any time.” I was told. But you know I had no doubts about my safety. My intelligence I questioned but not my safety. I told Evelyn that we were here in the middle of nowhere. “It’s not the middle of nowhere,” she protested. “That’s Troy.” Great. When is the next chariot?
The experience of going to Troy is not all I might have expected. Basically you walk around a ruin of which there is not much left and look at some walls. The text does not add a whole lot to the experience doing little more then identifying which Troy you are looking at and what the object is. I suppose that is not surprising. What distinguishes Troy is not that great ruins were found there, it is that these ruins were heard of from another source. Apparently the government realizing that just seeing some old walls would be a letdown built a large fanciful Trojan horse (not on wheels, by the way) to help capture some imagination. But for the most part the ruins work by imagination. The visitor can tell himself that he was there where this great story came from. One has the feeling that actually being at the war would be even less impressive. Basically is a bunch of grown men acting in very childish ways. Everything in the poem is undoubtedly exaggerated. Earlier in the day we saw a fight almost break out while we were waiting for a bus. Your feeling is just a little embarrassed to be there when it is happening. That must be what it was like to be at the Trojan War. A Homeric poet could have probably made even that near street fight seem epic. Such is the power of words.
Finally at 2:15 after 75 minutes of embarrassed waiting we asked for information. A man told us that the bus is very irregular. He could arrange a ride for $20. We gave him 5,000,000TL, about the same. I think he would have preferred the dollars but accepted the Turkish equivalent. We went got into a Toyota and another man took us back to Canakkale. To please his American passengers he put on a cassette of Christmas carols.
We asked to be taken to the Archeology Museum. I think that made more sense than to be waiting the whole afternoon in the hot sun. The museum currently costs 250,000TL. Not so much for hotel rooms, but just about everything else is really pretty cheap here. Most of what is in the museum is what was found in Troy. They start with a nice diagram of the layers of Troy.
The holdings include-Grave stele in marble-Pots and vases from Troy-Not much from the famous Troy-Roman statue from Troy 9-Pins and mirrors-Statues-Headbands that look like roaring 20s
There was a bust of a Roman Emperor. It was recognizable. This led me to wonder. It is not every stonecutter who can make such a good bust. How many stonecutters have even seen the emperor? And copies of copies already start to look very different. How would they make so many busts of the Emperor? How did they get them all to look alike? The standard explanation just does not seem to hack it, unless there is something I don’t know.
After the museum we walked back toward our hotel (here called an “otel”). Along the way I took pictures. I got lucky and passed a backyard wrestling match with oiled wrestlers, a la the film Topkapi. I continued snapping pictures of shops, horse carts, food in windows, etc. We stopped for a late lunch: soup, the local version of pizza (lahmacun), and Pepsi. Good stuff. From there we got a bus ticket for Izmir. We dropped things off in the room, and went to sit on dock and write.
As we were sitting and writing a cat came along. I tried to be friendly, but she preferred the unwilling Evelyn. She climbed up on Evelyn’s lap and would not leave. All these women who have their heads covered and seemed so serious, even when I try to be friendly, come over to smile to see the cat sitting in Evelyn’s lap. Cats have a special appeal here, I guess.
While we are sitting the boy from the travel agency sees us and comes out to invite us in to talk later. Frankly we are not anxious. Though I think I probably should go and argue against having an Islamic state in Turkey. I realize I am a bit out of my depth. What arguments would I give? I guess that I barely trust a government to make roads, I certainly do not want them interpreting what they think is God’s Law and trying to enforce it. The countries that do follow that path seem to have followed it to a dead end. And they fall into that path in part because their attitude is getting people ready for the next life not improving this life. Religious states seem to be bred of despair. We cannot care for our people in this life so we will do all the spiritual stuff just perfectly. We will be one of the world leaders in getting the spiritual stuff right. Far better than apparently wealthy nations. Basically they are choosing to re-define the goals of the game so that they CAN win. And if you assume their religion is correct, I suppose they are winning, but really it is only a power play. Most counties have some fundamentalists who want to see the government enforcing the laws of their religion. They say what I see as the proper rules the government should apply to everybody. Then it becomes “what I see as the proper belief should be what everybody believes.” That is not what government is for. And the governments that try to enforce spirituality fall into disease and poverty and misery. Yet every country seems to have some zealots who want to go that way. They think that is what will make God happy. I doubt it. I think that Kemal Ataturk agreed. He has strong separations between the religion and the state here. It goes beyond the separation in the US. For example, only secular marriages are legal. I hope this remains a secular state. Well, it is more than that. There are other states in the Middle East that are secular, but the religion still drives much of the policy. Not so here. That seems to make a difference.
Well, we got some snacks for the room and some postcards for our families and for work then went back to the room. The room did not appear to want the snacks so we ate some of them ourselves. At about 8 we went out to sample the baked sweets that are so popular here. We got some baklava and brought it up to the room to eat. Of course we had no utensils. I had to figure how to cut a block of baklava without a knife. I could have used my pocket knife, but it would probably never have been the same. I had to find a disposable knife. And a loop of dental floss worked very nicely.
Well, it livened up one evening. I did not bring my Walkman and cassettes this trip. With no classical station we can listen to the faint signal of the BBC or listen to local FM radio. The music is not great and listening to Turkish ads is the pits. I wonder what Paul Theroux for kicks.
Well, this is a special night. April 30 is the real Halloween, Walpurgis Nacht. This is when the witches’ sabbat really is. And would you believe it, nobody invited me.
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