Letters From Anatolia
Part 2

by DmetrI KAKMI




"Eski Gumus Monastrey"

Sunday, 12 May: Pergamum. The Aesculapion at Pergamum is on the plain. The citadel looks down on it from a great height, a defensive acropolis posing as theatrical backdrop. This temple to healing is dedicated to the physician turned god Aesculapius, who in one myth appears to have started life as a leech!

It was here that the leech-god physician revealed the cure to all ailments in dreams and visions. Going by descriptions it was a kind of pagan Lourdes, where sacred waters, in conjunction with certain ritual observances, provided a cure for spirit and body. Everything, every gesture, was loaded with symbolic meaning. There is no better place to experience this than in the underground Aesculapion passage, which culminates in a vaulted, circular chamber. Here gutters in the wall used to channel rainwater down to the floor level and fed it out again. The entire complex would have been aglow with the light of oil lamps and the susurration of prayer carried along by water.

Apparently the purpose of the underground passage and chamber has eluded archaeologists. They must have been English or German, for any Aegean Greek could tell you immediately what went on here. Once the pilgrim had taken the healing waters above ground and communed with the god, he would have descended into the passage in solemn contemplation. Descending the stairs into the bowels of the earth, he leaves behind the world of unhealthiness and imposes on himself a kind of ritual death, a burial. When he emerges at the other end, it is into the world of health and the living. But he is still underground and must navigate the circular chamber, which is the healing serpent with its tail in its mouth. It is a potent symbol of regeneration, the wheel of life and of healing. The pilgrim would have walked round and round this room, perhaps deep in prayer. At the end he would have taken his ablutions at one of the fountains located at the exit and ascended into the upper world, healed and restored to life.

The Greek Orthodox religion uses a variation of this in their holy springs, usually located in the basement of a church or chapel. There's a good example of one on Tenedos, where a chapel to the Virgin has been built atop a pagan sacred spring. Each year in July Christian pilgrims used to descend the slippery steps to take the blessed waters.

On the descent, through the upper levels of modern Bergama, stand the houses of the Greeks who left during the population exchanges of a century ago. In the main square are the rotting remains of the temple of Osiris, when even Egyptians lived here - the spiritual heart of the Greco-Roman world. On the outskirts an old Greek cemetery slowly sinks beneath a layer of dust, crucifixes drowning in weeds.

Refik informs me that there is an Australian gold mine not far from here. Apparently it is poisoning the local water sources with cyanide and destroying the traditional life of the villagers. A lone environmentalist called "Asterix" and a handful of elderly villagers are trying to stop it. But what chance have they got against the multinationals and corrupt heads of government that change the law to suit their purposes?

The Library at Ephesus

Monday, 13 May: Ephesus. We travel south along the western coast. All day long the Aegean and its islands play peekaboo from behind a dense curtain of pine forest and jaw-dropping ravines. Villages cluster atop needlepoint peaks and loaded up donkeys wend along narrow paths in an exquisite show of familiarity.

Freya Stark has much to say that is of interest about Ephesus, but I wonder if even her acute eye could have foreseen the new, fantastical beasts that walk these well-trod paths today. Welcome to the tourist production line! A cruise ship of Americans, put off by the violence in the Middle East, has been dropped off at nearby Kusadasi.

They come in waves of invading forces, the crackle and rustle of polyester leisure wear and acrylic jumpsuits muffles and gags. Blue hair, toupees worn like hats, horn-rimmed glasses, visors, vats of sun block, the soft, sinisterly silent pad of sneakers, and more cameras than you'll ever see in Japan.

Is anyone even looking at the sights with their eyes alone? Of course not, if anything exists at all, it does so only within the confines of a camera, a roll of film. It's Ancient World Disneyland. Why waste time? Snap it now. Enjoy later.

Oh, Ephesus, might city. Your great harbour has silted over so that now the sea lives some five kilometres away. Your great temples have collapsed. The theatres are home to lizards, the wild has swallowed up great villas and the colonnades have tumbled down. But pilgrims of another sort still flock to you. They come to see your twin peaks, the Mount of the Fair and the Mount of the Nightingale, and to crawl over your remnants like bugs.

"Oh, look Henry. A goat!" "Careful, honey, they're mighty vicious critters. Don't get too close now." "But I want a photo!" "Careful, honey, it might bite..." "I said --I WANT A PHOTO OF A GOAT TO SHOW THE FOLKS BACK HOME. Why, they just won't believe there's one in a museum... Would you believe it if I told you straight out of the blue? Ha? Wouldya?"

The homes of the wealthy have gone to sleep beneath the dust. Yet the mosaics hold on to their lustre, each bead, each stone sparkles, defying time and ruin. The garish façade of the famous library has been restored and some shops in the agora reopened for business, more or less. But what strikes you is the enormity of the site that once sat beneath sad hillocks of mud until the archaeologists took it upon themselves to excavate.

Outside the city dwelt the Great Earth Mother, Artemis. Her temple is now nothing but a perforation in the earth; where the cult statue once stood is a fetid pond with ducks and reeds. The one column that still stands is home to the ubiquitous family of storks.

The colossal statue that honoured the Great Mother is long gone, but there is a near life-size replica in the excellent museum. She stands imprisoned behind glass, an imposing and alien creature with her many breasts, something straight out of a chthonic nightmare: a milk-heavy abomination raised on two feet, carrying her temple on her head. Regarding her, I think we can never truly understand the ancients; they were human beings, yes, but they were of such a totally different mindset, we would be confounded at every turn.

Even in this diminutive state, Artemis is so awesome and bewildering, it is no wonder Demetrius, the leader of the city's silversmiths' guild, refused to believe Christianity represented a threat to her cult. In the end, he was correct in not taking Christ too seriously. Artemis was not so easily dislodged by patriarchal monotheism; she simply pulled a modest mantle over her innumerable breasts and became the Virgin Mary, who is said to have spent her last years in a house here in Ephesus, up the hill behind the public lavatories.

Artemis' misanthropic stance is equal only to that of the nearby Dionysus, who, reduced to shoulders and head, displays an icy sensuality that befits his myth; it is tempting to kiss his lips despite the knowledge that the encounter will probably be fatal. The artist understood well the god's androgynous appeal. With bunches of grapes adorning his flowing tresses, Dionysus is an invitation to malice and erotic misadventure.

The bust of Eros, on the other hand, is a hymn to paedophilia. The sculptor must have seen a seven year old urchin on the street and been dealt a fatal blow. This, he told himself, I must immortalise.

Clad in charcoal pants and jacket, two men slice the grass with a scythe. The back-and-forth flow, the gentle flow of their movements is at odds with the tourist surge and clamour. Both men seem attuned to the still and breathless air, the olive trees and cicadas clicking in the long grass. Beside the library a countrified woman gracefully makes her way along a path bordered by poplar and oak. The sky is a purple welt, heavy with rain, giving the light an intensity that causes each leaf, each blade of grass, to stand out in sharp relief. Even the dust on the ground has the momentum of gold.

Tuesday, 14 May: Selçuk/Priene. Last night dined with Refik in the cool balm of the evening. We're here, in the back streets, to have the region's specialty: çöp sis, roast rubbish, basically left overs from the previous night presented most deliciously, I am assured. But the restaurateur is right out of roast rubbish! Never mind; we'll make do with meatballs, instead. And, like school delinquents on the look out for the headmaster, we drank alcohol disguised as a non-alcoholic beverage. Why? Because the restaurant is near a mosque and school.

Outside, the sky grew heavier with purple cloud, sliced on occasion by brilliant white zigzags of light above the iridescent linden trees and rooftops.  Fat drops of water drizzled the window beside my head and made it cry in long streaks. While we ate cumin meatballs dipped in yoghurt and garlic, the last light drained from the sky, the streetlights flickered on and the town of Selçuk slowed a pace.

On our way back to the hotel, the air thick with moisture and the strains of Turkish music, we encountered an Anatolian vignette too good to ignore. An old woman was walking on the side of the road with two goats traipsing beside her. The beasts had the traipsing, superior attitude of someone that knows better, but will always defer to the imbecile; just for fun, you understand.

We navigate the virtually non-existent footpaths and see storks clattering like dislocated marionettes on the ruins of a Roman aqueduct, knowing we have been absorbed into the lungs of the town. We smile at an old Ottoman house, empty and derelict, leaning crazily over a café full of men, knowing we are home...

"You've lost your Mediterranean character," Refik said out of the semi-darkness. "You're walking on the footpath and not in the middle of the road."

If that does not stop me from indulging in self-deceiving fantasies, I don't know what will.

*

Cumali Kizik

Aepytus, a son of Athens, founded the original settlement in the tenth century on the plain by the banks of the nearby Maeander River. But from the very beginning it was surrounded by trouble. Sometime in the fourth century BCE the lowlands were abandoned in favour of this more strategic location. At approximately 150 BCE Priene was taken over by Rome.

With a population of approximately 5000, it must have been very tight living, this high up, on such a small nub of ground. Today it is a heavenly place of tumbledown columns where winds swish through thick stands of pine, breathing and sighing mysteriously in the sun. The utter quiet is celestial, a good place to contemplate the ages in peace, especially behind the temple of Demeter, low down in the intimate squeeze of streets where flies buzz in the dappled light fanning courtyards and colonnades.

Wheatear chirp in the trees and bees plunge into the malodorous purple of the Dragon Arum that grows in such profusion here. Sitting high up in the excellently preserved theatre, built in the second half of the fourth century BCE, I roll a bunch of velvety false dittany between my palms and suck in the odour. What a magical place this is!

There is a power and strangeness here that is hard to describe. The overwhelming feeling is that one is being offered a glimpse into a world that existed for the briefest moment in time. Yet in that brief window of opportunity the inhabitants perfected a subtle form of love and respect, an effortless, nearly invisible partnership, that is, or ought to be, the essence of human life. For a short while, it existed here, a concern for getting it right, perfect and true, before winking out of existence.

There is something reassuring in the knowledge, too, that in some tenuous way, a link exists between these people and myself. I could be a descendent of this transfiguring magic between landscape and human will. As I walk the streets, my footsteps follow in the footsteps of the earliest Greeks and Romans. Later, in the declining years, even Byzantine Christians lived here; as is evidenced from the small church built in front of the theatre. Later still, the Muslims left their mark inside the church, which they turned into a mosque; the layers of time, overlapping one another like onion rings. No, that's not correct. They coexist at one and the same time. They are all here, all of the ages at once, whispering over your shoulder, demanding to be heard, refusing to sit still and let someone else have a go at the game of life and of living.

Throughout this human toil, the Maeander River continues to live up to its name by twisting and curling and cutting back through cotton fields and wet lands. As it wriggles along, you would think nothing had ever happened to alter this landscape. And perhaps it hadn't. We were a sigh. We came and went. For you, Maeander, it was but a brief, unremarkable moment.

Temple Aphrodisias

Wednesday, 15 May: Aphrodisias. For Freya Stark writing in 1954, "the excitement of Ionia wanes as one follows the Maeander upstream, and something else takes its place..."

Travelling the same region almost fifty years later, heading due east now, leaving the coast behind, I found exactly the opposite. In this "less pure, but vaster" landscape, I began to find what I'd come for: the Turkey more or less unsullied by Greco-Roman influences. In the vastness that now begins to unfurl beneath the wheels, "the more violent, less subtle atmosphere of the Seljuk ...comes to its own."

Only for me there is nothing violent, overt or vulgar in the Seljuk style. Alien, most certainly. But violent no, unless we are talking about violence done to the eye and one's dearly held notions of art and architecture. The lyric opulence of the Seljuk manner of building, which feeds right down to their decorative arts, brings with it a wind from Persia. From now on, you can almost smell the desert exerting its influence beyond the spread of the Konya plains.

By comparison, the ruins of Aphrodisias can seem somewhat familiar, though no less beautiful. This famous Roman metropolis is in the foothills about an hour's drive from the provincial town of Aydin. This is Ahmet's region; his father has a property not far from here.

As you come out of the winding hills, green and sparkling after a rain shower, you can see Aphrodisias from afar. A grove of poplars standing stiff and formal as models, while beside them the dumpy willows cast their plump shadows over the plain. A ring of lavender mountains trickles down to misty foothills, thick with stands of fir and beech. The soil is so fertile it is the colour of coffee. And in the middle of it all, a clump of ruins that could be wax melting in the intense heat.

It is that time of the year again. Pomegranates are flowering like tiny red hearts on the bough. Ready to burst open, they could be Aphrodite's pudenda growing on trees - still! Standing back from the road, a decaying Ottoman house leans into a grove of poplars, its black skeleton stark against the frothing green.

While Asphrodisias was sleeping off the centuries beneath the earth, atop it sprang the village of Geyra. When archaeologists began gnawing at the soil, the inconvenient villagers were moved some kilometres away and the excavation began in earnest. One or two houses still stand from that time but the rest is all Roman gates, baths, a theatre, agora and, of course, the temple to the goddess for whom all this came into existence, Aphrodite. Built along the northern wall of the city is the truly astounding stadium, one of the biggest in existence. And surrounding the entire compound, like a halo around the moon, is the necropolis.

This city dedicated to the memory of Aphrodite is a good place to contemplate the on-going battle between paganism and the monotheists. For all the trouble they went to, all that's left of the church and Bishop’s palace is some ancient graffiti on the stairs. Outside the city walls, beyond the Baths of Hadrian, looms the dome of an abandoned sixteenth century Seljuk mosque. It rises above the reeds and bamboo like a great teat. The minaret toppled during an earthquake but the structure is still sound, and home to ever-present storks. The squat complex sits low down in the wet lands, surrounded by a thick grove of willows, beech and mulberry. It is a place steeped in melancholy. If anyone comes here it is because they believe it to be haunted and wish to test their mettle. Meanwhile, the nearby temple of Aphrodite dominates the pristine lawn, stretching its ivory arms to the sky, triumphantly rejoicing in the purity of sunlight.

As we take our leave of the mosque, a family of goatherds were leading the goats home in the vanishing light. Like their human carers, the animals regard us with mild curiosity before they let us pass. The folds of the goatherds' peasant garb, the way they stand still as trees, the ricketing of frogs in the long grass are straight out of a page from my book of memories. Before us a long avenue of rattling bamboo and thistles disappears into the time-honoured distance.

When we’re some way down the dusty road, I look back. The family is still standing on the shoulder of the lane, huddling in the shadows as if they belong there and nowhere else.

Thursday, 16 May: Pamukkale (Hieropolis). The first thing that strikes you about Hieropolis or Pamukkale, as it is known today, is that it must have been the Florida of the ancient world. Here came the rich and elderly of the Roman Empire to take the mineral baths. And here they were buried, for the city is entered via a vast necropolis that would make any self-respecting ghoul jump for joy.

Of course, the noble bones have been moved to museums and their precious belongings pilfered long ago. But the lichen-covered, smashed-up tombs and sarcophagi (the meaning of sarcophagus, by the way, is 'flesh eater'!) still line the entrance to the city. Once it must have been a glorious though none too comforting way to enter Hieropolis, for the wealth and ostentation was said to be most impressive. Now the burial places are simply derelict remains in which birds and snakes nest.

As for Pamukkale itself, the less said about it the better. Pamukkale, famous the world over. The darling of the Turkish Tourist Bureau is  -- an eye sore. To see what greed, avarice and plain stupidity have done to 'the greatest natural curiosity in Asia' is enough to make you join the Greens.

The white terraces are for the most part dry and streaked with a blackness that looks cancerous. Vast areas have been so utterly neglected they could be dry dinosaur bones sticking out of the earth ready to be picked clean by carrion. Parking areas and tourist facilities have been plonked atop the cliffs without a care or thought to the environmental damage they might cause.

The areas that are still running with water are grey, slimy and eroding due the never-ending procession of tourists who stomp across the cliff face in G-strings and bras big enough to house an entire nomad family. As they wobble from one pool to the next, they look like a battalion of Venus of Willendorfs. Most likely pilgrims came in droves back in Roman days, too. And no doubt it was still a vulgar display. But they were different times then. This astoundingly immodest show of lard on a mountaintop in the middle of Anatolia is disrespectful and distasteful in the extreme.

When I was here with my father in 1968 or thereabouts, there was hardly anyone about. Just the wind, the birds and a smattering of people relaxing in the pools. As you lay there in peace and quiet, tiny fishes came out of hiding and nibbled at the pores of the skin, removing all impurities. Above, the clouds sailed past like ships, he silence and emptiness complete. If memory serves me, there were one or two accommodations set well back from the cliffs, away even from the necropolis. But this new development is beyond comprehension. Surely they realise the very thing people come to see is being destroyed.

As I hide my rage in the necropolis, a guard approaches to ask if I am in need of assistance. When I tell him the cause of my distress he smiles and sits beside me on the warm rock. "Yes, we are aware of it," he says. "A decade ago, there were, oh, ten hotels here. Today they are gone. Soon the car park will be moved and we can begin to restore. You are seeing twenty years of neglect. It will take more than that to fix it." He slapped me on the back, smiling all the while. "Where are you from?" he asks. I tell him I was born in Turkey but now live in Australia. "Arkadasim," he says, throwing up his hands. "But you are a brother. You have come back. This is a good thing, my friend."

Arkadasim, my friend, my brother, it is a warming phrase in any language, but more so in this one. I only wish my Turkish were good enough to communicate with this affable man without resorting to English and absurd gesturing. When you think about it, language is such a subtle force to navigate around. My thoughts are formulated in Greek or Turkish, sometimes both at once, but when I open my mouth or put fingers to keyboard, it is English that pours out.

Is that what Ahmet meant when he said I was a foreigner?

Friday, 17 May: Konya (Iconium). Well, here we are in what is supposedly the "conservative heartland" of Turkey. When told of my impending visit, Ahmet said he could not tolerate Konya longer than three hours at a time. Even Refik swears that sickness overtakes him five kilometres before he even sights the city. "I can't wait to leave," he said, with a shudder. Of more interest is the fact that in Phrygian legend this was the first place to emerge after the Great Flood of Noah.

As we drove across the endless Konya plain toward the former capital of the Seljuks and, more importantly, the home of Rumi, I entertained visions of a "little Iran" thrown together slap-dash in the middle of Turkey, a conservative, highly religious environment that might even be hostile to tourists. In my mind's eye, I saw mobs screaming for the blood of the infidel Westerner who, no doubt, had come to desecrate sacred places.

All day on the old Silecian Road, from once-upon-a-time Ephesus to Iconium, from the present-day Selcuk to Konya. All day, the road cuts straight as a ruler through flat green expanse, time and space, until it vanishes to a mere point on the solid line of the horizon. At some point, the fertile valley gives way to stony plateaux, sprinkled with rusting electricity poles that look like crucifixes perched on hilltops.

Villages, when they appear, are separated by a regular distance from one another of five kilometres or so, tucked away on alluvial plains where there is the chance of spring water and, ironically, faults in the earth. The devastation of earthquakes is everywhere to be seen here. Undeterred, or simply resigned to the facts, peasants mattock in the fields as they have always done. The tucked away hamlets are often so destitute, flat brown rocks are used as headstones for the dead. The end result being that fields are toothy with sharp stone and grinning at the overbright sky.

When Konya suddenly nudges the horizon, I am taken by surprise. On the horizon loom not minarets, spires, domes and squat houses, but a puzzling black monolith. From this distance it resembles either the humming black stone from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the solidified cloud of locusts that descend on an African village in The Heretic: Exorcist II.

"What on earth is that?" I ask Harvey. "That's where you are staying tonight," he says, with a laugh. "It's the brand new Konya Hilton." "It's the tallest thing for miles," I say. "Perfect terrorist target!"

Indeed, standing in my swank room on the eighteenth floor, the impressive view offers a perfectly unimpeded flight path. As a symbol, the glitzy Konya Hilton is a beacon for any nationalist or Islamist nursing a grudge against Western imperialism. But the trippy service and the well-meaning but goofy staff are straight out of Fawlty Towers. Not just one bamboozled Manuel but fifteen, all running around and falling over each other! A perfect metaphor for the illusion of Western Power, I thought. The body beautiful too often hides diseased organs that, at the end of the day, are simply not up to the challenge.

*

If the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome look like wax melting in the sun, what remains of the Seljuks is sculpted primal mud. There is an organic quality to it all (particularly since they favoured vegetative motifs), as if, rather than being built by man, the soil conspired with eons of sun and wind to sculpt ravishingly earthy structures straight out of myth and legend.

I can honestly say, I have never seen anything as otherworldly as the Karatay Madrasa. It has its own flavour, a singular purity, expressed from the very ground up, it seems. Built at mid point in the thirteenth century it is a joyous explosion of decorative tiles and marble inlays in the Syrian tradition. Leading up from the practically square courtyard into the cupola are mosaic tiles in turquoise and varying shades of blue, as well as calligraphic friezes. Long before Islam forbade figurative representation, Seljuk artists mirrored life in all its humours with an abandon that captures sublimity and caricature. In the museum section, for example, there are wall tiles from the summer palace of Ala al-Din Kaiqubad displaying mythical beasts, princes and notaries and animals going about their chores with an openness that is wholly surprising; they are like persistent snapshots from ages gone by. Later, geometric shapes and elaborate calligraphic verses from the Koran flourished with Zoroastrian abstraction.

Outside, on the busy car-choked street, above the treetops, can be seen the squat minarets of the Ala al-Din Kaiqubad mosque, so typical of the Seljuk taste. The tall, spindly minaret is an Ottoman invention.

The Islamisation of Anatolia began in the second half of the eleventh century. From there on, as the influence of the Seljuks grew, the landscape around towns was dotted with tower-shaped tombs. Most of these are now hidden from view behind modern concrete buildings as the cities continue to grow. But one that will not be forgotten in a hurry is the tomb of the most revered Sufi mystic poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi, otherwise known as Mevlana. His tomb, covered with turquoise coloured tiles and capped off with a black turban to show his status, lies at the heart of the most important dervish monastery in Turkey.

Wandering around in the echo of his word, jostling for space before a ewer, ceramic dish or illustrated manuscript, the physical and intellectual realms combined to create slender chains of light and darkness until the place was suffused with a genuine, unbearable, sense of spirituality that could not be denied.

The place itself is intact and pure, holding its two enigmas close to the heart and neither of them can be easily separated one from the other. Mevlana was a double negative, rich transgression, tragedy and blood, fleeing the Afghan steppes as a refugee to become a vague and confused saint in Konya. (Had he fled to Australia, he would have been imprisoned behind razor wire.) His statements curl up like smoke from a censer, a truth with two sides, mutually contradictory. A lot like Jesus, really, and the last prophet, Muhammad.

As it is Friday, Islam's holy day, the mosques are packed for midday prayer. Male worshippers spill out into courtyards and even street pavements, praying on colourful mats. Just around the corner, row upon row of peasant women sit patiently in the shade beneath the plane trees trading fresh green herbs; white leek, purple eggplant and red tomato, still dripping wet from the garden.

We lunch in a tucked-away little restaurant, which, I am assured, is not run by a religious extremist. "You do not want to give your money to them," Refik advises, disgustedly. His dark eyes twinkle with merriment and barely suppressed resentment. What a balm he is! He does not realise that his flesh and blood presence keeps back the ghosts that hover on the edges of sight.

Later, walking back past a shady cemetery awash in an overabundance of vegetation, we find ourselves in the middle of a funeral procession, a rag-tag group of sombre men in suits, contradicting the sunlight. Cars edge around them like puppies. The coffin on their shoulders is draped in brilliant green.

"They are burying someone important," Refik offers. The solemnity of the occasion has muffled all sounds, as though the congregation is unreal, or the city is holding its breath, waiting for some disaster to happen. As they near their final destination, the men hurry forward for the honour of carrying the coffin, through the stone gate and down the long avenue of poplars.

Saturday, 18 May: As we head toward Cappadocia, a different landscape altogether. The Konya plain has given way to arid, treeless hills, round and flowing. The valleys are dotted with purple stavesacre, vetches and the yellow of spreading broom. In the distance a village of a couple hundred houses vanishes behind an outpouring of yet more hills. Here it could almost be Palestine.

On a lonely plain, the ruins of an old dãm -- flat roofed, stone or mud brick house -- remind one of the Neolithic homes of Çatal Hüyük, and even our own summer dãm on Tenedos. In front of it zaps a road that bows to the horizon, where an emerald field awaits it. Lonely petrol stations, electric wires dipping and rising, giant sprinklers spraying crops in the most remote, unlikely locations, dung heaps and once in a while a solitary man, seemingly lost to the world.

I am reminded of Mevlana seeking solace in isolation after the murder of his beloved Shams-e Tabriz. Did he come out here? This far from Konya he would certainly have found the peace that eluded him so long as his disciples fought for his attentions in the monastery. No doubt, he would have been aware that this is the halfway point between the Seljuk capital and remote Cappadocia, home of Christian ascetics who sought the monastic life in the tufa hills.

At arid, graceless Aksaray we stop to see one of the largest and best furnished of the Seljuk caravanserais, the Sultan Han. It is a fortified safe house on the Silk Road made to stand not only as an imperial statement, but a symbol of the economic basis that saw an extraordinary cultural flowering.

Standing in the scorching heat, we gape at the lavishly decorated façade that borrows from all ages and cultures. The Hittite is here, so is the Corinthian capital and the Syrian zigzag pillar and the Persian muqarnas dome over the immense gate. Most impressive is the cavernous camel shelter at the back, which looks like a cathedral to animalia - and smells like it, too. The ceiling rises overhead to vanish in the gloom, cooing with pigeons that clatter in the dry air. In the centre of its courtyard is a square, four-arched structure whose upper floor serves as a prayer room reached via a dizzying external stairway.

Toward mid afternoon, we shoot through a spit of a village called Agzikarahan. Surrounding the ruins of a modest caravanserai are the homes of Greeks who lived and prospered in this region right up until 1920s. Sweet little neo-classical homes, solid and honest as God's footprint on the soil, falling to ruin. Soon there will be nothing left.

As we leave the village behind, on a hillside fortification is written this once familiar refrain: Önce Vatan, Motherland First.  Beneath the immense writing is a crescent and star in limestone. In the next village and in everyone after that, Turkish flags decorate streets, homes and cars in preparation for tomorrow's national day.

- . -

To be concluded next issue.

DMETRI KAKMI was born in Bozcaada, Turkey. He is an essayist and critic whose work has been published internationally. He works as an editor for Penguin Books Australia.