The Camel Barn Library

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:50:00 +0000

'How to build a very large and perfectly rhomboid chimney':

Today's post on http://chemonights.blogspot.co.uk/

- this is really a Camel Barn Library post, as it shows some pictures of the restoration of the interior of the barn.

My neighbours’ window boxes

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:01:00 +0000

Around the corner from my house there are two houses side by side: the first, which faces onto 13 Nisan Caddesi, one of the three main thoroughfares of the old town, is one of the grander stone houses of Ayvalik. It is three storeys high, tall and thin in the classic Ayvalik manner, with an enormous, elaborately carved stone doorway, and an overhanging top storey. Many of my neighbours, renting the smaller, more ramshackle houses in the narrower sokaks, are villagers from the impoverished south east of Turkey who have migrated to the more prosperous west in hope of a better life; the owner of this house, however, is more likely to be from Istanbul or Ankara, as are many of the owners of the larger restored Ottoman Greek houses in Ayvalik.

The house has been immaculately restored, and in the summer pink and red trailing pelargoniums cascade down from its wrought iron balconies:

The second house, nestled up against the side of the first around the corner in the side street, is a tiny two-up two-down cottage, with a small walled yard:

It is lived in by a jobbing builder, his Azerbaijani wife, and their little son, a delightful child of unusually angelic disposition in an area teeming with feral infants. Here, although the opportunities for floral display are more limited, my neighbour engages in some creative container gardening on top of the yard wall:

At the front of the house she only has room for a single window box, but it is quite beautiful, as is her enigmatic smile, glimpsed behind the flowers and wrought iron.

Walking on wild flowers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here on the Camel Barn Library, and many people have asked me in the last few months, with varying levels of impatience, if I am EVER going to finish the saga of the Paraschos house, and finally satisfy everyone’s curiosity by giving them a look inside it.

Please accept my apologies, patient – and not so patient – readers. I am well aware of how annoying it is when a story stops abruptly, without finishing, and my only explanation is that life got away from me, rather, during the autumn and winter and so, by extension, did the blog. But now it’s spring-time in the Aegean, and time to get going again with the blog, and much else. I will be returning to the subject of the Paraschos house shortly, but to celebrate restarting the Camel Barn Library, and to remind both myself and you just why I love this place so much, today’s post is simply about walking in, and on, the wild flowers which cover the wooded hills around Ayvalik at this time of year.

Ayvalik is both built on and surrounded by hills, and if we walk straight up the steep sokaks (alleys) which lie behind the Camel Barn – no inconsiderable feat for me, though less so for my dog Freddie, who likes nothing better than bounding his way uphill on a brisk vertical run, preferably in pursuit of a motorbike – we can be in the woods in less than 10 minutes. The trees are mostly the graceful Mediterranean umbrella pines that grow throughout Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant.

The pines maintain their vivid greenness throughout the year, which is particularly welcome in the intensely hot, dry summer months, when all the undergrowth dries up and the ground becomes uniformly dun-coloured; at this time of year, however, the grasses are green and flourishing and so are many species of wild flowers, notable amongst them lavender and dog roses, endless acres of which cover the rocky ground in between the trees:

Although all the woods around Ayvalik are lovely, the areas closest to the town are sadly marred by litter, and fly-tipping. People here don’t, on the whole, use the woods for walking, running, or dog-walking; in the warm months they come to the woods by car or motor-bike, and leave behind them a constantly replenished tide of broken bottles, cigarette packets, plastic bags and other detritus. Builders also frequently dump piles of building rubble by the road going through the woods, even though the town tip is only a five minute drive away:

The constant desecration of a place of such astonishing natural beauty makes me want to weep; this is a problem that is found throughout Turkey, and not just in Ayvalik, and also of course in Europe, although I’ve never seen it on such a large scale anywhere else. The town council recently put up a couple of notices on the road that winds through the woods, forbidding the dumping of rubbish; the very next day I saw, walking past, that someone had neatly deposited a heap of building rubble just underneath one of the new notices. A few days later, approaching the same spot, I saw black smoke billowing into the air: someone had tipped an old sofa down the hillside, and set fire to it.

However, if you walk far enough through the woods, away from the town, you eventually get further than people can be bothered to go to drink beer, or dump their rubbish; you can then walk for miles over the hills along unmade fire roads, free of human detritus, and the only people you are likely to encounter are beekeepers. The Ayvalik area is famous for its pine and wildflower honey, and throughout the woods are neat lines of beehives, each weighted down with a stone to prevent its lid being blown away by the frequent high winds.

The beekeepers can be found, occasionally, tending to their hives, dressed in their slightly spooky beekeeping outfits, with veils attached to wide-brimmed white hats.

Apart from the beekeepers, no one else much seems to frequent the more remote parts of the woods, except me and Freddie. The only sounds are the wind, sighing through the pine trees, the occasional buzzing of the bees, and the scrabbling of Freddie’s paws as he excavates yet another hole amongst the flowers:

The further you go, and the higher you get, the more wild flowers there are, and after about 90 minutes’ walking there is a wide, steep track, climbing to a high point from where you can look inland towards the mountains, and out across the sea. This track is, for a couple of weeks a year, completely carpeted in purple flowers:

By the time we get to the top of the purple flowery road, Freddie and I will have been walking for a couple of hours, and are ready to take a rest on the summit of the hill, from where we can look out over the Aegean to the islands of the archipelago, and back across the hills to Ayvalik (which you can see just to the right of Freddie’s head in the photo):

It’s a long walk home, but during April and May we walk this way as often as possible; it’s always beautiful in the hills around Ayvalik, but when the wild flowers are blooming in such spectacular abundance, the beauty is quite overwhelming. It seems strange that so few people walk in the hills, or see the flowers, but in 3 years of regular walking through these woods, we have met only a handful of people. It’s rather like having our own private National Park…

To my shame, I am unable to give a name to most of the many different species of flowers which are currently blooming here, beyond the obvious lavender, dog roses, daisies and poppies; next year I will have to buy a field guide to the flora of Asia Minor, and see how many different flowers I can identify, but to give you an idea of their variety, the picture below shows a small bouquet I gathered last week for a friend whose health currently prevents her from walking in the hills - and yes, I know that in the UK you’re not meant to pick wild flowers, but here there are, quite possibly, millions of them, mostly blushing unseen. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be able to spend so much time walking through the flowers, marvelling at their beauty, and immersing myself in the deep, deep quiet of the woods.

An email from a ghost: part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:02:00 +0000

The story so far: A few weeks ago I was contacted by Manny Paraschos, a descendant of one the Ottoman Greek families exiled from Asia Minor in 1922, who asked me to help find their lost family home, somewhere in the old town of Ayvalik (pictured above). There was very little information to go on, and my early attempts to trace the address of the family home from census or property records were unsuccessful, but eventually Manny found and sent to me a photo which was thought to be of the family house. The photo was of very poor quality, the old town in Ayvalik is very big, and many of the old houses are in ruins, but there was an unusual architectural feature in the photograph which reminded me of a street in which I recently had been taking photographs. So, late at night, I went out with my dog Freddie to see if we could find the Paraschos house. Now read on…

It was just after midnight on a warm Aegean evening when Freddie and I set out to find the sokak (street) where there was an unusual window resembling the one in the photograph just emailed to me by Manny Paraschos. It would have been more sensible to do this the following morning, in daylight, but I simply couldn’t wait to see if the street I was thinking of was the right one. I had printed out a copy of Manny’s tiny photograph -

- and was clutching it in my hand as Freddie and I wandered around the maze of streets in the lower part of the town, close to the sea front, looking for the sokak in which I had been taking pictures a few days previously.

Ten minutes later, I found it.

There was the house with the low protruding window, and there was the low one storey house opposite it, with two huge windows framed in the soft, dusky pink local stone. The sokak was well lit, and I stood there in the same position relative to the two houses as Manny’s father had done when he took the photograph on his brief return visit to Ayvalik in 1952.

I looked at the photo, and then I looked at the street; I looked at the street, and then I looked at the photo. Were they the same? I thought they might be, but I wasn’t sure. I took some photographs to send to Manny, from an angle as close as possible to the perspective of the original photograph -

- and then, while Freddie happily sniffed his way up and down the sokak, and started chewing on something that I didn’t care to examine too closely, I walked up closer to the two houses to compare, as best I could, their features with those of the houses in the Paraschos photograph.

The window sticking out on the house on the left certainly looked very similar in height, in the distance it protruded from the house, and in the little roof which covered it. There was nothing that seemed different from the photograph.

The house on the right, however, the house that might or might not be the Paraschos house, had both similarities and differences to the photograph. The two huge windows, framed in stone, seemed identical on the house in front of me and on the house in the photograph. But there should be a door between them, and on the house in front of me there was no door.

Where was the door?

Its absence was not too worrying, because where there are two enormous windows like that on the ground floor of houses in Ayvalik, there is always a door between them. Or there was, once. Many of the old Greek houses have been considerably altered over the last 90 years, and those alterations often include filling in and plastering over windows and doors.

And so it was with this house. When I walked up close to the house, and stood midway between the two windows, I could see quite clearly, under the plaster on the wall, the outline of where the doorframe had been. There were a few other minor differences, all of which could be accounted for by alterations and redecorations to the facade of the house over the last 50 years, but the underlying structure looked very similar indeed.

It seemed to me that there was a fairly strong possibility that this could be the Paraschos house, but I would have to come back in daylight to take some more pictures, and get my friend Erkan to compare the photographs, and come and take a look at the house, and the street. I called to Freddie, and we walked home through the dark, quiet streets. It was past one o’clock in the morning by the time we got in, but I immediately downloaded the photos and sent them to Manny in Boston, with a rather excited email explaining that I thought I might have found the house, but this would need to be confirmed the next day.

And then I went to bed, with the feeling of a job well done.

The following morning I returned to the sokak and took more photographs of the house. In the daylight you could see that the roofline of the street beyond the house mirrored that in the original photograph: a line of one storey buildings, with a much taller house further on. Standing there, looking down the street, and comparing what I could see in front of me to the annoyingly small and dark photograph, I was 90% sure that this was the right house. Now it was time to see if Erkan agreed with me.

I walked the short distance to Erkan’s office, and we compared the photographs on his computer: the tiny, dark, photograph from 1952, and the larger, clearer photograph I had taken earlier that morning.

‘What d’you think? Could they be the same house?’

‘I think they definitely could be’, said Erkan. ‘The streets and the houses and the spatial arrangements are very similar. If it’s not the same place, then there are a hell of a lot of structural, geometrical and proportional coincidences. But….’

Oh dear. What was the ‘but’ going to be? I really didn’t want to be hearing any ‘buts’ right now. I wanted this to be the right house, end of story, so we could all pack up and go home.

‘…but it would be a lot easier to tell if they’re the same house if the old photograph was enlarged, so you could see a bit more detail. Have you tried that?’

At this point I must apologise to the more technically savvy of you, who must have been screeching

‘Enlarge the photo, you idiot! ENLARGE THE FRIGGING PHOTO!’

at the computer screen for some time now, in the manner of children at the pantomime shrieking ‘Look behind you! Look behind you!’

My brain is hardwired for words, pretty much to the exclusion of all else; a corollary of this is that both my visual sense, and my ability to manipulate images on the computer are, unfortunately, somewhere on a par with my skills at using scissors and at piloting moving vehicles of any description through space in accordance with predetermined and seemingly arbitrary rules (but hey, I’m left handed, and I still maintain the Cycling Proficiency test was rigged. We won’t dwell on the driving test: the burning shame of being overtaken by that milk float still lingers, all these years later) .

After receiving the photo the previous day, I had saved it in Picasa (the only photographic software on my computer), which remains almost entirely mysterious to me, other than as a filing system of inordinate complexity. I did try to zoom the picture, but when the image increased in size it just went all fuzzy, and you couldn’t see anything much, so I gave up and forgot about it. It didn’t occur to me that by using different software it might be possible to get a different result.

In fact, since the photo had arrived by courtesy of Gmail, all we had to do

- OK, all Erkan had to do, if you want to be picky about it -

was click ‘view’ instead of ‘save’, whereupon Google helpfully enlarged the tiny old photograph, without it going fuzzy - so clever! – thus immediately revealing a great deal of previously unseen detail.

And the very first thing we saw was that at the end of the street, the pine woods on the hills behind Ayvalik were clearly visible, which they are most certainly NOT from the sokak in my own photograph. That street was much too low down, too near the sea for the woods to be visible at the end of it. It was immediately apparent, even to my undiscerning eye, that the lie of the land, the triangulation between the sea, the hills behind, and street location was way off in my photograph. The house I had found was, quite definitely, the wrong house. No question about it.

‘Oh, BUGGER!’ I said, not for the first time that week.

We were back to square one in the search for the Paraschos house.

Again.

Dismayed, I slumped back into the chair, defeated once more by this seemingly impossible quest. Meanwhile, Erkan did what all Turks do at moments of crisis: he called for some tea. In the shops, offices and restaurants in the centre of Ayvalik they don’t make the tea for clients in-house – it comes from the nearest çay ocağı (tea shop or, more acccurately, ‘tea stop’; an otobus ocağı is a bus stop). Walking through the town you often see men or boys carrying glasses of tea, on metal trays with domed handles, back and forth between the çay ocağıs and their customers in the surrounding buildings.

(In Turkish, the plural of çay ocağı is, of course, not çay ocağıs, but çay ocaklar. But somehow that doesn’t work when you’re writing in English, for people who aren’t familiar with Turkish plurals. I will therefore apologise now to Turkish language purists both for this, and for all the other linguistically hybrid and grammatically incorrect sokaks, kedis, lokantas, and bayrams which may be lurking in blogposts still to come.

Mea culpa. Bu Türklish. Çok yanlış, biliyorum. Ben İngilizim. Türkçe çok zor. Çok özür dilerim).

Erkan’s office has an intercom link to the çay ocağı next door, and the tea usually appears within a minute or two of being ordered, as it did this day. While Erkan went off to deal with a customer who wanted to buy a big modern villa next to the beach in Ayvalik’s smart suburb of Şirinkent, I stirred sugar into the little glass of tea and gazed gloomily at the enlarged copy of Manny’s photo we had just printed out.

You could see much more detail on the enlarged picture:

the way the sokak curved round to the right; decorative stone columns inset on the wall on either side of the door; two more one storey buildings, and then a complete two storey house, beyond the house we were looking at; and, perhaps most importantly, you got a sense of the distance between the house and the pine-covered hills that could now clearly be seen in the background of the photograph.

The old town of Ayvalik is crossed horizontally by three wide roads: Atatürk Boulevard is the main road through the town, running round the bay right next to the sea; about 100 metres inland, beyond the area of old stone industrial buildings which used to be olive oil and soap factories, and now house carpentry, glass and wrought iron workshops, as well as cafes and supermarkets, lies Barbaros Caddesi, a busy shopping street which marks the boundary between the commercial and residential neighbourhoods. The third big horizontal road is 13 Nisan Caddesi, another 400 metres or so closer to the hills, and situated on their lower slopes.

Looking at the enlarged photograph, it was now obvious that the sokak in the picture was located somewhere in the lower part of the town, but not too close to the sea, in the large central residential area bordered by 13 Nisan Caddesi at the top, and Barbaros Caddesi at the bottom. I began to think about how to conduct a systematic search, starting from the northern edge of the old town, and working our way in towards the centre, sokak by sokak, alley by alley, house by house.

If you look again at the photo of the old town at the top of this post, you will get some idea of just how big an area we would have to cover. It would be both labour-intensive and time-consuming, but would offer the best hope of finding the house. If the house still existed, of course, which was by no means certain. I had been very foolish to think that I had immediately identified the house in Manny’s photograph, just from some superficial similarities; Ayvalik was full of houses like that, in sokaks like that.

I cringed, remembering my blithe certainty, the previous evening, of having found the house, and bitterly regretted firing off the email to Manny announcing that his lost family home had probably been found. Finding the house was a matter of great emotional importance to the whole Paraschos family, in America and in Greece; I should have waited until I was absolutely certain it was the right one, before raising their hopes like this. Now I was going to have to send another email to Manny, saying ‘I’m awfully sorry, but...’

Utterly despondent, and furious with myself for having jumped the gun, I had by this time been sitting staring blankly at the enlarged photograph for about 20 minutes. And then, quite suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, a thought popped into my head:

‘I know this house'.

I looked at the big windows, and the great big arched doorway, and the dilapidated plaster on the wall peeling off to show the brickwork underneath; a house not in ruins, but showing considerable signs of neglect.

And then my brain somehow superimposed on that house in the photo another image: of an identical house, with the big windows and the great big door, but replastered, painted, beautifully restored, and with containers planted with flowers standing on either side of the steps.

It was a house in the next street to my own, maybe 300 metres from where I live; close to the corner of Barbaros Caddesi, in a sokak curving round to the right, and with a view of the hills behind. It was a house I had always loved, because in a town so full of ruins, it had been properly restored and was immaculately kept; and although it had clearly lost its upper storeys in the earthquake in 1944, it was still an impressive house, one that you would take a second look at as you walked past, especially when the great big double front doors were open and you could catch a glimpse of the inside, where there seemed to be some kind of courtyard or atrium.

As the two images fused into one in my brain I became convinced that this, truly, was the right house. It had taken me this long to identify it simply because the house today looks very different from the way it did when it was photographed in the 1950s.

And, of course, because of my almost complete lack of visuo-spatial skills.

Despite the growing inner certainty that I was finally on the right track, it still seemed too good to be true. Could it really be the case that of all the houses in Ayvalik, the house in the Paraschos photograph should turn out to be one that I knew well, that was literally just down the road from my own? One seemingly strong candidate for the house had already been proved to be completely wrong; how likely was it that immediately afterwards I would manage to identify the right house, simply by looking at the enlarged photograph?

With the sheer improbability of this in mind, I refrained from leaping up and screaming about this new development to Erkan, who was just saying goodbye to his client; I had, after all, been wrong before. This time I was going to make absolutely sure I was right before getting too excited.

Erkan, on looking again at the enlarged photo and being informed of the location of the house of which I was now thinking, looked thoughtful:

‘Yeah, I know that house. It could be it. Only one way to tell – let’s go and have a look'.

This post is getting much too long, and the hour is very late, but, dear Reader, I have tried your patience long enough already in the slow, circuitous and episodic narration of this story. To make you wait for yet another instalment before I reveal the outcome would be very unkind. And I don’t like getting hate mail.

Are you still sitting comfortably? Right, then we’ll continue.

It’s only a five minute walk from Erkan’s office along Barbaros Caddesi to the sokak we were looking for, but that day it was a very long five minutes indeed. I held the A4 sized enlargement of the photo in my hand and, as we turned into the sokak and saw the house, held it up to compare the two: the dilapidated house of fifty years ago, and the smart restored house of 2010.

It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the same house.

The great big arched door between the windows, with the decorative columns of stone on either side, the curve of the sokak, the neighbouring houses, the window opposite, the view to the hills: all were identical. The only differences from the photograph were those caused by the restoration of the building.

We had found the house in the photograph.

And this is it:

(to be continued)

Coming up next from the Camel Barn Library: ‘An email from a ghost- Part V : Inside the Paraschos House’.

An email from a ghost: Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 21:59:00 +0000

The Paraschos family in 1922

To new readers: this is the third post in a series about the search for a lost house in Ayvalik. In order to follow the narrative, it would be best to start by reading Part I and Part II.

September is a beautiful month in Ayvalik. Every year, at some time during the first two weeks of the month, the temperature drops suddenly: overnight, the searing summer heat of the Aegean disappears and is replaced by soft sunny days, cooled by breezes off the sea, as the town relaxes into a quiet golden autumn, with the tourists mostly gone and the children back at school. Should you ever wish to visit Ayvalik, September is a very good time to come.

When I imagine September, 1922 in Ayvalik, I see the town bathed in that same soft sunlight, the breeze rustling through the pines, and the fear etched on the faces of its remaining Greek population, as they are finally forced to accept that the tsunami of the Asia Minor Catastrophe is not, as they had hoped and prayed, going to pass them by.

On the evening of the 24th September, 1922, Dr. Emmanouil Paraschos (pictured above with his family in a photograph taken earlier in 1922) who, like so many others, had been convinced that if the Greeks of Ayvalik stayed put, and stayed quiet, the war would wash harmlessly by them, came home from work in one of Ayvalik’s two hospitals and, deeply distressed and in tears, told his wife Vrysiis that there was no longer any choice in the matter: the time had come for them to leave.

The marauding bands of Turkish irregular soldiers - ‘Tsetes’, in Greek - who had been in the area since August, were now burning Greek villages just along the coast, and killing the inhabitants, he said; soon they would do the same in Ayvalik itself, if any of the Greek inhabitants remained. All able-bodied males over the age of 18 were to be rounded up and sent to labour camps in the Anatolian interior; only the old men, the sick, and women and children would be allowed to leave. There were Allied ships in the harbour waiting to take them into exile; they would sail the following morning.

Having told his wife, Dr Paraschos dried his tears and, with difficulty, pulled himself together in order to appear strong and calm whilst delivering this dreadful news to their five children: Athanasios, aged 18, Evmenis, 14, Polyxeni, 12, Kosta, 10, and Yannis, 2.

What was particularly painful for him was that whilst, as a prominent Ayvalik doctor with many influential Turkish friends, Emmanouil Paraschos had managed to gain an exemption from being sent to a labour camp, and was to be one of the few adult Greek men allowed to leave Ayvalik, he had been unable to obtain any such exemption for his 18 year old son, Athanasios. It was therefore decided that Athanasios would take the risk of going into hiding with Turkish friends, and try to escape to Mytilene later, rather than take the much greater risk of enduring a forced march into the Anatolian interior towards the grim privations of a labour camp.

The family spent the night making preparations to leave their home, possibly for ever. The first thing they did was to cover the windows with blankets, to ensure they could not be seen by any Tsetes who might be roaming the streets already. Then, they set about gathering together what little they could take with them. Vrysiis went to a cupboard and took out 5 blankets, giving one to each of the children. They would be able to take only what they could manage to carry on their backs, wrapped in a blanket.

When the children had sorted out a couple of changes of clothes each, a few toys and books, and their stamp collections, they were sent to bed. Then Vrysiis got down to work: she took out all her jewellery from the box in which it was stored and, through the hours of the night, carefully unpicked the seams of the coats of the family members, inserted all the pieces of jewellery, and then just as carefully sewed up the seams again so that the jewellery was invisible.

Once the jewellery was sewn up into the coats , and ready to be transported into exile safely hidden,Vrysiis got on with her next task: cleaning the house. It was a matter of honour to her that, whatever the circumstances of their departure, she could not leave behind a dirty house for others to find; so, as the children slept and the darkness of the night began to edge towards a grey dawn, Vrysiis swept, scrubbed and mopped.

Perhaps this mindless, physically demanding activity also helped her to endure the intense fear and anxiety of this terrible night, knowing that in the morning she, her husband and children would be forced not only to abandon their home and their lives in Ayvalik and sail away to a highly uncertain future, but also to leave behind the family’s eldest son, in a position of great danger. By the time the sun came up over the hills behind Ayvalik, and cast its rays over the Aegean towards Mytilene, the kitchen of the Paraschos house was immaculate, the tiled floor gleaming, all the utensils, ranged on their shelves, sparkling clean.

The next morning the Paraschos family, along with hundreds of others, all carrying similar small bundles of possessions, walked down to the harbour. There the boats were waiting to take them as refugees to the island which lies just offshore, and is clearly visible from Ayvalik: Mytilene, also known as Lesbos, once part of the Ottoman Empire, but by 1922 belonging to the Republic of Greece, and a safe haven for the Ayvalik Greeks.

Although the family were able to take some portable valuables – a small amount of money, jewellery, and a couple of stamp collections - with them into exile, they left behind virtually everything they owned: a fine, three storey house, one of the beautiful neo-classical stone mansions of Ayvalik, full of elegant furniture, rugs, china, art, and books; all the possessions of a well to do Asia Minor Greek professional family at the beginning of the 20th century. The Paraschos family would never be able to reclaim that house, or those possessions, but were fortunate in that they, unlike many others, escaped with their lives (Athanasios, with the help of Turkish friends, managed to escape to Mytilene and join the rest of the family a few days later).

Those lives would be eventually be remade and lived out successfully in other countries – Greece and the United States – but the entire Paraschos family would always carry with them, and pass on to their children, and their grandchildren, the sadness of exile, of refugeedom, and the enduring memories of the beautiful house in Ayvalik that was once their family home, on the western shores of Asia Minor, the homeland of their ancestors.

And that lost house was the one I was now trying to find, so far unsuccessfully, on behalf of one of Dr Paraschos’ grandchildren, another Emmanouil (Manny). It happens very often in families that the younger generations fail to appreciate that their older relatives, keepers of the family memories and history, much of it never written down, will not be around for ever to answer questions, and thus it was with the Paraschos family: by the time Manny got round to wondering if it might be possible to find the lost family home, most of the family members who had ever been there were dead, and there were few clues left as to its exact whereabouts in Ayvalik.

What Manny did find, however, on searching through the papers of his father, Evmenis, the second son, who died in 1975, was several copies of a very small and very dark photograph of a house -

- and this is the photograph he emailed to me a few weeks ago, as a possible candidate for the Paraschos family house.

His father Evmenis had, in the early 1950s, been permitted to come back to Ayvalik from Greece for a short visit of a couple of days, and had walked the streets (all by then renamed, in Turkish) of the much changed town, looking for the house he had left as a child three decades earlier. This was not, it should be noted, in an attempt to reclaim the house from its new owners: under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923, all those exiled from Turkey to Greece, and vice versa, in the Population Exchange forfeited not only the citizenship of the country they left, but all the property they were forced to leave behind there.

Manny thought that although the photograph of the house was unlabelled, his father must have taken it on this brief visit to Ayvalik. Further, as there were several copies, the photograph must be of some significance: it could well be the family home. This photo, this house, were all, for the moment, that we had to go on.

Could I find the house in the photograph for him?

You would have to be intimately familiar with the topography of Ayvalik, the old town spread across several hills sloping down to the Aegean, the warren of steep, narrow cobbled streets and tiny alleyways, the whole vast mélange of thousands of old buildings, in all possible states of repair and disrepair, from ‘a pile of stones’ and ‘ in ruins’, through ‘partially derelict’ and ‘in need of some urgent attention’, up to and including ‘modernised out of all recognition’, to understand quite how much my heart sank when I saw that photograph.

The photograph was so small and so dark that you couldn’t make out much detail, and since the house in the picture was of only one storey, it was clear that it must be one of the many larger houses in Ayvalik that had lost its upper storey, or storeys, in the major earthquake which hit the town in the 1940s. Along with the upper part of the house would have gone a lot of distinguishing detail: there are many once sizeable houses in Ayvalik with missing upper storeys and, to the casual glance at least, they all look rather alike.

I sat and stared at the photograph, rather dispiritedly. I imagined spending the next few weeks wandering the streets of Ayvalik, a print-out of the photo in hand, trying to find anything that resembled it. The old town of Ayvalik is BIG. It has a number of separate neigbourhoods, with some of which I am only passingly familiar. Although I’ve lived here for over two years, and walk around with my dog Freddie every day, I’m still constantly discovering streets and alleys which I have never ventured down – or, more likely, as the town is built on hills, up – before. I live in the lower part of the town, equidistant between the pine woods and the sea, but this house could be anywhere, if it still existed at all.

I continued to stare miserably at the photograph, beginning to regret that I had so blithely undertaken the task of finding the Paraschos house. Then I noticed something. On the left hand side of the photograph, on the opposite side of the narrow street from the house which might or might not be the Paraschos house, there was a house with a protruding window on the first (or for Americans, the second) floor, a common feature of Ottoman, and Ayvalik, architecture. What was unusual about it, though, was that the window looked very low, not more than 8 or 9 feet above the ground; generally, in this town of tall, thin 3 storey houses, they are much higher, as in the photograph below:

I vaguely remembered walking down a street with just such an unusually low protruding window, one low enough so that you could reach up and touch it, only a few days before - but where the hell had it been?

Then I remembered that I’d been in the street to photograph a horse and cart I spotted tied up there, and that the low protruding window had been somewhere beyond the horse and cart. Going into the photo files on the computer, I started to search and eventually found this embarrassingly incompetent photograph, with the light all haywire, which would never be seeing the light of day on this blog were it not an important step in the search for the Paraschos house:

However, my photographic deficiencies notwithstanding, if you look closely at the photograph you can see that behind the heap of tomatoes in the cart is a protruding window, not very high up, opposite which is a line of low one storey buildings.

Now go back and look at the photograph Manny sent me, of the house with a similar low protruding window opposite the one storey house, bearing in mind that the two photographs are taken from the opposite ends of their respective streets, one showing the window on the right, one on the left.

That night I looked at one photo, then the other, back and forth, over and over again. Could these two photographs, taken from different angles, be of one and the same street? Could I have already found the Paraschos house, without knowing it, on the day I had recently spent photographing horses and carts (still a common form of transport in Ayvalik)?

It certainly seemed possible, as there was clearly a striking similarity between the two streets pictured in the photographs, but the only way to tell would be to go and look at that street again, with a copy of the photograph Manny had sent me. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midnight. I looked over at Freddie, who was stretched out on his blanket on his designated sofa, looking about as comfortable as it was possible for a dog to be:

Freddie did not look like a dog who wanted to go anywhere anytime soon.

Well, tough.

We were on a mission.

Perhaps not a Mission from God, but a mission, just the same.

‘C’mon Fred,’ I said briskly. ‘We’re going for a walk.’

(to be continued)

The image below shows the diary entry of Manny’s father, Evmenis Paraschos, then 14 years old, for 25th September, 1922, the day the family left Ayvalik (also known in Greek as Kidonies) to go into exile.

Many thanks to the Paraschos family for providing me with the images used above, and also for sharing their collective memories both of the family’s life in Ayvalik and their experience of becoming refugees, on which much of this post was based.

And it’s a BIG çok teşekkürler* to the Google Blogger Team…

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:33:00 +0000

So, on Wednesday night, around midnight, I was thinking it was about time to shut down the computer and go to bed, but before so doing I clicked on to Statcounter, which measures blog traffic, to look at my blog statistics.

And there was something really weird going on.

According to Statcounter, instead of a couple of dozen people looking at the blog - which, as I hadn’t put up a new post for a couple of weeks, was what I was expecting – something like 900 people had looked at the blog on Wednesday, mostly in the preceding hour, something which seemed inherently unlikely.

‘Oh, pfft', ' I thought, assuming that Statcounter had somehow gone haywire, and was fabricating hundreds of fictitious hits on the blog in some kind of Crazed Out- of-Control Software Fictitious Blog Hit Binge. But then I looked more closely at all these ‘fictitious’ visitors, and saw that they were coming from Google Blogger, and in particular the Blogger ‘Blogs of Note’ page.

So I followed the link back and found, to my complete astonishment, that the very lovely people in the Google Blogger team, at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California

- which I have always imagined to be some kind of mountain top redoubt with a turreted log cabin fortress, circling eagles and panoramic views over range after range of snow-covered mountains, receding into the far distant blue horizons -

had, for reasons best known to themselves, chosen the Camel Barn Library as their Blog of Note of the day for Wednesday, 13th October, 2010, a date which shall now be forever engraved on my heart. As a result of the link to the blog being posted on the Blogs of Note page, over the next 24 hours there were more than 6,000 hits on the Camel Barn Library, something which left me quite stupefied with amazement, and has also led to a big increase in email and feed subscriptions, and comments and emails about the blog.

And this has made me exceedingly happy.

The criteria for choosing the Blogs of Note seem to be amusingly random, and The Camel Barn Library was probably selected less for its sterling literary qualities and informative content than for its very odd name, but I can live with that.

The main purpose of writing this blog is to share with people elsewhere in the world something of Turkey, the extraordinarily beautiful and endlessly interesting country in which I am living, and its fascinating history and culture. I knew very little about either the modern country of Turkey or the history of Asia Minor before I came to live here, a lack of knowledge which is very common in the West, even amongst people who regard themselves as well informed about the world . Such ignorance is something that should be remedied, given both the huge cultural importance of the many civilisations which have previously existed here in Asia Minor, and the growing economic and political importance of Turkey in the world today. The Camel Barn Library is intended to contribute, in however small a way, to achieving that aim.

When you start writing a blog – something I have never done before – it takes a while for the readership to build up, and since I haven’t been writing it for very long, and am doing so very slowly, I was more than happy that anyone was reading it at all. It had been becoming clear to me, however, from earlier responses to the blog, that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in the topics covered by the Camel Barn Library, and are eager to learn more about Turkey and its culture and history, just as I am. The problem was how to reach more of them, but I wasn’t at all sure how one went about doing that, other than relying on word of mouth.

However, being chosen as a ‘Blog of Note’ has suddenly enabled me to reach a much, much wider audience with the Camel Barn Library, which is wonderful. Of course, this is a fairly specialised area of interest, and for lots of the new visitors, it simply won’t be their thing; however, it looks as if there will be quite a few new readers who are here to stay, and for that I would like to thank you, Google Blogger Team, very much indeed.

As would my dog Freddie (pictured below playing it cool while a small but determined admirer tries to lick his nether regions) -

- who has gained a number of new fans in the last couple of days, much to his delight. He is woofing ‘çok teşekkürler’, and wagging his tail. Be thankful that you are barricaded in your mountain-top eyrie, Google Blogger Team; were you not, he would be jumping up and licking your faces enthusiastically to show his gratitude. Not to mention chewing your shoes. Whilst you are still wearing them. We’re going to have to do some work on the whole training thing very, very soon.

So, thanks again to the Google Blogger Team, and a very warm welcome to new readers: I hope you will stay around, as there is a lot more to come, not least the dénouement of the search for the Paraschos house, which will, all being well, be posted very shortly.

Hoş geldiniz! Welcome!

*not nearly as rude as it looks: it means ‘Thank you very much’ in Turkish.

An email from a ghost: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

So, there I was, 3 weeks ago, with my shiny new notebook and a blue Pilot 0.5mm fine point pen, but not exactly sure what, if anything, I was going to do with them. I had no real idea whether Project Paraschos would actually turn into something justifying the acquisition of new stationery items, or if my newly-commenced quest to find the location of the ancestral home of the Paraschos family ( formerly of Ayvalik, now of Boston and Athens) was going to end in a ruin full of feral cats, a newly concreted car park (of which there are many in Ayvalik, on the sites of old houses) or a complete dead end.

I walked down town to meet my friend Erkan -

(We are getting ahead of ourselves here, because Erkan is an important person in the story of the Camel Barn Library, which I am writing here chronologically, and needs to be introduced to you properly. But this is a real time addition to the story, so he is popping up out of sequence. Never mind. He will make his scheduled entrance in the narrative very soon. He is an interesting bloke, who has had a quite extraordinary life.)

- in a cafe by the sea, located in one of the most famous buildings in Ayvalik, at the end of a line of neoclassical facades on the water’s edge which constitute one of Ayvalik’s iconic images, frequently displayed on postcards, tourist memorabilia, or illustrating writing about the town, as above.

I was quite excited, as I walked into the cafe and saw Erkan waiting for me, because I thought my idea about finding the Paraschos house through census data was going to be a winner. I am familiar with population censuses, as they are part of my field of academic interest, and that morning had done a little research on censuses carried out during the time of the Ottoman Empire.

Censuses were first conducted in the Ottoman Empire, as they were in England, during the first half of the 19th century. The first modern census took place in 1828/29 in both the European and Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire. Its main purpose was to provide quantitative data to facilitate the levying of personal taxes on non-Muslims, and the conscription of Muslim male adults into the army.

In the 1830s the Ottoman government established the Office of Population Registers (Ceride-i Nüfus Nezareti) as part of the Ministry of Interior, and censuses in various different forms were conducted at irregular intervals until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The last one took place in 1905, and this was where I hoped to find the information we were looking for, not in the published data giving the macro view of the census, but in the detailed unpublished census data in which, as in the British censuses, individuals are located to street addresses; each person’s name is recorded against the exact address at which they live.

Unpublished census data in the UK from 100 years ago and before is now available on the internet via the National Archive, and is searchable by name and location. I have done some genealogical research on my own family using these databases, and it was remarkably easy. I didn’t really expect to find that the entire final Ottoman Empire census of 1905 would be available at the click of a mouse – this is Turkey, after all – but was hopeful that if we could get access to the unpublished census data for Ayvalik, a relatively small town, somewhere in those data we should be able to find, if we looked hard enough, the street and house number of the Paraschos family house.

I bounced into the cafe, ordered a glass of çay (tea), and related to Erkan both The Story So Far, and my idea for finding the Paraschos house using census data. What did he think?

Even before he opened his mouth, the expression was on Erkan’s face was not encouraging. Why?

‘You’re forgetting the language’ he said.

‘What do you mean, the language?’

‘Everything written during the time of the Ottoman Empire was in Ottoman Turkish. I couldn’t read it. Nor could you.’

My heart sank. In my excitement about the census idea, I had completely forgotten one very important fact: that one of the many sharp disjunctions between the Ottoman Empire of before, and the Turkish Republic of now, is in language. The modernisation of the Turkish language was one of the many fundamental reforms instituted by Mustafa Kemal, later Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, as he separated the squalling infant of the new Turkish Republic from its dying progenitor, the Ottoman Empire.

You may be wondering how a language can suddenly be modernised out of all recognition without the entire population becoming extremely confused, and why anyone should wish to do such a thing, so let us digress for a moment into the history of the Turkish language.

During the six centuries of the Ottoman Empire’s existence the Turkish language used within its borders developed into two distinct variants, with different uses: first, there was the simpler, purer, vernacular form of Turkish, ‘kaba Türkçe’ or ‘rough Turkish’ spoken by the lower echelons of society, which remained close to the original form of Turkish brought into Anatolia from Central Asia by nomadic Turkic tribes in the late Middle Ages, namely Oğuz ( Oghuz) Turkish.

Second, following the adoption of Islam in 950 AD, and in tandem with the growth of the initially small Ottoman principality into an empire, there developed Ottoman Turkish, which eventually became the literary and administrative language of the Ottoman Empire, in particular between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Via the Persians, who introduced them to Islam, the Turks were influenced by Arabic, the language of the Koran. This, plus the fact that the Arabs and Persians were then advanced in science and literature, led the Turks to adopt the Arabic alphabet, although not its grammar. Ottoman Turkish thus came to contain a vast amount of loan words imported from Arabic and Persian, was written in a variant of the Perso-Arabic script, and was an elaborate, ornamented, rhetorical language, in large part unintelligible to the mostly illiterate majority of the population, who spoke vernacular Turkish: Ottoman Turkish was used by only about 9 percent of the population.

And this is what it looked like…

In an earlier post we discussed the triune nature of the human brain, with its newer, reasoning part, the neo-cortex, welded awkwardly on to its older, much more primitive parts, the limbic and reptile brains, and concluded that if you were if you were setting out to design a brain for a thinking being, it certainly wouldn’t be constructed like this.

Ottoman Turkish was the linguistic equivalent of the human brain: a language welded together from quite disparate parts which did not function well together, and challenging to use, even for those who were well acquainted with it. Trying to combine Turkish , Persian and Arabic together in one language was really never a good plan: the grammar and morphology of the three languages were quite at odds with one another.

As the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire declined, and there developed in Anatolia a strong movement towards an ur-Turkishness, and a Turkish nationalism which would culminate in a modern Turkish republic which expelled ‘foreign’ minorities, the strange hybrid language of Ottoman Turkish became a symbol of what needed to be left behind, and the momentum grew for the language to be reformed into something truer to its original old Turkish roots, and more accessible to the wider population.

There were early attempts to get language reform under way in the late 19thC, but the major change came a few years after the founding of the new Turkish Republic in 1923, when Atatürk instigated the great language reform. This had two major parts: one was the elimination of Arabic and Persian words from the language, and their replacement with words from old Turkish and, if necessary, neologisms based on old Turkish roots.

The Turkish Language Society was set up to bring back into use authentic Turkish words discovered in linguistic surveys and research, and its work continues to this day. The outcome of these linguistic reforms, according to the Turkish Ministry of Culture, is that the use of authentic Turkish words in written texts has risen from 35-40 percent in 1932, to 75-80 percent in recent years.

The other part of the reform was changing the script in which Turkish was written from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman, adapted with a few extra letters to accommodate Turkish vowel sounds. Atatürk strongly believed that for Turkey to become a modern state, a contemporary civilisation, it was essential to benefit from Western culture. The change to the Roman alphabet in 1928, which allied Turkish with European rather than Oriental languages, was thus a deliberate and highly symbolic act, one of the key points in his extraordinarily comprehensive programme of political, social and cultural reforms (of which we will discuss other aspects in due course), which dragged Turkey into the modern world, laying the foundations for the successful modern state which exists today.

Atatürk himself promoted the change by touring the country to introduce the new alphabet to the public, as in the photograph below, taken in Sinop -

- and public education centers opened throughout the country, resulting in a dramatic increase in literacy, which before the language reform was about 9%. By 1950, literacy rates had risen to 48.4% among males and 20.7% among females.

All exciting and important stuff, but what the language reform also did was to cut modern Turkey off, suddenly and sharply, from direct access to its written past, from the extensive written records of the Ottoman Empire, from its literature, and from its recent history. Atatürk gave a famous speech in Ottoman Turkish to the youth of the nation in 1920, one that is still compulsory reading for all Turkish school-children, but in its original version the speech is now unintelligible to the reader of modern Turkish, even if transliterated into Roman script.

Every couple of decades Atatürk’s speech has to be retranslated, so that succeeding generations can understand it. The language has changed, and is continuing to change, that much. By analogy, imagine if the English language had changed so much that Winston Churchill’s ‘Blood, sweat and tears’ speech of 1940 had to be periodically updated with new vocabulary so that we could continue to understand it. For a young Turkish person now, trying to read the original text of Ataturk’s speech would be like an English person trying to read Anglo Saxon.

And, returning to our subject after a considerable detour, the same problem would arise in trying to read Ottoman census records. As soon as Erkan mentioned the language problem, I realised that my plan was doomed: it would be impossible without the assistance of a scholar of Ottoman Turkish. And the chances of finding in Ayvalik an Ottoman Turkish scholar who would be prepared to go through the town’s entire census records to find the name ‘Paraschos’, just for fun, seemed vanishingly small.

Erkan then put an end to the whole idea by explaining that anyway, all records in Ottoman Turkish were now held in a national archive in Ankara, so we wouldn’t even be able to access them without making a 400 mile trip.

‘Oh, BUGGER’ I said. ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

We ordered some more tea, and I tried to regroup. Time to move on to Plan B, which was to go to the local property records office, and look at records from pre-1922 which would …… yes, which would also be written in Ottoman Turkish.

Plan B was then disposed of even more swiftly than plan A, as Erkan explained that current property records here only go back to the early 1930s, when the houses of Ayvalik were registered, with their new owners, in modern Turkish; all the older records were also in the national archive in Ankara.

Project Paraschos was turning out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. There seemed to be no way forward without some more information, some clue, from the Paraschos family itself. Manny had told me he was searching through his late father’s papers to see if he could find any more information, and it was thought that his elderly aunt, who was away from home at the moment, might have a photograph of the house.

I mentioned the possible existence of a photograph to Erkan who is, amongst other things, an estate agent. His face brightened.

‘That would be much, much easier.’ he said.

‘I know every street, every house in this town. If they send a photo, and the house is still standing, I’ll be able to find it. I promise you.’

I agreed to keep him updated on any developments, went home and sat down at my computer to send Manny an email telling him of the disappointing outcome of my first attempt to find the house. When I opened my inbox, I saw that there was a new email waiting there for me from Manny. Even without opening it, I could see that there was an attachment to the email. A photograph.

I opened up the email and began to read.

(to be continued)

An email from a ghost

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:40:00 +0000

Exactly a month ago I received an email from a man in America. The email opened without salutation: the writer merely said that he loved my blog, and was passing it on to others, a statement guaranteed to make me feel warmly towards him, whoever he might be. He then went on to say ‘I need some information you might know something about’.

What, I wondered, might that be?

The next paragraph made my jaw drop: I was stunned.

‘My father's family was from Aivali. His father was a physician at the hospital there. Is there a way to find out where the Emmanouil Paraschos (Εμμανουήλ Παράσχος) family lived until 1922?’

I live in a town full of ghosts. The Greeks who lived here until 1922 hover constantly at the edge of one’s vision, a shadow population peering from the empty windows of ruined houses, and only ever glimpsed in the few photographs* that remain of life here a hundred years ago: middle class couples, like the one above, in a formal pose for the photographer, confident of their place in the world; families in their Sunday best ready to attend mass at the Greek Orthodox churches that now have minarets attached;

children lining up in solemn-faced rows for school photographs;

and a young girl in a white dress, gazing calmly into the future, unaware that her childhood was about to come to an end and that her adult life, if she survived the coming catastrophe, would be lived in another country:

The disjunction between those sad spectres of the past and the town in which I live has always seemed complete; when I talk to people who live here now about their family backgrounds, they tell me that their grandparents and great grandparents came here from Salonika, or Mytilene, or Crete. There is literally no one in Ayvalik today whose ancestors were here before 1923. They are gone, lost to history, and can never come back.

Yet when I read the email from the professor in Boston, a man called Manny Paraschos named, it seemed, for his grandfather, it was as if someone had suddenly stepped straight out of one of those old photographs, waving, and shouting ‘Hey! We’re still here!’

I had received an email from a ghost.

When I started writing this blog, I imagined its possible readers as people like me: interested in, but largely ignorant of, both modern Turkey and the many previous civilisations and empires which rose and fell, flourished and faded, during the last 9,000 thousand years in Asia Minor. It simply never occurred to me that the blog would be read by anyone in the diaspora of Asia Minor Greeks.

I wrote back to the professor immediately, expressing my delight at making a connection to someone now living who had his roots in that lost world, and offering to help him in any way I could in the quest to identify his ancestral home. If he had no address for the Paraschos family house, as was implied by his question, then I would try to approach the problem from another angle: I knew that population censuses list the names of all the people living at any given address, so if there were any pre-1922 census records for Ayvalik still extant, I could search them to find any mention of the name ‘Paraschos’.

Another possibility might be the Property Records Office of the Ayvalik municipality. My own house was built in 1908, only 14 years before the Greeks left, so I imagined it might only ever have been occupied by one family, and I remembered a friend telling me that if I wanted to find out who used to live in my house, I might be able to do so at the Property Records Office, where the land registration deed should record the name of the house’s first owner. Without an address, it would be more difficult, but it was possible that the details from land deeds had been computerised, and one might be able to search by name, rather than address.

I outlined these possibilities, both of which seemed to offer at least some slim chance of success, to Manny, and undertook to discuss the problem with a Turkish friend here, who has a strong interest in, and considerable knowledge of, local history. However, not wishing to get his hopes up too high, I added the following caveat: that many records had been destroyed during the cataclysmic events in Anatolia between 1919 and 1923, and that even if we could manage to find the address where the Paraschos family lived, the house might be a ruin, or have disappeared completely and been replaced by a new building. I would do my best to help him find his family home, but was, in truth, doubtful of a successful outcome.

Still, it was a fascinating quest, and I was determined to try. I arranged to have lunch the next day with the friend who might be able to advise me on my search, and bought a new notebook, on the basis that all great –or even small – enterprises should begin with a new notebook and a Pilot pen with a very, very fine point.

Project Paraschos was now officially underway.

(to be continued)

* Please note that these photographs of Greek families in Ayvalik before 1922, from publicly available sources, are not of the Paraschos family.

My City of Ruins

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:07:00 +0000

“Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins — invariably, we’re people who come from the outside”.

Orhan Pamuk '’Istanbul: Memories and the City’

If you come from one of the tidier countries of northern Europe, like the UK, then you will spend the first couple of days of your first visit to Ayvalik in a state of shock. The guidebooks will have told you of the charm of the town’s cobbled streets, lined with picturesque old Ottoman Greek houses, and you may well have had your appetite further whetted by the ‘Rough Guide to Turkey’ rhapsodising thus:

‘Ayvalik presents the spectacle –almost unique in the Aegean – of an almost perfectly preserved Ottoman Greek market town, its essential nature little changed despite the inroads of commercialization. Riotously painted horse-carts clatter through the cobbled bazaar, past the occasional bakery boy roaming the alleys in the early morning selling fresh bread and cakes….

There’s little point in asking directions: use the minarets as landmarks and give yourself over to the pleasure of wandering under numerous wrought-iron window grilles and past ornately carved doorways.’

Well, yes -

- a whole book could be devoted solely to the eccentric beauty of the doorways and wrought iron work of Ayvalik .

But what they don’t tell you about is the ruins.

In an earlier post I described how in September 1922 the Orthodox Greek inhabitants of Ayvalik were forced to leave the town and migrate to Greece, taking with them only what they could carry, and how they were replaced a year later by Muslims forced to migrate in the other direction, from Greece to Turkey, who moved into the abandoned houses of those who had left, and turned their churches into mosques.

The incoming migrants, however, were much fewer in number than those who were forced to leave, which meant that a lot of houses were left empty. Some of them have remained uninhabited to this day, and have been standing there, slowly decaying, for the last 88 years. This process was accelerated by an earthquake during the 1940s, during which some of the taller, three- storied houses lost their upper floors. As a result, the charming cobbled streets of Ayvalik feature - amongst the moderate number of houses that have been properly restored and the rather larger number that have been modernised in what is perhaps best described as an ad hoc fashion – many houses in various stages of decay and ruin, some long beyond the hope of repair.

My street contains several beautifully restored houses, amongst them the elegant summer residence of one of Turkey’s most famous rock stars (the house and its restoration have been featured in newspaper and magazine articles in Turkey, so its location is well known):

It also, in rather marked contrast, contains this

and, right next door to me, this:

The ruins are beautiful in a heartbreaking kind of way: you will see a huge, imposing doorway (Ayvalik is full of doorways with attitude), a magnificent facade, and behind it nothing…

…but the bare bones of the house it was once was.

Houses fall down regularly in Ayvalik, despite the fact that the old town is a conservation area, and has been for decades; a friend of mine narrowly missed being hit by the falling rubble when the house pictured below collapsed a few months ago:

To someone coming from a country whose architectural heritage is preserved, conserved, restored and polished to the nth degree, such a state of affairs is, at first, literally incomprehensible. The first-time British visitor wanders about the old town of Ayvalik dazed and confused: delighted by the beauty of the town, but simultaneously quite overwhelmed by the stunning visual impact of its decay.

It takes a bit of getting used to.

Once coherent thought returns, the visitor’s next reaction is ‘But this is terrible! How can such a thing be allowed to happen?’ to which the short answer is ‘Burası Türkiye’ – a popular phrase meaning ‘This is Turkey.’ The longer answer, inevitably, comes under the category of ‘It’s complicated’, and I’m not sure that I can provide an adequate explanation. However, the answer seems to lie in a complex tangle of cultural, political and economic factors.

One view, put forward by Bruce Clark in 'Twice A Stranger' his book about the 1923 Population Exchange between Turkey and Greece, is that for painful historical reasons there is no particular general desire here to preserve the architectural heritage, however picturesque, left behind by what are perceived as the historic enemies of the emergence of the Turkish nation state, the Asia Minor Greeks (with a mirror image of this sad situation being found vis-à-vis the many physical remains – and thus reminders - of centuries of Ottoman rule in what is now Greece).

A Turkish friend of mine here in Ayvalik argues against this view, pointing out that the problem of preserving the physical remains of Turkey’s multiply layered multicultural heritage is a much broader one, and I would tend to agree. As described previously, Turkey is chock full, on a scale quite difficult to comprehend, of the archaeological and architectural remains of earlier civilisations (and I will list them again, as I do so love the litany of their names) -

Hattis, Hittites and Hourrites, Uruartians, Phrygians and Lydians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Trojans, Romans, Byzantines, Selcuks and Ottomans

- amongst others. Many of these sites have never been excavated, and perhaps never will be, because there simply isn’t enough money, in a country which is still developing, so from this point of view a few crumbling Ottoman Greek houses in a small town in the north west Aegean are perhaps fairly minor in the great Anatolian scheme of things.

There is a wider cultural point, however, which seems significant: Turks, on the whole, are not that interested in old houses, and with a few exceptions have little interest in restoring them, much less living in them. This is a sweeping generalisation, but there is empirical evidence to support it. To explain why this is the case we need to take a brief look at the development of Ottoman architecture (Ottoman referring to the period between 1299, when the Ottomans took over in Anatolia from the Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm, and 1923, when the Ottoman Empire officially ended and the Turkish Republic was established).

Stephane Yerasimos, an architectural historian specialising in the Ottoman era, describes how Turkish domestic architecture developed using a material – wood - chosen for its transience, with the spiritual symbolism that entailed, in contrast to the permanence of the stone used for public buildings:

'The need to emphasise the transitory character of human life, in every undertaking related thereto, became a fundamental principle of Ottoman civilization, especially in the synthesis it effected between architectural creation and its materials. By contrast with the mosque and other public buildings (caravanserais, baths, hospices etc) , designed to endure and thus fashioned of stone for all eternity, the structures for sheltering the private lives of individuals are in wood, made to be rebuilt from one generation to the next.’

Stefane Yerasimos, ‘Living in Turkey’

The high density and proximity of the wooden houses of Istanbul and other Ottoman cities led to repeated destruction by fire, and gave a wood-built house a life expectancy of only thirty years or so; as a result, the constant replacement of domestic living spaces, generation upon generation, has been a feature of Turkish life for hundreds of years.

It is instructive in this context to consider what has happened during the last hundred years to the wooden houses of Istanbul, the main component of the city’s domestic architecture since the 16th century.

Their fate has some parallels to the situation in Ayvalik. At the beginning of the 20th century most of Istanbul's housing stock consisted of wooden houses. Today, there are only about 250 timber houses left in the entire city, and many of them are in a very poor state of repair.

For four hundred years, wooden houses were built, and regularly replaced, generation after generation. But after particularly devastating fires during World War One, construction in wood was banned by the authorities. The wooden houses could no longer be replaced, and throughout the twentieth century those remaining have fallen victim to neglect, poor planning, and population changes.

Most of the tradesmen who had the skills to maintain and restore these houses were from the Greek and Armenian ethnic minorities who vanished from Anatolia, through death or deportation, during the cataclysmic events of the first two decades of the twentieth century. After the Second World War the Turkish middle classes abandoned the neighbourhoods of decaying wooden houses for more modern suburbs, leaving the old houses to rural immigrants without the money, or the know-how, to repair and maintain them. Although the planning laws in theory protected the houses, as in Ayvalik, many have been allowed or even encouraged to fall down by owners with no interest in preserving them, and local authorities are reluctant to spend public funds on houses in private ownership.

In Ayvalik, too, owners of old decaying houses have preferred to move to more modern accommodation in the suburbs, rather than bear the considerable financial costs of modernising and maintaining inconvenient old houses. Many of the houses in the old town of Ayvalik are now rented, to recent migrants from the east of Turkey, who, like their counterparts in Istanbul, have neither the money nor the skills to maintain the buildings.

It would be possible to obtain funds for the urban regeneration of Ayvalik from the EU, or UNESCO, as has happened in a few other places in Turkey, notably Safranbolu and Eskişehir. However, that would depend on energetic project leadership from the political leaders of the town, something that has to date been notably lacking.

The houses that have been properly restored belong mostly either to incomers from Istanbul or Ankara – Ayvalik attracts writers, artists and musicians, like my neighbour the rock star – or to foreigners, like myself. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them and, even more unfortunately, two years ago the Turkish government passed a law banning foreigners from buying property in Turkey in areas of ‘cultural and historical importance’; the old town of Ayvalik is one of those areas. Since there are rather more foreigners than Turks interested in buying these houses, and willing to pay the considerable costs of restoring them to the required standard, this has slowed down the rate of house restoration considerably. A few foreigners continue to buy here by having the ‘tapu’ (property deed) held by a Turkish friend, but it is something not many people are willing to consider.

It is probable that the law will be rescinded at some point, but the houses are fragile, and every winter the torrential rains, which intermittently fill the steep streets of Ayvalik with running water, further damage and destabilise these already weakened structures. At least half a dozen houses have fallen down in the two years I have been living here, and there are many others on the verge of collapse. It is immensely saddening to see the decay progressing, week on week, month on month, year on year.

The ruined houses of Ayvalik have a peculiar, haunting sadness about them. The restored and modernised houses, the lived in houses, have moved on into a new era, and are continuing to function, the horrors of what went before papered over with another layer of history. For the ruins, however, there is no such effacement of the past: they stand there empty, untouched and unlived in for nearly ninety years now, and decaying more with every winter’s rains. And their doors - if they still have doors - stand always open, waiting patiently for their lost owners to come home.

‘The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes’

Derek Walcott

Entertaining angels unawares

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:22:00 +0000

‘Her yiğidin bir yoğurt yiyişi vardır: Each man has his own style of eating yoğurt.’

Turkish proverb

A recent visitor from England, walking round the local supermarket with me, stopped in front of the chiller cabinet – actually, the series of chiller cabinets - devoted to yoğurt, and said:

‘That’s interesting. In Turkish they have the almost same word for yoghurt as we do. Is that a word they’ve borrowed from English?’

I stared at him, appalled.

‘It’s a Turkish word. The Turks INVENTED yoğurt. The English stole the word from them. And MANGLED it.’

My visitor looked slightly bemused by the vehemence of my reaction, as well he might. He had no idea of the central importance of yoğurt in Turkish life and culture, although the stream of people lugging huge 5 litre BUCKETS of the stuff into their supermarket trolleys might perhaps have given him a bit of clue.

So, let’s talk about yoğurt. There are some things you really need to know.

First, spelling and pronunciation: the British, when importing the word yoğurt into the English language, came a cropper over the fact that is spelt with a silent ğ which was transliterated into English as a ‘gh’. This was fair enough, as in English, as a general rule

Vowel + g + h -- silent gh as in Dough

but it ended up being pronounced as a hard g, when it shouldn’t have been pronounced at all.

What were we thinking?

Yes, I know. I still haven’t properly explained the Turkish silent ğ. But there’s a lot to get through. There will be a post on the strangeness and difficulty of the Turkish language very soon. For now, all you need to remember is that it is an

(WARNING: do not click the following link if you suffer from any kind of Grammatical Anxiety Disorder)

agglutinative language and features a silent ğ, the use of which simply lengthens the vowel in front of it.

So it’s not yo- as in ‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’ -urt (William Shakespeare)

It’s yo - as in ‘I said Yo, Jay, I can rap’ -urt (Kanye West)

So there it is: a silent ğ and a long ‘o’ – yo’urt.

The word is derived from the root yoğ- , which is the basis of a number of Turkish words relating to density, and the process of thickening or condensing: e.g. yoğun – thick, yoğunlaşmak – to become dense, thicken, or condense.

But enough with matters linguistic, before you lose interest entirely and wander off to Awfulplasticsurgery.com (No, of course I didn’t make that a hyperlink; I’m not entirely stupid. But do go there later to marvel at the bizarre juxtaposition of photos of Hollywood celebrities with surreally bad plastic surgery and … adverts for California plastic surgeons. Only in America).

Let’s get on to the more – and you’re going to have to trust me on this - interesting stuff: the history of yoğurt.

In the beginning, for thousands of years, the original Turks were nomadic tribes, roaming the steppes of Central Asia (they didn’t turn up in what is now Turkey until considerably later). They were pastoral nomads: indeed, Central Asian Turks were the first people ever to domesticate sheep and cows, during the Neolithic age. Living in a climate where summer temperatures were around 40 degrees Centigrade, and frequently travelling long distances, they needed to find ways to preserve food, particularly the milk from their herds.

At some point it was noticed that when milk fermented, it turned into a denser, slightly sour substance which stayed fresh much longer than raw milk: and thus was yoğurt invented. It was first made and stored in animal skins, easily transportable when the nomads were travelling. Exactly how long ago this happened is a matter for conjecture, but it’s likely to have been not long after the first domestication of sheep and goats in the Neolithic age, so at least 5 or 6 thousand years ago.

Perhaps yoğurt’s earliest appearance in the written historical record is in the Bible: in the Book of Genesis, (which in its current form dates back to 500BC or thereabouts) we find the famous story of Abraham putting together an impromptu al fresco meal for some strangers who arrive unexpectedly, and later turn out to be divine messengers. The menu included ‘curds (i.e.yoğurt) and milk’ – perfect for a light lunch should you find yourself ‘entertaining angels unawares’.

Another very early written reference to yoğurt comes from Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’ (written around AD 77-79), in which this cheese-loving Roman imperialist, happily unaware that one day there would be yoğurt-fuelled barbarian hordes frolicking in the ruins of the Coliseum, rather snootily observes:

"It is a remarkable circumstance, that the barbarous nations which subsist on milk have been for so many ages either ignorant of the merits of cheese, or else have totally disregarded it; and yet they understand how to thicken milk and form therefrom an acrid kind of milk with a pleasant flavour".

It is entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion, but nonetheless interesting, that Pliny the Elder died during the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii, after sailing from a position of safety across the Bay of Naples towards the eruption, in order to study what was happening at closer quarters. Pleasingly, this self-immolation for the sake of furthering human knowledge did not go entirely unrewarded: Pliny is still remembered in volcanology, where the term Plinian refers to ‘a very violent eruption of a volcano marked by columns of smoke and ash extending high into the stratosphere’.

I’m sure Pliny would have been thrilled.

The historical significance of yoğurt to the Turks is demonstrated by the fact the word yoğurt is included, with the same meaning, in the oldest known dictionary of the Turkish language, Kasgarli Mahmut’s ‘Divân-i Lûgat’i Türk’, published in the 11th century. There is an entire thesis to be written on the role of yoğurt in Turkish epic poetry and other literature, but to gauge how important yoğurt still is in the average Turkish home, let me just point you to the following short extract from the section devoted to yoğurt on the fascinating Turkish Cultural Foundation website, a fount of information on all aspects of Turkish culture:

A dish that is to be accompanied by yoğurt is a must on any traditional Turkish table - unless of course, there is already another dish whose main ingredient is yoğurt. For thousands of years, yoğurt has been an indispensable element on Turkish tables. It is consumed plain or as a side dish, and it is a crucial part of Turkish Cuisine. Yoğurt is used to make soups, sweets, and the favorite drink ayran, which is made by mixing in water, mineral water and salt. Another reason why Turks hold yoğurt dearly is that all over the world it is consumed and known as “yogurt,” which is a word of Turkish origin.

A few months ago I visited Diyarbakir, an old city in south-eastern Turkey famous for its dramatic black basalt city walls, and was delighted to find there an entire bazaar, many hundreds of years old, devoted to yoğurt - the Eski Yoğurt Pazar:

Inside, I saw where they got the idea for the plastic buckets in which yoğurt is now sold in Turkish supermarkets:

In the rural south east of Turkey, they still make and sell yoğurt the old-fashioned way, something I was to witness for myself a few days later when I went to stay with a family in a village on the Mesopotamian plain between Diyarbakir and the ancient city of Urfa (the biblical Ur, and birthplace of the yoğurt-loving Abraham).

This happened purely by chance: ready to move on from Diyarbakir, I was looking on the internet for hotels in Urfa, and came across a local company called Nomad Tours, which conducts short tours around south eastern Turkey, and also arranges home stays in Yuvacali, a remote, very poor, village some distance from Urfa. The home stays (which Nomad Tours organises on a voluntary basis) enable villagers, who make a meagre living from subsistence farming, to earn some money, and provide their guests with an insight into rural life which it would be impossible to obtain in any other way.

I’m going to write in more detail at a later date about the time I spent in Yuvacali, which was the highlight of a month-long solo trip exploring south-eastern Turkey for the first time. For the time being, let’s focus on the yoğurt-related elements of my stay there with my hosts Pero,

Halil,

and family:

in their partly concrete, partly mud house looking across the Mesopotamian plain to Mount Nemrut in the far, far distance, on the other side of the Euphrates:

The concept of ‘food miles’ is not really applicable in Yuvacali, where virtually everything the villagers consume (except tea) is produced on their own smallholdings: Pero and Halil grow wheat, vegetables and fruit, and raise sheep, cows and chickens, to provide eggs, meat and milk, which is made into cheese, yoğurt, butter and ayran.

Truly, Yuvacali is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiritual home, although even he might find the stand-pipe which provides water, and the outhouse in the middle of the vegetable garden, a little challenging:

My hostess Pero, a woman for whom my admiration knows no bounds, shoulders a work load which would fell most Western women about half way through the first day, including as it does rising at dawn to sweep the farmyard, before feeding the chickens, milking the sheep and cows and cooking the day’s bread over an open fire. All this before breakfast.

But for the moment, let’s focus on the yoğurt.

You’ve probably seen yoğurt recipes before; you may even have got yourself one of those nifty little electric yoğurt-makers and brewed up at least one batch of this life-preserving superfood for yourself and your loved ones before relegating it to the back of the kitchen cupboard which houses all the gadgets that will never be used again.

You are unlikely, however, to have seen a yoğurt recipe which provides you with a step by step guide from sheep to breakfast table.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:

How to Make Yoğurt in 6 Easy Steps, Yuvacali-style

Step 1: First catch your sheep

Step 2: You and the sheep, up close and personal

Step 3: Milking done, disengage from your sheep and rise gracefully in one swift movement, taking care not to allow the sheep to kick over your bucket of milk as you do so (this may require a little practice).

Step 4: Take the milk to the dairy, built with thick mud walls to withstand the baking heat of the Mesopotamian plain*

Step 5: Boil the milk, add the ‘starter’ from the previous batch of yoğurt and then leave it to ferment, a process which takes only a few hours.

Step 6: Preside over the next day’s breakfast table, with yoğurt that has travelled all of 3 yards, from the dairy into the house, and is still within spitting distance, literally, of its sheep of origin.

* Should you try to recreate this recipe in its entirety in, for example, the English Home Counties, it might be wiser to focus more on the water-proofing aspect when constructing your dairy.

******

‘Sütten ağzı yanan, yoğurdu üfleyerek yer: A man who’s burnt his mouth drinking hot milk will drink even yoğurt very carefully’.

Turkish proverb

Alexander the Great says ‘Just do it’

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:48:00 +0000

In an ideal world - the world say, of many of the most important philosophers in the history of Western thought, and virtually all economists - human beings make decisions guided purely by reason, assessing carefully beforehand the likely advantages and disadvantages of any given course of action. Although there are other internal influences on human behaviour, namely emotions and desires, what distinguishes humans from animals is our power of rational thought, and that is what can, and should, prevail in human decision making.

This paradigm came down to us from Plato and Aristotle - by way of the 17th century Rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, followed by Kant and the other philosophers of the Enlightenment - into the work of 20th century social scientists, especially economists, who enshrined the idea in Rational Choice Theory. This theory is based on the supposition that the ‘Rational Actor’, free of any external influences, performs a cost-benefit analysis on each and every potential course of action, and then chooses how to behave accordingly.

This model of decision-making, ubiquitous in social science is, of course, a little detached from the real world, as even economists have finally started to admit: in the last 20 years or so the advent of ‘behavioural economics’ has acknowledged the existence of ‘fuzzy’, non-rational elements also influencing human behaviour.

These non-rational elements developed at a much earlier stage of human evolution than rationality. We only have to look at the way the human brain is structured to see that rationality, which is processed by the neo-cortex, was a late addition to the human cerebral tool-kit:

Beneath the neocortex, the reasoning brain, lie the limbic and reptile brains. These are much, much older and more primitive, and provide instinctive responses governing behaviours essential to the maintenance of human life: the homeostatic physiological systems of the human body, defence, dominance and aggresion, and mating. The instinctual behaviours deriving from these older parts of the brain can, and often do, override the commands of conscious rationality.

The human brain has evolved in a fairly haphazard fashion– if you were setting out to design a brain for a thinking being, it certainly wouldn’t be constructed like this – and the rational brain has been compared to ‘an iPod built round an eight track cassette player.’ Thus, in contrast to the smooth cost-benefit calculus of the imaginary Rational Actor, the way we behave is generally a messy compromise, the outcome of the constant tension between the dictates of reason and the powerful inputs from our instinctual emotions and desires.

The subordination of rationality in human decision-making concerned with any kind of desire, corporeal or otherwise is, perhaps, summed up most neatly in Pascal’s celebrated anti-Rationalist one-liner: ‘Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point’ : ‘the heart has its reasons, of which Reason knows nothing.’ Pascal and Descartes did not get on, and this remark was by way of an ‘up yours’ gesture to the man who inflicted the lingering blight of Cartesian Dualism on the world.

All bets are off, then, when it comes to the conflict between reason and passion, as was demonstrated only too vividly on my second visit to the camel barn. In a previous post I described visiting Ayvalik for the first time, seeing and falling in love with the camel barn, and buying it the next day. That is the essence of what happened, but of course it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

I went back to look at the house and barn for a second time the next morning, before making a formal offer for the property, and during that second visit both the rationality of my decision, and my sanity, were called severely into question by the friend with whom I had come to Ayvalik.

Standing in the camel barn that morning, and again overwhelmed by a passionate longing to turn this building into my long-desired library, I was assaulted by reason in the form of my Turkish friend and university colleague Tuğçe (pronounced Too-cher – we will discuss the Turkish silent "ğ" at a later date). She had brought me to Ayvalik for a weekend to see if I liked the place and might one day consider buying a house there, and was now seriously alarmed by my sudden – and, as she saw it, manifestly crazy - determination to do so immediately, only 24 hours after arrival.

Acting as the Voice of Reason in the face of my raging passion to acquire the camel barn as soon as was humanly possible, Tuğçe seemed that morning to be channeling Immanuel Kant (poster boy for Enlightenment philosophy, high priest of Pure Reason, declared enemy of passion and kill-joy extraordinaire), something quite unusual for this blonde, beautiful academic and feminist of the postmodern kind, who is normally much more likely to be found channeling her icon and look-alike, Marilyn Monroe.*

Whilst I stood, speechless , smitten, in the camel barn, with the vision of the glory of my future library before me, Tuğçe was looking round the place with an expression of marked distaste.

In retrospect, I suppose she may have had a point, but at the time I was baffled by Tuğçe’s lack of enthusiasm; the ensuing discussion, across a vast gulf of mutual incomprehension, went something like this:

T: Caroline, you should really go away and think about this for a while before making a decision.

C: I don’t need to think any more, thank you. I’ve already made my decision.

T: Caroline, this barn is just a wreck, a big empty space, a heap of old stones. The amount of work required to restore this building would be enormous. And enormously expensive.

C: It’s an empty space now, admittedly, but like all empty spaces, it has a HUGE amount of potential.

T: Shouldn’t you discuss this with your family first?

(Family is all important in Turkey. Very close family ties, and constant family togetherness, are central to Turkish culture. Taking a major financial decision like buying a house and barn would be unthinkable without lengthy discussions involving, probably, the entire extended family, including uncles and aunts. Uncles and aunts loom large in Turkish family life).

C: No, what’s it got to do with them?

T: (shaking her head) I don’t understand you English.

She then decides to come at it from another angle:

T: It will be very, very expensive to make a restoration of this building.

C: Yes, you’ve already said that.

T: For the same price, or less, you could have a lovely new villa in Şirinkent (a delightful seaside suburb of Ayvalik, where many residents of Istanbul and Ankara have summer homes) with central heating, air-conditioning and a communal pool. Low maintenance, lovely gardens, right by the sea, no restoration needed. Are you crazy?

C: I don’t want a villa, Tuğçe, I want a library.

Tuğçe sighs, heavily.

T: OK, if you really MUST have one of these high maintenance, inconvenient and uncomfortable old houses, why don’t you get one that’s already been restored? There are plenty of them for sale, and they’re not that expensive.

Then you will know how much money you’re spending up front. If you buy this… wreck and try to restore it, you have no idea what the final price is going to be.

C: We’ve already looked at some restored houses, Tuğçe, and they’re perfectly lovely, but none of them has enough room for MY LIBRARY.

T: Have you ever restored an old building before? Do you know ANYTHING about restoring old buildings?

C: No, and no. I’ve lived in some, though.

T: Do you know anything about plumbing, wiring, roofing, anything about building at all?

C: Not as such.

T: Do you know anything about Turkish building regulations? They’re very complex, especially in a conservation area like this, and the planning office bureaucracy is always difficult to deal with. It’s one of the things we inherited from the Byzantine empire.

C: I’ll find someone who does know to help me.

T: And you will communicate with this person how, exactly? To my certain knowledge you only speak 4 words of Turkish so far: merhaba, teşekkürler, and çok guzel. (hello, thank you, and very nice)

C: I’ll find someone who speaks English to help me.

T: This is not Ankara: Ayvalik is a small provincial town 170 km from the nearest city. Almost no-one here speaks good English. And the builders will cheat you because you are a foreigner. That’s a given. And you’re a foreigner who doesn’t speak Turkish, so they will cheat you more. MUCH MORE.

And you’re working 700 km away in Ankara, Caroline. How can you possibly manage a building restoration project in Ayvalik when you can only come here in the breaks in between university semesters? You will lose all your money, it will be a total disaster, and then your family will blame ME for bringing you here.

C: I think I’m beginning to sense a little negativity here, Tuğçe.

T: That’s because you’re being CRAZY. This is a crazy, irrational idea. You will regret it if you buy this place. It will bring you ALL SORTS of trouble. I’m trying to save you from yourself.

By this point I was mentally sticking my fingers in my ears and going ‘lalalalalalala I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’

Then Tuğçe went in for the kill:

T: Also, you have no practical skills whatsoever. You told me your mother spent your entire childhood trying to keep you away from sharp objects.

C: And that is relevant to this discussion how?

T: Caroline, I know you. Your brain works very well for tasks requiring abstract verbal reasoning. That’s your special skill. But you should leave building restoration projects to others. People who can successfully use scissors.

But by now Tuğçe’s voice was receding into the distance, merging with the faint squawks of the seagulls flying overhead across the Aegean towards Lesbos, just offshore.

I was lost in Library World again, and this time my vision was much more detailed.

I could see right before my eyes the bookcases in the library: vaguely Greek looking, with that neoclassical revival vibe, and all the books lined up there, finally out on shelves again after all those years stored away in boxes, and neatly divided on the shelves into sections and subsections, and properly catalogued with some of that amazing bibliographic software you can get now, which comes complete with YOUR OWN BARCODE SCANNER, and how cool is THAT?

And I could see a great big stone fireplace on the end wall, with big comfy chairs and sofas around it, and desks, and tables to put books on that you don’t need just now, but might need a little later, so you don’t have to put them back on the shelf in the interim, and lots of lamps and good reading lights, and on the 10 metre long wall of the barn opposite the main door a wooden gallery, with an iron spiral staircase going up to it, and then up on the gallery more bookcases and a small desk underneath the little window in the centre, where you would be able to sit and work and look out of the window at the giant mulberry tree that stands in the garden of the house behind the barn.

I saw all those things quite clearly, right inside my head. My very own bibliographic paradise. And all that was standing between me and the beautiful library in my head was the organisation of a little building project, just a few months’ work.

Was not the realisation of my life-long dream worth a little effort and expense?

Suddenly, I thought of Alexander the Great, who swung by this part of the world a couple of thousand or so years ago and whose passage, against all the odds, was marked with a pretty substantial record of success.

I turned to Tuğçe.

C: Sometimes, Tuğçe, when you have a dream, you just have to forget about rationality and take a step into the unknown. Alexander the Great would never have got out of bed in the morning if he’d thought rationally about his prospects of success in trying to invade Asia Minor, overthrow King Darius III and take over the Persian empire, would he?

T: What ARE you talking about?

C: Really, Tuğçe, compared to conquering the entire known world between Macedonia and India, renovating a camel barn in the north Aegean should be a piece of cake.

T: (keening) Allah, Allah…

C: And let’s not get this out of proportion: I’m not going to be unravelling the Gordian knot, just renovating a couple of old stone buildings in a town where loads of other houses are already being renovated.

Really, how hard can it be?

* In order to protect Tugce’s privacy, I offered to change her name in this blog, in which she will be a frequently recurring character. This suggestion horrified her: she has opted instead for full disclosure, pictorial representation and, moreover, would like it to be known that she is currently single.

Street Life

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:17:00 +0000

The great heat of July is upon us; it is the price we pay for the glorious months of sunny, warm weather in the spring and autumn. July is the hottest month: the heat of August is always tempered by strong winds blowing from the north –‘Ayvalik air-conditioning’ – but in July, when the temperature is often in the high thirties, and occasionally the low forties, there is little relief from the heat unless you sit by the sea, or climb up the hill to the woods, in both of which places you can generally find a cooling breeze.

In the old town of Ayvalik, many of the residents are quite poor, and air conditioning units are unusual. Most of my neighbours simply have to endure the stifling heat , and during the summer months a large part of their time is spent outside, in gardens, on roof terraces and balconies, but also in the cobbled streets in front of their houses.

Many of the people here are recent migrants from villages in the east of Turkey; although now living in the town, they manage an approximation of the village life they left behind, often keeping chickens or, on the higher ground up near to the woods, a few sheep or goats.

The companionable evenings spent sitting outside on the street are a relic of village life and, as the weather gets warmer, pieces of furniture begin to creep outside to make this outdoor living more comfortable. When Freddie and I climb up the hill at 6.30 a.m to walk in the comparative cool of the very early morning, the sofas and chairs lie empty, and look a little incongruous:

In the heat of the afternoon the streets are quiet, as it is simply too hot to be outside, but with the approach of evening, as the shadows lengthen and the heat begins to abate, people start to emerge from their houses.

Soon the cobbled streets burst into life again, with children playing energetic games to work off the energy accumulated whilst cooped up inside for the afternoon; their parents, meanwhile, sit outside their houses and chat with their neighbours.

Children here spend far more time outside and have infinitely more freedom than in England; whenever I feel slightly irritated at the foghorn cries of the little boys who play football in my street, I remind myself that this is what little boys are meant to do.

Hilary Clinton’s dictum that ‘It takes a village’ to raise a child can be seen in action here: even very small children play outside in the streets unsupervised, as there is always a neighbour around to watch out for them, and few strangers wander around in the cobbled streets and alleys that wind their way up the hill in the old town.

By the time Freddie and I return from our evening, walk, around sunset, the sofas and the front doorsteps are fully occupied:

When you walk a dog every day along a regular route, you become part of people’s mental furniture. They look out for you, exchange greetings, express concern if you have failed to appear for a few days and gradually, although you don’t really know each other, you become friends of a kind.

The woman in the photograph above is called Sardya, although I'm not sure if that's exactly how you spell it. She sits outside her house every evening in the spring and summer, when the weather is good. Freddie and I have to climb up a very long, very steep flight of steps to get up to the street where she lives, which leads straight up the hill into the woods. One day, seeing me breathless after the climb, Sardya motioned to me sit down and catch my breath, and we talked for a while.

Now we have become friends, across the gulf of culture, language, age and experience that separates us. Sardya has a kind of tranquil beauty which quite transcends age. I don’t know her life story yet, except that she was born in the house where she lives, and has lived there her whole life. Her calm gaze seems to be that of a woman who has seen a lot, and come though unscathed. She always looks out for me and Freddie, and I like her very much.

A City on a Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:53:00 +0000

‘ You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’ Matthew 5:14

On the day that I first stepped into the camel barn and instantly decided that it would become the library of my dreams, I was unaware that the ruins one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world were situated only a few miles away from Ayvalik, at Pergamon. Pergamon was the literal embodiment of the biblical metaphor of the city on a hill, standing high on a rocky bluff 16 miles inland from the Aegean, about 1,000 feet above the surrounding plain. Its ruins still stand there, looking down on the modern Turkish city of Bergama.

Pergamon - mentioned in the book of Revelation, which accuses it of housing the ‘Throne of Satan’ - became important during the Hellenistic period (the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC ) when colonists established Greek cities and kingdoms in Asia and Africa. Under the Attalid kings, the Kingdom of Pergamon controlled a large part of western Asia Minor (i.e. most of the western half of present day Turkey).

The last Attalid king, dying without an heir, bequeathed his lands to the Romans in 133 BC, and Pergamon became the capital of the Asian province of the Roman Empire, continuing to be a commercial and cultural centre of major importance, with a population of 150,000.

Pergamon’s decline began when the Goths arrived in 262AD, after which it was ruled by a series of other invaders before, eventually, being abandoned and falling into ruins. This city on a hill was not hidden, but simply forgotten for over a thousand years until 1871, when a German railway engineer bought some old mosaics from local farmers, and later came back to excavate the site. Much of what was excavated, including the enormous altar of the Temple of Zeus, was taken to Germany, where it is displayed in the Pergamon Museum , part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Nevertheless the ruined buildings which remain – like the partly reconstructed Temple of Zeus, below - testify to Pergamon’s lost magnificence,

while the drawing below gives some idea of what the city would have looked like in its prime.

It was during the reign of the Attalid king Eumenes II (197-159 BC) that most of the major buildings of Pergamon were erected, including its famous library. Eumenes II wished to make Pergamon a major cultural and artistic centre, and built a theatre seating 10,000 (the steepest theatre in the ancient world), a library, a large gymnasium complex, and a number of temples and altars.

In order to establish his new library as an important centre of learning which could rival Alexandria, the greatest library of the ancient world, Eumenes II recruited Crates of Mallus, a Stoic philosopher – now best known for having constructed the earliest known globe representing the Earth - as its resident scholar.

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, the Pergamon library contained about 200,000 volumes: not, of course, books in the form we have them today, but manuscripts written on to parchment, and then rolled into scrolls. One of the legends of Pergamum, related in Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’ , is that parchment was invented there: previously, all books were written on papyrus, produced only in Egypt. The story goes that King Ptolemy, ruler of Egypt, feared the library at Alexandria might lose its pre-eminence to Pergamon. He therefore banned further exports of papyrus to Pergamon, to prevent the library from increasing its holdings.

Pergamon responded by beginning to produce its manuscripts on parchment – thinly stretched sheep or goat skin – thus breaking the stranglehold the Egyptians had over the dissemination of information , with the result that, as Pliny puts it -

‘ afterwards the material on which the immorality of humans depends spread indiscriminately.’

- a sentiment frequently echoed today in relation to the ubiquity of pornography since the invention of the internet.

Since parchment was used in Asia Minor well before the time of the Pergamum library, this story would not seem to be entirely true, but it is an appealing one, nevertheless. So, too, is the other great legend of the Pergamon library, which concerns Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch relates that when in 35 BC the Roman general Mark Antony married Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs (the dynasty descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals who had seized control over Egypt after Alexander's death) , he gave her the entire contents of the Pergamon library as a wedding present, to replace volumes lost in fires at the Alexandria library, and thus brought to a sudden end Pergamon’s days as a major centre of learning.

Scholars disagree as whether or not this story is true, but when you visit Pergamon, and wander around the ruins trying to find the location of the library, it doesn’t seem to matter very much exactly how things ended. The library has been gone for 2,000 years, and very little of its structure remains. It’s also quite hard to find, but I persevered, since my first visit to Pergamon was by way of being a pilgrimage, to pay homage to one of the legendary libraries of history before beginning to create my own, rather smaller, version.

Eventually I found the site of the library, but there was little to see: the outline of the building, and a few stones. There was something nearby, however, that was a rather more arresting sight:

This monumental headless torso, part of a statue of the Emperor Trajan, immediately brought to mind Shelley’s Ozymandias, King of Kings, of whom all that is left are ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’
standing in the desert.

Here, I thought, was Ozymandias’ missing trunk at last.

And then it occurred to me that if, like Shelley’s traveller in an antique land, one were to travel round Turkey and explore more of the many ruined ancient cities of Asia Minor, it would be quite possible to assemble a complete Ozymandias from the countless pieces of statuary scattered across the landscape.

A head, perhaps, from amongst those frozen deities that stand for all eternity on the peak of Mount Nemrut, built 2,000 years ago for the eternal glory of King Antiochus I Theos of Commagene:

We might also add the 5 foot long right arm of the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, bearing a globe, recently discovered in the ruins of Sagalassos, high in the western Toros mountains, which was destroyed by an earthquake between 540AD and 620AD:

I could go on.

Asia Minor is, quite literally, littered with innumerable pieces of stone left by the astonishing array of civilisations that have emerged from, or moved into, this part of the world: the Hattis, Hittites and Hourrites, the Uruartians, Phrygians and Lydians, the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and the Trojans, the Romans, Byzantines, Selcuks and Ottomans. That is only a partial list: there are many more.

This land wears empires lightly, though.

Nowhere else demonstrates quite like Asia Minor the vanity of human wishes, as all those broken memorials to long-forgotten kings and emperors bear witness:

‘And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Where the bodies are buried

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:10:00 +0000

There’s a place up in the woods where my dog always goes quite crazy.

One moment Freddie is bounding along happily, his ears and tail flapping in the breeze, full of doggy joy at being out in the woods and running free. Then, always in exactly the same place, he suddenly stops dead and starts snarling and growling, running round in ever decreasing circles, snapping and lunging, as if facing up to some unseen enemy. But of course there is nothing, and no-one, there.

I often wonder if this might be where some of the bodies are buried.

My last post described how in September 1922 The Orthodox Greek Christian population of Ayvalik was expelled by the Turkish army: 3,000 able-bodied males over the age of 18 were sent on forced marches to work camps in the Anatolian interior – from which only 23 ever returned - whilst women, children and the elderly were evacuated onto boats which took them to Greece.

Not everyone left, though.

Ayvalik and its neighbouring island of Cunda constituted an important centre for Orthodox Greek Christianity. There were nearly 50 churches and monasteries in the area, including the Taksiyarhis Cathedral on Cunda (seen in the photo below as it is today, empty and unrestored) , seat of the local bishop, Gregorias Orologas.

The Greeks of Ayvalik, and their clergy, had traditionally enjoyed good relations with the Ottoman authorities. In 1770 an Ottoman admiral, Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, commanded an Ottoman fleet heavily defeated by the Russians in the Battle of Chesma, a short way down the coast from Ayvalik. As they escaped, the admiral and some of his men were given shelter in Ayvalik by a Greek priest unaware of who they were.

When Hasan Pasha later became Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, he showed his gratitude by granting Ayvalik virtual autonomy as a Greek enclave within the Ottoman domains, with self-government and exemption from many taxes. Ayvalik prospered, and went on to become the second most important Greek commercial and cultural centre on the Aegean coast, after Smyrna. The town’s prosperity was derived principally from the olive oil industry, and its wealth was evident not only in the grand neo-classical stone mansions of wealthy merchants, but also in the magnificent churches of Ayvalik and Cunda.

The Asia Minor Greeks, it should be remembered, did not disappear from Anatolia overnight: it was a long, slow, agonising process bracketed at one end by the start of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1821, leading to the creation of the Greek Republic in 1832, and at the other end by the Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923.

Thus by the time the last of the Ayvalik Greeks were evacuated in 1922, the people of Ayvalik had already been affected by the gradual worsening of relations between Muslims and Christians within the Ottoman Empire from Anatolia to the Balkans, and in particular had suffered a great deal during the Turkish War of Independence, when they were accused of collaborating with the invading Greek Army.

Nevertheless, even with the Greek army defeated, Smyrna burned to the ground, and the victorious Turkish army approaching Ayvalik, it was impossible for the inhabitants to believe that Ayvalik’s 300 year history as an Asia Minor Greek town was over. At this point, the local authorities made a huge error: they docked all the boats to prevent people from leaving, in the hope that this demonstration of good faith to the Turks would lead to the safety of the townspeople, and in time a return to Ayvalik’s previous well-ordered existence.

The chairman of the meeting which made this decision was Bishop Gregorios Orologas, and he was also at the head of the deputation welcoming the Turkish cavalry when they rode into town on September 19th, 1922. Unfortunately this warm welcome for the Turks, which also included an entertainment with music and dancing, made no difference at all to the fate of the Ayvalik Greeks, who were shortly afterwards dispersed as described above.

And the ones who didn’t leave?

The following passage is from 'Twice A Stranger', Bruce Clark’s fascinating, and definitive, book about the Population Exchange, which has a chapter entitled ‘Ayvalik and its ghosts’* :

‘Gregorios and all the other clergy of the town were taken to a lonely spot outside the town and killed: the bishop is said to have died of a heart attack shortly before an attempt to bury him alive. Ironically some of those who died were choristers and vergers who donned clerical clothes in the belief that they would be treated with greater respect.’

In that place up in the woods, the lonely place high above the sea where Freddie always goes crazy, the ground undulates strangely, in a way quite atypical of the local landscape. The rest of the hilltop is flat, but in this one area there is a series of low mounds and hollows, as if the earth was disturbed there a long, long time ago.

And every time Freddie’s hackles rise, and he starts growling and yapping and chasing things that aren’t there, I wonder if this place might be where some of those bodies are buried.

* My posts about the Population Exchange draw heavily on this book, which is by far the best English language source on the subject.

Churches with minarets

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Why do the churches in Ayvalik have minarets?

Or, to rephrase the question, why are all the mosques in the old town of Ayvalik actually old Greek Orthodox churches, rather poorly disguised by the addition of minarets?

The answer is - well, how long have you got?

The very short answer is that in October 1922 the original Greek Orthodox Christian population of Ayvalik left suddenly, and was replaced by in 1923 by Turkish Muslims, who later turned the abandoned churches into mosques.

The slightly longer answer is that after the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish War of Independence, with the victory of the newly emergent Turkish state over the invading army of the newly emergent Greek state, the 30,000 Orthodox Greek Christians of Ayvalik (effectively the entire population of Ayvalik), were forced to leave their ancestral homes (Ayvalik had been an Asia Minor Greek town for 300 years, although part of the Ottoman Empire), and to migrate to Greece.

They were either put onto boats, and forcibly deported to Greece or, if unlucky enough to be male and over the age of 18, sent to forced labour camps in the Anatolian interior, from which few ever returned. They were replaced by a much smaller number of Muslims, many Greek-speaking, from the island of Mytilene (also known as Lesbos) which lies just offshore, from Crete and from other Greek territories now part of Greece, but formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, who were similarly forced to leave their ancestral homes to move to the new, primarily Muslim, nation state of Turkey, created from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

These forced migrations were part of the much bigger Population Exchange which was taking place between Turkey and Greece at the time, and later ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923. This was based purely on religious identity: one and half million Greek Orthodox citizens of Turkey and 500,000 Muslim citizens of Greece were forcibly deported from their homes and sent to live in the other country, where they would form part of the religious majority.

None of the 2 million people involved had any choice in the matter: their lives were torn apart because the international powers had agreed that in order to avoid further conflict Turkey should be primarily Muslim, and Greece primarily Christian. Unfortunately for them, those 2 million people were living in the 'wrong' place for their religion, and because of that were forced to migrate, as penniless refugees, to places where many of them could not even speak the language.

Those are the bare facts about what happened to the Ayvalik Greeks who suddenly disappeared and left all those churches behind, and the people who came in to replace them and turned their churches into mosques. A more comprehensive explanation of why this happened, however, would have to take in both the 3,000 year history of the Asia Minor Greeks, and the rise and fall of the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire and its replacement by the rather more culturally homogenous and less religiously tolerant Turkish Republic. This followed the First World War, the ill-advised Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919 and the subsequent vicious and bloody Turkish War of Independence, which ended with the Greeks being driven back, quite literally in some cases, into the sea.

That's all rather too much for one blog post, though.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:48:00 +0000

Silent, in a Camel Barn in Ayvalık

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats

The problem I have always had with Keats’ poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is Stout Cortez. I imagine him, red-faced and dangerously overweight, stuffed into an uncomfortably tight leather tunic, not standing up straight on the peak in Darien for that first magical glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, but bending over, wheezing and gasping for breath after the exertion of getting up there, and quite unable to appreciate the view.

Keats was, of course, using the word ‘stout’ in a different sense to the one above, but there's no helping it: for me, the image of Stout Cortez will always be that of John Prescott in a Conquistador’s uniform. And looking at portraits of Cortez, that image doesn't seem too far from the truth.

Nevertheless, the poem does convey vividly the idea of the life-changing moment: when, quite without warning, you come upon a person or place or idea that alters everything, and the boundaries of your previous world slip and slide in an instant, opening up new, and previously quite unthought of, horizons. For me, that moment came on a sunny day in January 2007, when I walked into a camel barn in Ayvalık, a town on the north Aegean coast of Turkey.

I first came to Ayvalık quite by chance, when I was teaching at a university in the Turkish capital, Ankara, and thinking of buying a house in Turkey. A Turkish friend suggested that I should consider Ayvalık, a town famous for its beautiful location on the Aegean coast, surrounded by islands, for its Ottoman Greek architecture, and for its delicious golden olive oil. We came to Ayvalık for a weekend, and from the moment I first saw the town, I never considered buying a house anywhere else.

Ottoman Greek, in terms of architecture, refers to houses built before 1923, (when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and was replaced by the new Turkish Republic) by the Orthodox Greek Christians who were the principal occupants of this part of Asia Minor under the Ottoman Empire.

Many of the houses in Ayvalık are built in the style of the Greek neo-classical revival - square stone boxes, with pediments - like the one in the photograph on the right, which belongs to my next door neighbour N, one of Turkey's most famous rock stars (and also an architect).

Others are built in the traditional Ottoman style, with an overhanging upper storey, giving them a slightly mediaeval air, although the town is only about 400 years old: it was founded by people looking for a safe place to live on the mainland, to escape from continual pirate raids on Lesbos (which lies just off-shore) and other Aegean islands.

The old town in Ayvalık contains just under 2,000 Ottoman Greek houses, in varying states of repair from fully restored, like this:

to falling down - literally- like this:

The house I ended up buying, with its attached camel barn, was somewhere in between, but was distinguished by being one of the most hideously modernised houses in Ayvalık. The picture of the house on the estate agent's web site looked deeply unpromising. It was 100 years old, but you wouldn't have known it: in a town full of beautiful swans, this house was a serious ugly duckling:

I only went to see it because there was some kind of stone 'studio' in the garden, and I was looking for somewhere containing at least one really big room, to house all my books. The inside of the house turned out to be much, much better than its dispiriting exterior. As it stood on a corner, there were many windows, and the house was filled with light. The rooms were large, with high ceilings. Although most of the original features had been removed, there remained one tall, typically Greek, extravagantly-pedimented cupboard, which alone almost justified buying the house:

The 'studio' turned out to be this, the sad skeleton of a once lovely stone building, the windows and doors long gone, and the massive stone walls coated with whitewash:

It was, the emlakçı (estate agent) told me, a camel barn, about 150 years old, and thus rather older than the house. It was built in the days when camels were the main form of transport for bringing in the olives and other produce from the surrounding countryside, and was used to stable the camels whilst their owners were busy disposing of their produce in the marketplace close by.

As soon as I walked inside the camel barn, however, I stopped hearing what the emlakçı was saying: I didn't see the empty door and window spaces, the concrete floor piled with junk, or the mess made by whitewash on the pink stone walls.

I saw my library, the one I had been waiting for all my life. The barn was 10 metres long, 6 metres wide and 7 metres high. It was big enough to house all my four thousand or so books, many of which had been in storage for years, because the Oxfordshire cottage I previously lived in only had room to shelve about half of them. This room would house all my books, and more. For years there had been lurking in my head the image of a great big barn-like room, lined floor to ceiling with books, maybe even with a gallery, as some of my favourite libraries, like the Oxford Union library, have. And here was that room. I could finally make my library, in a camel barn.

That was the moment when the boundaries of my world changed: I decided to buy and restore the house, and then make a library in the camel barn. There was no question about it, not a moment's doubt, even though I had been in the town for less than 24 hours, knew nobody there, and was working in Ankara, 900 miles away. This was going to be my library.

Reader, I bought that camel barn.

The very next day.

If you go down to the woods today...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:06:00 +0000

Truly, for my next post I was intending to write about the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923, and its catastrophic effect on the people inhabiting Ayvalık at the time. And I will, I will. But I have been waylaid by a puppy, and this is he.

At the moment the puppy's Coke bottle chewy toy is somewhat bigger than him, but he is a Kangal, or Anatolian sheep dog, the Turkish national dog (and, perhaps, symbol of national virility) which means that one day he will be the size of a Shetland pony, thus:

And I am to be his godmother.

Down in the valley between the two ranges of pine-covered hills along the coast south of Ayvalık, there is an unmade track running between olive groves, and this constitutes the homeward arc of Freddie's and my circular walks, once we have climbed up the hills, gazed at the views over the sea, and then come downhill again through the pine woods.

I have recently become friendly with a man I often see down there who owns a ramshackle, unfinished farm house apparently being built without benefit of a plumb line.

The house is surrounded by many interesting artefacts, not least among them several boats in varying states of repair, an unexploded Greek mortar shell dating back to the Turkish War of Independence, and many examples of what is probably best described as 'Outsider Art': think Steptoe, amongst the olive groves.

My new friend, M, tells me that he is a man who like animals much better than people. The truth of this statement is evident from the menagerie that lives in the enclosure surrounding the farmhouse. M keeps rabbits, ducks, hens and six dogs of varying sizes.

One day M invited me into the compound to have a cup of tea, and to meet the animals. He let me play with the puppy for as long as I liked, and sent me home with a handful of newly laid eggs. Now, if he's around when Freddie and I walk past, we often sit and chat for a while. Although he owns other properties in Ayvalik and elsewhere, and presumably has some kind of other life to fund this bucolic idyll, M spends as much time as possible down here tending his animals, his vegetable garden and his olive grove, and having his friends over in the evening to drink beer and cook stuffed mussels (an Aegean speciality) over an open fire.

Although M is not fond of people in general, I am acceptable because I come with a dog attached. Freddie loves it down on the farm, as there are five other dogs for him to run around with. The puppy is too small for that yet, and during my visits spends most of his time curled up in my lap.

The puppy is a relatively new arrival, and a few days ago M asked me if I would like to think of a name for him. I felt honoured, and gave the matter much thought, considering numerous alternatives before returning to my first idea: Utku, which means 'triumph' or 'victory' in Turkish, and was the name of a student I taught in Ankara. I love the sound of this name, and have previously bestowed it on one cat (now deceased), and on the fighting camel I fell in love with last year, and whom I long, passionately, to own.

But it also makes a hell of a good name for a puppy that will one day be 4 feet tall. Yesterday, I told M that the puppy's name would be Utku, and he seemed pleased. He picked the puppy up and said 'Utku, Utku, Utku', kissing the puppy in between each repetition. That, he said, made the name official.

Then he invited me to come back to the farm this evening for a christening party - this being Turkey, I am translating freely here - for Utku at which, I understood him to say, there will be cake. Naturally, I accepted, and am now wondering what might be an appropriate christening gift for an Anatolian sheep dog puppy to whom I seem to have been appointed de facto godmother.

I'm thinking in terms of a big, juicy bone.

The truth about cats and dogs...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:39:00 +0000

I awake to the realisation that I left the kitchen door open last night and that not one, but two, feral cats are in the house.

Shortly afterwards Freddie, my dog, realises this too.

There are breakages.

For does not an old Turkish proverb say: 'A terrified cat will always choose to rampage through a tray of wine glasses rather than head for the door standing wide open'?

After several minutes of extreme havoc and a considerable amount of collateral damage, the feral cats are ejected. I sweep up all the broken glass, feed the dog and yowling resident cats, and take a cup of coffee into the courtyard to sit awhile and regain my equilibrium.

I sink gratefully into the Lloyd loom garden chair and raise the mug of coffee to my lips, but even as I finally take the first sip of coffee of the day, a loud clacking noise starts coming from inside the camel barn. I sigh, knowing what the noise is. My cat Ollie is sitting inside the camel barn, batting the door of the cat flap back and forth with his paw. CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! goes the door. He will continue doing this until I get up, walk over to the camel barn doors, and lift up the cat flap door from the outside, thus allowing him unimpeded egress from the camel barn into the courtyard.

Ollie is 15, very old in cat years, and I indulge him in this practice on the grounds that he may be going senile and have forgotten how to use the cat flap. The possibility remains, however, that he simply sees no necessity to bother with pushing his way through the cat flap when an indentured servant is available to do it for him. I strongly suspect that he manages to get through that door perfectly well on his own when I am not in the vicinity.

With Ollie ushered safely through the cat flap I manage, finally, to drink a few sips of coffee and sit back in my chair, enjoying the scent of the jasmine growing up the courtyard wall.

Then two things happen simultaneously: Ollie strolls over to the flower bed in which the jasmine is planted, just next to where I am sitting, and defecates neatly, and copiously, right in the middle of it. The scent of the jasmine is immediately replaced by something infinitely less pleasant. Meanwhile, Freddie begins to exacavate, with enormous, earth-spattering enthusiasm, the large terracotta pot in which I have recently planted some not particularly robust geraniums.

Once I have disposed of Ollie's little gift and swept up the earth and broken flowers, I bow to the inevitable and decide to take Freddie for a long walk to dissipate some of his energy. As I re-enter the house via the camel barn, in which I will be entertaining some friends for dinner this evening, I notice a very strong odour of Eau du Feral Cat, a souvenir of last night's uninvited guests. When a cat sprays the smell is both disgusting and extremely difficult to eradicate. At this point it becomes necessary, for the sake of my mental health, to move into a state of extreme denial, and I decide to think about this problem later.

Freddie and I set off on our walk, and make our way up to the pine woods with only two motorcycle-chasing incidents (not bad going), and no one moved to throw anything at Freddie or me because they don't like dogs (also good). The day is looking up. We continue to climb and, after an hour or so, get to the high point of the walk, where there is an extraordinarily beautiful view over the Aegean and the islands of the Ayvalik archipelago, shown here in a photo taken last week:

At this very moment, however, as Freddie sits on the ground panting happily and I, gazing at the view, am struck anew by the incredible beauty of this place, the electrical storm which has been threatening for several days finally arrives, with thunder, spectacular lightning effects and torrential rain. We are some distance from any form of shelter, and within minutes I am soaked to the skin. I sit down on the wet ground next to my big, wet dog, give him a big, wet hug and, huddled together, we sit and watch the sheet lightning illuminate the sky over the sea.

Between the woods and the sea.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:57:00 +0000

It's been a long time since my first blog post, nearly a year, but I've been writing it in my head all the while: the longer I live here, the more I love Ayvalik, and the more I want to write about it.

Here's a little visual context for the Camel Barn Library: this is a photo I took earlier today from up in the pine woods behind the town, on my morning walk with my dog Freddie. It's a terrible photo, for which I apologise, but the reason I'm posting it is that you can see where my house is, just about.

See the mosque - actually an old Greek Orthodox church with a minaret stuck on to it - in the middle of the photo? Look straight down below the mosque and there's a house with a large, yellow ochre side wall, with a line of trees to the right. The yellow ochre house belongs to my next door neighbour, and her yellow ochre wall lies at the end of my courtyard (happily, the bottom half of the wall is bare stone). You can just see the roof of the camel barn in front of the trees, and then the roof of the house, which adjoins the barn at a right angle to form two sides of the courtyard, beyond that. It's a good location to be in: not too high up (the steeper streets in this town are a killer), and midway between the wooded hills behind and the sea - only five minutes walk in either direction.

By the sea you can see the marina - full of beautiful boats belonging to people from Istanbul and elsewhere, who come here in the summer to sail - and the fish market, where the local fishermen come and sell their catch every morning. Some fishermen still tie up on the waterfront in the town centre and sell directly from their boats, attended by patient, ever-hopeful street cats. This photo shows the southern end of Ayvalik: the town centre lies to the north, five minutes walk from the right hand side of the photograph.

So. there we have it: I'm back, and the scene is set. What I really want to write about now is why the local mosque is an old Greek Orthodox church with an added minaret, and that will be the subject of a post in the very near future.

The joys of solitude...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:49:00 +0000

At the mid-point of my early morning walk, I sit on a large flat rock up on the pine-wooded hills surrounding Ayvalık, from where there is a view over the old town, the bay, and across the Aegean to the mountains of the island of Lesbos (called Midili by the locals), which lies a few miles offshore.

This morning, as I sat there drinking water and letting my brain soak up the extravagant blueness of the sea and the sky, I noticed a woman climbing up the very steep slope below me. I walk to this place by a circuitous route with a much gentler gradient, and was surprised to see someone scrambling straight up the hill. As she drew nearer, I saw that it was a village woman, laden down with various items: a huge empty plastic water container, a wicker basket, and what looked like some kind of agricultural tool. She was probably on her way to work on one of the farms that lie on the other side of the pine woods.

I say ‘village woman’ because the women from village families who have moved here to the town have a distinctive style of dress, multiply layered, based on voluminous flowery pantaloons and usually featuring a sleeveless cardigan. They will generally cover their heads with a scarf, but in a fairly minimal way. There are many Kurdish families in Ayvalık, who have moved here from the very poor, mostly Kurdish, south eastern region of Turkey in search of work; the Kurdish women are easy to spot because their headscarves are light and gauzy, with a little lace-work around the edges.

When the woman reached the top, she was out of breath, and sat down beside me on the rock to rest for a moment. We exchanged greetings, and after establishing that I was English, and a university teacher, her next question was ‘Where is your husband?’ In Turkey, this is the first thing a foreign woman with no visible male in attendance is always asked:’Where is your husband?’

I explained that my husband was dead, she patted me sympathetically on the arm, and we sat for a moment in silence, gazing across the sea to Midili. Then she said ‘You’re probably better off without him, dear. You can have a much more comfortable life without a man. It’s just work, work, work, all the time.’ And with that, she gathered up her belongings, and set off again through the trees to begin her day’s work in the fields beyond.