Turkey Rocks!

The main target for the trip outside Istanbul was a part of central Anatolia with possibly the most evocative name I have come across - the Phrygian Valley. It's name sounds to me something out of a Hellenic legend; and in fact, the Phrygians were contemporaries of the Ancient Greeks, their most famous King being Midas (he of the golden touch).


We headed for their eponymous valley with only the Lonely Planet Guide to Turkey as a navigation tool; this turned out remarkably well, thanks largely to one party Kamal Ataturc's policy of westernisation having been converting the whole country from the Arabic alphabet across to the Roman one. I cannot even imagine the effort this would have taken - but as with so many of these hard-to-imagine social changes, all it took was some good old-fashioned dictatorshippin'.


I also can't imagine the effort it would have taken to work out firstly how to get to where we wanted to be, and secondly how to find any of the things we were wanting to see. Despite having landscape "as beautiful as anything in Cappadocia", the Phrygian Valley is far less trafficked by tourists. In fact in the whole day that we pottered around in our little car, the only folk we ran in to were locals. Locals staring at us from the roadside, locals staring at us from their donkeys, locals grabbing us and refusing to let go as they declared their joy (I'm pretty sure it was joy) at seeing us there, locals putting their grandmothers into our car to get a ride to the next town. And not a soul that spoke English, refreshingly.

This is a very interesting part of the world. The rock dwellings that the Phrygians originally hew out of the stone here are far from gone - in fact, they are still incorporated into the lives of the people who inhabit the area today. Many of them are clearly still inhabited (with street numbers and all), and form the core residences of the little villages scattered throughout the valley. The place is a playground - we drove along, diving off the main roads whenever we saw a brown sign indicating an historic site - and as you can see, were not disappointed in the results.


One place in particular was truly amazing - we could only guess at what it had once been. Chambers upon chambers (literally one on top of another) were carved into a cliff. One large room had several large holes dug into the rock floor, along with seats carved from the walls. My theory was that it had been a communal baths; the large holes resembled nothing more than tubs, with two levels, the higher of which was shaped for sitting. I imagined Phrygians with pruned skin sitting on the surrounding seats, wrapped in conversation regarding the next door neighbours blasted hammering as they made themselves a nursery. One of the best bits of the whole complex (into which we just wandered - no ticket offices or roped off areas here!) was a small room at the very top with a hole giving access to a long fall down the cliff - a genuine rock-hewn, long-drop lavatory. I didn't need to go, unfortunately.

These couple of days out of Istanbul were the perfect counterweight to the time spent in the busy city, and meant when we finally flew out, it felt like I'd been in Turkey for a lot longer than the five nights we'd spent there. The other overwhelming sensation was that I couldn't wait to get another taste of the place - and writing this five months later, still can't.

Kutahya

Dusk on day one outside Istanbul fell on us at Kutahya, a large town towered over by its red fortress. Although not visible here, the large keep at the top hosted a rotating restaurant, providing us with a great view of the sun setting on the Anatolian countryside as we sipped sweet apple tea, and protection from the howling wind up on the hill. The taxi ride up was comfortable, but not nearly so much fun as the trip down, straight down the hillside and through the backyards of a few unsuspecting locals down to our quirky hotel overlooking the main square.

Warm welcome

The first stop we made outside Istanbul was Bursa. The thing that became immediately apparent in the countryside was that the great characters aren't limited to the capital. On stepping out of the car, the first person we encountered was a gentleman walking up the hill towards the market portion of the town. Walking at about the same pace as us, he asked where we were from - and soon enough, after a quick tour of the market, we were having tea with him in his textiles store, along with his son, an engineering student who commutes to Ankara. It was this sort of hospitality, which we came across throughout the trip, that was one of the things to make Turkey such a great experience.