Turkish Letters #3 Safronbolu and Ankara (Shiralee)

It took Busbecq1 19 days to get from Constantinople to Ankara - and eleven more before he reached his destination, Amasya. He travelled with an armed escort that was partially for his protection and guidance through the wilds of central Anatolia - but just as much to keep an eye on him. He travelled with all of the 16 th century necessities - mostly large amounts of wine, rough as guts for his escort and servants, and a much better quality for himself. He doesn't record whether he took his menagerie along, but he amused himself collecting ancient coins, new species of plants and inscriptions from the ruins of previous civilizations that still litter the plains and mountains of Anatolia.

It took us three days to get to Ankara via Safranbolu and 7 hours from there to reach Amasya.

We left Istanbul at 10.30 in the morning, collected by a dolmus2 from the travel agency that had booked our bus tickets for us. Istanbul has an enormous otogar3, multi-storied and labyrinthine, with shops and restaurants and burnt out wrecks packed into every inch not actually being used by a bus at that moment. There is a mosque, hospital and other services. You could live your whole life in the otogar and die without ever having to leave. I was more than a little afraid that we might suffer that fate - but luckily our dolmus driver chivvied us and another tourist to the right bilet-bey booth to pick up our tickets, and then pointed us at the right bus.

We didn't have an armed escort, but we did have a particularly job-proud driver's assistant to keep an eye on us. He was a natty little chap who made sure that everyone sat in their allocated seat and kept their tray tables in an upright position unless in use. He spent a substantial amount of time grooming himself in a mirror suckered to the window above the exit door, but he was punctilious about making sure that everyone had beverages, cake and was doused in lemon cologne at frequent intervals. And he made sure that we understood when we were to stay on the bus and when we should get off. Everyone else on the bus helped out, explaining the complexities of the system in mime and rapid Turkish whilst we blinked stupidly at them and went where we were pointed. One man even showed us his qu'ran, beautifully printed in Arabic and kept in an embroidered bag when he wasn't reading it.

By 6.30 we were in Safranbolu, which is about 5 hours north of Ankara and 7 hours east of Istanbul. I say 'about' because our bus-driver was an unusually careful driver. Mind you he had reason to be. As we climbed to the Central Anatolian plateau, up an endless mountain road just bursting with stalls selling pumpkins and plaster figurines and mangels4, mizzling rain suddenly metamorphosed into enchanting, gently drifting snowflakes. Soon the world looked like a sentimental Christmas card. We stopped for the obligatory gözleme5 at the peak and JB and I surreptitiously made snowballs (my first ever!) out of the fluffy white stuff. It wasn't until we were back in the bus and heading down the other side of the mountain in the quickly falling night that I realised the true nature of that seemingly innocent substance; the only indication of where the road went appeared to be the on-coming headlights. Thankfully, we crawled down to the plateau, but if the driver had thought to make up time on the relatively flatter roads thereafter, he was to be sadly disappointed. Someone had decided that immediately prior to winter was the perfect time to dig up the entire road to Karabük.

On the other hand it would have been worth travelling for 19 days to get to Safranbolu. Somehow all the development horrors, (eg endless grided expanses of identically butt-ugly apartment blocks), that have blighted so much of the rest of Turkey that we have seen, seem to have passed it by. Busbecq never went to Safranbolu, but if he had I'm sure he would have been as infatuated by it as we were. It is a jewel. A treasure. And the defeat of superlatives.

Safranbolu was, as its name suggests, once the centre of saffron production in Turkey although its main industry now is tourism drawn by its unusually well preserved Ottoman houses that have earned it Unesco World Heritage Site status. Saffron, still worth more than its weight in gold, is no longer actually produced in Safranbolu, although they still do a mean saffron-flavoured Turkish Delight, but is still grown about 20km away. There was once a lot of money in the town. It lay on the main Ottoman trade route between Gerade and the Black Sea. Its prosperous citizens, merchants and artisans, built winter mansions and houses in a sheltered intersection of three valleys (Carsi), each with their own tiny river. In summer they would move to airier places higher up the hills amongst their vineyards. These have mostly disappeared under the ubiquitous modern housing developments, but Carsi was somehow overlooked. Today it is a timewarp, providing a glimpse of a way of life now almost extinct. And not in an ersatz Disneyworld kind of way. Artisans still practise their crafts in tiny workshops although some have displaced by the inevitable souvenirs (woodblock textiles from Tocat and light-up models of traditional houses being the most ubiquitous), into more obscure locations. Equally miniscule stalls and slightly larger shops sell locally grown produce, especially honeycomb and nuts. Blacksmiths are as at home with arc-wielders as they are beating out ploughshares on ancient anvils. You can hear, and see, cobblers hammering away at their lasts, producing lightweight flat-soled shoes. Actually, every second shoplet sells shoes - it's like they're expecting an army of Imelda Marcoses with a penchant for sensible black shoes to descend at any moment. Tiny ancient men and women lead cows through the town from one micro-pasture to another (...I'm assuming, but maybe they are paid to do it to add local colour and authenticity to the scene).  

And, of course, there are the houses. I had justified6 not only our sidetracking to Safranbolu but also splurging on staying in one of the restored Ottoman mansions as being research. Safranbolu is, after all, one of the last places in Turkey where I could get an idea of how Istanbul might have looked in the mid-16 th century. Most of the houses are actually late 18th through to early 20th century materially, but they appear little different aesthetically from what I understand 16 th century Ottoman architecture to have been. Most of them are wooden-framed on a foundation of local rock. The walls are filled in with mudbrick held together with slurry of mud and straw and rendered with some kind of whitewash. In Britain, they'd be called Tudor. Some have brilliant pigments mixed into the render that fades and blotches in the most photogenic manner. Every street door is painted brilliant jewel colours; turquoise, emerald or sky-blue. Upper stories, traditionally the heramlik or private women's spaces, jut out over the narrow cobbled streets and lanes. Some have elaborate carved window-screens, shutters, balconies and doo-dads. Despite its protected status, Safranbolu is packed with renovators' delights, DIY repairs and magnificently ramshackle edifices. An awful lot seems to be for sale and average prices are, I'm told, around a A$100,000 - not a lot for a slice of paradise, but enough to make them unaffordable for local workers whose incomes seem to average about YTL300 a month.7

The grandest houses are generally close to the centre - a tiny square cum carpark whose parameters are defined by a trifecta of public buildings from the mid-17 th century (obviously a boom time in downtown Safranbolu); a handsome mosque, a squat multi-domed hamman (bathhouse), a restored large stone han8 that is now an expensive hotel and restaurant, and a dolmus stop and cab rank.

From the ruined fortress; the han is the large central building.

Our hotel, Selvili Koçk, named for the handsome and ancient cypress in its garden, is one such mansion. A family home up until about 15 years ago, and still with photographs of the plain but obviously tough as guts ancestors adorning the entrance hall, it has been rather sensitively restored and adapted to its current use. The adaptations include central heating, electricity, and modern ablution facilities. In our room these were hidden in what had been linen cupboards and were tiny but perfectly formed.

Selvili Koçk -- actually one of three establishments now owned by its patrone. Those are our windows -- the three on the top right corner plus another 3 on thfacing onto the lane. It has a large garden, that we looked down into, which must be rather pretty in summer.

We were the only guests and were catered to be an extremely personable young chap called Hacün (hopefully the right spelling). Perhaps it was the fact that he was reading 'Crime and Punishment' for pleasure. Perhaps it was his endlessly obliging politeness. Whatever, we both fell completely in love with him. He was almost embarrassingly solicitous; escorting us to dinner at a nearby restaurant so we didn't get lost, fetching slippers, setting up the breakfast table next to the Dutch-oven and urging us on to prodigies of breakfast consumption. He insisted that JB smoke his Marlboros rather than his own rollies, and let me beat him at backgammon. We met his fiancée and his brother. We had long conversations in fractured Turglish with the aid of our phrase books (thanks Rosie and Jacinta!), and his dictionary. If anyone ever found a way to bottle Hacün, they would make a fortune.

If it had not been for the sheer gobsmacking beauty of the place, we might never have left the hotel. Still, waking at dawn with the muezzins' calls, we were seduced out by the view from our windows; serried ranks of houses ranging around and up the bowl of the valley junction, wreathed with autumn reds, oranges and golds, and veiled by smoke and gently drifting snow. Sheer cliffs topped one valley wall, a ruined fortress (Kale) another. Some thirty mosques poked their minarets through the mist. So we walked and walked and walked. We 'merhaba'-ed workers clattering past in clogs or heavy boots, children scampering to school in their cuteness-squared blue smocks and multicoloured woolly hats, suspicious-eyed women bundled in layers of patterned scarfs, smocks, baggy ankle-crotched pants and padded coats who watched us from doorways and windows. We gaped. We gawped. And we occasionally took a picture... or five thousand... in a doomed attempt to catch and hold something of the spirit of the place.

The valleys are a maze of narrow cobbled walkways delineated by stonewalls, homemade fences and the streams. Tiny bridges bracelet the rivulets that have created deep narrow chasms in places. Sometimes these fast little rivers are completely hidden by homes and mosques built right over them, only to suddenly reappear as miniature rapids or tiny waterfalls. Every lane beckoned with multi-sensory delights (and treacherous footing). Every corner promised to reveal even greater beauties. Every pathway, to lead to some fresh paradise. Landscape and architecture, the nattily restored, the ad hoc DIY repairs and the rapidly crumbling, domestic and industrial, urban and rural, blended together in a symphony of unplanned concordance. Everywhere there were golden grapevines, fig trees tipping their bare branches with swelling fruit, pomegranates and persimmons spangling others. Herbs, salad plants and flowers in simultaneously fading and rusting olive oil-tin planters gave way to kitchen gardens and then to orchards and cultivated fields as we wandered. Just as the urban and rural gently segued one to the other, the architecture and environment met in a perfect synthesis, one seeming to grow out of or into the other.

Safranbolu has hosted civilisations since 3000 BCE or longer - the Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks and Ottomans have all fallen to its charms. And it's little wonder. There's almost no point in writing about it and even photographs are the merest indication. The only way to begin to experience its beauty is to be there, walking its labyrinthine byways, breathing the cold high mountain air laden with smoke and autumn and baking bread and the nose-prickling undertones of fruit and leaves rotting on the ground, blinking snowflakes off your eyelashes, and listening to the muezzins' calls echoing off the high stone walls. And then you'd have to come back when the town is blanketed by snow in winter; then when it is a riot of blossom and drifts of new green in spring; and then when it is full and fecund and cool-shaded in summer. Or perhaps just stay... we certainly didn't want to leave.

When we got to Ankara we discovered yet another reason (or 99,000) to mourn the end of our time in Safranbolu.

The best that can be said about modern Ankara was that at least Ataturk didn't decide to wreck somewhere else by putting his new state's capital there. Perhaps it was a nice place once9... today it is bursting at the seams with people, commerce, traffic, stress, pollution, racket, shouting, decay and extremes of income. Beggars bare their twisted, crushed, missing or otherwise deformed body parts in the mean cold wind screaming in from the mountains. Traditionally-dressed women from the country clutch blue-faced babies or thin grubby urchins as they tug on your arm or wave their pathetic token wares at you, desperate for money. Everywhere someone is trying to sell something. Scam something. Push ahead. Even its much vaunted archaeology museum is all advertising and surprisingly little substance. It is a hard cold city with little to obviously recommend it. I hope to never have to go back there.

Busbecq spent a full day there, resting up after the rigours of his journey across the plains. Lucky him, he camped out. We stayed in a rather expensive and incredibly pokey-roomed hotel that had a mechanical shoe-polishing machine as its highpoint. One of its many low points was the view - totally dominated by a derelict 60s brutalist/cheap modernist office building.

Busbecq investigated the production of the eponymous yarns and goat-derived materials that had made the area famous. Of these, we saw nothing - although every second street seller retailed woolly hats and socks and every second shop displayed a wide range of what appeared to be mostly polyester modest 'fashion'-wear.10

Busbecq observed the local wildlife. We saw a dead cat, several street dogs and a fat black and white bird that appeared to be a cross between a willy-wagtail and a peewee - but five times as big.11

It was in Angora that Busbecq recognised and had copied one of the most famous of all Latin Inscriptions, the Monumentum Ancyranum , a succinct record of his public acts made by the Emperor Augustus, and which accounts for some of Busbecq's modest fame. We went to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which was rather small and expensive, although graced with very fetching dovecotes on poles and some incredibly silly-looking Seljuk lions. We didn't see the tablet, however, nor many of the exhibits. This was because, firstly, part of the museum was cordoned off for a film shoot; secondly, lighting appears to be a luxury in many museums. And thirdly; because they arbitrarily decided to close the museum early. Our favourites were the Hittite animals - bronze stags with branching horns, lions and wolves and pottery cattle, rabbits and other farmyard beasts that must have been produced for some ancient festival of cute.

And Busbecq undoubtedly looked over the citadel (kalesi or hisar) that stands atop the area's highest hill. Its inner walls have been there since at least the 7 th century CE, whilst the Byzantine emperor Michael II constructed its outer walls in the 9 th century. It faced, not particularly successfully, invading crusaders, Persians, Arabs, Seljuks, Ottomans etc. They weren't fussy abouut what they built with and incorporated not only sliced up marble columns but also inscriptions and even bits of statuary.Today it protects a 'traditional Turkish village' inhabited by traditionally-covered women, gossiping groups of stare-eyed men, grimy hawkers (and their cute but incredibly wily - read 'successfully mercenary' -- children), numerous school excursions and souvenir shops. Its mosques have minarets painted turquoise, whilst many of the crumbling and undoubtedly cramped little houses bare the fading remnants of bright colour-washes. As we wandered through the wending back alleys, we stumbled on a gate that should have bared the way up to one of the fortress towers. Luckily someone had forced it and we slipped through and clambered up to a panoramic view over Ankara at dusk and an insight into the organization of a defensive fortress. Remind me never to take a job that requires stomping up and down narrow steep stairs, standing around on the edge of sheer drops and patrolling narrow high walkways wearing my own body-weight in metal.

We didn't find Ataturk's tomb. Museum or most of the other multitude of things dedicated to his memory 13. Frankly, we didn't care. We just wanted out of the city. We almost cried with relief when the dolmus arrived to take us to the otogar for our Amasya bus.

We almost cried again when we realised that the otogar was a 2YTL 10 minute ride from our hotel - not the half hour 30YTL taxi trip that it had cost us to get there. Still, it did prove that jackals and hyenas are as common in Turkey today as they were Busbecq's time.

FOOTNOTES

1 For those of you who don't know, Ogier Ghislan de Busbecq, aristocratic Flemish bastard and imperial ambassador to the Sublime Porte 1554-62 is the ostensible reason we're here. I'm confident that somehow or other, I'll use having the best time of my life for some pragmatic scholarly or creative ends...

2 A minibus typically driven by a maniac with a creative approach to road rules and a mobile phone glued to his ear.

3 Central bus station where all the inter-city and long distance buses leave from - Istanbul's is sited in a quasi-rural wasteland some 15km from Sultanahmet.

4 A mysterious substance, object or service obviously hugely popular if the amount of places advertising it are any indication.

5 A delicious hot 'pancake' most often filled with white cheese and parsley but also really good with spicey potato.

6 To myself...

7  The Australian dollar and the New (Yeni) Turkish Lira are currently almost equivalent with the advantage going to the Aus$.

8 The Ottoman's take on caravanserai or traveller's pitstop; typically a rectangular 2 or 3 story stone construction with a central courtyard with a fountain and often a restaurant. Animals were stabled on the ground floor, whilst the upstairs floor/s were generally a series of small cells where travellers could repose. These often provided free accommodation for travellers for a couple of days before requiring them to move on. Busbecq was actually housed in a han in Istanbul.

9 What day that 'once' was, we were unable to discover. Even the Ottomans had a bad time there - for example, Beyazit II was captured by Tamarlane in Angora (ie Ankara), and forced to watch his wife serve table, naked, for the Turkic conqueror and his warlords. He beat his own brains out against his cage bars. I could completely understand that action if the alternative was being forced to stay in Ankara.

10 However, green, which Busbecq records as being Suleyman's favourite colour (even if he did think it unsuitable for someone of the Sultan's advanced years and stern dignity), seems to still be popular,

11 Apparently it is related to the jackdaw or raven - clever, cheeky and a thief.

12 The petrochemical and smoke-heavy haze looked almost pretty in the fading light with aprox 2.8 million peoples' lights twinkling through it...

13 It is, however, worth checking them out via the www - they appear to be prodigys of totalitarian aesthetics and secular beatification that appear to be completely at variance with the great man's actual achievements, ideals and tastes. And I did very much love the statue in the centre of Ulas: JB has already described it but he did leave out the most salient point: its accurate description of the position of women in Turkey -- getting crapped on from a great height...