Mom and Dad in Istanbul

It occurred to me recently that I had better write this blog post before my brother and his wife get here in a few months so that it doesn't seem like I have a steady stream of visitors! So here it is, the Mom and Dad visit: We drove the rental car back to the airport with Dad back at the wheel and me playing navigator; he really got in touch with his "inner Turk" as we tried to remember that turn signals (and often lanes) are optional and posted speeds are nowhere near to being representative of reality. We arranged for a transportation service to take us to my parents' hotel, as much to ensure that they would have prearranged transportation to the airport the following week as to save money on taxis. After a minor mishap wherein we were taken to the wrong hotel, I directed the driver to the correct hotel and got my parents settled in their room. I decided to stay that night rather than going home and returning in the morning; we were all pretty tired after the drive and since I was going to take them to some tourist sites the next day it made the most sense for me to avail myself of the cot provided for a nominal fee by the hotel. We ate at a restaurant across the street from the hotel, after which Mom went back to the hotel and I took Dad to look at the Hippodrome. We let our imaginations take us back to the time when chariots carried competitors around the cobbled circle, marveled at the column situated at one end of the track, and acknowledged one very large, seemingly attention-starved stray dog.

The next day, I brought my parents to Topkapi Palace, where we made our way through the Ottoman artifacts, treasury rooms filled with gifts from all over the world, and into the tiled rooms of the palace itself. After taking a few pictures of the Golden Horn from one of the many balconies, we made it to the rooms I had been telling my mom about the whole trip: the most treasured jewels of the Ottoman sultans. In these rooms are all the diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and other precious stones you could imagine, including the Topkapi dagger which figured prominently in the movie Topkapi, and the "Spoonmaker's Diamond," an 86-carat diamond found, as legend tells it, by a poor man who found it in 1669 while digging through a garbage heap who bartered it to a spoon maker for three wooden spoons. The spoon maker sold it for ten silver coins to a jeweler, and eventually the sultan heard about it and appropriated it for his treasury. After Topkapi we went to Haghia Sophia, Emperor Justinian's church-turned mosque-turned museum. My dad had read about a bit of Viking graffiti being in the building somewhere, which led me and my friend Mark to spend the better part of two hours searching everywhere we imagined an 8-foot Viking could reach; I eventually gave up, leaned on a railing out of frustration, and as I looked down I discovered the Viking's runes carved onto a ledge. I saved my parents the trouble and showed them where it was while we wandered through the museum together. Afterwards, I gathered up my luggage and made my way home, leaving my parents to explore the underground cisterns and Blue Mosque on their own.

The next day, I met my parents at the hotel and showed them how to get tram tokens; the three of us made our way to the seaside where we bought tickets and boarded a small ship that took us on a cruise up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, where we disembarked long enough to wander the fishing village at the mouth of the Black Sea and have a delicious lunch of fresh fish. On my parents' final day in Istanbul, they found their way to my apartment and I washed some of the laundry they'd accumulated during our travels while they got reacquainted with Loki, and I showed my dad some of the campus while my mom got caught up on some email and checked on the status of the flights-their visit was during the eruption of the volcano in Iceland and it had caused many flight interruptions and cancellations throughout Europe. After ensuring that their flight was indeed still scheduled to depart on time the next day, we headed over to Emirgan Park, where the tulip festival was in full swing. It was a fitting end to a wonderful trip. I'm so glad I got to share this beautiful city with my parents! Thanks Mom and Dad!

Dream Deferred No More Part II

After leaving Troy, we made our way along the coast of the Aegean Sea to Assos, an ancient coastal city overlooking the island of Lesbos that was once the home of Aristotle. The winding road that lead us there made me grateful for my father's experiences with driving the mountain roads of Montana, as the possibility that a two cars, much less a tour bus and a car could pass one another in the space allotted seemed to defy the laws of physics. Once there, we breathed much easier and were rewarded for our feat with what must surely be one of the most beautiful views of the ancient world. Aristotle's former home ascends steeply from the modern-day beach resort community of Assos, a small area that is somewhat sheltered from Poseidon's fury by the island of Lesbos, which lies about a mile off the coast. We entered the city through the necropolis which lies at its foot, not having realized that the main part of the city lay at the end of the road that turned to the left and seemed to lead back into the village that currently lies behind the ruins of the ancient city (we often made such mistakes as the roads near tourist sites in Turkey tend to be marked with the names of very specific features of locations, without the notes in parentheses for those of us who don't know what it is we are looking for). We wandered around the necropolis and on to some of the ruins that lay beyond the wall beside it, then drove further down the road to the theater, where we found a few goats wandering around looking for their favorite plants among the tangled undergrowth. After Assos, we had a lovely lunch at a roadside restaurant with a beautiful view of the countryside, after which we made our way through some coastal mountains to the flatter areas along the sea and on to our next destination, Ayvalik. After some trouble locating out hotel and some trepidations about the somewhat makeshift elevator at the hotel, we settled our things in our room quickly and went to the seaside to find a restaurant. Ayvalik is a seaside resort town that is probably more densely populated during the high season, although it seems that the economic downturn of recent years has taken its toll there as well. Our hotel was in a neighborhood that seemed to be an offshoot of the main part of the town, more designed for busloads of tourists to make their way to and from other locations than for small families looking to explore the town itself. The next day we drove through the larger industrial city of Izmir, the town whose airport I had used on my way to Sirince a few months before our trip. We arrived in Selcuk, Sirince's valley-level neighbor, late in the morning, and decided to make our way to Ephesus that day rather than trying to do so the next morning before driving all the way to Canakkale. One of the owners of the hotel brought us to Ephesus himself, pausing as we piled into his van to grab a few handfuls of unbelievably delicious fresh-off-the-truck strawberries for us to eat for refreshment before making our way through Ephesus. Considering the difficulties my mother's blood-sugar issuescause her, it's a good thing we had those because we didn't really get the chance to eat anything until a couple of hours later when we left Ephesus and had a late lunch. Ephesus was everything we expected and more: one of the best-preserved sites of the ancient world. It was fairly full of tourists from all over the world, but not nearly as filled as it would have been in summer. The two hours we spent exploring the site were nearly perfect in terms of weather-it was sunny, warm but not hot, and there was a breeze that kept us from overheating from our exertions. Just as we made our way out of the immense amphitheater, a storm began approaching in the distance. The hotel's driver picked us up from our souvenir shopping just as the first raindrops began to fall, and we settled in for a delicious lunch of gozleme as the deluge hit. As soon as we finished, the rain abated and my father and I wandered up a short hill to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers; we opted to skip the side trip to "Mary's House" in favor of a nap for Mom and a hike to St. John's Church and Monastery for Dad and me. One of the highlights of Selcuk was the nesting storks just outside our hotel window; there were three nests atop the telephone poles nearest our hotel and my parents got some great pictures of them. They made a clicking sound with their beaks each time one of them arrived in the nest after foraging; it took a few minutes for us to realize what the sound was but we were delighted once we made the connection. Such huge birds! I hadn't seen any since the trip I took to Europe when I was 13, when I saw them in a small town in Hungary and realized they were not mythical creatures. The next day we began our two-day drive to Istanbul with an overnight stop back in Canakkale.

Dream Deferred No More

"When I was ten years old, my father handed me an illustrated encyclopedia of Greek and Roman gods." This is the beginning of the explanation I give to my students whenever they ask me the inevitable question, "How do you know so much about this mythology stuff?" My story finally has the ending it's been missing for the last twenty two years: I have now been to Troy. My parents came to Turkey for my spring break in April, and together we visited Gallipoli, Troy, Assos, Ephesus, and Pergamon. We began by trekking around the Gallipoli peninsula, following less-than-helpful signs until we finally found Anzac Cove to see for ourselves the narrow strip of land where the allied forces had made their failed attempt to take the strategically crucial Strait of Dardanelles. The view there was breathtaking, but it was easy to see why it was an offensive move that was doomed from the start. We took the trans-continental ferry to Canakkale, a beautiful seaside city that lies at the entrance to the Dardanelles and sees more ships pass by it in a year than most people will see in their entire lives, and made our way to our hotel with the help of directions from a local cab driver.

The next day was the one I had been looking forward to all these years: the day I would finally visit Troy. It was something my father and I have fantasized about most of our lives, and it did not disappoint. As Mom tried to avoid the bees and identify wildflowers, Dad and I stood back and soaked up the view of a lifetime: the plains below Priam's city where the Trojan War took place. We imagined Achilles dragging Hector's body behind his chariot, where the Greeks had build their defensive barricades, and how far the now-distant sea had been at the time. We looked at the many layers of cities that had occupied that place, each carefully marked and catalogued by the archaeologists who continue the job of excavating and restoring the pieces of those cities, and hurried past the giant beehive that has taken over one of the largest of those pieces lest my mother end up needing to use the epi-pen she carries with her everywhere she goes. But mostly we just used our imaginations to try and see what the city once har been: a majestic hilltop fortress that was home to many heroes, one overindulged prince, and the captive whose face had launched the thousand ships of Greece.

Camel Kisses on Rainy Days

In the past year and a half, I have heard about many of the ancient traditions from this part of the world. Two of the annual events that most intrigued me were grease wrestling, an event involving a group of half-naked men covered from head to toe in olive oil, and camel wrestling, involving a bunch of thousand-plus-pound beasts wrestling each other to the ground for mating rights. The grease wrestling was cancelled last year, apparently for financial reasons, so when a friend from Grand Marais who is teaching at my school sent out an open invitation to attend the annual camel wrestling event in Selcuk(sell-chook), I was immediately interested. Another friend (who incidentally had also lived in Minnesota for a time), Melissa, also signed up, and so a large group of us made our way last weekend to Selcuk. For those not familiar with Turkish geography, Selcuk is the town nearest to Ephesus, just southeast of Izmir(formerly known as Smyrna). Since I will be visiting the area this spring with my parents, I held off on the tour of Ephesus, choosing instead to focus on the mountaintop village of Sirince(sheer-in-jay) where we were staying and the town center of Selcuk. It turns out that Sirince is one of the wine-producing centers of the country, and Melissa and I soon found a wine shop where we sampled some of the best wine I've had since coming here. We also met a local guy named Ali who promised me all the free raki I could drink if we came to have dinner at his restaurant that evening(he wanted to practice his English). After our late-morning sipping session at the wine shop, we made our way down the winding mountain road to Selcuk in search of the camels. We found them ambling through the streets beside the acik pazaar(open-air market), and after lunch we joined them in the meydan (city center). After snapping a few photos and petting a few camels, one of the camel drovers offered me the reins of his beloved beast. Melissa began to take what would have been a very sweet picture of me with the champion behemoth, if not for the fact that he decided to turn his head (and froth-covered mouth) my way to satisfy his curiosity about the current holder of his reins. The results speak for themselves. The next day, the day of the big event, it was pouring rain outside. Apparently, the whole event is based on the mating season of the camels, and the rain has the effect of a cold shower on any boy...needless to say they were not in the mood to fight over any girls, so the wrestling event was cancelled. To get an idea of what the event entails, however, you can watch a well-done multimedia presentation by following this link: http://vimeo.com/2980491