What is Left but the Cleaving

With only two days to go before the girls and I head back home, my feelings are mixed and hard to convey.

E. E. Cummings (*) had a neat technique for expressing this kind of ambivalence and adding depth to his poetry. He would often pair a word with its antonym, or else a word with an oppositional connotation. The best example of this is probably "my father moved through dooms of love" in which he uses phrases like "haves of give," "depths of height," and the titular "dooms of love" to portray the mutability/multiplicity of both the man he is describing and his own opinion of/relationship to him. Cummings called this idea "knowing around," an awkward phrase that nonetheless hints at the three-dimensionality it evokes. He credited his discovery of it to modern art and reading Freud.

(* Sorry to be pedantic, but see here for why I don't use the lowercase when writing his name, which echoes what I learned doing research for the little book I edited/wrote about his work.) 

The most common expression of this kind of thing is probably the word "bittersweet," which Cummings might have coined if it didn't already exist. That's a good word, it conveys a lot, but it has become a little watered down by over usage. Much more interesting to me are those rare words that wield this great power in more subtle fashion--they don't just smash together two antonyms, they quietly embody their own opposites. And like two mirrors facing thus create a kaleidoscope of conceptual depth. The simultaneous slipperiness and density of meaning conveyed by these special words is rather ironically reflected in our inability to settle on a single term for them. Instead we have at least eight: autoantonym, contronym, antagonym, Janus word (after the Roman god), enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy, or addad.

Some good examples include fast (moving quickly/fixed in place), refrain (non-action/repetition), weather (withstand/wear away), left (remaining/departed), and sanction (permit/punish). My favorite, however, is the word "cleave" which means both to cling and to split apart.

I found myself thinking about cleaving and contronyms as I sat down to conclude this little travel journal. Especially after I realized this time of year has always been bittersweet for me (teachers out there are nodding their heads and saying, tell me about it). In my youth the end of the school year meant both liberation and the loss of guidelines, brief excitement often followed by ennui and aimlessness, pride of accomplishment and fear of future. These contrary feelings took on even greater resonance at times of graduation. It was also around this time that Lizzie and I left Virginia on a cross country drive to start a new life in California. A year later, it was again when we drove back across the country to get married. Thereafter, it became the time we parted ways for the summer and she went abroad (a time of separation and loss, but also an annual reminder not to take each other for granted). Likewise it was when we moved to Connecticut, and then again to Virginia. After that I thought such periods of push-pull would only be reflected in the lives of my daughters. Except, here I am again, readying both to depart and return, to look ahead and behind, to consider what is left. To cleave.

Things I will miss:

The sunsets. Being able to see one every night is a special privilege. This was tonight's.

 The call to prayer. Until this year, for me, the adhan has always been an evocative song of Otherness, the clearest signal that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. A phrase from my book comes to mind--"the soundtrack to an Orientalist mind film." Although it is not as omnipresent here on a college campus as it is in the cities and villages, and though I remain devoutly irreligious, the call to prayer now triggers a different feeling, one more rooted in its actual purpose. To me it says, Stop what you are doing. Breathe. Give thanks. Be mindful.

The Phrygian Highlands. The Phrygian Highlands. The Phrygian Highlands.

The way thunderstorms roll over Ankara almost every afternoon in early summer. Storms have bookended our stay here, actually. There was an epic lightning storm the night we arrived. It lit up our new city like a carnival funhouse and made me instantly love the view from our apartment. Then we got a surprising amount of snow. But now it's all about the thunderstorms and their leviathan grumbling. I've always found this sound comforting for some reason. It makes me feel cozy, even when I am out in the rain. I didn't learn until moving to California that thunderstorms aren't common everywhere. They may not come as regularly, but I am thankful that Virginia always serves up some doozies.

When you are really lucky, you get a thunderstorm, the call to prayer and the Phrygian Highlands all at the same time. With such a triumvirate blessing your senses, it is easy to forgive your daughters for nearly spoiling your already windblown, amateur hour cinematography with their whiny voices.

I will also miss the use of certain phrases that plumb this country's deep well of graciousness and goodwill. I only know a few. Kolay gelsin, which means "may it come easy." You say it to your bus driver, the guy sweeping the street, or the women cleaning your hotel room. It conveys sincere empathy, especially with those who work the hardest for the least pay. I think this phrase should be universalized somehow. Afiyet olsun, "may it be good for you." This is said by someone serving you a meal they made themselves. To which you respond, Elenize sağlık, or "health to your hands." Hoş geldiniz is said whenever you enter an establishment or to someone arriving in a new place. It means "it is nice you are here." The response is hoş bulduk. "I find it nice (to be here)." Although I am ashamed of how little Turkish I've learned, I am glad to have learned these and I was proud to use them often.

A standard response would be to say the food. I do love the food here and  I will dearly miss certain dishes, especially döner kebabs, certain kinds of güveç, white cheeses, and man oh man the olives. But America has more variety. And much better beer.

Things I won't miss:

Being mute and powerless. Language is a tool you take for granted until you are stranded without it exactly when and where you need it most. I like tools. I like to be handy. Over here I am not handy. I am handicapped.

Living in an apartment building. Especially the journeyman guitarist who lives above us and played the same handful of blues riffs all year, at all hours, including right now, this very moment. And the woman who lives across from us, who often gets tired of her screaming children, so she pushes them out in the hallway and lets them roller blade back and forth, banging against my doorway for hours. Especially on days they have off, and I am trying to write.

Along the same lines, I certainly won't miss the military helicopters that are forever running mysterious sorties from some unseen base in yonder hills to an equally mysterious destination beyond our building. What are they doing? Why are they doing it all day long? Alas, I will never know, and maybe I ought to be reminded of the world's state of perpetual war but it sure spoils my concentration.  

Something small that will never be the same:

Honeysuckle. It's everywhere over here this time of year. It follows me as I walk to get the girls from school. It wafts up to our balcony from the big bush across the street. Back in Virginia, there is also a honeysuckle bush across the street from my house. For the rest of my life I will probably never smell it there without thinking about it here.

To Cleave or Not to Cleave. That is the question. Yes. No. Either. Neither. Both.

Lost and Found and Lost Again

On Day 5 we woke in Manisa. This sizeable city between Sardis and Izmir was known in classical times as Magnesia ad Sipylum (to distinguish it from the other Magnesia on the Maeander River). It is perhaps most famous as the site of the final battle in the Roman-Seleucid War. We were there to track down and if possible see in person another unique setting for my book: the Kybele Anıtı, a monolithic rock carving found halfway up Mount Sipylus. The night before we had pulled into town with a flat tire, but a nice fellow at our hotel helped us get that patched with relative ease, so we used the last of our daylight to seek out the Ağlayan Kaya or Weeping Rock/Niobe with which the Kybele Anıtı is often confused. Both are stone images of women drawn from myth, both were mentioned by Pausanias in his 2nd-century AD work Descriptions of Greece, and both have a familial connection with Tantalus, but the former is man made and the latter is natural. The Niobe is not that hard to find or reach, provided you don't mind driving Manisa's narrow back streets. She was the daughter of Tantalus, sibling to Pelops and Broteas. She weeps because all fourteen of her children--seven daughters and seven sons--were killed by Artemis and Apollo, respectively, as punishment for her boasting about her fecundity to the pair's mother, Leto. Whereupon she fled back to Mount Sipylus and was turned to stone, condemned to weep alone forever. Pretty grim. A public park and amphitheater now provide her with frequent company but both were empty when we arrived right at sunset, save a small klatch of shifty eyed young men sipping beer in paper bags. A few hundred yards away is a cool Roman bridge and nicely situated cafe that further insures Niobe never stays lost or alone for long.

The Kybele Anıtı is a different story. First off, she is a native Anatolian deity, not an imported Greek myth. Secondly, she is way way older. Nobody really knows how old exactly but a clay figurine found at Çatalhöyük (a Neolithic site in Central Turkey) which bears a striking resemblance to statues of her from the Classical period dates to the seventh millennium BC. Which puts her at the very dawn of history--twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids. The third thing that makes the Kybele Monument different from the Niobe Rock is that, nowadays at least, it is much much harder to reach. Strangely, this doesn't seem to have been the case in the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries. While doing research for the book, I've read about a dozen early traveler reports and collected almost as many drawings and photos (see below for a little timeline I put together) that suggest it was a fairly regular stop on antiquarian tours of Asia Minor. Pausanias, who was born nearby, dubbed it the "most ancient of all the images of the Mother of the gods." Dutch-Levantine minister and missionary Henry Van Lennep had this to say about it in 1870: "We here look upon a monument which was even to Homer an object of venerable and unknown antiquity, a monument antecedent not only to history, but in some sense to mythology itself." Pioneering archaeologist, spy, stateswoman, confidant of kings and all around badass Gertrude Bell (about whom Werner Herzog just made a movie starring Nicole Kidman) visited the Kybele in 1902 and wrote this in a private letter: "She looks so old - her face indistinguishable, her body leaning forward over her knees - marred as she is I think she is still the most impressive figure I have seen since the Sphinx."

Greek legend attributes creation of the relief to Broteas, brother of Niobe. Current scholarship dates it to 1300 BC and credits the Hittites. Whatever the case, given that kind of pedigree and historical prominence, you'd think the site might warrant a modicum of attention or respect. I don't know, maybe a sign? Perhaps a parking lot. Something resembling a trail. I would have settled for a map. Instead, a podunk amusement park abuts the highway beneath the mountain and completely obscures the Kybele's existence. It's not there because the Kybele is there, it just happens to be there. I know this because neither the concierge at our hotel nor the lone fellow we found manning the gate of the park (closed for the winter) had any idea a 3,300-year-old work of art worthy of mention by Homer even existed in this town, let alone a thousand- odd feet overhead. I get such a kick out of this kind of cultural nonchalance. I'm not sure whether it can be better explained by the embarrassment of ancient riches in Turkey or just a fundamental disconnect with nature and history. Then again, maybe we're just weird. Yeah, that's probably it.

Kybele Anıtı , hiding in the jungle of underbrush.

I had scoured the Internet for some kind of trail map and the best I came up with was something from a website cataloging dubious proofs for Atlantis. I overlaid that on a Google Earth satellite image to get a sense of distance and terrain but forgot the damned thing at home. It probably wouldn't have helped anyway because the trail it marked simply did not exist, at least not when we were there. I found one other blog of a guy who had tried and failed twice to find it (kind of like my trials at Aizanoi). This guy is a minor personality in the field of fringe archaeology and I was determined to succeed in his wake, despite the fact that he had hired a guide and didn't have two eleven-year-olds attempting it with him. One paragraph from his blog is worth quoting: "Three hours later I had aborted the journey. I was shattered. I mean, devastatingly exhausted. My heart was pounding and I was physically incapable of continuing. Although I could see the Cybele relief a few hundred metres in the distance, for the life of me I could not reach it; the terrain was too inhospitable. Even if I had had a machete, I would have struggled to penetrate the brutal undergrowth."

That pretty well sums up the task at hand. Nothing worth doing is ever easy, though, right? Shortly after we plunged into the briars we lost our vantage on the relief and had little to no real sense of where it was or where we were going.  Surprise, surprise, we ended up way off track and didn't realize this until an hour later when I left Lizzie and the girls behind to do some reconnaissance. Scrambling straight up a rockfall, I finally broke through the trees and underbrush enough to get a bead on the Kybele and saw we had been heading in the wrong direction all along. I went back to retrieve the ladies and deliver the bad news. Then we doubled back up the way I had come. I thought getting out of the thicket at least would speed our progress but I had led us to a precarious spot where going on was just as dicey as trying to get back down. The girls were game, though, and so we went for it. The next hour was pretty white knuckle, with a lot of butt shimmying to keep from falling down a series of steep pitches with bad footing. We hit a few impassable crevasses and had to descend a bit and then regain our altitude but in due time we made it across.

After all that effort, seeing the Kybele up close and personal was an ambivalent experience. Her sheer size is humbling and perhaps explains her arrested state. She is not merely weathered, she is also stillborn. Maybe her anonymous sculptor just took on a bigger project than he or she could finish. Maybe fate had other plans. Then again, from a postmodern perspective, this nascent quality captures the act of creation, or birth, much better than something complete and wholly realized. In the book I describe her as looking like a cicada that died trying to shed its shell. From many angles she is more monstrosity than Great Mother, more golem than goddess, but like her stone sister Niobe a certain startling recognition snaps into place when you circle just so and you spot the all too human tension between stoicism and imperfection, strength and frailty. Her throne is a great many-colored thing, striated and moist. Signs of previous visitors were more abundant than I would have liked. Graffiti marred much of her lower surfaces, and some gonzo adrenaline junkies had left foot and hand loops in the thinnest climbing rope I have ever seen as an invitation to scale the cliff from which she had been carved. I stopped short of accepting and ate an apple instead. When our sweat had cooled and dried, and we lingered long enough for time to slip its tether, and the sun had crossed its bittersweet meridian and was throwing the shadow of Mt. Sipylus across the vast fertile plain below us, we bid the Kybele goodbye and began our descent. A wadi, or dry stream bed, made the first section much easier, for now we decided to head straight down until we hit the fence behind the abandoned amusement park and try to cheat the briars along its supporting wall. This strategy worked for the most part and before we knew it we were lifting the girls over a section of barbed wire and heading to the car. Before we left, I ran out onto the road and took one last look back at her, tucked into her aeonian alcove far above the passing world, and felt a childish thrill at the thought of how many times she had been and would yet be lost and found and lost again. May the way to her never be signed or mapped, and that parking lot never built.

 

Waystations Between

Day 3 of our road trip took us through territory that will feature prominently in the climax of my book, so I won't be writing anything about it here, other than to mention the Otel Dülgeroğlu (which isn't in the book, though it deserves to be). If you ever find yourself in Uşak, or traveling along the old Izmir-Ankara highway that bisects Western Turkey, I recommend a stay in this converted han/caravanserai. Rates are reasonable, staff is friendly and courteous, the rooms have gorgeous high ceilings and thick enough walls to inure against the noise of the bustling city, and the restaurant is excellent, if a wee bit overpriced. I'd advise against arriving at rush hour like we did, or trying to navigate any of the one way streets around it, but beyond that you can't go wrong. After our vehicular tribulation in Çavdarhisar, we couldn't have asked for a better place to rest up, lick our wounds, and pretend we were extras in a remake of Casablanca. Only we must have missed the memo about shooting being cancelled that day because the place was almost empty. Solitude seems to follow us like Pig Pen's cloud of dust, but for me it always brings a peace and quiet as comforting as Linus's blanket.

Day 4 brought us first to Alaşehir, the city built over ancient Philadelphia, which also features in the book. We weren't there very long. Earthquakes and fires have robbed much of its material history. But I had really come in the vain hope of finding some hip and enterprising young turk capitalizing on the sister-city thing by selling classic Dr. J t-shirts with a fez on his afro, or döner kebab hoagies, or even some sketchy dude selling simit (the Turkish soft pretzel) from a dirty grocery store cart instead of a pile atop his head--anything to make for a good photo or souvenir for my Philly obsessed family back home. Alas, the best I could do was summon the same sense of abject disappointment we reserve for our sports teams. 

There was nothing disappointing about Sardis, our next destination. For some strange reason, this site is seldom accorded the same attention or respect that Turkey's more famous archaeological destinations get, but that's actually a wonderful thing. Because it means you have a decent chance of finding it uninhabited and taking in its charms at your own pace, and in your own headspace. Lizzie did all her graduate school fieldwork there, mentored by the late Crawford Greenwalt, Jr., a legend in the field whose graciousness, gentility, and warmth even today, several years after his untimely death, seem to infuse the place with a numinous serenity and light. The ruins are extensive and awesome, so much so that I won't even bother trying to describe them. We saved the monumental Temple of Artemis for last, ate our lunch and spent hours alone there; I even took a nap. Suffice it to say that there may be other temples its equal in grandeur and beauty of surroundings but surely none surpass it. Earlier, while touring the well-preserved city street, synagogue, and gymnasium we were followed around by a handsome little pup and it took everything I had to resist the urge to bring it home. 

We had all been there before, even the girls. I actually spent several weeks babysitting them in the temple when they were four, and as cool as those times were, this visit will stand in my memory at least as the red letter day. For Lizzie that will likely be in two weeks, when she returns alone to see the Bilkent Orchestra perform in "Greenie's" honor, in the temple, a symphony that he commissioned. Heady stuff for a humble gal from Virginia. As we were leaving that day, it was especially touching to watch the recognition and joy wash over the site guard's face when he remembered Lizzie from her time working there, over a decade before. His wife was there as well, selling scarves and handmade purses, fruits, and nuts. She fawned over the girls and despite her obvious poverty, refused any payment for the items she wanted to give them. Turks may have a reputation for haggling, but trying to outbid their generosity is often just as difficult. We drove away waving as if from family we would dearly miss.

I had originally planned to include Day 5 in this post as well, but since it entails a self-contained adventure, with lots of backstory, I think I'll leave that for next time.  

Görüşürüz. (See you later.)

 

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.) 

In Pursuit of Magic (Along the Turquoise Coast)

Nearly two months since my last entry. Reasons being: work on the novel has consumed all my time (a good thing) and we haven't left Ankara in that entire span (a bad thing). So it was with great stir-crazy excitement that we hopped a plane south to Antalya the day after Christmas, and three from when my parents touched down for their two-week visit. Wet weather followed us, but the storm gods graced us with just enough well-timed sunshine to get out and sightsee when we felt the urge and just enough rain to hunker down and relax when we didn't.

Floor mosaics in the Church of St. Nicholas

Our first stop, en route to our home base in Kaş, was the ancient and seasonally apropos site of Myra (modern-day Demre), bishopric of the historical Saint Nicholas. The last time I'd been there, the town was so overrun with Russian tourists that we didn't even bother to see old St. Nick's incredibly well preserved Byzantine church. If a similar crowd had come for Christmas, they were gone the day after, because we had the place virtually to ourselves, a common and welcome occurrence during the succeeding days and sites.

The church's nearly flawless state of preservation is a result of the modern soil level reaching almost exactly to the tip of its two-story height. To tour the Church, visitors therefore descend into a hollow in the ground with impressive retaining walls. I'm not normally attracted to or overly impressed by churches, but the mosaics and frescoes of St. Nicholas are breathtakingly beautiful and vibrant and the passing rainstorm gave the whole place a feeling of freshness and clarity that stuck with me for days. For some reason I had always understood our modern Santa Claus to equally descend from the legend of this 4th-century Greek bishop and the Germanic tradition of Sinterklaas. I was quite surprised to learn the latter is just an elision/transliteration of the same man's name. The longer I live here, the more I begin to think that almost everything originates in Turkey.

On the other side of town from the church is a much more ancient site dominated by a Roman theater that is situated beside an impressive assemblage of Lycian tombs. These I had seen before, but through the fresh eyes of my parents, and beneath the exploring feet of my daughters, both structures shined anew.

Theater at Myra

More heavy rain hit us on the winding road to Kaş, slowing our progress and forcing us to descend into the town in total darkness.
Our lovely little "villa" (only a slight exaggeration) was on a peninsula outside Kaş proper, and it was probably a good thing we couldn't see just how precipitously the wet road plunged into the Mediterranean at each of the hairpin turns as they were scary enough in dry daylight.

The next day was spent somewhat leisurely acclimating to the coastal lifestyle and getting a sense of Kaş. We explored the restored Hellenistic theater in a light rain and Doc, the twins, and I scampered around the high ground above it until rendezvousing with Lizzie and Nana on a verdant trail to one of the Lycian tombs Lizzie discussed in her book. I never tire of finding ancient architecture sitting forlorn and under-appreciated in such easily accessible places and can only imagine what it must be like to grow up with such awesome play forts and hidey holes. 

Theater in Kaş

Lycian tomb from Lizzie's book

Nana vs. Baby Goat

On the way down we encountered a goat mother and kid and the playful billy briefly squared off with Nana before ceding the path.

We ate that night at a cozy little place up a narrow street. Outside we met and were warmly welcomed by a Kiwi and his Aussie girlfriend in town for a break from crewing a pleasure yacht. Inside, we tried our rudimentary Turkish on our waiter, only to be told he understood English better. Turns out he was a Kurd, in Kaş to spell his cousin (the restaurant's owner). Usually he lived in Norway, where he was (according to his own boast) a famous lothario, but lest we get the wrong idea he proudly displayed the name of his Norwegian wife, which was tattooed on his arm. The next day, at a cafe specializing in gözleme (a wonderful flatbread crepe), our waiter was another stand-in for that restaurant owner's pregnant wife. Normally he lived in the south of France. He also ran a real estate shop across the street in case we were in the market. Kaş was clearly an interdimensional waystation for colorful characters.

Day two took us up the coast to two more Lycian/Roman sites. First up was Patara, famous for its abutting white sand beach and a heavily restored bouleuterion (council hall) where the Lycian League, arguably the first known democratic body in history, met and debated the issues of the day. After a bit of a bushwhack to find my favorite Pataran feature--an imperial-era Roman Temple with a mammoth doorway and lintel--Nana and the girls were ready to hit the beach. Doc and Lizzie dutifully walked off to find the ruins of the lighthouse. We met up later for quite an ample picnic on the sand, sitting on a convenient shelf made by the tide.  So few people were there that I felt bad for the proprietors of the deserted beach shack, so we capped off the visit with a big beer and some tea while C & E indulged their aboriginal fantasies on the beach. An ambassador of the famous but so far elusive breed of Van cats that Callie and Ella love some much (known by their snow white coats and heterochromic eyes—one blue, one green) graced us with a brief visit and then we were off to Letoon.

Van cat and anonymous hipster

It wouldn't be a proper road trip if we didn't wander the wrong way down a strange path, so we indulged Doc and Nana en route with a little detour into a community comprised entirely of greenhouses. Bisecting this glass village was a single, brick-paved road that was evidently being constructed at the very moment we accidentally happened upon it. At its unexpected terminus, through a gauntlet of puppies, chickens, and curious villagers, we met a gaggle of men building the road who greeted our inquiries about the location of Letoon with faces both amused and confused. A tricky twenty-point turn, with full complement of spectators, sent us back the way we came, red-faced but eventually on track.

Arched entrance to theater at Letoon

Letoon is a roadside site, easily missed and on this day a bit muddy. Without Lizzie along to explain the salient features of its three temples and theater, it probably would not have registered very highly on the wow-o-meter, which is probably why the guard and his dutiful assistant closed up the place the minute after they achieved their single-visit quota.

On the way back to Kaş, we paused above Kalkan to snap a few shots of a stunning sunset. That night and the two days following brought several bouts of torrential rain, which meant we could lay low for a bit and relax before heading back to Ankara. 

Sunset over Kalkan

We did take one final short trip up the coast to an amazing little beach called Kaputaş Plajı, situated where a gorge splits open the towering rock faces that make the Turquoise Coast so unique. Down several steep flights of steps, waves crashed upon a stony beach with suitably dramatic flair and sent us running for higher ground. In the summer, at lower tides, the place is apparently packed but we were once again alone and thankful every minute of it. On the steps back up we noticed a little stencil that succinctly summarized our travel philosophy.

Beyond that we lounged by the pond-water pool, we played with the pack of cats who haunted the villa's grounds, lunched under the vine-covered veranda, and took a nice walk around the peninsula. Doc and I even trespassed (at his urging) onto an abandoned property tricked out like some kind of ridiculous Knossos knock-off. It had clearly once been a bar, and would be one again if we had anything to say about it. Alas I only took one picture for posterity.

Kediler everywhere

Doc surveys the site of his future bar

We chose an alternate route back to Antalya that took us through Elmalı, the highland plateau town where Lizzie spends each summer excavating. A sometime guard met us there and unlocked the site for us. Lizzie took us on a whirlwind tour of the mound that ended in sleet, with me crouched over a puddle trying to clean the girls' boots and Lizzie unknowingly offering a bag of clementines from Kaş to a man with a yard full of orange trees. Good thing, too, because it later gave the girls something to eat while we waited for our delayed flight to finally board. Evidently there's an old adage that says half an orange tastes just as sweet as a whole one.  Clearly the man or woman who said that never got to eat an entire bag.

Mountains en route to Elmalı