s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

I’ve added photos to the Cappadocia post, just F-Y’all’s-I. Will get to Konya and Antalya soon.

And thus the first big driving part of our trip began. We had been on a little large-van-sized minibus previously, but our comfort-minded companions complained, and requested a larger and more luxurious bus. Thus the 13 of us spent the rest of the trip on medium or large coaches, which provided wider seats, double seats for everyone, more leg room,and generally much more luxury. [Hassan was very keen that we should get a bus that had sufficient engine power -- after the trip over the mountains to Antalya, we understood why -- being able to maintain speed up hills means a faster trip means less time stuck on the bus and more time to actually see stuff. An extra hour means a lot when you're packing in as much as this tour did, and there were a *ridiculous* number of traffic lights on the long strip of highway coming into Antalya. Hassan had at least once in the past managed to catch nearly all seventy-something of them red, and the experience clearly scarred him. -T.]

From Cappadocia we steered a course south by south west, heading towards the coast. First stop was Konya the ancient capital of the Seljuks, but more famous now for holding the tomb of Rumi (founder of Sufism). [Actually, the founder of the Mevlevi School of Sufism -- there were and are other flavors. The Mevlevi School is one of the more famous, though, because they are the "Whirling Dervishes". -T.]

Tam would have been happy enough for an “all Seljuk, all the time” part of the tour, as she is quite interested in the period. The way the tour (and local geography and archaeology) is structured, you end up seeing sites spanning thousands of years on any given day. While it does give a great sense of the scope and breadth of history in the place, it can make it rather difficult to build up a sense of internal continuity, and what each site meant in relation to its neighbors (was that last pile of stone we saw Hellenistic?, Byzantine?, Roman? Seljuk? Ottoman? Was it a contemporary neighbor to this pile of stone?)

The tomb of Rumi was quite spectacular, as you would expect from such a major religious figure. Within the main tomb were also some of the major followers/founders of the religious faction, in color-coded coffins (white and green) with the sufi “hat” design- the colors designed their rank and importance. Throughout the tomb were people who had come to worship, often through the simple act of reading his poetry within the tomb.

No photos were allowed within the tomb (arrgh!), but I did manage to find a good book full of photos of the artifacts within in the gift shop, but only in Turkish. Time to test the skill of Google Translate!

The long drive to Antalya took us over the Taurus mountains, which rise very suddenly from the plains in a manner reminiscent of NZ. How people got through those five or six bands of sharp-sided peaks and valleys in antiquity baffles me. It was quite the modern engineering project getting the road through one of the ancient “passes”. It does explain why crusader armies, after taking wrong turns or not listening to advice, found themselves trapped or ambushed in that harsh terrain.

[One aspect of the trip that I really appreciated, but which was nearly impossible to convey in a photo, is that we were there when everything was in bloom. There were wildflowers absolutely everywhere, including fields of those gorgeous classic red poppies, bougainvillea in the most eye-popping shades, fat globular thistly things, wild roses, pink and white oleander, passion-flowery flowers that weren't actually passion-flowers, all kinds of stuff. We were totally lucky with the timing. Pomegranate looks like trees of orange carnations ! I think Stephen mentions elsewhere how very fertile is much of Anatolia. On the Med side of the Taurus mountains, it's greenhouses as far as the eye can see, most of them full of tomatoes. -T.]

Our hotel in Antalya bears note. The Divan had the most fantastic views perched on the cliffs above the Mediterranean, each room had a sea view, and listening to the waves gentle sloshing agains the rocks through the night was very pleasant.

We started the morning on Monday the 24th by driving back east to Perge. This was a large Roman-era city that has been partly excavated. We went into the sports arena, which was notable for being built on the flat, not against a hill to hold the stands (they were supported by lots of barrel vaults in stead). The field, in its day, could seat tens of thousands of spectators. Next door was a theater that was fenced off pending renovation. The main part of the tour was the large baths within the city, where the structures of the heating furnaces, water pipes, and pools was all still visible.

The city had a large market (agora), and a interesting feature of a system of cascading pools down the main street to provide cooling during the brutal local summer. [A shaded shopping arcade with built-in air-conditioning, without electricity or fossil fuels... -T.]

After Perge it was a short drive to Aspendos. Remnants of the 18 km aqueduct remain, and we could see one of the 5-meter high water-tank pressure tower that were spaced regularly along the aqueduct to maintain pressure and defeat friction from the terra-cotta pipe.

We drove around the Aspendos acropolis to the theater on the far side. This is in excellent shape, and is still used for classical performances today. There were some tourists singing beautifully in the acoustic “sweet spot”, which was a great demonstration of the wonderful acoustic design- even after the place was partly broken down and many bits had been altered or removed. The Seljuks did a bunch of renovations to the structure in the 13th century when using it as a military outpost (some of the Seljuk decorative features still visible), which is largely why it is so intact now.

[Stephen is writing this stuff without really knowing whether we have the photos to back him up. I don't think the pics of the theatre are that awesome, really (or of the Antalya Old City, either), but I'll stick them in anyway. The Only interesting thing about these two photos, really, is that they exist at all. The stage side of Roman theatres is usually the first part to fall down, and the photo of the *outside* of the theatre is interesting -- despite it actually being not very attractive -- because, really, how often do you see the outside of an intact Roman theatre building, Seljucized or otherwise ? -T.]

The drive back through Antalya showed how large and sprawling the city is. Over 1 million people now live there, largely clinging to the coast. Many resorts and hotels, all quite new. Sprawl, traffic flight, and hot tarmac. Twenty years ago, before it became a tourist destination, it had only a quarter of the current population.

The bus dropped us off on the far side of town and we walked back through the old city. The is in a sunken low portion of the coast, the geologic feature providing a bit of a harbor and hiding all the old town within.

We passed a military-only vacation resort. Apparently many of the big government employee groups (teachers, military) have their own resorts and guest houses, a perk to help balance their relatively low salaries.

Within the old city we saw an early Seljuk mosque, now a wreck, that they plan to restore. It was interesting as it used a byzantine-style barrel vault, not a done, making the architecture more like a Basilica.

In the afternoon Tam and my parents did the Turkish-bath offered by the hotel, I will let her report on how it was.

[I'm not sure how completely authentic our Turkish Bath experience was, since it didn't involve a middle aged woman built like a linebacker (NZ translation: a rugby prop) dislocating our limbs, and that's apparently a benchmark, but it *did* involve a lot of... "exfoliation" is perhaps too genteel a word, so we'll just call it "vigorous scrubbing". Followed by sluicing. The sluicing was very nice indeed. Then there was some massage. And if you want more detail than that, you'll need to buy me a beer. -T.]

That evening Tam and I walked back to the old town to visit a shoe shop we had passed that afternoon. The fellow’s family has been making shoes for a long time, and they still make the classical Ottoman point-toed designs. A design that is very old. Meaning a great place to get hand-made leather period style shoes for a very reasonable price!