Good and Lost

I must say, it’s good to be traveling again. A week ago today, I landed in Istanbul and headed to where I was staying, a few blocks away from Taksim square, where I unpacked my things and promptly fell asleep around 8:30 PM thanks to getting little sleep on my flight and having a rather disturbed sleep schedule to begin with.

For the next few days I explored Istanbul. In the winter, the feeling there was very different. The swarms of tourists that had inundated the city in the summer were gone, but the city was still incredibly active. Because I had already seen many of the tourist sights in Istanbul, this time most of my explorations took place in and around the Taksim district, with its abundance of cafes, live music, used bookstores, and street performers. This, I think, is the heart of modern Istanbul: Istaklal Cedesi, the main artery running from Taksim square to the Tunel, the funicular that transports passengers up and down the steep hill to the rest of the city. In the winter, the street is strung with lights and is pedestrian only, save for the old-fashioned tramline that runs down its center. And the street is packed, a solid mass of people from morning until well after midnight; a glittering array of stores, cinemas, and cafes, with dozens of narrow side streets branching off of it and full of sights all their own.

For most of my visit, the sky was overcast, and intermittent rains washed the streets. I took a bus one day up to the outlying village of Sariyer, a little town with cafes clustering the seafront among the fishing boats and decaying wooden structures from the Ottoman days and managed to take some photos before the rain started in earnest and I retired to a cafe for a warm glass of sahlep, a Turkish winter drink that deserves a presence in all the world’s coffeehouses that were themselves inspired by the Ottoman Turks. Sahlep is a sweet, creamy mixture infused with spices and capped with a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon–I’m going to have to find out how to make it when I get back to the States.

Tuesday morning dawned bright and clear for the first time in my stay–and that was the day I left. I took the city bus to Istanbul’s enormous, teeming otogar, and made my way through the long lineup of bus companies until I found one that would get me to Trabzon. After a moment’s misunderstanding (”Saat! Saat!”, the clerk pointing at the one on his watch) I found that the bus was leaving at one o’clock, a mere ten minutes after my arrival at the otogar. Taking my last breath of Istanbul air, I boarded the bus and found my seat.

As we left Istanbul, I realized again just how enormous a city it is. Istanbul is the fifth largest city in the world–the city proper is over 700 square miles, and the greater metropolitan area over 2,400. It took almost forty-five minutes before we left the city’s crowded suburbs and moved out into the forests and fields of the countryside around the highway to the Black Sea.

After a waystation stop for dinner at one of Turkey’s deluxe bus and truck stops, we rolled on into the night. I read a good deal before managing to fall asleep and woke the next morning half an hour before we arrived in Trabzon. It was a spectacular day with clear blue skies, already sixty degrees by seven thirty, and I was feeling rather good as I climbed the steep hill from the port to the city center, where I found a low-budget hotel and dumped my bags. With plenty of time still left in the day, I decided to see the place I’d missed on my first visit here: the sixteen-hundred-year-old Sumela Monastery in the mountains some 50km outside of the city. I found a ride and headed up into the mountains. The Black Sea coast where Trabzon is built is already very rocky, with deep valleys and high hills, and those hills turned into high mountains and, finally, towering cliffs as we moved further from the city.

When we reached the little cluster of cafes at the base of the trail to the monastery (all closed) I began the long climb, enjoying the clear air of the mountain and the smell of the pines. When I saw the monastery through the trees, I stopped in my tracks and stared.

Sumela is built directly into the side of the cliff, and not at the base of it. Seeing it, framed in trees, is to see a rocky cliff wall rising and then breaking into the continuous front of the monastery some sixty feet off the ground, which ascends for four or five stories before being capped by a heavy-timbered roof. Above that, the cliff continues far above, where a few pines peek over the edge against the sky.

Ten more minutes of walking brought me around the corner and up a steep set of stairs and switchbacks to the monastery’s external courtyard, where I payed the eight lira entrance fee to climb the final set of steps (these monks must have been healthy) to the gate in the thick stone wall. I had the place to myself, and explored the low rooms with their stone walls and low timber ceilings, all of it simple, all of it pleasing to the eye, all of it built to endure the centuries. This, combined with the view of snowcapped peaks rising across the valley, and the black cliffs towering above, proved beyond all doubt that these monks really knew how to pick a place to live.

I explored the old chapel, with its vaulted ceilings of colorful frescoes and many windows to let in the light. Some of the lower frescoes had been defaced by vandals carving initials. I suppose I can understand someone carving their name into a tree or a rock, but into a priceless, thousand-year-old piece of art? We humans aren’t a particularly intelligent or appreciative lot, it seems; things like this just go to prove the point.

After taking a drink of water (so cold it made my teeth ache) from the fountain built in the monastery wall, and sitting for a while to enjoy the beauty of the place, I headed back down and made the return trip to Trabzon. Before I started my explorations of the city, I stopped in at Ataturk Park, a wide stretch of cobblestone more or less in the center of the city, for a glass of tea, and was treated to a half hour conversation with a man who spoke no English, in which my rather pathetically limited grasp of Turkish gave me little help. As far as I can gather, it was about religion (”isa musa muhametan”–he was Muslim), which led to his quitting drinking (”hayir bira, hayir vodka …”). Through diagrams and the little Turkish I already knew, I gathered he was an either an engineer or some kind of visiting physician (”ev doctor”–building doctor). It also had something to do with his making less money than Europeans: “Hakan” (his name) 1000 euro, “Hans” 7000 euro. I also explained where I was from, in relation to Texas and Obama, and the name and profession of my father. The main word I learned from the encounter: “Anladin”–”you see?”

The rest of the day I explored the seafront and commercial districts of the city before returning to my hotel to work for the evening. This morning I headed out again, this time walking a good distance up into some of the hills the city sits on, including the one surrounded by the fortress walls of the old city: Trebizond, of Marco Polo fame. As one of the most important ports on the Black Sea as well as its location on the Silk Road, Trabzon has always been a thriving city and a center of international commerce–as well as the capital of a number of nation-states in times past. For 250 years, the city was the capital of the Empire of Trebizond, a Byzantine state set up in the aftermath of the fourth Crusade, which lasted until it was conquered by Sultan Mehmet II and added to the Ottoman Empire. An enormous bronze bust of the turbaned Sultan commemorates the occasion in one of the seaside parks, gazing sternly upon the pigeons, pedestrians, and besotted young Turkish couples occupying the benches opposite him.

Unfortunately, little is left of the fortified city other than the walls themselves, thanks to a large earthquake, and Trabzon is overall a modern city. The deep river valleys are full of the cheap block-style apartment complexes and a few incongruous farms pegged into those slopes too steep for construction, and the further one gets back from the seafront, the more run-down many of the older buildings are. One particularly dilapidated hovel was built directly into the ruins of the fortress wall, little more than a cluster of lean-tos of tin and plywood set up against the meter-thick stone walls–and capped off with three satellite dishes. Poverty it may be, but it’s poverty with cable.

Trabzon does have some of the seedy air common to port towns–the docks are fronted with rows of suspiciously cheap-looking “hotels” and, as Trabzon is one of the main ports of call for Russian ships, it is also home to a disproportionately large number of “natashas,” or Russian prostitutes. Despite this influence, however, the rest of the city is remarkably clean, with long cobbled streets fronted with cafes and, of course, the “bazaars”; here, little more than close-packed shops selling clothing and shoes (Turks do seem to love their shoes) and jewelry, and packed with people from morning til night. Shopping in Turkey, it seems, is a national hobby.

After a short visit to the wonderfully ornate Kostaki Mansion (now a museum), I made my way back and had a chai at a little cafe as night fell. Tomorrow, I’ll be heading on to new territory: Batumi, Georgia.

Should be interesting.

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