Turkish Letters #2 Istanbul to Amasya (John)

Turkey - day 4
A warning for future visitors - wear shoes that do not require polishing. If your shoes are old they will need polishing. If your shoes are new they will need polishing. In fact, come in summer and go barefoot. By day two I had inadvertently become the patron saint of the Shoe Polishers' fraternity. My wish not to offend by refusal coupled with my confusion about the currency led to me putting some guy's kids through school, and probably a private school at that. These polish-laden piranhas could corner you in a circular room. 'Hello, where you from?' they ask.   'Australia.' You reply. 'Ossie!' they say grabbing your ankle if you have been foolish enough to slow down while replying. Before you know it your foot is on their footrest. 'No!' you say trying to spot the obvious flaw in a pristine boot, 'I don't need a polish.' 'No polish,' they reply 'just a brush. Is a gift.' A couple of quick strokes with a brush, and a hand is shoved in your face. At this stage hope you have some change or you can pay near fifty dollars for having invisible dirt removed from your footwear.

'Fifty dollars?!' You may ask. Well, this is where the currency works against you. Turkey uses the lira. Thus everything is in multiples of 1,000 and notes can have a value of 5,000,000 lira. This would not be a problem except Turkey has rationalised the currency by removing five zeros from everything. However, the old currency is still in circulation leading to the confusing state where a new note with the face value of 50 lira is worth 50 dollars(ish) and an old note for 500,000 lira is worth 50 cents. The shoe shiners know this and gouge the jet-lagged tourist, whose shoes are perfectly clean, for all they can get. Remember, when approached by these brigands of the buffing brush to say 'Hiya tesheker ederim' and keep on walking. Even for the cute young ones.

To avoid further bother you should carry a rug over your shoulder at all times. I have yet to try this but hope (hope, mind you) that it will deter the carpet merchants. The carpet merchants are slightly less bothersome than the shoe shiners in the way that a Moray eel is less bothersome than a shark. The carpet merchants, at least, can't follow you down the street carrying all their wares.

At cursory glance it would appear that Turkeys favourite artwork is called The Tortoise Trainer. In this remarkable work a red-robed, be-turbaned, stick-wielding gentleman is surrounded by a group of four, one assumes, unruly tortoises. Just what he is training them to do escapes me. Whether they are attack tortoises or courier tortoises is up to the imagination. Maybe they dance. I prefer to imagine they are used to transport thoroughly un-urgent messages or to pay bills for contractors, which may explain the state of the buildings in Istanbul.

Anyway, whatever their purpose the painting, in various forms, appears everywhere. And it makes you wonder how you control a tortoise. I imagine hitting their shells with a stick would be pointless. It occurs to me that if you strapped them to your feet you would have a primitive Segway.

On closer inspection I realise there are five tortoises but one appears to be making a break for it. Never mind, the guard snails will run it down.

Weird and dangerous.
50 meters away from an apparently 16 year old polis/military guard armed with a sub-machine gun two peddlars are selling realist toy guns. Bismillah!

Driving in Istanbul is highly recommended for those with a death-wish. Turks drive on the right which is academic when most street are one lane wide. In a display of economic rationalism Turks use their cars horn as both indicators and brakes. This is not as bizarre as it sounds in a city where road rules are elective. It would seem that the Turks dabbled with pedestrian crossing but decided they were merely a passing fad and gave up after installing three. The crossing signal work as traffic control during certain unspecified hours of the day. For the rest they are pretty decorations for this great metropolis.

For the uninitiated:
One beep - means I am driving forward.
One beep - means I am turning left/right.
One beep - means please move your car it is blocking my way.
One beep - means I am going to accelerate around this blind corner.
One beep - means 'Hello!'

I hope this is clear.

Someone in Turkey is making a fortune from cement. Bricks appear to be an afterthought. Their function is to separate on layer of cement from the next. When bricks are used en-masse it is to fill in the gaps where the cement has dropped away to the street below. I could be a builder here and my pet ferret could be an architect. This is not to dismiss the charms of this delightfully ramshackle city.

Dangerous metaphor territory.
Istanbul begs metaphors. I am reluctant to indulge - it would be like an alligator making handbags. However, Istanbul has been washed by the ebb and flow of history and as the tides have passed all the flotsam and jetsam has wound up piled higgledy-piggledy on this tiny headland. Buildings thousands of years old are piled upon by buildings that look thousands of years old. Ramshackle houses are built into the ancient walls. Recent edifices cling limpet-like atop aqueducts, cisterns and the like, although limpets have a better understanding of structural integrity. The ancient walls, towers and roads are still here bedecked by house, shops, kiosks and any number of edifices all in need of a lick of paint, a lick of power, a lick of plumbing, a lick of...well, in need of as many licks as a chocolate fetishist. All that said, there is a wonderful affirmation of life. Like a coral reef covering a sunken wreck the city grows atop itself. It is unquestionably gorgeous. I could happily live here, particularly if I was independently wealthy. Dream on John.

When you come in from the airport the city, at first, looks like the world's largest light industrial zone. Only the minarets, which appear to be medieval intercontinental ballistic missiles, jut above the skyline. When the taxi, only the insane, the terminally insane and Turks drive, enters the city you find yourself in a medieval town with cars and mobile phones. Speaking of which, if Turkey is so poor why does everybody have a better mobile phone than me? The narrow winding streets (every street seems to be a back ally) force you to adopt a leisurely pace. No worry, the city is tiny. You walk across town to visit a mosque, turn a corner and your home again. Temporal and spatial displacement is a normal state of mind. I have fallen in love with this ancient pile of bricks and am having an affair with the modern laminae. I could rabbit on with short burst of poetry but you get the drift, and I'll save you the agony.

Ships glide through the night with only the navigation lights visible like bizarre new constellations. I think I saw one run aground last night but given Turkish driving habits this is probably par for the course. No one seemed to be hurt but the ship was stern down and surrounded by tug boats, search lights and huge cables. Eventually it was dragged b backwards down the Bosphorus, which sounds like a title for a song by The Cure.

Safranbolu
Safranbolu is probably the most beautiful town I have ever seen. Bits of architecture and the landscape blend so well it is hard to say which came first. Gorgeous tumbledown, stone-walled, tile-roofed houses spill down alleyways so steep and rugged I think the original inhabitants descended from mountain goats. Dry-stone walls encircle gardens so damp, dank and overgrown any melancholic teenager would burst with delight. A steep-walled creek runs around, through and under the town. It gushes past the front doors of some houses, under a mosque and reappears intermittently in little chasms in the most unlikely places.

We stayed in a bed and breakfast place almost as old as white Australia with high intricately patterned ceilings spanning elegantly Spartan rooms. We awoke on our first morning to see snow falling gently outside our window. Rugging up like Scott of the Antarctic we went out into a bracing morning and took photographs like a Japanese tourist on speed. Wandering up and down we quartered the old district snapping anything that stood still long enough. And this place has been standing still for a very long time. We had to agree to take 50 paces between photographs or there would not be an inch of the town we didn't record.

Modernity has discovered Safranbolu and come off second best. Rusted satellite dishes adorn houses that have seen and shrugged off the invention of steam power. Around the corner from the internet café three blacksmiths work at their furnaces bashing out all sorts of things. A walnut seller sits at a special anvil cracking walnuts one by one. Locals buy bread fresh from the oven.

School children, so cute it's a crime, all smiles and oversized satchels run down lanes so crazily paved they could break the ankles of a ballerina in response to the school bell. Later we heard the reciting Allah knows what from a building dutifully guarded by one of the ubiquitous Attaturk statues. It raised a lump in my throat.

Everybody should come to Safranbolu but not all at once. It must be sheer paradise in Spring or Autumn; especially if all the tourists were taken elsewhere. By coming in the off-season we virtually had the town to ourselves.

Despite my earlier diatribe against shoe shiners and carpet salesmen all the locals we have met have been unfailingly polite, interested and helpful. Total strangers on the bus to Safranbolu went to great pains to ensure we knew what was going on and when to disembark. I admit my earlier experiences made me somewhat suspicious of their motives. I am ashamed. One chap showed us his Koran and made sure we got off the bus (and back on again!) during the rest break. Another, looking like a mediteranean James Caan explained the local transport network, and the refreshments waiter explained a slight change of schedule - all without a word of English. They are a remarkable blend of folk - some strikingly good looking with that beautiful mediteranean skin tone and languorous Byzantine eyes. Others so colourfully weathered they look like they stepped out of comrade Stalin's first five year plan. A woman all of four feet tall, her head wrapped in the traditional scarf and wearing a coat twice her body weight showed us where the local internet café was located. We had passed by it about half a dozen times - much to the amusement/bemusement of the men in the tea room opposite.

I was becoming a little self-conscious about some of the stares I was getting. I assumed that I looked like some local pop star or TV celebrity (both ridiculous notions). Our host pointed out that in my black coat I looked like a mafioso. Which may explain the friendliness but I think they would have been just as considerate if I had been dressed as Ronald McDonald.

Ankara
Ankara is a hole buried in a pit. There is a quaint old quarter perched atop a hill like a cat chased up a tree by the rabid dog that is modern Ankara. I do not recommend you visit unless you have business. Given the military presence on the streets, I hate to think of the kind of business that would bring you here. The place is hectic, ugly and smelly. Pollution seems to be the primary industry and they are Hell-bent on setting a world standard. Apparently bad architecture students are sent to work here as punishment. The outer suburbs are an architecture atrocities theme park. This place may have been the cradle of civilisation but any civilisation with its wits about it would have picked up its bed and walked long ago.

The motorists are as crazy as elsewhere but faster and more vicious. Being a pedestrian is an extreme sport akin to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver. You get the feeling that Turks elsewhere are so nice because Attaturk forcibly moved all the nasty ones here. A walk through the city is as exhilarating as being dropped into a lion pit at feeding time. One can alleviate the terror by playing spot the eyesore. The city's central roundabout is overlooked by an equestrian statue of Attaturk (who else?) who appears to be looking longingly for somewhere else to ride to. The reason the ancient citadel that is the center of the city was never successfully taken by an enemy is that most attacking armies died in the streets on their approach. Ankara is the only Turkish city in which I saw signs of vandalism although this could be deemed to be grass roots urban renewal. There is a famous saying 'See Venice and die.' In the case of Ankara reverse the order.

A fine meal softened my hostility somewhat and I must say that the locals we met (who weren't taxi-drivers) were typically polite and helpful. But en-masse the Ankarans lack the feckless insouciance of the Safranbulians and the Istanbulis.

The five and a half hour journey from Ankara to Amasya was through the Anatolian plains which are obviously rich and productive but at this time of year are bleak and forbidding. Ghastly towns give life to an otherwise uninterrupted series of construction sites and cement quarries. I recommend the Turks turn a buck by renting the place out for above ground nuclear tests.