First of a series of dispatches from Eşenler

Soooo... wow. We're spending the next few days in homestays in the village of Lower Eşenler, located kind of in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. We've been here for a matter of hours and I've already had a thrilling succession of interesting thoughts, so there's lots of blogging to be done. I'll post in a series separated by thought process.

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I've spent the last few hours chilling with my family, watching TV, and occasionally chatting with my hosts as much as my Turkish allows. There've been some surprising discoveries. I'd assumed that the rural, overwhelmingly headscarved, lower class would be staunch about their religion and support the AK Party, yet when I asked my host he said that he doesn't like AKP for economic reasons - the job market has been rapidly declining in the last four years since they've come to power (this was a much more nuanced response than I'd been expecting). He then proudly and rather emphatically declared that he was a strong leftist. Further conversation with Muammer, one of the ones who arranged the homestays, revealed that, in fact, the whole village tends to the left. Huh!

The dichotomy I'd been expecting between Kemalist urban areas and Islamist rural areas doesn't really exist. The call to prayer is observed to the same extent in the village as it was in Istanbul - that is to say, not at all by anyone. Turkish flags and Ataturk portraits, though they don't exactly abound in the village, are still very present and prominent. Far and away the most incredible evidence of Kemalism in Eşenler is my host's son, whose name is, get this, Mustafa Kemal! Mustafa Kemal! I kid you not!

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I'd assumed that Kemalism and secular Turkish identity hadn't really spread throughout the country, and that in the more remote areas would still identify more with older Islamic bases for social cohesion. This is quite clearly not the case. At least, it isn't the case in Eşenler. But Eşenler may be a special case - it's a remote village with a constant influx of Westerners who are both spreading Western culture and eagerly receptive to learn about Eastern culture. How is that effecting the political thought processes of the villagers? How representative is this village of the whole?

More on carpets.

We're spending a few days in Konya visiting cool people, some of whom (like Mevlana) are dead and some of whom (like Memet) are in the carpet-making business. Mevlana didn't have a whole lot to say, but we learned even more about the carpet business from Memet. He's producing carpets solely in natural dyes, almost exclusively for export to European and American markets. He exports traditional Turkish carpets to Europe and, get this, traditional Navajo carpets to America. That's globalization for you.

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Some of the natural dyes in question.

A lot of his business comes from restoring the antique rugs of rich Europeans. He dyes new thread to match the colors of the original and sets his people to work reweaving them. It's a labor intensive and difficult process, and he apparently gets something in the way of $50,000 for each restoration.

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He's unraveled less ornate carpets from the same period and is currently bleaching the thread. He'll redye this to use in the restoration so that all of the restored carpet will be from the same time period. What a perfectionist!

Of course, Memet didn't actually do the carpet weaving himself - that job goes to the 30ish households in the greater Konya area whose women collaborate to weave a single rug of the course of a few months. They get a several hundred dollars for this - obviously it isn't enough to feed a family, but it's a tidy bit of supplementary income that the household wouldn't have otherwise. Memet insisted that the women enjoy weaving the carpets and it's a wonderful situation for everyone. He's probably right. You always approach these situations expecting to find a sweatshop hidden somewhere in the depths, but the more we looked at it the more it seemed like there wasn't anything too dodgy going on.

Sooo... yeah. It's a good day in Turkey, I guess.

Hoo-ah?

Turks in the middle of their military service at a base near Eğirdir came into town for the weekend to be with their families. I never actually met any young militaristic and clean-shaven Turks wandering the streets with their families, so I unfortunately can't really write about that.

However! I did see a guy on the street just before we left Eğirdir this morning wearing a fascinating t-shirt. Ideally I'd display this shirt in a picture, but I didn't get one, so I'll do my best to display it dramatically as possible as text.

SIMPLE QUESTION PREVENTS AUTOMATIC ACTION!

His shirt really was that color.

Perhaps because I was already thinking about the Turkish military and forlorn about my lost blog post about conscripts, I immediately linked this shirt to the military complex in Turkey and shot off on a mental tangent. The above sentiment seems central to the system - officers are trained to think and reason, but the average Turk civilian, doing his obligatory 8-month stint in the military but nothing more, only gets trained to obey orders. So this is the capstone of the Turkish education system - questions, even simple ones, even important ones, even good ones, prevent automatic obedience and are discouraged. It's a good method for training sheep but maybe less good for training citizens of a democracy.

The Tourism Extravaganza Post

So the last few days have been a blur of exciting and picture-worthy events, but there hasn't been a lot of deep thought attached. As such this is mostly going to be a string of pictures and brief descriptions.

Our journey begins at Pamukkale, a huge tectonic upheaval of calcium bicarbonate, limestone, chalk, etc... basically everything white that can be tectonically upheaved. This is every bit as bizarre-looking as it sounds.

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After a long and, you know, bizarre walk up, we reached the site of Hierapolis, the city built around the springs that created Pamukkale itself. The city is in ruins, obviously, but it's still a pretty incredible place.

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The next day we departed for Eğirdir, a small town on an eponymous lake (or maybe the town is eponymous - I'm unsure) that is apparently a popular resort destination for Turks.

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Upon my arrival the mountain climbing urge that had been barely suppressed through this long Philmontless summer awoke with a vengeance and I proceeded to climb Sivri Dağ ('The Sharply Upward Pointed Mountain') while my compatriots swam around in the lake.

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To give some idea of scale, there are 10-story buildings at the foot of the mountain (1). I walked around the back of the mountain (2) before reaching the summit (3) from the back.

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Quite delightful.

Today we went to a national park about an hour from the town (and lake) of Eğirdir that features a long canyon carved out by a river. We swam in the river. Good times were had by all.

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All of these sites occupied different niches in the tourism market. It was possible to gauge the prominence and projected audience for each site based on the languages used at each. Pamukkale, as the international tourism site that it is, featured all the important languages (i.e. Turkish, English, French, German, and, again bizarrely, Korean). The Hieropolis sites were in Turkish, English, and Greek.

Eğirdir, targeted as it was towards a primarily Turkish crowd, had very little in foreign languages. There were, unfortunately, no signs in any language helping the lonely hiker to find his way up Sivri Dağ, but the village halfway up was all in Turkish and the villagers I spoke with lacked the basic knowledge of English that most Turks possess in areas of higher international tourism.

The national park, again, had signs only in Turkish. This seemed passing strange, as the only group there (us) was not, in fact, Turkish.

Greek village

This evening we went up to a Sirence, a Greek village outside Selçuk whose inhabitants make a meager living bottling fruit wines. And not, you know, the normal fruits like grapes. Pomegranate, cherry, and blueberry are only a small taste of the bizarre wines available. The village, though, was fantastically rustic and peaceful. I absolutely loved walking around the quiet little chute-shaped country lanes.

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It was quite quaint.

Yet all is not as it seems! The city is in no way Greek - the inhabitants speak Turkish, are Muslim, and identify themselves as Turks, not Greeks. The only smidgen of Hellenism in the village is a ruin of an old Greek Orthodox church that the now nonexistent Greek population used to go to.

Nor is it nearly as meager as it may appear. Someone (I forget who) said, in a tone of voice that suggested he knew what he was talking about, that the village is actually one of the most wealthy areas in Turkey - wineries are no longer the province of the poor. The streets and houses may be rustic, but there's undeniable quality in the workmanship.

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That is not the window of the lower class.

We debated for a while about why the Sirencians took such pains to portray themselves as a poor Greek community instead of a prosperous Turkish one. The only conclusion that I came to was Joe Tourist would be more interested in a rustic Greek village selling fine wines than a rebottled Turkish establishment. Ultimately I have to agree with Joe Tourist - I liked the village more when I thought we'd stumbled upon some unknown jewel than when I realized we were yet another round of tourists stopping off to wine and dine. I can't decide whether the false advertising made me feel better or worse.

I guess this post didn't really have a very finely-crafted point.

Just Plain Theft

We spent the morning walking through the ruins of Ephesus just outside of Selçuk.

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It was pretty incredible.

Yet it also gave me a sense of the frustration that has to be felt by the Turks and many others every time the West has stepped in to rescue some defenseless statues. Our tour guide at Pergamon yesterday made a point of noting that "the statue from the Temple of Zeus was NOT stolen by the Germans - it was bought from the Ottoman Empire fair and square, unlike everything else, while Schliemann was busy demolishing Troy." She was rather understandably bitter about the whole thing.

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At least they left us the seats.

As we walked through the remains of Ephesus, nearly every building would mention somewhere in its attendant description that the statues originally decorating the facade could now be found in the Ephesus Museum... in Vienna. Well, that's not particularly convenient.

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There are several rather conspicuously missing statues here.

The Ephesus museum in Ephesus has done its best with what European museums left it. It has a number of satisfactory exhibits and displays, yet from the incredible goldmine of Ephesus it's barely kept a pittance. What I found to be the most meaningful exhibit in the museum was a letter from a Dutch tourist who apologized for taking a small rock from the floor of the agora in Ephesus and mailed it back to the town. Above the rock was a short poem in Turkish and English: "Every flower is beautiful in its own garden. Every antique is beautiful in its own country."

We're looking at you here, Europe.

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Well, he's not. His head's somewhere in Europe.

Identity Theft

We've spent the day touring the (purported) site of ancient Troy(s) and Pergamon. Talk about layers of identity! There've been civilizations in Anatolia for thousands of years. And unfortunately, Turkey has attempted to gorge itself on the famous attributes of each, representing a nightmarish amalgamation of cultural history. All of the ruins at Troy and Pergamon are tied into the web of nationalist identity.

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Our tour guide was very adamant about the fact that Troy was an Anatolian civilization, not Greek. Regardless of how much Hellenic influence might have shaped Troy, and how little Troy resembled anything else in later Anatolian civilization, Troy is located in Anatolia and it is therefore part of the Turkish cultural heritage. Hands off.

Later Clayton noticed a (rather horrifically misshapen) bust of Homer with the label "father of poetry, son of Anatolia." Well, yeah, ok, I guess he was. Thankfully they didn't go so far as to call him a Turk.

At Pergamon it was much the same - the city may have been founded and developed by Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans (basically everyone in the area except Turkic tribes), but it's in Anatolia, and that makes it Turkish cultural heritage.

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Yet somehow it doesn't seem overwhelmingly Turkish to me.‎

How can Turkey make sense of all this disparate heritage? There's no common thread running through it all except geographic location, and whatever connections that brings must begin to wear thin after a few thousand years. How else can they find a meaningful cultural connection with the distant past? Call their positive qualities cultural inheritance and sweep their negative qualities under the rug?
Our tour guide at the ruins of Pergamon told us some fascinating trivia about the Asclepeion, a surprisingly sophisticated healing center located there. In order to preserve the institution's reputation for medical infallibility, no cemeteries were allowed anywhere in the city, and no one who was deathly ill was allowed within the city.

"At last!" I thought. I can finally see a clear national heritage here! An official state policy that attempts to reshape the truth by denying that anyone ever died should be nothing new to the Turks.