INTRODUCTION. In 1973 the six of us had travelled through Athens, the Peloponnese, Delphi, and Mikonos. I have included some of the slides taken then, as well as photos from 1997 when Joan and I are retracing some steps before island-hopping to meet up with Ann and Mary in Turkey. As usual, not only is our itinerary vague, but our timetable is uncertain, depending on the stork which will deliver our next granddaughter, Faith. For now, we are masquerading as archaeologists, following an introduction from Paree Hartley to an inexpensive but central hostel run by the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA) .
ATHENS. BA632 flight from London was quite smooth compared to that of 24 years ago when the pilot was giving Kate flying lessons. Much of Athens still looks Third World, the crumbling old buildings and the dirty new ones reminding me of Macau. We ask the taxi-driver about Athens politics and from then on his hands scarcely touched the wheel. The AAIA has three other visitors. Dr. Schulz of the Berlin Museum of Archaeology works far into the night cataloguing the day’s collection of plaster casts of ancient coins. Lena, from Sweden, is waiting to go on a dig in Crete. Kelly, an architect from Perth, simply loves Athens and keeps signing up for another month. The Acropolis seems almost in reach up there, the balcony is now filled with racks of our drying laundry, and the kitchen is cluttered with trays of Dr. Schulz’s plaster casts, dangerously resembling tasty pikelets.
THE ACROPOLIS, “The most important ancient monument in the world” (Guidebook). “Went to the Acropolis today and saw a lot of old stones” (Madeleine’s diary, aged seven, 1973). Today we get there as the gates open at 8:30 and, moving swiftly uphill, manage to stay ahead of the German army, advancing in waves from a dozen parked coaches, led by megaphones and whistles. Later, to avoid another army, Japanese on the right flank, we take a short cut down to the Plaka, to sip a Greek coffee and gaze back up the hill. It is astonishing that the Parthenon’s massive structure with its exquisite sculptures was assembled in a mere nine years some 2,500 years ago. I doubt modern technology could do this today.
DEJA VUE. And today the Phaedra Hotel in the Plaka seems unchanged since the time when the six of us arrive at one a.m. from the Mikonos ferry. Then, we had had to wait on a dusty landing for a scarlet lady and her client to vacate our room. The massive column from the temple of Olympian Zeus is still sprawled where John and Madeleine left it.
At Epidauras, in the amphitheatre that could seat 13,000 people, sitting in row 50 we clearly heard John drop a coin centre-stage. Back then we didn’t find the old town in Naphlion, only the port. So, guidebook in hand, we now wander its wide Venetian squares with their green doors and narrow medieval lanes high above the harbour until we find Eleni’s rooms, below the Palamidi fortress (way up behind Madeleine sitting on the quay, 1973).
Ours is a pine-panelled mini-room and micro-bathroom, equipped with an electric radiator resembling an early bronze-age satellite dish. A tiny balcony provides a view of Bourtzi Island and the snow-capped mountains of Arcadia. Soon, our elasticised, spiral clothes line is carrying a line of semaphore across the balcony. Each day we buy bread, fruit and cheese, eat our breakfast muesli out of empty yoghurt cartons, and lunch out of our backpacks somewhere interesting. Down the hill, shaded by tall eucalypts, four cannon embossed with the Venetian Lion of Saint Mark, point out across the bay. The Venetian is just one of the many empires that have surged back and forth across the Mediterranean, leaving their marks. Last time here we met a man who said “I drive taxi Melbourne six years”, and Rebecca said “We go to Mummy’s seenee today.” Today at Mycenae we meet another Greek who drove a taxi, in Sydney, and we practice tourist-Greek and taxi-English on each other. The ruins at Mycenae are more than 3,000 years old but next week, in the Cyclades islands, we will go back more than 4,000 years. And next month we hope to visit Troy where a king from Mycenae mustered 40,000 men to rescue the beautiful Helen of Troy. Bernard Shaw claimed that, if Helen’s nose had been a quarter of an inch longer, the history of the world would have been changed. We return through the ancient city of Argos from which Jason took his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. And when we return to Athens, we will pass Old Corinth where Saint Paul preached, in comparatively modern times. Meanwhile, here is Naphlion seen from the Palamidi Fortress and, below, a window at Mycenae and a face in a srar. Did Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, peep through this window, and was that his face?.
At Mycae and later at Troy we touched parts of that network of legends immortalised in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In 1939 the Queen’s College of British Guiana presented me with a book Favourite Greek Myths; I think it was the only school prize I ever got, and its complex plots continue to intrigue me. We have an amazing video of a modern adaptation, The Medea, much of it shot spectacularly in Capadocchia, with Maria Callas, saying little and singing less.
Here we were at Mycenae and here was Kate, posing as a victorious athlete in the stadium at Delphi.
WHEN THE GOING WAS COLD. “Le temp est exceptional” as the French farmer said once as we explained why we had burnt all his firewood. It does seem that an exceptional weather pattern follows us on our travels. The long silk underwear which arrived in a parcel from Kate I have worn night and day since. Each day the temperature, and the snow-line across the bay, gets lower. The Greek from Sydney says this is the coldest time this whole winter, and a young German couple says it has been minus four in Berlin. But bright yellow wattle is flowering along the cliff walk where gypsies are collecting thyme, sage and rosemary. Spring must be round some corner somewhere, surely.
THROUGHOUT EUROPE spies are posted outside every bank, museum, gallery, ancient site and tourist office. And, as soon as they see the Smileys approaching in the distance, they hurriedly print a CLOSED notice corresponding to that particular time and day of the week. And so, after climbing the 998 steps, zig-zagging up the near-vertical cliff to the Palamidi Fortress, I am told it is closing. “Five minute, special for you” so I race in with the camera. Soon he blows a whistle. “Steps?” say I. “Steps now closed. You go road”. “But road is ten kilometres” say I. “You walk” says he. Joan has found that the next mass at the Catholic church is not until May 11, and the Museum of Folk Art is closed until 1999.
THE MILOS EXPRESS leaves Piraeus at 7:45 tomorrow. In 1973 it took us to Mykonos (photo opposite), today to Foligandros. Reports of very cold winds had decided us on a 12 hour turnaround in Athens in case ferries are cancelled. Jan, from Tasmania, manages the AAIA hostel and speaks Greek. She takes us to Santa Katerina, the little Greek Orthodox Church next to the Phaedra hotel. The cantor’s voice sounds like coke being crushed under a door, but the choir sounds like angels. We take Jan to our favourite tavern in the Plaka for moussaka, then set the ping timer for six a.m. Now, at seven a.m. I am glad of Mary’s backpack as I clamber up several sets of ladders into the huge ferry. At the sixth island in this circle called the Cyclades we clamber down onto the dock at Folegandros and share a bus with Ted and Philippa up to the little white-washed town. Next day it is bitterly cold and we explain to the landlady that the little room has no heating. She laughs, points to the sun, and we huddle under the blankets until it is time to go out. Since there are only four tourists on the island we usually seem to meet Ted and Phillipa in the taverna. The island has one road, along a rocky ridge 12 kms long, but it has a soft, white-washed serenity. The donkey is ploughing the rocky ridge, Joan is finding the serenity.
CHAOS AND DRAMA. The incredible precision with which these huge ferries are worked sideways and backed into tiny fishing ports is in stark contrast to what happens next. High up in the stern the first-mate bellows instructions to a dozen would-be captains who have just come out of the tavern to wave their arms and shout their own instructions back. Eventually one of them ties up a huge, shaggy rope which the engines keep taut, and the ramp slams down on the quay. Stumpy, bow-legged old crones in black scuttle like crabs up and down the heaving ramp, as trucks with loud horns are replaced by other trucks with loud horns. As the guide-book says: Chaos is a Greek word and drama is a Greek invention. Now, two days later, the ferry has left Folegandros at mid-night, dumping us at Santorini around three a.m. at what looks like the entrance to Dante’s underworld. We have missed the last bus and there is a thousand foot cliff between us and a bed for the night. Sitting gratefully in a van that suddenly materialised from Hades, we pass two back-packers toiling up and wonder if they will make it by daybreak. The van turns out to be a tourist trap operated by tourist crooks charging tourist rents. Since it is hard to wake up before the early checkout time they charge you double, then go down that night to get another victim for the room you have already paid for.
WHEN THE GOING WAS SMOOTH. That hotel, on a north-facing slope, was expensive and unbelievably cold, but the next one is unbelievable in quite a different way. We are now looking down from our balcony on the rim of what is left of the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The rim is a circle of islands with two little ones in the middle poking up out of the sea. One of them poked up after the earthquake of 1707. But it was around 1450 BC that the big one blew a hole in the island ten kms. across. The fallout wiped the Minoan and Cycladic civilisations off the map, but the hole filled with water on which, today, float three large cruise liners. Whitewash is everywhere, on the little churches, and even the towns themselves seem to be poured, in a white sludge, over the edge of the rocky cliffs.
A COMEDY IN FOUR SCENES
Scene 1. Two balconies below us. In one, two Australian males, stage right, asleep in the sun. Six Heinikken beer cans, empty, centre stage. Stage left: An American peers over the party wall. “Hi there, how are you guys handling the pressure?”
Scene 2. Foreground: two American males pacing up and down in the street looking at their watches. Background: two American females, one Greek jewelry shop owner speaking persuasively “Look at these ones Madam. Very good value”.
Scene 3. A Frenchman silhouetted against a fine sunset. He comes from Montpellier for three months every year just for the sunsets, finding work as a builder when he needs money.
Scene 4. David and Joan banging on door of Nautical History Museum. Sign CLOSED. Curtain.
VOLCANOS AND VESPERS. Ted and Phillipa, from Perth, seem to board the same ferries and eat at the same tavernas as we do. So it is no surprise to find them on the same little boat chugging across to the island of black, twisted lava. I count 50 trippers but only six life belts, so we crouch on the stern, near them, just in case. From the summit we can smell sulphur leaking from the kind of tortured landscape you might expect on one of the outer planets. But the immense flooded Cauldera, into which cruise ships sail, is spectacular, and we are finding the island quite beautiful. One of the most beautiful things so far is a Vespers sung by 12 young nuns in a little Catholic monastery, though perhaps the little nun on the right could yawn less obviously and not blow her nose so loudly. By this time it is no surprise to find Philippa in front of us in the congregation, or ahead of us in the bus queue for Akrotiri, or buying eggplant from a stall. A historian from Perth University, specialising on class relations in medieval Norfolk, she seems able to explain most things, including the co-existence of Latin and Spanish in the Vespers and the absence of skeletons at Akrotiri. But I wonder how she will explain her Mediterranean hotel expenses to her supervisor of class relations when she gets back.
SKELETONS AND QUARKS. No skeletons were found when the 1967 earthquake shook yet another ancient city to the surface. The inhabitants of that Minoan outpost at Santorini must have heard the first rumblings of the big one in 1450 BC and escaped by boat to their homeland in Crete. That evening, behind a building hosting an international conference of physicists entitled The Strangeness of Quarks, a sudden explosion reminds us that the next earthquake is probably due and perhaps we should have caught the morning ferry to somewhere else. The explosion comes from boys throwing large bangers, but the physicists are away in other orbits with titles like Strangeness Condensation and The Behaviour of Strangelets, while we seek earth-bound sanity in souvlaki and retsina.
WHEN THE GOING GOT ROUGH. A sudden change in the weather has brought in a plague of mosquitoes during the night and they had drunk deep by the time we woke, and our counter-attack has left the walls splattered with blood. We are leaving for Naxos and Rhodes today and Ted, who is sick, and Phillipa are taking over our room – it has heating and a warm, sheltered balcony where he can recuperate. I decide to wash the blood off the walls – I wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea about our married relationship. In Greek mythology Theseus dumped Ariadne on Naxos and now the ferry has dumped us there in heavy rain. But Despina at the tourist office has the right advice: “Take a cheap room on the quay and read a good book until you see the night ferry coming in”. And we do. I am reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Robert Calasso. “Theseus had no particular reason for deserting Ariadne. There wasn’t another woman. It was just that she slipped his mind for a moment.” I must remember to take Joan with me tonight. And I do.
RHODES. The ferry has been lurching in heavy seas all morning along the Turkish coast, but now it stops and rolls for three hours until it is safe to land at the island of Rhodes. The ramp crashes up and down on the jetty near to where the Colossus of Rhodes once straddled the entrance to the old harbour. After two short nights, sleeping on a quay and then on a second class lounge settee, we lug our baggage up and down like zombies, looking for the usual $25 dollar room, eventually capitulating at $75. Since it is not the sort of place you can eat your own bread, fruit and muesli, we pay for breakfast in the courtyard next morning and checkout. The young waitress from Bulgaria is homesick, so Joan cheers her up by singing Sto mi e milo, milo e drago. “Old song from Bulgaria” says the girl, obviously delighted.
Now we are in a more down-market but more comfortable room in Pension Olympus, a crumbling house off an arched and vaulted medieval lane in the old town. Joan has worked out how to shower in the 3 by 4 foot shower/basin/loo cupboard without flooding the bedroom floor. You crouch under the tap to soap up, then flick the lever to shower and shiver under a trickle of tepid water. Towels here are more in the nature of a loin cloth, just large enough to cover one loin. The toilet roll can only be reached by a variant of Tai Chi. I am drawn, mesmerised, by all walled medieval towns and the stairway (and cannon balls?) are fascinating. The Knights of Saint John built this massive Palace of the Grand Masters, and Mussolini later restored it as his weekender at this end of the Mediterranean. Yes, the Italians ran the place before the Greeks, and just about everyone else ran it before that. There is even an Indian restaurant here, but when a Greek wearing an absurd jewelled turban came to the door we decided to eat at Maria’s taverna next to our pension. Greece was winning a basketball match on television so it was a riotous evening.
ANZAC DAY is always fine, even here in Rhodes as we catch the hydrofoil to Marmaris. Two hours later we have drawn 40 million Turkish Lira ($400) from a Banka and caught an Otobus from an Otogar. And two hours later we are both saying “I can’t believe this” for the second time on this trip. The first time; on the balcony of our pension in Santorini with the million-dollar view of the cruise ships far below in the crater. And now on a waterfront balcony overlooking Gocek harbour, encircled by mountainous islands. Ramos, the schoolboy son of the owner, will teach us Turkish if we will teach him Italian, but our conjugation of Italian verbs is being interrupted. We must meet an “Australian” with a “cruise yacht” (above) who lives upstairs. But Mehmet turns out to be an Arab with a Gold Coast Australia Tee-shirt and a small fishing boat. He did actually visit Australia last year and had to be rescued from a rip at Bronte Beach. Now, April 26, and Mehmet explains the fortuitous celestial confluence which makes it propitious for us to go out in his boat today. We take his word for it and his word is good. The sandy bays, the islands, the pine forests and the mauve mountains are exquisitely beautiful, and the little fishing boat never broke down or sank once.
THE JAGGED WHITE CLOUD in the distance slowly resolves into a snow-capped mountain range. We have been driving east all morning in a country bus, and now we turn south to Kas, a pretty, cosmopolitan seaside town. Our room in Otel Orion is on a rock ledge from which we look straight down into clear green water. Next day we join 20 others for a cruise, this time in something much bigger than Mehmet’s fishing boat. Roy, from California, is divorced twice and, perhaps unsurprisingly, travelling on his own. Mac, from Virginia, took early retirement after a disastrous computer project (familiar story) and is also travelling on his own. In Istanbul they fell in with a bunch of Australians headed for Gallipoli, but decided to come down this way instead. In between anchoring to explore 3,000 year-old ruins of a Lycian civilisation I had never heard of, a submerged Greek city, a Turkish fort, some ancient rock tombs, and the arch which frames Joan (opposite), we find time to exchange a few dozen travel stories. Most travellers we meet who have island hopped from Greece to Turkey share our preference for the polite, cheerful, friendly Turks. I am now reading Paul Theroux’s Pillars of Hercules and I was able to quote “The whole of Greece seemed to me a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket.”
MEN, WOMEN & FUSEBOXES. A domestic comedy in four scenes.
Scene 1. Man comes back from town:”Banks close at one, there is a road up to the castle, buses leave from north side of the square”
Scene 2. Woman comes back from town: “Met a nice Canadian couple. His first daughter graduated in aroma therapy and her mother’s second husband had a triple bypass four years ago”
Men, it has been said, communicate economically towards some cooperative result, even non-verbally, as in sharing bait. Women, it has been said, communicate effusively towards some socially competitive result. Mixed gender conversation, it has been said, resembles a seamless garment, entry into which requires split-second timing.
Scene 3. A hotel room in Kas. Man fuses all lights. If he reports it, otel will find out that he was boiling soup from an electric razor socket. Man examines fuse-box which suggests a central fuse. Therefore man keeps quiet until someone else fixes it. Woman gives some good advice to man.
Scene 4. Man: “I like your hair tonight”. Woman “Shut up and deal”.
PEOPLE, POLITICS AND FRIGIDARIUMS. The two young men who run the Otel at Kas join us for breakfast. One presents a rose to Joan and the other serenades her with a ZAS (like a sitar). Another Otobus takes us to Antalya, Ann and Mary arrive from the Middle-of-the-East in the middle of the night and, next morning the first priority for four dusty travellers is laundry. Round the corner is a small, friendly launderette where the whole family turns out to say hello, and to tease me about my harem. The first of several problems with the Lets Car Hire Company is the small size of the car we now collect. But by working the gearbox hard we can manage the hills. On a quiet back road the garage attendant invites us in for tea with his family. Ann gives the little boy a tiny Koala and then three generations of that family come out to smile and wave us goodbye. I think any language using six syllables to say thank you (Tessekur ederim) and goodbye (allahasmaladik) suggests a courteous and kindly people. After a Turkish bath they say ‘May it last for hours’, and after any misfortune ‘May it be in your past’. People almost everywhere are friendly and helpful.
Politics is a quite different matter. Greece occupies nearly all of Turkey’s offshore islands. ‘If necessary, the air force could take out Athens in 2 hours’ (Turkish Air Force colonel). And to mention the Kurds does not usually generate an atmosphere conducive to the free flow of ideas. It was nearly a week before we realised that Turkey, already with a bad Kurdish human rights record, had invaded Iraq, where the Kurds are the cannon-fodder of Islamic competition. Theroux says ‘fundamental’ Islam is really ‘political’ Islam. The little church of Mereamana we visited, where Mary is reputed to be buried, contains four eulogies to her taken from the original Koran. But in Ephesus we saw Greek temples desecrated by Christians, and in Goreme Christian churches desecrated by Moslems. And the greed of Middle East oil politics, for example, is neatly explained in the quote ‘My grandfather was a camel-driver and, when the oil runs out, my grandson will be a camel-driver’. And Theroux describes Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel as ‘tiny, irritating, shameless and vindictive’ occupying
the world’s attention ‘way out of proportion to their size or importance’.
But at least with Frigidariums you know where you stand. After the Trojan War some footloose Greeks got the locals (slaves were cheap in those days) to build the city of Perge. Then came some Romans with their fetish for bathing. At Perge we wander through the baths: the frigidarium, tepidarium and calderium. And at Ephesus, the bathhouse had a library and restrooms for 1000 people. But at the Turkish bath at Celzuk, Mum and I are the only patrons. Everywhere else weeds are overgrowing and goats sleeping on priceless treasures of antiquity.
STEPPES TO CARAVANSERAIS, FAIRY CHIMNEYS and UNDERGROUND CITIES. With straight, open roads, a 5-speed gearbox and Ann and Mary driving, we cross the steppes of Central Anatolia easily in half a day. I’d never heard of Anatolia but, in the Istanbul museum later, we were to find that it was the birthplace of agriculture and the world’s first city was there some 9,500 years ago. The Hittite empire was also there, rivalling that of the Egyptians, and later came king Midas, then Greeks, Romans, then the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Always there are snow-covered mountains and always they seem the same distance away. We are following one of the silk roads which once linked China and Europe and, sure enough, we come upon a Caravanserai. I had thought of them as places to pitch your yurt and water your camel, but this was a massive fortress with wells and toilets, bed-sitters and shopping precincts for the weary camel-driver, a very ancient motel. In the afternoon the landscape changes to steep-sided valleys with curious conical rocks, fairy chimneys, the larger ones with doors and windows looking out from multi-storey accommodation hacked out of the rock, perhaps thousands of years ago, some still inhabited. For refuge from invaders they built the equivalent of air-raid shelters, only these were underground cities, seven stories deep, with wells, kitchens, kindergartens and cattle sheds to accommodate 1000 people for as long as 6 months. Tonight our ‘hotel’ rooms are actually caves, into which have been embedded, thoughtfully, showers and hot water. Tomorrow we visit an underground city, but lit now by electricity, not oil lamps. Meanwhile, in Urgup, I work hard on my accent and the waiter says ‘Oh, you must be from Turkey’ but he says it in English!
The caravanserai Fairy Chimneys Cave dwellings
An underground city Our own cave
BACKWARD STEPPES AND CARPET SELLERS.
We say goodbye to our camel and head west to the limestone pools of Pamukkale.
In the hot spring bathing pools we sit on submerged Roman columns lying horizontal just under the surface. At Seljuk Joan and I need a rest so we send Ann and Mary tearing off to Bodrum for two days. Efesus is a short walk down the road from Seljuk. It was warriors from Seljuk who built what finally became the Ottoman Empire but today their expertise, and aggression, lies in selling carpets.
THE MAGIC CARPET MAFIA. ‘Can I help you’? ‘Yes’ says Joan ‘What is the meaning of that statue’? ‘It is a long story, come and I will explain it.’ We come to what turns out to be his carpet shop. It takes 2 hours and 4 glasses of apple tea to escape. ‘Where are you from’? Oh, I have a cousin in Sydney’ (or Rockhampton, or wherever, but a carpet shop round the corner). ‘The temple is up there’ says the man in the car park, miles from town. Joan scolds me for ignoring him but when we return he gives us his carpet business card. ‘My heart is filled with joy…special price for you…it is antique…I make specially for you…’ and so on and so on. But we do buy a carpet, two in fact. Sinan has a masters degree in economics and his assistant a degree in geology, which says something either about the Turkish economy or the profit opportunities in carpets. We may never know, but we liked them, and, unlike the usual carpet mafia, they did spend 5 patient hours explaining the technology and history of Kurdish carpet weaving.
SOPHIA, THE GODESS OF WISDOM still stands in her alcove in the elegant two-storey facade that is all that is left of the Roman Library of Celcus. Nearby is a diagram of the machinery used in the construction of these amazing buildings that have brought millions of visitors to this corner of Turkey.
‘THE TRAVELLER IS VAGUE, THE TOURIST IS EXACT’ (Theroux, again). During the months of planning, our itinerary changed often and is still changing. I realised the same was true of Ann and Mary when I heard Ann say ‘let’s give Paris the flick’. And now, from the map, Candarli looks a good base from which to explore the remains of the Greek temple at Pergamum, before looking for wooden horses at Troy. We are the only guests for the Otel Amigar and its startled manager, both waking up from winter slumber. Like an elderly Zorba the Greek gone to fat, he waves his arms in mock resignation as we offer him half a million less than his opening price. But he counter-attacks. ‘Two nights, not one’. We look at the purple carpet of flowers leading from the white-washed patio to the hot sand and clear blue sea, capitulate, and change into our swimmers.
GELIBOLU is what we call Gallipoli. We had changed our plan and crossed the Dardanelles lower down and driven up the European side to the town of Gelibolu. We now are dining ($6 each including a good wine) on a terrace looking back to the lights of Asia. In 1915 some 55,000 Turks were killed defending their land here. To our right, at the far end of the peninsular, about 21,000 British and 10,000 French died. Behind us, on the other side of these lovely rolling hills, some 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders died at and around what was later called Anzac Cove. In war, civilian casualties were seldom recorded or even known. Here is a memorial to a Turkish veteran and his granddaughter.
Every country writes its own history and, in those days, what actually happened in wars was usually recorded in such a way as to honour the fallen and thank the bereaved while ensuring that they send more sons next time. Today, my only modern sources are ‘The Lonely Planet’ and two Turkish pamphlets. The Turkish viewpoints are interesting. For example, they believe that the allied strategy was very good: to split Turkey from its Germanic allies, attack Germany from the rear, link up with Russia and stop Turkey blocking the Suez canal. They also believe the plan very nearly succeeded, but for the intervention of a genius, subsequently named Kemal Attaturk, who disobeyed some incompetent Turkish generals and imposed his own highly successful strategy to contain the allied landings.
Sitting above this military strategy, so to speak, was, so it seems, a disreputable and dishonourable political strategy to carve up Turkey into Greek, Italian and other colonies. And lying below the military strategy, so to speak, are the well-known stories of the muddles and mistakes, the ‘lions led by donkeys’, the heroism, and of the great respect the fighters on each side had for each other, and for each other’s wounded in what were called the chivalry and conventions of war. By 1943 these conventions had fallen apart somewhat when, for example, Gran’s brother Jack was killed in Burma by Japanese soldiers disguised as the refugees he was trying to help. Perhaps one of the greatest, and perhaps the last chivalrous and humane statement on war was made by Kemal Attaturk in 1934 on the occasion of the first Australasian visit to the cemeteries of Gallipoli, words now recorded at these cemeteries:
THOSE HEROES THAT SHED THEIR BLOOD AND LOST THEIR LIVES
YOU ARE NOW LYING IN THE SOIL OF A FRIENDLY COUNTRY
THEREFORE REST IN PEACE.
THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE JOHNNIES AND THE MEHMETS TO
US WHERE THEY LIE SIDE BY SIDE HERE IN THIS COUNTRY OF OURS.
YOU, THE MOTHERS, WHO SENT THEIR SONS FROM FAR AWAY COUNTRIES
WIPE AWAY YOUR TEARS;
YOUR SONS ARE NOW LYING IN OUR BOSOM AND ARE IN PEACE.
AFTER HAVING LOST THEIR LIVES ON THIS LAND
THEY HAVE BECOME OUR SONS AS WELL
After WW1 Attaturk went on to repel the Greek invasion, reform and modernise Turkey, build roads, railways and industries, liberate women and serfs, de-toxify its religion, and make its grammar so logical that Esperanto was modelled on it. After Attaturk, came the corruption which seems always to follow any reform and, recently, perhaps a dream of a new Ottoman empire of Turkic peoples, as far north as the Ukraine, and as far west as Albania.
From gallipoli I suggested we save travelling by following the north coast of the Sea of Marmara instead of the south as planned. But, instead, for some reason we shoot up to the Bulgarian border and have some difficulty persuading Mary not to cross it. We stop at Erdine, get the keys to Sinan’s famous mosque from two young caretakers (we sent them this photo), and admire his ceiling..
From Edirne a motorway takes us faster than planned, and close enough to Istanbul to realise how much of the Thrace countryside its grimy suburbs have gobbled up. So we double back along a coast of fully-booked hotels until we find a semi-derelict motel in a tacky seaside town where the trucks are rasping and thumping past all night. From tomorrow we have a pre-paid hotel voucher, airline tickets across Europe, and a pre-paid car hire voucher at Gatwick. After all this relaxing vagueness of un-planned travelling, we must from now on be exact tourists. But if not exact, we hope Madeleine’s stork will be vaguely late rather than vaguely early. Meanwhile, we have a few days in Istanbul.
THE 30 METRE DOME of Aya Sophia, the byzantine cathedral built in the sixth century, is as astonishing as its Islamic rival down the road, the Blue Mosque. Nearby is the water supply called The Cistern, I am standing next to the head of Medusa, plundered from an earlier civilisation, originally forming the base of the column supporting the roof.
WE MEET SOME OF THE LOCALS.
The ferry we had boarded was overcrowded and we were fighting for seats with a Turkish family. As often happens, absurdity turns hostility into humour, then friendship and eventually laughter when my multi-million lira lemonade bill arrived. On the gangplank stewards were serving lemonade, as they used to when boarding a plane. I had taken four glasses gratefully not noticing that no one else was. By the time we stopped for lunch at the little port on the Bosphorus, we were their guests sharing their picnic lunch. Here is the tea boy, and here is the knitter
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND
Cultural heritage, or a pile of rubble? I am ashamed to admit that, after 7 weeks of ancient ruins, I do not always see that much difference between the overgrown foundation of a Bronze Age hearth and that of the old school residence at Eurobodalla. And looking in the museum at thousands of statues, tombstones, pots and pans excavated from Troy, Ann said, with her genius for concise summary: ‘How did they get all this stuff out of that mound of dirt?’ We had scrambled over that mound of dirt a week earlier, then looked in disbelief at the diagram of eight cities which had been built there, one over the other, over 5000 years. Sometimes the history is tangible, as in the Grand Theatre at Ephesus where we sat in a royal box still lined with marble, and performed, centre-stage, singing a duet Drink to me Only With Thine Eyes, to 25,000 empty seats. Almost empty, except for applause from Ann and Mary and six confused Scandinavian tourists. But usually the guide books are needed, for example to explain the wall in front of the stalls, high enough to stop a lion polishing off a few spectators. But it was mainly gladiators who got bitten and, at Pergamon, we found where they were taken, to one of the first ever sports medicine centres. And, without guide books and museums, we would not have known that at that place was laid down the basis of all Western medicine until the 16th century, or that the local god of medicine had two daughters, Hygeia and Panacea.
Some international travel signs
Undertaker loves overtaker (India)
Boutique petrol (on the island of Naxos)
Petrol teas (England)
Hotel Petrol (Istanbul)
Two-stroke toilets (England)
Operator Doktor (outside a rusty tin hut in Turkey)
The Goodbye Cafe (Attaturk airport)
Use bottom cushion for flotation (Turkish airline emergency advice)
Humour. For the first 6 days Joan and I travelled by bus along the south, mostly mountainous, coast of Turkey, Joan’s usual ingenuity solving problems of food, drink, accommodation and laundry along the way. After meeting up with Ann and Mary at Antalya we drove round Turkey for 15 days through the strangest landscapes I have ever seen. After the first few gasps we got used to, and appreciated, each other’s adaptation to driving on the right pretty quickly. Most roads are raised, and trucks which wander tend to roll into the ditch. We passed a huge crane and 6 police cars trying to lift a big truck, the poor driver shivering by the side of the road with the expression of one who knows he has just lost his job and his livelihood. Wherever we went Aunty Ann’s genius for the humour of the absurd kept us laughing. Joan, reading guide book: ‘That castle used to be surrounded by forests’. Ann: ‘So did they move the castle?’ As we struggled up a spiral staircase in a caravanserai ‘you’d have a job getting a camel up here’. As we passed a group of Arab women sitting under a tree ‘That must be a CWA meeting’. Years ago at a dinner party; a TV station had closed down last week, but someone saw its helicopter taking off yesterday; Ann: ‘Perhaps it was a rerun?
JOURNEYS OF THE SOUL
The Greek legends Iliad and Odyssey were compiled by Homer around 700 BC and have been adapted ever since. I once saw a play called Amphitrion 38, the 38th time the story had been reinterpreted. We have two DVD recordings: The Medea in which Jason and the Argonauts sail the Mediterranean in search of the Golden Fleece, and Orpheo in which Monteverdi tells in opera how Orpheus failed to rescue Eurydice from the underworld. These legends, and other Greek tragedies and comedies, are still staged as and where they were originally performed, in the stadiums we visited in Athens and Epidaurus.