During a recent research trip to Turkey, I learned that this holiday season looks like being as dreadful as the last, with many hotels, travel agencies, restaurants and bars sure to close and a great many livelihoods lost.  The sector is realistic about its prospects and is not the least surprised that the turmoil of the last year – the bombings, the shootings, the attempted coup, the state of emergency, the crack down on writers and journalists – has deterred even some of its most devoted visitors. Read More→

Goulette/Goélette (Fr.): schooner

At a time like this, when Turkey is in such turmoil, there seems precious little point in sweating the small stuff.   Like pronunciation.

Except that, unlike the assassinations and the massacres, and the imprisonment by a shamefully craven judiciary of every dissenting voice, however original and distinguished, we may at least be able to do something about pronunciation.

Like sorting it.  For once and for all.

I care that words sound as they should, especially the ones closest to my heart.  One such Turkish word is gulet.  I have spent some of my happiest days on gulets, the traditional timber sea boats of southwest Anatolia, but these would have been happier still without the interminable talk of ‘gullets’ (like mullets) or ‘gulays’ (to rhyme, at a pinch, with blue haze).

Old hands will know that the first rule when boarding a gulet is to take one’s shoes off.  The point seems two-fold: to echo the age-old custom generally observed in Turkish homes, and also to protect the decks.  Which is fine, but it doesn’t do anything for my outraged ears. Which is why I’d like to insert another rule in front of this. Now I’ve no wish to jeopardise the warm welcomes for which gulet crews are renowned, but I do think there’s something to be said for posting an officious person, with clipboard, at the foot of the gangplank to check that guests can at least pronounce the thing they’ll shortly be calling home (much in the same way that the Ellis Island, NY immigration officers once inspected new arrivals for unwelcome contagions like TB) before allowing them on-board.  Heaven knows, we could even hand out congratulatory certificates.

When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the Ottoman (Arabic-style) script in the 1920s, he replaced it with a Roman-style alphabet which was adapted to provide a near-total phonetic logic; that explains all the odd-looking diacriticals – the cedillas, and especially the umlauts which convey the unfamiliar and off-centred vowel sounds Turks tend to make.  The problem is that while this logic may not trouble the locals, it’s anything but apparent to the rest of us.  There’s a reductive quality to Turkish words that makes many of them appear bewildering, or plain ugly.

Gulet, to be clear, is the phonetic rendering of the French word goulette or goélette – and doesn’t that already look so much lovelier?  Written like that, we instantly get the salt spray and the sunshine, and that lovely long bowsprit.  There’s a rich and wonderful etymology at play here as the word is also closely connected to other variants – the Spanish goleta, the Italian goletta or the Portuguese galeota – and, more distantly, to the English galley.  And galleon.

This originally Romance-language term no doubt found its way into Turkish as a consequence of the mercantile influence Europeans, especially the French and Italians, traditionally had in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant.    So it is that the port for Ephesus, Kuşadası (note the cedilla and the undotted ı) was until the 19^th century known as Scala Nuova, or New Quay in Italian.  Which further explains where the Turkish word for quay, iskele, comes from.

But it’s the words of the French – for centuries the Ottomans’ most favoured trading partner, not to mention their main creditor – which have the most to offer linguistically-minded visitors.   The more thinly disguised of these like otogar (autogare; bus station) and bilet (billet; ticket) are a sinch.  But one of the many joys of a protracted acquaintance with Turkey, and Turkish, is identifying less obviously recognisable ones.  Let’s start with this example which I spotted last summer in Kars, eastern Turkey; what’s this café called?

The answer is, of course, sympathie, sympathy in English, though the French word’s richer resonance means it better translates as something like ‘Friendship Café’.

Here are ten more, some extremely testing and one or two verging on the obselete, to get your teeth into:

makyaj

şezlong

gişe

şöför

enteresan

kuaför

lokosit

tretuvar

randıman

and aksesuar.

The first respondent to email me all ten correct answers, with both the French rendering and the English translation, gets a free bottle of reasonably good wine.  Turkish, of course, which tastes best on the deck of a gulet, ideally on one of the gulet tours I’m leading this summer, though I’m afraid you’ll have to book that bit…

Which brings me back to gulets and why I’m so fond of them.  I love their honorable working origins as sponge-diving boats or citrus fruit freighters, and I love the way the way this heritage is expressed in the varnished timbers, in that handsome sprit and galleon-style stern and in the crews, often the sons and grandsons of seafaring men.  I also love the way that southwest Turkey’s topography – all those indents, coves, headlands and islets, like a heated-up Hebrides – means the gulet can sidestep harbours or soulless marinas to drop anchor, and loop a stern line, where and when the captain sees fit.  And sometimes in the very shadow of the classical sites which litter this myth-haunted shore.

I also love the small groups – no more than ten – and the like-minded souls that gulets attract; companionable types in thrall to the classical world and to rural Anatolian life, to good food and some light learning, night skies and night caps.

The only stipulation is that they can pronounce ‘gulet’.

For more on my summer 2017 gulet tours, please visit www.somewherewonderful.com/tours/

Some of you will have heard that Westminster Classic Tours, a knowledgeable specialist tour operator with a glorious niche product, announced yesterday that it is to cease trading at the end of this season.  The small-group cultural gulet (Turkish schooner) tour company went down in characteristic style; which is to say honourably, all debts paid, without any of its clients, suppliers or friends left hanging. Read More→

Next month my first book (now approaching the 21^st anniversary of its original appearance in English) finally sees its publication in the land that is its subject.  A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat (London, Picador) becomes, simply, Fes (Istanbul, Koton Yayincilik). Which, given the situation in Turkey right now, could make for an interesting landing.

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The book (the boy on the cover, incidentally, is my Turkish editor’s grandfather) is a callow and sometimes flippant, but sincerely affectionate, attempt to make sense of my impressions of a country in the course of journeys made there back in 1993.  It is a narrative framed, as its name suggests, in the curious history of the national headgear, and tells how a radical regime sought some 70 years before my journeyings to reengineer attitudes by replacing the tenacious turban and the commonplace fez (Ottoman, establishment, even reactionary and Islamic) with the various western hats – homburg, flat cap, panama, fedora, even top hat – which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his ruling clique regarded as progressive and secular.  Hats would do their bit, then, to ease Turkey’s transition from Ottoman theocracy into a liberal, western-style democracy.

Or would they.

I am drawn to Turkey for any number of reasons, but decidedly because here was a country which dared to dream up something called the Hat Laws (still on the statute books but rarely enforced) which it passed in November 1925.  One delightful consequence was a surreal rush to acquire the new hats, along with an attendant rash of newspaper articles on how best to wear them, and the ceremonial disposal of old fezes into the Bosphorus or their conversion into felt slippers for the destitute.  For thıs same reason I love Turkey’s ubiquitous Atatürk statues, a relic manifestation of this historical episode, and I especially admire the top hats in which the great leader is often presented.

But there was another consequence of the Hat Laws; a wave of civil disobedience in which outraged social conservatives took to wearing clandestine fezes beneath infidel impositions (which they especially reviled for rims which interfered in the act of Islamic abasement). Officials who caught such reactionaries in the act obliged them to remove their hidden fezes and stamp them into the dust. I am simultaneously appalled that the consequences of persisting in wearing a fez could have extended to sometimes severe persecution.  I have to remind myself that 1925 marked a period of extreme revolutionary change in Turkey, and that in a society set on fast forward, severe sanction for choosing the wrong hat might somehow have seemed rational.

I mention all this because I am interested, even apprehensive, to know what Turks will make of the book in their own language.  For it’s a book whose subject would appear to cast me as a critic of the secularist tradition – at a time when the authoritarian and undemocratic behaviour of the socially conservative AK Party brings a deserved storm of criticism and protest down on its head.  I will say only this; just as they should have let citizens choose their own hats in 1925, so they should let journalists and writers choose their own words, within the clearly articulated laws of libel, in 2016.

Enough.  And mutlu okuma…

With all the dire news coming out of Turkey, and this summer’s tourism prospects in tatters, what better time to recount a little tale, if only to remind all those holidaying elsewhere of what they’ll be missing?

Some will have heard of Ara Guler, a distinguished Turkish-Armenian photographer now in his eighties, and will perhaps have seen the permanent display of his photographs at Aphrodisias, the ancient city site near Denizli which Guler visited in 1958.  I reproduce a couple of these photographs later in this post.

Aphrodisias wasn’t on Guler’s itinerary.  He had spent the day photographing a newly opened dam – Prime Minister Adnan Menderes had grown increasingly dependent on populist but cripplingly expensive infrastructure projects to keep his doomed administration on track, rather like the current lot with their bridges and airports – in the nearby mountains for Hayat Magazine.  I include the cover shot of a Hayat issue from the period (published by chance on the very day of my birth) so you can see for yourself that there was more to this publication, and to late-1950s life generally in Turkey, than newly opened dams (the cover girl actually turns up in a considerably more provocative pose on page 9 – though you’ll have to await my next blog for that).

I digress.  On the way back from the Hayat assignment Guler’s driver got lost on Anatolia’s backroads, a tangle of unsigned and appallingly maintained tracks.  It was dark by the time they saw the distant lights of a village.  The locals, who didn’t often see cars, especially ones with official black plates (the local governor had lent Guler his car for the day), immediately invited their important guests into the village tea house while they prepared simple lodgings.  In the tea house, amidst kerosene lights, Guler noticed the men were playing dominoes – on Roman column capitols.

The next morning Guler discovered that the village, called Geyre, was located amidst an extraordinary wealth of classical remains.  Columns supported rickety porches.  Sarcophagae served as grape treads or for washing the laundry.  Men scythed wheat in the stadium.   Guler marvelled at the casual customisation of these ancient artefacts, as his images show so movingly:

All photographs © Ara Guler

Guler soon established that he had stumbled across the ruins of Aphrodisias, a Roman city which had been forgotten since preliminary excavations there in the first years of the 20^th century.  Guler’s visit kickstarted a renewed interest in the site, which was to be welcomed, except for the change it inflicted on the inhabitants.  Visitors to Aphrodisias will have noticed that the villagers no longer live among the ruins.  By the 1970s they were being relocated to New Geyre, a purpose-built village nearby, to make space for the archaeologists.

Archaeology has shoved aside the local community, to the distress of Guler and others, and not only at Aphrodisias.  It transpires that a great many of Turkey’s archaeological sites were inhabited until the 1970s or later, when the museum service began to clear communities out.  Some, like Aphrodisias, were home to permanent communities while others, like Labraunda, served as seasonal settlements for grazers and their families.   I’m with Guler in regretting these clearances, and suggest that archaeology should be required to work with and around community.  Life comes first.  Besides, there’s something entrancing and vital about the interplay of old stones and living communities, as Guler’s photographs show.

The good news is that some of Turkey’s ancient sites do survive as living communities, and it’s precisely because life endures there that they rank among my favourites.   I write in my website about Sidyma and Heraclea (where I’ve learned from the locals just how good the fluting on 2nd-century columns is for levering off boots), and will shortly be posting on Stratonikeia.  In this fabulous site, where 19^th-century village streets abut temple platforms and locals still raise vegetable plots among the fallen columns, history’s many strands are entwined with the present, and the visitor’s experience is the more resonant for it.

It’s all about life.  Which, after all, is what hayat means.

Only last night a friend asked me whether Istanbul was safe to visit; he was planning to take the family in April.  I was busy putting together enthusiastic recommendations this morning when the news broke that a suicide bomber, Hell-bent on Paradise, had exploded his vile self near Istanbul’s Sultanahmet Mosque, targeting a group of German tourists and leaving 10 dead and 15 injured.   The attack has not only taken innocent lives and done its bit to further destabilise a dangerously febrile Turkey; it also makes it increasingly likely that visitor numbers will plummet this year.   My friend, like many others, is doubtless having second thoughts about visiting.

In the light of this latest outrage, and as a good number of people have recently asked about the advisability of visiting Turkey, now’s the time to give their questions the detailed considerations that they deserve:

1. WILL THERE BE MORE BOMBS?

Today’s attack in Istanbul follows those in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, in October 2015 when two suicide bombers caused over 100 deaths and 400 injuries at a peace march in October 2015.

The aim of the Ankara attacks, widely assumed to be the work of IS, seems to have been to stir old hatreds between the Turkish state and the country’s Kurdish minority – by targeting an event aimed to promote peace between the two.   The IS monsters take comfort from the fact that Turks and Kurds are at each others’ throats; any accommodation between the two would allow Turks and Kurds to combine their military efforts against IS.  In this sense, Ankara was a strategic attack without direct implications for visitors to the country – except perhaps for those planning to attend political rallies where a raised risk of violence exists.

The Sultanahmet attack has changed all that by deliberately targeting tourists.  It must be presumed that there will be further such attempts, not least because of the sheer number of Syrian refugees – some jihadis secreted among them – now in Turkey.  Is it safer to stay at home?  Probably.  To visit Athens instead?  Probably.  Is there a case to be made for risking a visit to Istanbul, at once enjoying the city while showing solidarity with the people, given that the statistical likelihood of being caught up in a terror attack remains vanishingly small?   A heartfelt yes.

2. HOW ELSE MIGHT JIHADIS THREATEN ME ELSEWHERE IN TURKEY?

IS territory in Syria abuts southern Turkey, and it is said that many jihadi elements are moving freely in Turkey.

The Foreign Office now advises against 1. all travel along Turkey’s border areas with Syria and 2. all but essential travel in the provinces which abut the border.  Point 1, say within 10km of the border, is unquestionably good advice as there have been suicide bombings and here the dread prospect of kidnap and removal into Syria must be considered real.

Point 2 is less clear; some reputable Istanbul-based travel companies continue to take cultural groups to cities like Antep and Urfa some 30 kilometres from the Syrian border, and magnificent ancient sites like Göbekli Tepe, confident in the safety of their clients.  Hmmm.  Is it mere scare-mongering to suppose that some jihadis might attempt a cross-border swoop to kidnap western tourists and smuggle them into Syria, there to face unimaginable atrocities?  Extremely unlikely, but possible.

There have, of course, been foiled attempts to behead people in places like Australia.  I have never felt the least threatened in Turkey, not even at any time over the last year as the security situation deteriorated.   Turks are passionate and proud about their reputation for hospitality; they would be horrified that any such atrocity should befall any foreign guest, and I personally know of many Turks who would put themselves at grievous risk to protect their guests.

No travel advisories currently apply to the rest of the country, including the east, where I hope (numbers permitting) to be leading a tour next June in Van, Dogubeyazit and Kars en route to Georgia for Jon Baines Tours.  That said…

3. NEED I ALSO BE CONCERNED ABOUT KURDISH SEPARATISM?  

On the night of 23 December 2015 a Kurdish terror group attacked Istanbul’s second airport with mortars, killing a cleaner and wounding others. 

For six months Turkish forces have been waging an increasingly bloody campaign with Kurdish separatists in the east of the country, especially in and around the regional capital Diyarbakir.  The government’s reckless actions have done for a ceasefire which had held for years.  In a statement claiming responsibility for this reprisal the group then condemned the governing AK Party and its so-called collaborators for the destruction in the east, adding ‘As of now we won’t be responsible for the safety of international airlines that fly to Turkey, or for foreign tourists’.  This is obviously a chilling statement for any prospective travellers, though doubts exist over this splinter group’s ability to deliver on this threat (the airport in question was closed at the time of the mortar attack).  Kurdish separatists also recognise that many western capitals, Paris, Berlin and London among them, have long been havens for Kurdish exiles, and know that any such atrocity would instantly drain reserves of international goodwill to their cause.

4. WHAT OF THE MIGRANTS?

Vast numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Central Asia are on the move in Turkey, with not only radicalised Islamists but also criminal elements among them. 

It is true that a great many migrants, perhaps even millions, have lately crossed into Turkey or have left the country’s refugee camps.   Resident Turks advise that some urban areas, especially south of Basmane Station in Izmir, are now considered unsafe due to the presence of newly established foreign criminal gangs.  But this aggressive manifestation of the migrant crisis should have no implications for visitors who heed local advice in the cities (as they should in any urban area) or who keep to smaller towns and the surrounding countryside.

5. WILL THE TURKS GO TO WAR WITH RUSSIA?

Turkish forces shot down a Russian jet above Turkey’s border with Syria in November 2015, and more recently there was an altercation between a Turkish fishing boat and a Russian naval vessel near the Greek Aegean island of Lemnos.

It is worrying that our NATO partner chooses to tangle with Russia which has responded with various economic measures, most noticeably cancelling all package holiday flights to Turkey.  Most commentators judge that neither side means to push this towards outright hostilities.

6. WHAT OF THE IMPRISONMENT OF WRITERS AND JOURNALISTS?

Turkey’s ongoing silencing of voices critical of the governing AK Party and of President Erdogan, writers and journalists especially, is persuading some visitors to put off visits to the country.

If the security issues don’t deter you, then the moral case might just do so.  There have lately been appalling instances of repression, not least when the courts – with the President’s enthusiastic backing –  imprisoned two journalists for exposing the clandestine delivery of arms by Turkey’s security forces to Syrian opposition forces, perhaps even to IS itself.    The imprisonment of many writers and journalists and the closure of news outlets critical of the governing party constitutes a disgraceful and sustained assault on Turkey’s established pluralities, and one that western visitors will rightly deplore.

But should they therefore stay away?  Any such boycott, while principled, would no doubt be dismissed by the Turkish authorities as unwarranted interference in the country’s internal affairs.     Plenty of Turks agree that the suppression of the country’s independent media is scandalous; but the understandable concern of those in the huge tourism sector is that any such attempt to support the country’s beleaguered writers and journalists ends up leading to job losses among tourism workers.

7. SO.   WOULD YOU GO?

Turks have always been exceptional hosts; and at this time the country needs its guests more than ever.   There may be a time, God forbid, when terror engulfs Turkey.  At the time of writing, however, the vast majority of visitors have a fabulous time there.  Yes.

And may the suicide bombers go to Hell.

Welcome to Turkey….

… where suicide bombers and trigger-happy anti-aircraft gunners are busy stirring up mayhem.  A country whose security forces have been accused of complicity with Islamic State in northern Syria, Turkey’s immediate neighbour, by allowing passage, and even supplying arms, to jihadis and facilitating sales of their oil; a country whose President is busy scratching at every old sore – be it the Russians, the Kurds or the domestic secular opposition – but still finding time to clamp down on writers and commentators who would dare to criticise him.  Then there’s the economy – on the wrong end of an outflow of international investment funds.  And the migrant crisis.

And here I am, with a new website that’s all about visiting this wonderful country.

You’ll have gathered that I’m not on the payroll – as, God help us, a ‘brand ambassador’ – of Turkey’s tourism authority.  For while the tourism ministry does occasionally fund my flights and accommodation when I’m on travel assignments for publications, there’s no understanding, not by me at least, that this in any way muzzles me or limits my right to voice opinions.  Which is good because after three decades of exploring the place I have my own views as to what makes Turkey special.  And that’s what this website is about.

First, though, a little more on what I don’t like about Turkey’s tourism scene: the dreadful architecture which has blighted many of the coastal developments; the unpardonably free hand given to the mining companies in areas like Mount Ida and the Beşparmak Mountains, and to the water companies in the Meander and Tigris valleys; and the electronic turnstiles – a particular bugbear – which ‘welcome’ visitors at an increasing number of ancient sites and put the former site guardians out of a job (you’ll be hearing more on this).

Turkey too often removes, bulldozes or otherwise does away with what is beautiful or distinctive, partly in the belief that modern must be good.  A common presumption is that most tourists, be they Turks or foreigners, care for nothing beyond the beach bars and banana boats.  Take the site watchmen; many tourism officials fail to appreciate that many visitors to the country’s stupendous ancient ruins might actually be enchanted by offers of tea from a man who has stood guard there for decades, through the seasons, as his father did before him, and is a treasure trove of local knowledge. And with communication skills which belie his limited English.

This alternative, independent experience of Turkey is easily realized. One reason for this website is that many first-time travellers to the country struggle to categorise it as either ‘easy’ (where travellers feel confident about making their own arrangements, driving hire cars, generally getting about and finding places to eat and stay, like France, Australia or Sweden) or ‘difficult’ (where they don’t expect to manage without drivers, guides and organised itineraries, like Ethiopia, Iran or Georgia). With its vast, often high, hinterland and reputation for occasional unrest, Turkey can look ‘difficult’ but is in fact easy, with good roads, cheap and efficient car hire, regular food stops, friendly locals and a general lack of the tourist bureaucracy that plagues independent travel outside the western democracies and south-east Asia.  It’s the very much the place for independent and imaginative travellers.

One reason is the wealth of archaeological and cultural treasures, with new ones being uncovered all the time.  Last month, not far from the dispiriting bustle at Ephesus, I was the only visitor at Magnesia.  Beyond the city, with its wonderful Roman colonnades and Byzantine basilica, I followed a dusty track through fig orchards to round a final corner.  And to gasp.

I found myself at the open end of a vast stadium, much of which was overgrown and buried so that its stepped contours showed only vaguely through the soil.  At the far end, however, excavations had revealed the colonnaded walkways and exquisite friezes – of gladiators, gods and charioted heroes – of what archaeologists consider the most intact and impressive of all Anatolian stadia.   I had all this to myself, though an azure and orange-coloured flock of bee-eaters did briefly fly overhead.

I write about these places because they deserve to be known.  They are the reasons you will fall in love with this country.  I hope this website leads you to some of them.