The Matar Strikes Back

Day Two of the Spring Break trip turned out to be a long test of nerves, Lizzie's Turkish, family cohesion, and cultural flexibility, but it did leave us with one of the most vivid memories of the year.

We spent the first part of the morning in Kütahya, going to yet another archaeological museum (every city of any size has one, and Lizzie wants to see them all) and wandering around the old part of town looking at the Ottoman houses. Except in isolated wealthy enclaves and a handful of cities with identities and economies tied to their preservation, these beautiful buildings with ornate woodwork and projecting upper floors or cantilevered rooms are quickly becoming a rarity in Turkey. Well-meaning but ultimately paralyzing preservation laws have left them in the no-man's land between heritage and habitation. They are expensive to restore and regulations dictate that it must be done in a prescribed manner. On the flip side, there is a strong disinclination and in some cases legal restriction against leveling them. The end result is that they are often left to rot, and the oldest sections of many cities are littered with decomposing edifices to a lost era. I have to admit a certain affinity for beautiful decrepitude, but it's sad to think that within a generation or two these buildings may be gone and cement apartments will likely go up in their place.

 As we left Kütahya our Garmin was suggesting we take a mountain pass to our next destination instead of the highway. It's always a toss up what to do in this situation. This particular GPS, in this particular country, has probably resulted in more wrong turns than rescues. No doubt this is partly due to our slightly outdated maps but I'm inclined to believe (as I suggested in my last post) that this problem mostly stems from the fundamental disconnect between Anatolia and any fixed notions of time and space. Newtonian physics, timetables, and satellite triangulation just don't always apply here. One of my favorite pieces of fiction from the last decade or so is a short story by China Mieville called "Reports of Certain Events in London" (from an anthology edited by Michael Chabon, called McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, which also features the astonishingly good "7C" by Jason Roberts) in which a secret society of researchers track the movements and try to glean the obscure motives of sentient city streets that seem to move at will. Extrapolate that concept to an entire countryside and you get a good sense of what driving Turkey's backroads and dirt byways often feels like. Despite all that, however, we decided to trust the Garmin and were treated to a lovely ride full of highland meadows bursting with life. Along the way I had a funny but entirely unrelated conversation with my daughters about negligence, intentional and unintentional harm, and the various degrees of murder, in order to divest them of the notion that no blame can be assigned unless an act of malice is deliberately planned and executed. Like say, if they just happen to fling out their arm in a restricted space and it just happens to hit their sister in the face, shortly after said sister did something they didn't like. They were deeply disappointed to learn the phrase "But I didn't MEAN to hurt her" is not a universal or watertight defense.

We pulled into Çavdarhisar late morning. On its surface this humdrum hamlet gives no sign that it houses the spectacular ruins of ancient Aizanoi or once served as a popular destination for 18th and 19th-century travelers. It's a one-horse town, with no stoplights, no accommodations (least nothing open this time of year)  and only one gas station. Zero tourists were there besides us--just the way I like it. We'd already visited once before, during our fall trip through the Phrygian Highlands, and toured the Temple of Zeus and the unique underground chamber beneath it that was consecrated to Kybele (one of the mysteries surrounding the Great Mother is how a supposed fertility goddess can also be chthonic and related to death and the underworld. Which goes back to that quantum fluidity I mentioned in my last post). 

The only reason we'd come back was to take a second stab at locating an even more unique Kybele sanctuary situated about four kilometers outside town that factors into my book. On our first attempt, to my great frustration, we had failed to find it. In retrospect, this isn't all that surprising. Lizzie is pretty damned versed in this stuff and it was news to her. Only one other archeologist that we mentioned it to had ever heard of it before. But this time I had GPS coordinates, Google Earth satellite photos, detailed drawings, even a plan of the site. I just had to get there.  Only problem was, as with most Kybele sanctuaries, a river runs nearby and that river had swelled with the spring runoff and turned the dirt road we needed to take into a quagmire. 

Which brings us to the present. We are driving a rinky dink Hyundai. Lizzie drives about a hundred yards and says no way Jose, this is stupid. Unfortunately, I am very pigheaded about such things, and refuse to take no for an answer. There's no way I am going to fail twice at finding this place. So I make her get out and let me drive. Because she can read the Turkish signs, knows the country very well, is comfortable driving within its shall we say unorthodox traffic conditions, and because insuring an extra driver costs extra money, up until this point I'd left all the driving to her. Which is incredibly emasculating, but hey I'm the kind of guy who can handle that. But I figure now is the right time for me to assert my manliness. I am going to step in and get the job done. Well, within another few hundred yards it becomes obvious we are going to get miserably stuck if I go any further. In fact, there is a very good chance we are already stuck. I somehow manage to get us turned around and then try to get us out of there. You need a little speed to get through these situations, I think to myself, and so I give it a little gas. Enough gas to send us fishtailing through the deepest part of the muck and nearly into the river. Lizzie closes her eyes. No problem, no problem I get us straightened out. Yeah, just in time to hit the only sizable rock in our path. THUNK! goes the underside of the car. EXPLETIVE! goes the idiot behind the wheel. But hey, it's cool, we got out of that mess, right, how bad could it be? For about ten minutes we consider just parking the car at the end of this washed out road and walking back the four kilometers and change to the sanctuary but it's lunchtime and we think, let's just grab a bite in town and then do the hike.

It's a good thing we did. It's also a good thing I had to parallel park, because otherwise I might not have noticed the trail of oil leaking from our car. Oh no. Maybe it's not that bad. We leave the car, walk to the one gas station and confer with some guys there. Is the oil pan aluminum or iron? No idea. Let's go check. By the time we get back it's a moot point, the oil leak is not the type you can patch with some JB Weld. It's a geyser. We aren't going anywhere and this particular rental car has done it's last fishtail for a while. My daughters look at me like I just ripped open their favorite animal lovey and ate its stuffing. Again.

I guess now is a good time to mention that all the priests of Kybele, a.k.a. the Matar, were eunuchs. Not just eunuchs, though. Self-emasculated eunuchs, in ritual, bloody fashion. I now knew the feeling.

It's a little after noon. Lizzie spends an incredibly frustrating length of time on the phone with the car rental company. We had gone with Turkish Hertz for a change, thinking we needed a national outfit for our cross country trek. Fortunately, they had talked her into buying damage insurance at the last minute. Ha ha, jokes on them. Unfortunately, Turkish Hertz isn't exactly like American Hertz. For one thing, they don't answer their phone. For another, there's just the one office in Ankara, 4-5 hours east of our current position. When they do finally answer the phone, they keep trying to pass the buck and give us the runaround. They want us to try and get the car fixed on our own. Not possible, we say. It's Sunday and there are no shops here or open. Turkish Hertz mentions the communal junkyards/tool depots outside most rural Turkish towns where people go to fix their own cars. Are you kidding me? We can't drive this thing and I'm no mechanic. That's why we bought the insurance. OK, call the insurance. What? You're the insurance! No, actually we're not, you have to... ARE YOU KIDDING ME! OK, OK, call Hyundai. Hyundai? Why? Because they made the car. What? Yeah, call Hyundai. So we finally get some guy from a Hyundai office a few cities away to say he's going to come look at it. Supposedly, this guy is something like roadside assistance. Supposedly. That guy takes a few hours. In the meantime both our cell phones die. We can't really leave the car. We have lunch and then sit. And sit. And sit. The guy from Hyundai arrives and I know right away he's going to be no help whatsoever when he steps out in fancy shoes and lots of rings on his fingers. This guy is affiliated with Hyundai, but he looks more like a used car salesman than a mechanic. He spends exactly five seconds looking under the car and at the Exxon Valdez-size oil spill, gives us the hairy eyeball, and then says this car is broken. Then he gets on the phone. He wants nothing to do with this situation.

It is now mid afternoon. Lizzie goes off to charge her phone at the gas station. Half the town has walked by the car and asked us if we know we have an oil leak. Yep, thanks for the heads up. Turkish Hertz, when we can finally get them back on the phone, tells us to get a room for the night, it's Sunday and nothing is going to happen today. But Çavdarhisar has no hotels, motels, pensions, or hostels. We begin to pull the kid card: we're stuck out here with our children, please help us out. Don't strand us here. Please. It's getting cold (the truth). Alright, alright, said Turkish Hertz at last. Sit tight and we'll send a guy with another car. When? Four to five hours. You sure? Sure. Awesome.

It's late afternoon. It will be dark in an hour and a half, it's raining lightly, and the temperature is dropping fast (this is all happening in March.) I briefly toy with the idea of heading out alone to try and make it to the sanctuary before the sun sets, but A) I have no idea how long that will take, B) I'd have to walk back in the dark and we only have the one flashlight, and C) What kind of jackass leaves his wife and kids alone with no flashlight in a foreign city to go do book research after stranding them in the first place? So instead we decide to take a walk as a family. The skies clear. By now all the stress and adrenaline of the experience has left us kind of loopy and we actually have a blast on a sunset stroll through this little town in which absolutely everyone knows our business. Grandmas wave and smile; men on bikes wish a pleasant evening. We walk around the back of the temple, down the street that leads to the quagmire, and check out the old village houses. This brings us full circle from the morning, as these houses are the village equivalent of the old Ottoman city houses in Kütahya. They're beautiful and broken and a little pathetic, sort of like our predicament. We run into a herd of goats led by one wearing a pretty blue necklace. We watch the sun set from a crumbling theater and look back at this incredible temple that has withstood wars and earthquakes and a thousand other things worse than we are experiencing. We grab dinner at the only open restaurant in the town. They have basically one thing--kofte (meatballs) and rice. To me it tastes great but Callie and Ella insist they put something in the meatballs that dries out their mouths. What? Ok, don't eat it. Eat the rice. We get back to the car thinking we managed our time really well and we should only have a half hour or so before the new car gets here.

Wrong.

We sit in the car, in the dark and the cold, fogging up the windows. The girls finally lose it. They begin crying and shaking, like they might actually be going hypothermic (probably not, but we'd stupidly left their winter coats at home, not expecting to be outside at night), so I take off my fleece and wrap it around them. I pull some of my shirts from my suitcase and tuck them around their feet. It doesn't help much.

In every town or village in Turkey, no matter how small, is at least one teahouse. Devout muslims abstain from alcohol, but men are men wherever you go and they're going to congregate and shoot the shit somehow, so in this country that means party at the teahouse. It just so happens that our car bled out directly across the street from Çavdarhisar's one and only teahouse. So as the night deepens just about every man in this town walks by our car. They all know what happened because half of them asked us and that half told the other half. The four of us are sitting there and we are tonight's entertainment. Well, maybe more like tonight's diversion. Twenty guys are sitting outside and they're all talking about us. Eventually, they confer and send the teahouse manager over. He motions to open the window and when we do he invites us inside.

It is hard to know how to respond to this. Turkey has seen a lot of social change over the years, but one thing that is immutable is that the teahouse is for men only. No women. And for damn sure no female children. But here is this fellow telling us to come inside and get warm. We accept.

Inside the teahouse I have the most intense culture shock I've ever had in Turkey. Conversations die the minute we walk in and only some of them pick back up again. They seat us right next to the stove and I get that weird tunnel vision you sometimes get when you go too quickly from freezing to hot. Nobody is talking to us, nobody is quite staring at us. We are the elephant in the room. Lizzie orders some tea. I hate tea, unfortunately, but this isn't the time to quibble. The girls have juice. The discomfort of the situation never lessens. I know this is largely due to my own self-consciousness but it just feels weird to be in there. Lizzie agrees.  After one more tea we ask for the check. They are aghast. We don't need to pay. We are their guests! We feel terrible. We thank them profusely and go back to sit in the cold car. The crisis has passed. The girls have recovered a normal core temperature. They fall asleep.

I get out of the car hopeful every time a vehicle pulls through town, ready to flag it down. I do this a dozen times. Each time it is not our man. Cars stop passing. The teahouse begins to shut down for the night. A few men linger, talking amongst themselves. No doubt they are drawing straws to see who must offer us a room. Being inhospitable to waylaid strangers is unforgivable in Islam. I begin to think our guy has abandoned us. What does he care? Who are we to him?

He finally pulls up after I nod off. He's nice enough but is clearly not happy that he had to drive all the way from Ankara on a Sunday night. I have no idea where he will stay, or how he will get there. I finally get it and understand that this too, all of it in fact, is my fault. I express my thanks in the most polite, most effusive way I know how. For good measure I also give him a 50 lira tip. We wake the girls and load everything into the new car. It's so nice and warm inside. Lizzie signs a few papers. The final teahouse stragglers wander over and we share a laugh with them. They, and we, are very happy it didn't come to imposing on them. All's well that ends well, they say. Something like that anyway. We thank them again. And drive off into the night.

p.s. I did eventually make it that sanctuary, two months later (I'm stubborn that way) but that story will have to wait for another time.

Bad Day at Black Rock becomes Great Day at Zey

Hard to believe it's been nearly five months since I posted. Apologies to anyone expecting more frequent updates, but I warned you from the outset that blogs and I have a love/hate relationship. The good news is that I'm nearly 100,000 words into my novel. The bad news is that a handful of story and structure dilemmas have stymied my production of late and it looks like I probably won't quite be finished with a first draft when I leave here. While I work through those, however, I thought I might as well catch up on recounting some of our springtime adventures.

The novel is about two women who go missing in Anatolia approximately a hundred years apart while searching for the origins of the mother goddess cult, one of the oldest, strangest, and least understood religions of all time. It's a story within a story, and a book about a book, but thankfully that's about as meta or postmodern as it gets. Mostly it's about seekers and travelers; about the still powerful lure of the ancient past; and about how words, names, faiths, myths, and landscape shape reality and our place in it. But it also represents my own humble attempt to read the palimpsest that is modern day Turkey--a land with so many cultures and paths written across on its face that its very soil becomes a kind of protean hieroglyph; the Borgesian Aleph or space-time nexus where all other points converge.

Because so much of the book takes place in exotic, often remote places, it was imperative that I see as many as possible with my own eyes. Some of these places I've been lucky enough to visit before, but with time winding down on our year abroad, I needed to knock out a few key stragglers so Lizzie and I somehow managed to convince our daughters (read: gave them no other choice but) to spend their spring break zigzagging across West-Central Turkey, covering well over 1000 km in the car and who knows how many on foot. Along the way, I got to thinking about just how much of this country they've seen, on this and their three previous visits. A staggering amount, actually. Certainly more than most Turks (who, like most Americans, rarely take the time to cross their own country by car). My daughters definitely don't love long car rides, but if they grow up anything like me, all those moments and experiences will pay huge dividends in ways they will only begin to understand as adults.

Pessinus

Our first stop was Pessinus, about an hour west of Ankara, a ruined city at the Eastern edge of the ancient kingdom of Phrygia and one which most Greek and Roman sources cite as the capital of Kybele worship. A word or two here about Kybele: nowadays, if one happens across it at all, her name is most often spelled with the Latinate C. This is simply because the Romans spread her worship farther, and left more written references to her, than all other ancient cultures combined. However, in both Greek and the original Phrygian, her name is spelled with a K and that is how it will appear in my book. That said, "Kybele" is just a catch-all epithet for a deity who went by many names. She was actually most widely known as Magna Mater (The Great Mother) or Mater Deorum/Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods, in Latin and Greek, respectively). Some of her other names include Kuvava, Koubaba, Kybebe, and toponyms like Dindymene, Idaea, Sipylene, Steunene, etc. She was also readily blended with preexisting deities, and took on their names as well, most notably the Greek titan Rhea or her mother Gaia. That is not to say she was a generic deity or Jungian archetype--her attributes and mythology were too specific, consistent, and idiosyncratic to support that idea--just that the ancients weren't always so hung up on limiting something to a single identity, name, or attribution. (One of the things I find most fascinating about ancient myths and religions is the way they force you to uncouple your mind from the modern insistence on binary thought and logic. Things are seldom either/or in such cosmologies, they can be both, neither, or all at the same time. Quantum archaism, people. Dig it.) Like one of my protagonists, however, I take great faith in etymology, and believe there is much meaning and hidden information to be found in words and names. Scholarly consensus now says that "Kybele" derives from "Matar Kubileya," a Phrygian epithet only attributed in two extant inscriptions but one which carries an extremely evocative meaning: "Mother of the Mountain." For a whole host of thematic and narrative reasons I have taken this phrase as the title of my novel.

One of many historical backdrops to my book is provided by a very curious episode in Roman history. It's fairly well known and extensively documented, but unless I'm mistaken (and correcting me would probably break my heart), I don't think it has been dealt with in any substantive way by any previous work of fiction. Just mentioning it here makes me nervous someone will beat me to the punch. I have a history of happening upon ideas or information, as if by osmosis or telepathy, at the exact moment someone else is busy broadcasting them (remind me to tell you the story about that Atari game some guy plagiarized from me when I was ten or eleven), but this one is mine, I tell you. All mine! If you're out there, you idea-pilfering doppelganger, and you're planning to steal my thunder this time, know that I'm coming for you and this time it's war.

Speaking of war... in the early third century BC, Rome was in a panic. Hannibal had crossed the alps on his war elephants, royally kicked their butts in a few key battles, and ravaged the Italian mainland. The Romans were terrified he would march all the way to Rome and pillage their fair city. To make matters worse, they were also in the midst of a plague, a drought, and a meteor shower (sources are vague on the timing of these things). So they did what all the ancients did in times of anxiety and uncertainty: they consulted an oracle. In this case, they asked the Sibylline Books, a venerable collection of trippy writings by famous female prophets, allegedly acquired by Lucius Tarquinus Superbus, the last king of Rome. The question: What should be done to protect Rome against the foreign invader? The answer that came back was as straightforward as it was strange: go to Pessinus and bring back the Great Mother.

How exactly does one kidnap a goddess? Well, fortunately for them there was a ready solution. Within the temple to Kybele was kept what's known in fancy circles as an aniconic image, called The Black Rock of Pessinus. That is to say, an object that represented the goddess without actually looking like one. If you had to guess, what do you think it was that made this particular black rock so special? Yep, it was a meteorite. Pretty weird, right? Actually, not so much. If the sources are to be believed, the ancient world was chock-o-block with holy meteors. One of them is still glued into one corner of the Kaaba, the black cube in the Great Mosque at Mecca that all Muslims pray to five times a day.

Exactly why the meteoric icon of a foreign goddess was necessary to thwart Hannibal, or why the Kybelean priests at Pessinus (known as the Galli) would just hand it over, are very open questions, discussed and debated quite a bit in the literature. The most straightforward explanation is that Kybele was seen as a protectress of cities, among other things (hence her crenelated headdress in later depictions), and her favor (earned or imagined) was often used to confer and legitimize kingship. Whatever the case an official delegation was sent, the king of Pergamon brokered the deal, and the Black Rock of Pessinus was brought to Rome with great fanfare. Shortly after that, the plague ended, the rains came to end the drought, and the Romans beat Hannibal all the way back to Africa. Kybele received her own temple on the Palatine Hill and enjoyed a place of honor for the next four centuries while the Empire spread her worship everywhere they held territory. Kybele altars and statues turn up from London to Cairo. So the million dollar question is, what happened to the Black Rock of Pessinus? More bad news/good news: you'll just have to read the book to find out.

Needless to say, the Black Rock was long gone by the time we pulled through the ramshackle village of Ballıhisar and set eyes on the screaming anticlimax that is modern day Pessinus. Unfortunately, the entire site, such as it is, is now fenced and evidently off limits off season, a fact which (sshh) did not keep me out but did keep my scramble-happy daughters from even wanting to get out of the car. The really curious thing about Pessinus, given its constant association with Phrygia and her chief goddess in the Classical period, is that very little of it is turning out to be Phrygian at all. Almost nothing there dates to before the famous Black Rock episode. Rather than screwing anything up, this actually plays nicely into my devious little hands (imagine me as Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, riffling my fingers and crowing "Excellent.")

They Zey

Still, we felt bad about Pessinus being such a letdown for the girls, so we decided last minute to add another stop to the itinerary: the little known Necropolis of Zey. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? The site was only (re)discovered and published within the last 10-15 years and doesn't feature in my book. Lizzie had been there once (with good friend and esteemed U. Vic. professor Brendan Burke) in 2002 but her memory of it was understandably hazy. At the time they just walked into the village and asked some little boys where the tombs were. I had done a lot of homework with Google Earth and had a long list of GPS coordinates to plug into our Garmin, but Turkey has a funny way of laughing in the face of such devices. En route to Zey we hit a farmer's market in the center of a nearby village. Lizzie leaned out the window and asked if there was any way through. "Not without great difficulty" said a somber man who seemed intimately familiar with such prospects. Nonetheless, we soldiered on. Three dozen jogs and little alley cuts later we were again upon the road to Zey, only the road soon became a heavily pockmarked dirt path climbing precipitously into the snow. Surely this can't be the road? we asked ourselves. Surely it is, Turkey replied.

A nervous half-hour later we pulled into the village of Zey proper but it was almost entirely abandoned because everyone was at the market. No brown Ministry of Culture signs. Not even a herd of goats heading out of town to show the way. Thankfully, there was one kind Omega Man to point us in the general direction of a tractor path above a river valley. The road soon bogged down and became impassable so we parked and set out on foot.

I absolutely live for this kind of bushwack adventure and, fortunately, my daughters do as well, so long as we cut the leash and allow them to roam free. (As an archaeologist, Lizzie's willingness to ramble sort of goes without saying). We scrambled over and around a bunch of rock outcrops, looking for telltale cuttings, and as usual it was much farther than expected. But what a payoff! Almost all Phrygian sanctuaries, necropolises, or cult centers are situated in naturally beautiful surroundings and this one was no exception. A clear brook curved and laughed below us, feeding a fertile valley where a trio of village women crouched and picked some kind of berry. We spent the rest of the afternoon there, climbing in and out of the half dozen tombs that were readily accessible, gazing at those that were not, and taking in the ancient peaceful atmosphere of the place. Once more we treasured the gift of exploring it alone, without official encumbrance or tacky tourist accoutrements. There are no signs, no trails, no guard ropes or postcards; just you and the natural mystic. Absolute heaven. It got a bit chilly when a light rain began to fall, but it couldn't dampen our spirits and we frolicked and lunched in our 2,600-year-old picnic spot. With a little luck and a break in the rain, I even managed to take my favorite photo of my girls so far.

My girls

After that, we drove to Eskişehir just in time for Lizzie to squeeze in her requisite dose of museum time (she turns into a gorgon if she doesn't get it), and then on to Kütahya, where we stayed in a smelly room near a noisy elevator at a lousy hotel with crap food. We woke the next day thinking at least we'd gotten our one bad night out of the way and man, were we wrong.

(To be continued.)