Sunday, July 06, 2008

On the move again,from Rhodes to Seteia, Crete


We're kind of in the phase of our trip like "If it's Tuesday, it must be Rome." After two days on the island of Rhodes, we are flying to Seteia on the island of Crete tomorrow afternoon. A lot of these flights are costing an incredible $3o USD (pretty amazing when you consider that gasoline, and presumably, kerosene (aka jet fuel) costs about $11 USD a gallon (quit your belly achin' America). When we refilled out rental car with 7 gallons, the tab was $75 USD.



The trip on the ground, in the air, and on the water so far::::::::::::::: fly Seattle--> to Calgary-->to London-->to Istanbul (stayed a week)--> fly to Izmir-->drive to Selcuk (stayed three days)-->Drive from Selcuk-->to Datca (stayed three days)-->Drive from Datca-->to Marmarise-->sail to Rhodes, Greece (stayed two days)-->fly to Seteia, Crete, Greece.


From Seteia, we will take a bus to Heraklion, Crete and visit the famous, awesome, and controversially reconstructed ruins at Knossos (where Icarus and Daedalus flew their ill fated mission) and the home of King Minos, anwhich Keelin and I visited previously in 1982. From Heraklion, we will sail to Naxos, and then to Santorini, and finally to Piraeus (which is the port for Athens). After a couple days in Athens visitd all the bull worshipping. After visiting the great ruins there, we will board a plane for home. Wah.
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Saturday, July 05, 2008

Graffiti in the marble, pointing the directions to the Brothel along the collonaded walkway at Ephesus



click to enlarge


This tile of marble, still laid along the walkway, points out the direction to the local house of ill-repute in Ephesus.
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Poem: Prayers in Istanbul




1.
On a dusty cobblestone street
I hear three muezzins
In three directions

Call people to prayer
At three mosques,
With a slight delay

Between the calls.
Three chanters in three different rooms
Sing the same song

In phase-shifted rounds
Through nine silver speakers

Mounted on three
Ivory-white minarets
Capped in gleaming cerulean blue.

2.
At the washing stations,
Water splashes from brass spigots
Into pale grey limestone basins.

The faithful wash,
Bag their sandals,
And for the fourth time since dawn,

Walk onto the lush carpet
Of the cool quiet mosque
Tiled in words and symbols.

3.
They kneel, face the wall
And pray one more time.
I don’t know what they pray for,

But when I see their faces
And watch their devotions,
I know it’s something good.

4.
It’s so still and calm
In the mosque,
You could hear a fly expire.
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Adolph Hitler's return to Berlin

Madame Tussand's withered, hunched over, half-mad rendition of Hitler is now on display
The Times of London reported today that a wax figure of Adolph Hitler has now arrived in Berlin. Interestingly, one of the last things Hitler said before he killed himself in April 1945 was that "he was determined not to fall into the hands of the Russians — and land up as the freak exhibit in a Moscow waxworks."

According to The Times "As luck would have it, Hitler — or, at least, a waxen effigy — has now been put on display in Berlin, a short stroll away from his former bunker.

"Thanks to Madame Tussauds, which has just opened a new affiliate in Berlin, Germans can at last view a realistic model of the Führer. The suspicion, though, is that he will bring nothing but trouble.

"To ensure that the wax Führer does not inspire neo-Nazi pilgrimages, Madame Tussauds has cordoned off the dummy and imposed a no-touch rule. You can kiss Robbie Williams or even Angela Merkel, but not Hitler; nor can you pose for a picture with him. There are CCTV cameras and the London-based company has also taken the precaution of moulding a very shrivelled Führer. Unlike the Hitler model in London, he is shown as a distinctly unvigorous character. It was created using 2,000 photographs of The Fuhrer for models."
I have drawn and painted a few Adlophs over the years. Here are two. One is a digital paintng, and one is a crude approximation I created in my police sketch software, Faces 3.0:


click to enlarge

click to enlarge
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Friday, July 04, 2008

Poem: Just beneath the topsoil



Collonaded ruins wait
Hidden beneath the topsoil
For the next generation

Of archaeologists and historians
To begin excavation anew.
Cream colored Ionic columns

Shattered friezes, and statues
Lie quietly in repose
As someone back at the University

Matches Part 1324A to 1324B
And come up with a cornerstone
To act as a plinth

For the first earthquake fractured column
And the reconstruction begins.
If time and grants allow,

They may later get to the fragementary
Fingertips, hands, noses, ears, and penises,
And reconstruct the statues for us.
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Painting: The Temple of Aphrodite


Click to enlarge
This is my rendition of the Temple of Aphrodite (Venus) at the ruins of Afrodesia, Turkey, which we visited on our car trip from Selcuk to the coastal town of Datca.
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Happy Birthday, America, more or less



And, yes, I know, many people say it is jingoistic and/or ethnocentric of us to call our homeland America. But::::::::that is how we are known in Europe and at least the part of Asia I have spent time in now. When they ask you where you are from and you say United States, they usually respond, "America." Most people have relatives there, and a fair number have actually been there. On that note, I often try to tell them I am from Seattle, but once someone said "Oh! all the snow in Alaska!" Other times, I try to explain...West Coast, on The Pacifico...near Canada...northwest U.S...and about half the time now I just say California, which registers instantly. It's not too big a jump after all...I've lived there and been there at least 20 times in the last 18 months.

This is the second time I've been away from the States on the 4th of July. The first time, we were with our long-time vacation pals the Hokits on Salt Spring Island in Canada. Our kids (minus Claire, she claims) put on red, white and blue facepaint and were very cranky about Canadians ignoring the 4th, not to mention the fact that they had no fireworks. Yes, they were unable to make the almost sacred Hejira to Boom City to buy the real (aka not "Safe and Sane"), dangerous, fireworks. I think somehow the Tulalip Tribe was still somehow able to make their payroll, and that massive pre-4th logjam on Interstate 5 probably still occurred.

As Henry Gibson said in his song in the great Altman movie Nashville, "We must be doing something right to last 200 years." Over here you realize what an infintesimal drop in the bucket that 200 years really is (sorry to end with a preposition...sometimes it's just easier).
Jack, July 4th, 2007, Ródhos, Hellas, Europa
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Datca, Turkey to Rhodes, Greece


The Isle of Rhodes


This morning we sailed from Datca, Turkey to the Island of Rhodes in Greece. It was a one hour boat ride across the sea.

This very minute I am sitting with Keelin at the cafe our hotel owner has outside the hotel. We are talking to him about the ruins of Greece...and he is expressing his anger and sadness that Turkey is not still part of Greece ("the part, not the east...that's the Kurds and others.").

I just asked him if other Greeks feel the same way. "No. Many are much more angry about this."


The castle of the Knights of Malta in Rhodes

It's nice to be back in Greece, after 26 years. Rhodes itself seems very European and Cosmopolitan, compared to mich of Turkey at least. In fact, Keelin and I are celebrating our return this afternoon (it's 5:30) with a glass of Retsina in the garden of our hotel. We were half our age when we came here last( a pre-honeymoon of sorts).

One thing that has definitely changed in Turkey is the money and the prices. When we were here in 1982, it was very very cheap. The currency was then based on the Greek drachma. They now use the Euro, and you can just imagine how the dollar is faring against the Euro. (a Euro is now worth about $1.60). More sticker shock. Since we got up at five AM, I spent much of the afternoon napping, and recovering from a touch of what you might call the Sultan's Revenge).

In case you're wondering about the Colossus of Rhodes (one of the "seven wonders of the world")...don't bother. Yes, this is where one of those seventh wonders was, but it no longer exists. It was destroyed in an earthquake fifty-four years after it was built. (According to the Wikipedia: "Media reports in 1989 initially suggested that large stones found on the seabed off the coast of Rhodes might have been the remains of the Colossus; however this theory was later shown to be without merit.

Another theory published in an article in 2008 by Ursula Vedder suggests that the Colossus was never in the port, but rather on a hill named Monte Smith, which overlooks the port area. The temple on top of Monte Smith has traditionally thought to have been devoted to Apollo, but according to Vedder, it would have been a Helios sanctuary. The enormous stone foundations at the temple site, the function of which is not definitively known by modern scholars, are proposed by Vedder to have been the supporting platform of the Colossus."
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Thursday, July 03, 2008

Mareymane - The Virgin Mary’s House???


click to enlarge and read the story behind Mary's house

As you know by now, most ruins, sites, and museums charge around 10 YTL (or, as I call them yurtles), or, $8 USD for admission, and sometimes an additional $8 USD or $2 or $4, for a special extra admission (like the incredible dwelling excavations at Ephesus). And likewise, the admission to visit the Virgin Mary’s last purported domicile, outside of the town of Selcuk was a stiff ten yurtles.

The place was packed with Catholic faithful (the Pope also visited recently), kneeling and making the sign of the cross. It was a small stone house, and entirely unremarkable. The evidence, as you will see from the informational sign, was shaky at best. After four minutes, you’ve seen everything there is to see.

Mareymane is where St. John the Evangelist brought Mary to care for her. On the cross, Jesus requested his favorite disciple to care for her. It was in this part of Asia Minor that John was charged with establishing churches and spreading the gospel of his friend and savior.


According to legend, after Jesus was assassinated, John never left Mary, and took care of her until her dying days, as he wrote his letters, his Revelations, and his Gospel.

A highlight of the visit to Mary’s was filling our bottles with real spring water at a source. It was the first time we’ve drunk much tap water since arriving in Turkey. It was also the first museum-ruin-site where I felt like we had been fleeced!
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The Food In Turkey ( a very subjective take)


Turkish breakfast




The Turks claims this is one of the six countries in the world that is food self-sufficient. They grow everything they eat and drink. At least that’s what they claim. I’m not so sure about the Coca Cola (or the just as good and half the price Turka Cola). I don’t know who the other five countries are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one is Mexico.

On the whole, Turkish food is serviceable. I’ve never had bad food here, but then again, I’ve never had great food. In general the quality level doesn’t vary much. And there are roughly 12 dishes that you see everywhere, and they rarely have many local or creative twists.

The number one snack food on the street is grilled corn, which somehow came here from the new world and became a local favorite. Istanbul in particular has hundreds of grilled corn carts, but I saw it in most other cities as well. You also see carts selling incredible tasting almonds and pistachios.

The soups, both lentil-based and tomato based ones are very subtly spiced (usually no or little garlic and almost never spicy). They are almost always good. There is also a nice vermicelli soup in a tomato base, with oregano and mint.

Fresh squeezed orange juice is everywhere, and it’s cheap ($1 or $2 USD)and great. They also have excellent cherry, apricot, peach, and pomegranate juices.


Lahmacun, a respectable Turkish version of pizza

You see lime trees everywhere, and I’ve seen them in vegetable stalls a few times, but they are mostly ignored in favor of lemons. However, the most common form of lemon is bottled lemon juice, which is like bottled lemon juice everywhere…that is, pathetic. I think my time in Mexico has left me far preferring lime to lemon. Additionally, the fresh lemons never seem vibrant here, but always seem a little tired, like the peppers.

Mezes – Usually cold starters that include spreads, dolmades, and other nibbles. They are almost strictly vegetarian, and would be a good option for our veggie pals, and most of it would even work for more extreme vegan-Taliban.

You would have to work extremely hard here to maintain a gluten-free diet. The salads and soups would probably be safe, as would sis kebap. You could eat the pilaf, but sometimes, they have broken pieces of vermicelli in it, which would not work for celiacs. There are a lot of fruits and vegetables and meats, so you could piece something together, but it would not be easy.


Rice Pilaf. This is a much beloved food, but, alas, I find it pretty subpar and almost always far too oily. Of course, I have much the same complaint about restaurant risotto, and restaurant paella too.

Pizza. They have their own take on pizza (pide) — one comes with cheese, and the other with minced lamb, with a few other variations. The crusts are baked in a wood fired oven, and are excellent. You get a small pizza (enough for one person) for around $2.75 US.

Tea, or Çay (pr: chai). The number one beverage. Çay is served in delicate, small fluted glasses, usually with a couple lumps of sugar and a tiny spoon on the saucer. It’s very good tea. They also serve (but don’t drink themselves) a very tasty apple tea. One turk told me he drinks dozens of glasses of Çay a day.

Turkish Coffee – Is a suspension of water, coffee grounds and sugar. I used to drink it many years ago, at Greek restaurants, but I don’t have the heart for it anymore. When you finish, there is about an inch of sludge in the demitasse cup. People will read your fortune in it, like they do in tea leaves in the western world. Some places have espresso, which I’ve avoided. I don’t think I’ve seen a Starbucks here. I’ve been making do with one cup of the ubiquitous and execrable Nescafe, and am almost decaffeinated. Now I just have to quit drinking Turka Cola light.

Sis kebap, or Shish Kabob. Usually lamb. It is never bad, and is often very good. The marinated lamb (or chicken) is cooked over charcoal, and often served with eggplant, roasted tomatoes, and other vegetables.

Doner – Like the Gyro often served in America, but better because they don't put too much meat on. Lamb or chicken is cooked on a vertical rotisserie and as the meat chars a carver slices off thin slices for your sandwich. It is served on something like a Pita (Pide), but much better, with usually tomatoes, a little onion (never enough) and a touch of sauce (tomato or yoghurt based). These are great, ubiquitous, cheap, and pretty clean (e.g. very little oil).

YoghurtYoghurt here is great, and comes in many varieties. In fact, at the grocery store, the yoghurt choices are mind-bending. The yoghurt section is an emormous aisle and very little distinguishes the dozens of varieties to the non-Turkish reader. So far our random selections have all been good.

Turkish Breakfast – This meal often gets you through from 9 AM to 6 PM. The basics include some fruit (apricots, or oranges); sometimes a feta-like cheese, and another local mild cheese; at least two kinds of olives—oil cured black ones, or brine-cured green olives; baskets of the good and ubiquitous French bread; cherry and strawberry jams; margarine or butter; Çay (Tea) or Nescafe (powdered instant coffee with milk); often an omelet or a boiled egg; and sometimes yoghurt. Breakfast was always good. A bagel like bread was often served too, almost always with sesame seeds baked into the crust. It is my favorite bread.

Shepherd’s salad – usually tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley and olive oil. They give you wedges of lemon to season it, salt and pepper, and bread. Honestly, it’s kind of a feeble Greek Salad a/k/a Choriotiki

Eggs – Eggs are very similar to those in Mexico…extremely fresh, with bright orange yolks. They come ten to a carton. A dozen is not a frame of reference here.

Drink – Some of the local wines are very good. Interestingly, alcohol is taxed at the grocery store at 18%. Efes Pilsner, a local brew is very good. Three or four other beers are available: Carling, Miller High Life, and two more local beers. Raki, an anisette beverage is fiery, and pretty good if you have just one or two. Foreign liquor goes for $40 to $80 a bottle, but locally made vodka (votka), gin, and raki is reasonable. The local version of diet Coke is very good (Turka Cola) and half the price of the American stuff.


Wines made in this region are reasonable (10-15 USD), and pretty good, but you also see really mediocre wines from elsewhere, like Yellowtail from Australia, selling for $40. A bottle of French wine we buy in the US for around $15 goes for $60. In short, stick with the local wines, liquors, and beers, or just drink Çay.

The local "French" bread is very good, and they serve it at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It goes for an incredibly cheap seventy-five cents at the bakery...still warm.

The two times we’ve had a kitchen in an apartment, I have gone to the grocery store and cooked dinners (like I do in Mexico). Shopping in a Turkish grocery store is like being on drugs …you aren’t even sure what about half the goods are and the labels and pictures don’t often tell you what is inside. A package of Oregano may have a picture of a monkey and it is ground more like we grind thyme (when you can even see the packet’s contents). As always, vegetables are the easiest to buy, since they’re not packaged. I can tell when they are ripe, old, expensive, etc. Meat is tricky—the cuts are far different than ours, although they treat chicken exactly the same as we do. I could usually tell what I was looking for by the texture. Cheese was a total crap shoot—we locked onto one we liked and stuck with that.


Fruit was like fruit anywhere, and the best here seem to be cherries and apricots and oranges, and, of course, watermelons, which Turks love. Every day you see dozens of trucks hauling in watermelon and a large percentage of people you see on the street are carrying one home. It is a frequent desert.

They love baked potatoes here. The potatoes are basically Russets, and they serve them with all sorts of toppings. Yoghurt, of course, and various dips and spreads, and chicken, and olives, and salt and pepper.

Although most of the vegetables are excellent, the peppers are always a bit tired. And don’t try to buy just one banana or head of garlic! You take the whole stalk, or nothing, and if you break the rules, you get a good-natured scolding.

I was cooking dinner last night (sis kebap, Greek salad, and tortilla Espagnole) and I had Del run to a store to buy salt. He had to draw a picture of a table with diners and a salt shaker. Finally someone in the store said “[in Turkish] Oh, he wants saray tuz!” When Claire went to buy feta the first time, we ended up with goat cream cheese. Two times I ended up with buttermilk when trying to buy sweet milk. It’s always an adventure…
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Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Turkey in Ruins



By Keelin Curran
All This Is That History and Archeology Editor






Turkey is in ruins, and fully alive at the same time. I love ruins, and did not fully realize when we selected this destination for our trip exactly how much in heaven I would be here tramping around the churches, columns and caves.


A salvaged frieze from the Temple of Afrodesias


Aphrodite (aka Venus) herself, from the Afrodesia Musem of statuary, friezes, etc. Click to enlarge.

In college, one of my sidelines was Greek archeology. I even took a few semesters of Ancient Greek. On one of our earlier trips to Greece, I tracked down a just-discovered (1979) Minoan temple site destroyed by an earthquake in 18th century BC—Anemospilia—see http://www.uk.digiserve.com/mentor/minoan/anemospilia.htm based on the xeroxed information my professor at Hunter College (whose name I don’t recall, but who was an acolyte of renowned Greek archeologist Emily Vermeule) had handed out to the class.


The gate to the Temple of Aphrodite. Click to enlarge.


A close-up of the gates. Click to enlarge.


I travelled by bus, and tramped around the hills near Iraklion to find it. It was not much—just three rooms you could imagine based on the stone foundations, but they had done sacrifices there that brought the place to life—and death--as this passage describes:


Del Brummet ponders a statue of a philosopher in the excellent Afrodesias Museum. Click to enlarge.

“The west room is, in many ways, the most interesting. . . . [t]his room was used for blood sacrifices. Uniquely in Crete, three skeletons were found in the room. Two of these people, a man and a woman, had been killed by the earthquake and resulting fire. Another male skeleton was also found in the room. This body was found lying on an altar. A knife was resting on the skeleton. The feet had been tied and it has been argued that the young man had been sacrificed and the blood drained from his body. If so, it might well have been his blood in the vessel found in the antechamber next to the skeleton. It is most likely that the normal victims of sacrifice would have been bulls, but in the face of seismic activity which threatened the whole community, it may have been considered necessary to make a human sacrifice.”


Colum Brummet emerges from the gladiator's tunnel at the vast 30,000 seat stadium at Afrodessia. Click to enlarge.

This is about as dramatic as it gets
in the ruins world, but well illustrates the open-ended speculation (along with tolerance for sifting and digging) required to do this work.


The 30,000 seat stadium & gladaiatorial venue at Afrodesia.

Anyway, since that 1982 trip
to Anemospilia, I haven’t been able to indulge my ruins interest until the last few weeks. The family has been most accommodating in patiently going along on trips to see Agia Sofia in Istanbul, (not a ruin, an amazing, living space from 6th C BC but still a lasagna of one culture on top of another, as ruins often are), the cave dwellings and churches of Goreme, and more recently, the ruins riot that is Ephesus, and most dreamily, the ruins of Afrodisias.

I barely know where to start in talking about these experiences. Goreme and Cappadocia were the most mysterious and humbling. These cave refuges of troglodytes and early Christians were often built at great heights above the current ground level—or far below ground. How did they get up there? How did they tolerate long seasons underground? You have a sense about how scared these people must have been, much of the time, threatened by Hittites and Romans et al. The spaces are so small. They would have known everything about each other—a contrast from our life of screens and large dwellings. And the simple, repetitive and sometimes beautiful scenes of the life of Christ in these churches give one the sense of how much reinforcement is necessary to start a religion from the ground up.


Jack in the Bouletarian theatre that served as the ruling council's meeting place as well as a theatre and performance space.

Then, Ephesus and Afrodisias.
These two cities give a living sense of Roman life, in its beauty and brutality. The museum near Ephesus had a riveting exhibit on gladiator culture in ancient Rome, complete with an analysis of the wounds suffered by gladiators based on the skeletal evidence. This culture existed among the beautiful marble buildings and statues; blood and circuses and Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe. Yet you can not help but compare the artistry born of imperial ego, politics, wealth and will in these urban spaces with those we inhabit and find our world poverty-stricken in comparison.

At Afrodisias, up until the last few decades, the town of Gehre was built right on top of Afrodisias. Townspeople built there modest houses braced by the bottoms of roman columns, and crushed their grapes in roman baths. The Temple of Aphrodite, unreconstructed, was a field for their livestock. Seeing the pictures of Gehre (since moved a few kilometers, sadly, to allow the excavation) gives one the sense of how we are just the latest layer in this earth lasagna.

Okay, I will stop. Thanks to you All This Is That readers for indulging me in this Turkey travelogue. We have more ruins to go, so life is very, very good for that reason and all the others that make travel so great.
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