Raise high the roofbeam, Carpenters!

Come One, Come All--If Your Name Is Greg.

2012-12-14T05:05:00.002-08:00

The fun starts here. If you're name is Greg.

In 1673 the Society of Gregories--a club made up of men named Gregory--met in St Michael's Church in Cornhill, London for a celebratory meaning. A sermon was given by one, Francis Gregory. After listening to this learned discussion on 'the spiritual watch' (in printed form running to twenty seven pages) the club members celebrated the baptism of a baby--baby Gregory.

The Society of Gregories' other activities are obscured by the inattention of history. The number of Gregs filling St Michaels that day is unknown, and we can only guess why they came together on that day to celebrate the virtues of Gregness. Yet this gaggle of Gregs was not alone in celebrating gatherings of their namesakes. There is evidence of other patronymic societies in London in the late 17th Century--one for Adams, another for Lloyds, and one for Smiths. Yet these societies made on first-name-basis did not last long. This fad soon lifted, becoming little more than a historian's curiosity. Perhaps some Gregory online with time on his hands want to resurrect this ancient and once-proud rite?

This information comes from Peter Clark's British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800.

The Precious Beaver Testicles of Gerald Of Wales

2012-10-15T04:37:00.001-07:00

History remembers the killer apps which remade the world--the printing presses, the cotton gins, the fire. The conquering army, the victorious legislator, the trailblazing poet--these are the names that will live on forever.

And you're not one of them. And I'm not one of them. And nobody you've ever met is one of them. (Probably.)

Clio, muse of history, probably doesn't even know your goddamn name.

No, our world is rich in folly and failure. Medical researchers calculated the half life of a given truth to be 45 years. That is, of any given set of facts (all things being equal) half will be disproved in a little less than half a century. So in forty-five years, half of everything you think is true will be proven wrong. No wonder old people get so cranky.

Brilliance, humility and genius prove no antidote to failure. Take the ebullient medieval scholar Gerald of Wales, who lived in the 12th Century. Tall and fearsome and erudite, Gerald became a churchman and a politician. The undisputed 'universal scholar' of his age travelled to the peripheries of the British Isles. These trips resulted in exemplary, entertaining and learned histories of Ireland and Wales which remain go-to historical sources. In addition to these travelogues Gerald published about twenty other tomes on topics ranging from theology to hagiography to biography. (It was the 12th Century: there wasn't really any wiggle room about genre). Gerald of Wales combined his era's best learning with keen empirical observation. If anyone should have avoided folly, it would have been Gerald of Wales.

But even poor Gerald fell prone to mistake. Here's just one. Nestled at the end of a fine description of a European beaver colony, Gerald goes off on a tangent about how when beavers are frightened they bite off their own testicles.

Wait, what?

Yes, you read right. Gerald of Wales thought that when hunted, male beavers chomped off their own balls with their sharp sharp teeth.

Gerald's peculiar observation has some source. He is going off a description of beavers in Aesop's fables, in which the beavers, hunted for their useful testicles, wisely detached their gonads from their bodies and offered them to the slavering dogs--gratis--so that they could go on their merry way, alive but gelded. This is backed up in Pliny's Natural history which tells pretty much the same story.

Now you can wear the unmistakable scent of beaver anal glands!

And even this is not as crazy as it seems at first blush. Beavers were hunted for a thing called castoreum--which Pliny, Aesop, and Gerald all misidentified as the beaver's balls. Actually castoreum comes from glands in the beaver's anus and it proves incredibly useful--it remains in use today as a perfume base (giving 'animal notes') and a food additive. A Scandinavian schnaps called Bäverhojt is flavored with castor.

Now you can taste the unmistakeable relish of beaver anal glands!

So the myth of beaver's self-castrating self-preservation is explained, if not excused.

And this is how the parade of folly makes its march down the avenue of history: a misheard word, a bad joke, a good guess that turns out wrong--repeated again and again until it assumes the air of truth. And in forty-five years, if the scientists have it right, half of what I've written here will also be filed away in the ignoble archives of idiocy.

This post was inspired by the always-inspiring In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, which recently ran an episode on Gerald of Wales.

Letters, Lies and Calculus

2012-10-02T07:27:00.001-07:00

In 1696 Guillaume de l'Hôpital published one of the first calculus textbooks, euphoniously entitled Analysis of the Infinitely Small for the Understanding of Curved Lines--or the Analyse for short. In the Analyse's pages l'Hôpital laid out a method of figuring out the limits of indeterminate forms that was a huge deal in the burgeoning field of calculus. It made L'Hôpital a star.

With all the linguistic verve of mathematicians, the rule was dubbed l'Hôpital's Rule, and ever since it has been rammed into the heads of calculus students, where it remains, a bit of discarded fact lodged somewhere between first girlfriend's middle name and capital of Peru.

As you can probably tell from the de appended to l'Hôpital's name (and the frothy wig perched on his head) good old Guillaume was a nobleman. More than that, he mixed a genuine mathematical curiosity with the ability to straightforwardly explain the stuff he was interested in. But while l'Hôpital was undoubtably a very good mathematician, and his textbook remained required reading for a hundred years, it turns out that all of the great discoveries that l'Hôpital is known for--including the eponymous rule--weren't actually discovered by l'Hôpital. He merely owned them.

It all started in the salon of Malebranche, where the aristocratic thirty-something savant l'Hôpital met the 24-year old wannabe math nerd Johann (sometimes John) Bernoulli. At some point in the night Bernoulli whipped out his 'secret weapon'--an unpublished forumla on how to figure out the radius of the curvature of a curve. L'Hôpital, impressed, signed Bernoulli up to be his calculus tutor for ten months. In 1694 l'Hôpital offered Bernoulli a further three hundred francs a year if he would tell him everything he could about this new-fangled calculus--and not tell anyone else. Bernoulli agreed, and produced a series of brilliant letters explaining everything l'Hôpital could hope to know--and then some. L'Hôpital would then take the insights Bernoulli told him and pass them off as his own, reaping the fame.

When l'Hôpital died, Johann Bernoulli claimed much of the content of l'Hôpital's work. The famous textbook? Actually that amounted to the ten-month course Bernoulli taught l'Hôpital. The rule? It should be Bernoulli's Rule. L'Hôpital's work on conic sections? That was Bernoulli's work. But no one believed him.

There was good reason for this. Johann Bernoulli was an irascible thin-skinned man who involved himself in quite a few mathematical kerfuffles. One acrimonious struggle was with his own son Daniel. To win the argument (against his own son!) over who came up with some principle of hydrodynamics first, Johann resorted to forgery.

So clearly Bernoulli was jealous of his reputation. Since he didn't claim l'Hôpital's discoveries with any special grievance, people just thought Johann's claim was just Johann being Johann again.

But Johann Bernoulli was right. And nobody realized until 1922, when Bernoulli's first calculus lectures were discovered in a musty archive somewhere. They were written before l'Hôpital's textbook. And they were undoubtedly l'Hôpital's inspiration for the Analyse. The L'Hôpital's Rule is really Bernoulli's Rule.

But I suspect that renaming l'Hôpital's Rule is just plain greedy. The Bernoullis claim a menagerie of grey matter so quirky and brilliant that the three generations of genius could easily make up the cast of a Wes Anderson film. (Bill Murray as Johann Bernoulli; Jason Schwartzman as Daniel Bernoulli. Right?) Because of this tons of stuff is already named after them. There's the Bernoulli Effect. The Bernoulli Principle. The Bernoulli Distribution. The Bernoulli Theorem. These range over the domains of statistics, fluid dynamics, and calculus--and they are only a small sampling of the discoveries pinned with the Bernoulli name. Do we really need a Bernoulli Rule? Really? The rule itself is confusing enough as it is. We don't need to go messing around with its name.

My primary source for this story is an article by C. Truesdale. I learned about l'Hôpital's Rule in Mark Hansen's math for social scientists class.

The Emperors Of Ice Cream

2012-08-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

One of the most profound things I've ever seen took place on a guided tour of Queensland. In amongst the usual touristic sights of natural beauty--the LOTR-worthy lakes, the picture-book rain forests, and the prehistoric cassowaries--we stopped to get ice cream.

One of my fellow tourists was a young woman toting a squint-faced newborn. The new mother scooped some ice cream up in one of those diminutive plastic ice cream shovels, then held it out to the child.

The baby's lips puckered. She blinked. Once the ice cream was on her lips, there was a moment of tension.

"This is her first ice cream," mom drawled.

The baby's eyes grew as large as baby eyes can go. She laughed. She reached out before. This new stuff--it was good! This new stuff--it was more than good! It was fantastic!

I felt lucky to watch this--a person realizing that existance is awesome enough to include ice cream.

On the face of it, ice cream seems like it must go hand-in-hand with the glories of electric refrigeration. Human beings are a crafty bunch however, and our sweaty summers have been relieved by ice-cooled treats for at least four millennia.

The Chinese--first at everything--produced the earliest recorded ice confection, made by taking milk, overcooked rice, and spices, and throwing the mix all together with some fresh snow. Yum!

The Chinese practice of mixing snow with sweets passed along to the Persians, who add fruit juice to snow to refresh themselves during the summer. This is the origin of the word sherbet--a Persian word meaning 'he drank.' From here, the technology passed on to Alexander the Great who--in addition to his usual claim to fame of having one of the largest land Empires ever, must add 'bringer of iced delicacies to Europe.' Alexander's gift to the western world shows up again in the reign of the maligned Emperor Nero, whose bacchanals often were accompanied by refreshing mixtures of fruit juice and snow.

But where did the snow come from in the summer? The mountains. In Rome's case, the ice came from the alps. Back in the ancient world, there existed an ice trade. Entrepreneurial mountain-dwellers would collect snow or lake ice, cover it with a thick sheet, then transport it to the the sweltering metropole for the refreshment of the pest-ridden city-dwellers. The ice was stored in icehouses--insulated sometimes underground storage rooms, in which a cache of ice could remain frozen even in the hottest month of summer. The first recorded building of an ice house goes all the way back to 1700 BC, when the snow-loving Persians constructed one 'which never before had any king built.'

The Turkish Sultan so loved ice that they had an entire class of servant dedicated to the upkeep of the ice and snow stores. (This was just some of the 1570 people who as of the 16th century were employed in the Sultan's kitchens, others including the oh-so-necessary yogurt makers, simit bakers, and wheat pounders.)

Simits, though not involving ice or ice cream in any way, remain food fit for a Sultan.

The Chinese came up with a further ice confection improvement around the 17th Century. Salt. You may remember making 'home made' ice cream back in school, and, because of the infinite cruelty of the education system, this somehow involving turning a crank. You also for some reason needed salt. No one could tell me why this was so.

Notice the hand-crank of cruelty.

Adding salt to ice reduces the freezing point of water. Immersing a thing into this super-cooled brine allows for the freezing of more than just ice--now people could freeze ice or custard. Sometime in the 18th Century a Sicilian Procopio Cuto at the Parisian Cafe Procope made some of the first for-sure European ice cream available to non-royalty. (Cafe Procope is named after the Byzantine historian Procopious, he of the Secret History fame.)

Ice cream was an ever-popular dish for the illustrious rich. George Washington spent over two hundred dollars on ice cream one summer. Thomas Jefferson was such a fan of ice cream that, in very Jeffersonian fashion, he laid out an 18-step process on how to make the perfect ice cream. Supposedly it tastes a little bit like a baked alaska.

Ice cream recipe written in the same hand as the Declaration of Independence.

It took until the middle of the Nineteenth Century for ice cream to reach the common people. Then, a Baltimore man named Jacob Fussel, a dairy merchant, needed a way to get people to buy cream. He started the world's first ice cream factory, became rich by selling affordable cream, and gave middle class America a taste for what Wallace Stevens called 'concupiscent curds.' A devout Quaker, Fussel took time out of being an ice cream impresario by also supporting the underground railroad.

Ice cream is one of those parts of human life so unabashedly wonderful, so flawless, so pure, that it is certain to accompany human culture to the very twilight. Indeed, in that last age, when man crouches in some burnt-out wasteland, if he still has culture, he will sometimes wipe the sweat off his brow and get a double scoop of chocolate.

New Novel: Starseed

2012-08-18T12:31:00.001-07:00

I recently finished a science fiction book. And now you can read it in the comfort of your own home because of this cool new technology they call the Internet.

The book's called Starseed. It's available on Smashwords.

So what do you get in Starseed?

Packed into 85,000 words of fine Mackie-crafted prose there's...

Psychics in cryogenic stasis.
Sex AND violence!
A singularity-eque Artificial Intelligence.
Metaphors! Smiles! Extended metaphors!
Deep-space travel.
Discussion of the nature of the human soul!
One hundred and seventy four (174) exclamation marks (!)

And more, much more.

I know you folks at home are already asking: how much money do I need to throw at you so that I can get this marvelous e-Book?

The answer will leave you spraying Mountain Dew all over your monitor.

The book is pay-what-you-want. So you can just pay nothing at all for the enjoyment of nearly two-hundred pages of finely written science-fiction action. You can also pay fifty dollars. Somewhere between those two numbers is probably a fair middle ground.

So don't wait a second more! Click. Buy. Read. Tell your friends. Leave a nice review. Name your first born in my honor.

A NOTE TO MY PUBLISHING FRIENDS: You probably know that I've recently finished an ambitious manuscript I'm trying to get looked at by agents and editors. Starseed is NOT it. Though Starseed is cool, if you are an agent or editor, I'd much rather you take a peek at my fat big American novel, Please Give Me Money--contact me personally and I'll send you a copy.

The Wallpaper That Named America

2012-08-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Columbus discovered America. America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, who did not discover America. In the lacuna between these two well-known facts there hides a story of adventurers, pickle-sellers, forged letters--and wall-paper.

Before the story begins, a Roman prologue. In the Second Century AD there was a Greek-speaking Roman citizen from the province of Egypt named Ptolemy. (Students of ancient history know that this is not anything unusual: almost every Greek-speaking Egyptian ever was named Ptolemy.) This Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemy, put all of his era's geographical knowledge into a single book titled, with characteristic Roman creativity, the Geography.

Ptolemy's Geography mapped the known world, and mapped it well. Europe is drawn with care. The Persian Gulf looks suitably gulf-like. Important rivers are all in the right places, including some in the far east. The Indian Ocean exists. The map even shows parts of China, though in blurry, uncertain haziness.

For more than a thousand years the Geography was the Google Maps of princes, merchants and explorers from Bruges to Baghdad. In the late 15th Century, Christopher Columbus turned to it as he was trying to convince European kings to bankroll his ambitious globe-crossing voyage. Columbus--who we've written about before--was the last man on earth to find the Geography useful.

That was because of what Columbus discovered once he sailed deep into the Western Ocean: the New World. But Columbus never knew the significance of his discovery. When he first made landfall on that first unnamed idyllic Caribbean island, he assumed he was on East Coast of Japan, and that the Caribs were vassals of the great Khan.

Enter Amerigo Vespucci, a man Emerson derided as a mere "pickle seller" and a "thief." Vespucci was a Florentine explorer who made two trips West. A certain air of vibrant disreputableness hangs around him.

Amerigo Vespucci: Explorer. Lover. Seller of pickles.

In the early 1500s, Vespucci wrote letters from the New World, describing a huge continent extending south of the Indies, bordered on both sides by ocean. In Ptolemy's Geography--a book, remember, that had been state-of-the-art for 1,300 years--there was no huge southern continent that extended past the equator. The conclusion was mind-blowing. The world was big. There was a whole new continent. Florentine printers gathered these letters together, spiced them up a bit, and in 1502 or 1503 published them as a book called Mundus Novis. The New World.

Instantly, people demanded an update to Ptolemy's previously immortal map. A flurry of sextants and compasses scribbled across pages as publishers and map-fanciers rushed to be the first to make a accurate map of the new earth.

Enter two Germans--Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, cartographers. They produced a map now known as the Waldseemuller map. It was printed on 12 sheets measuring a massive four and a half by eight feet. It was probably the largest map then made, and like all cool maps, it was meant for display as much as it was meant for navigation. It was wallpaper. If it were around now, it would be advertised in the Skymall catalogue.

The modern-day equivalent of the Waldseemuller map.

The Waldseemuller map was more than just big. It was more than just cool. It also included a certain brand new exciting continent hanging out to the far right, stretching below the Equator. There, in the mostly empty space, was printed a name in serifed all-caps. America. The name was probably made up by Ringmann--a feminization of Amerigo.

The first printed instance of the name America.

The map was popular. German universities clambered to pick up one of the thousand printed copies. Students made copies of it and showed it to their friends. In modern parlance, the map went viral. As the map spread, so did the name America. In the middle of the century Gerardus Mercador--he of the projection and a cartographical superstar in his own right--decided that the whole landmass of the New World should be called America. Despite two centuries of Spanish complaints to the contrary, America would be America forever.

But a further twist complicates the story. Remember those letters that Vespucci sent back to Europe? The ones that inspired Waldseemuller and Ringmann to believe that South America was a distinct continent? Those turned out to be faked. Waldseemuller flip flopped, and when he published a new set of maps after Ringmann's premature death, South America was not shown a separate continent--indeed, no mention word America was made. Waldseemuller explained the change:

As we have lately come to understand, our previous representation pleased very few people. Therefore, since true seekers of knowledge rarely color their words in confusing rhetoric, and do not embellish facts with charm but instead with a venerable abundance of simplicity, we must say that we cover our heads with a humble hood.

The inspiration for this post comes from Backstory's segment on Vespucci and the Waldseemuller map. The always fantastic Smithsonian Magazine has an article on the Waldseemuller map, which proved to be a great trove of facts.

The Arm That Wasn't Paralyzed

2012-08-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

An intelligent, lucid 60 year old named Nora was interviewed by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. Ramachandran tells the story in his book, the Tell-Tale Brain.

"Can you walk?"
"Yes." (Actually, she hadn't taken a single step in the last week.)
"Nora, can you use your hands, can you move them?"
"Yes."
"Both hands?"
"Yes." (Nora hadn't used a fork for a week.)
[...]
"Touch my nose with your left hand."
Nora's hand reamins motionless.
"Are you touching my nose?"
"Yes."
"Can you see your hand touching my nose?"
"Yes, it's now almost touching your nose."

Nora's left side is paralyzed. But she won't admit it. This is a more common phenomena than you'd think. After suffering a stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain, many people suffer paralysis of the left-hand side of their bodies. About one in twenty of these people will insist that they are not in fact paralyzed. This is called anosognosia, which is medical-speak for denial-of-illness.

Anosognosia does not necessarily go along with any other mental impairment. A person can be psychologically completely normal in every respect--except when it comes to the inert mass of their paralyzed left half.

A notable sufferer of anosognosia was Woodrow Wilson who became paralyzed in 1919 after being smitten with a flu-related. He was bedridden, blind in his left eye, and paralyzed on the left side of his body. He remained in office, even as he was on the brink of death, mumbling limericks to himself, his wife serving as his 'steward' (read: regent). He didn't attend any cabinet meetings for a full half year, and when he finally presented himself to his cabinet, his staff were shocked at the frail state of his heath, and at the secrecy which had covered it up. But Wilson grew angry with any mention of his incapacities, and fired many functionaries who dared suggest that there was something wrong with him. He even pondered running for a third term.

Anosognosia can come in many exotic flavors. Some anosognosiacs will refuse to admit that other paralytics are paralyzed. A syndrome called somatoparaphrenia often accompanies anosognosia, in which a person will deny all ownership of their paralyzed arm. Nora, mentioned above, had somatoparaphrenia. "Whose arm is this?" Dr. Ramachandran asked her. "That's my mother's arm," she replied. "Where's your mother?" "She's under the table."

People can be anosognosiac about more than just paralysis. Patients with Wernicke's aphasia--brain damage which limits their communication to a fluent stream of babble--are often anosognosiac about their condition, nodding and smiling and talking even though they have no content to their speech.

Sources today are V.S. Ramachandran's the Tell-Tale Brain, and Errol Morris' five-part blog post on anosognosia which is fun, philosophical, and exhaustive--not words you usually associate with five-part blog posts, I know.

Puppies in a pool! (Open thread)

2012-08-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

From r/aww

Hey reader! I'd like to hear from you. So I have a few questions. Answer as many or as few as you'd like or just write a hello.

What do you like to eat for breakfast? If you could be reincarnated in any historical period, when would you live? Puppies or kitties? Tapatio, tabasco, or siracha? Cherries or peaches?

Also, if you happen to know any literary agents, I finished a novel I think is pretty damn good, and I'd like to show it to someone who can turn it into a real book. Just sayin'.

The Almost Cure-All Urine of Albert Alexander

2012-08-10T09:48:00.002-07:00

Hennig Brand, playing with pee, discovering the philosopher's stone.

Urine is useful. The Latin poet Catullus mocked the Spanish for brushing their teeth with their own pee. Drinking your mid-stream morning tinkle is recommended by some practitioners of yoga. The Roman world collected piss to use for washing clothes--the ammonia would help bleach the coarse fibres. And it was curiosity about the magical properties of wee which led Hennig Brand in the 17th Century to experiment with urine and so discover phosphorous.

None of this mattered for Albert Alexander, an Oxford County policeman who in 1941 was hospitalized with a severe infection resulting from an unfortunate rosebush scratch on his mouth. He came down with vicious blood poisoning, and his face became so matted with weeping red abscesses that one of his eyes had to be removed. The infection then spread to his lungs. If he was not cured, he would die in writhing agony. But the only cure at the time, the drugs called sulfonamides, were not effective with cases when the patient was as utterly suffused with pus as Alexander was. He had no hope at all.

Enter Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, two scientists who had been experimenting with a drug that could very well become the magic bullet--the medicine that would destroy all infection.

To make the drug, they'd been culturing 500 liters of mold every week. They hired three or four girls to grow the mold in every receptacle they could find--they used baths, bed pans, pie dishes, and even food trays, before finally settling on a purpose-made ceramic jar.

After successful trials on rats, Florey and Chain were finally ready to try the panacea on a human subject. But they were concerned. The drug was so strong it would probably reveal itself to be highly toxic to humans. Would the cure be worse than the disease?

The mold was penicillin, and Albert Alexander was going to be the first person to be cured by it.

The magic mold itself.

On February 12th 1941, Florey injected Alexander with a large dose of penicillin, and the results were considered miraculous. By the next morning Alexander's temperature had returned to normal and he had even regained his appetite. He was cured! But there was a problem. To fight off the infection Alexander required an injection of about a gram of penicillin a day, and there just wasn't that much penicillin to go around, no matter how fastidiously the three or four 'penicillin grils' tended to their mold vats.

Enter urine. The enterprising scientists collected Alexander's urine and processed it, retrieving whatever penicillin Alexander happened to piss out. This was duly injected into Alexander again, and for nearly a week, his infection was beaten back.

But it was not beaten. After five days, with their reserves of penicillin completely depleted and longer able to retrieve more penicillin from Alexander's urine, Alexander was left with his infection. He succumbed to it on March 14th.

Albert Alexander did not die in vain. His initial miraculous recovery was proof that penicillin actually worked in humans, and more--it proved non-toxic to people. The next person to be treated with the magic bullet, a teenager whose temperature had shot up to almost 100 degrees as a result of an infected hip--was back to normal in two days. A new era opened up in human history--one where we didn't ever have to worry about death from rose-thorn scratches. In part, for this we have to thank that first brave medical guina pig, Albert Alexander, the constable from Oxford County who had an unfortunate pruning accident.

I heard about the case of Albert Alexander from Dr. Karl's Podcast. My other sources are an interview with Norman Heatly on Science Watch, and the article the Discovery of Penicillin from the American Chemical Society.

Plato's Less-Than Ideal Arithmetic

2012-08-08T15:09:00.001-07:00

Philosophy is nothing more than footnotes to this guy, so they say.

Plato rightly deserves his central place in the Western canon. He founded a school--the Akademia--from which we get both the word and the inspiration for the modern academy. His insistance on the immorality of the soul so suffused the Greek-speaking world--including the authors of the New Testament--that Nietzsche dismissed Christianity as mere 'Platonism for the masses.' Plato wrote over thirty dialogues that survive as masterpieces of argument and storytelling--a feat made all the more striking by the fact that back when Plato lived there were no paper mills, no printers, no bookstores, and no pens. Plato pretty much set the aims, the methods, and the questions of philosophy for the next two thousand years.

But despite his heavyweight resume, Plato seems to have flubbed his math a bit.

Here's Plato calculating the exact amount that the philosopher's life is better than the tyrant's, from Book nine of the Republic.

Or if some person measures the interval by which the king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will find him, when the multiplication is complete, living 729 times more pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval.

What a wonderful calculation! And how enormous is the distance which separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!

Yet a true calculation, and a number which nearly concerns human life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and years.

Plato's math, according to the footnotes in the second edition of the Grube translation of the Republic are "hard to follow." Here's a try. The tyrant experiences only two-dimensional pleasures, while the philosopher experiences three dimensional pleasures. Additionally, the philosopher is nine times away from the tyrant in terms of pleasure, so the philosopher's pleasure is represented by a nine-unit cube, while the tyrant's pleasure is represented by a one-unit square. But Plato flubbed things getting to the number 729, which was sacred to the Pythagoreans. He miscounted the number of times removed the tyrant was from the philosopher (it should have been five, not six) and multiplied where he should have merely added. Sadly, it turns out that the philosopher is only 125 times happier than the tyrant!

But we can't blame Plato for having trouble with his sums. In Plato's time, before zero, before calculators, before arithmetic notation, math was decidedly hard to do. Here's another example of Plato doing math, from the Republic, Book 8:

Now that which is of divine birth has a period which is contained in a perfect number, but the period of human birth is comprehended in a number in which first increments by involution and evolution, obtaining three intervals and four terms of like and unlike, waxing and waning numbers, make all the terms commensurable and agreeable to one another. The base of these with a third added when combined with five and raised to the third power furnishes two harmonies; the first a square which is a hundred times as great, and the other a figure having one side equal to the former, but oblong, consisting of a hundred numbers squared upon rational diameters of a square (i. e. omitting fractions), the side of which is five, each of them being less by one or less by two perfect squares of irrational diameters ; and a hundred cubes of three. Now this number represents a geometrical figure which has control over the good and evil of births.

What Plato's trying to say--again according the Grube Edition's footnotes--is that the human number is the product of three, four and five raised to the power of four, or (3*4*5)^4, which comes to 12,960,000. This can be shown geometrically in two ways. First, by the area of a square with the sides of 3600 or as a rectangle with sides 4800 and 2700. Simple enough for us moderns. But we have the ease of working with arabic numerals. You can see how Plato--even Plato!--can be forgiven for messing up his math.

And you thought math was hard in high school! Sacrifice a cock to Asclepius in thanks that you were never a math student in ancient Athens.

In Soviet Russia, Punchline Laughs At You

2012-08-05T14:13:00.003-07:00

The dead do not laugh. Everyone else does. Earlier this year, we talked about the legendary humor of the Spartans and the world's oldest jokes. Today we'll be talking about jokes so funny they could get you sent to the Gulag. We're going to delve into the humour of Stalinist Russia.

Many of the jokes had to do with the Stakhanovites--workers who achieved supernaturally high production levels, becoming a legion of pseudo-celebrities. Often Stakhanovites would get special privileges and gifts.

Four Stakhanovite milkmaids were getting prizes at a public ceremony. The first got a radio receiver. The second got a gramophone. The third got a bicycle. Finally the fourth came onstage, the leading pig-tender of the whole kolkhoz. The audience held its breath. Wiping tears from his eyes, the kolkhoz director shook her hand with great pride. "I present to you the collected works of our beloved comrade Stalin!" Silence. A voice peeped up from the back of the hall. "Just what the bitch deserves."

Others had to do with the tension that came from the suddenness of soviet-style repression.

"Did you hear that Petrov's been shot?"
"Nonsense! That's Petrov himself walking on the other side of the street!"
"Yes, he hasn't heard yet."

Fear might make us try to stifle our laughter, but a few snickers always get out. Here's another.

1937. Night. A ring at the door. The husband answers it nervously. He returns to his wife, glowing with relief. "Don't worry, darling. It is only bandits who have come to rob us."

Finally, jokes can offer us a way to imagine hope in a hopeless situation.

A riddle: Stalin, the entire Politburo, and their whole entourage are on a steamer going down the Volga. If the steamer were to sink, who would be saved?
Answer: The peoples of the USSR.

My sources today were Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism and Political Humour Under Stalin, edited by Michael Brandenburger.

Three Things The Ancient Olympics Can Teach The Modern Olympics

2012-07-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

The Olympics started in the seventh century before Christ, when young women completed a footrace to see who would become a priestess of Hera. From these humble beginnings, the Olympics became the foremost of the four pan-Hellenic games, a ceremony so important to the Greek-speaking world that truces were called in order for athletes to arrive at the games safely.

These Olympics were not the familiar biennial show-case of brute physical competition that we know and love. The race with the Olympic torch--now so engrained in our image of the Olympics that is has become a synecdoche for the festival--was an innovation brought in by Hitler in the 1936 games. The gold, silver and bronze medallions replaced the traditional reward of an amphora of olive oil and a sprig of olive. In the translation between ancient celebration and modern spectacle, some important aspects of the competition were lost.

Today we'll look at three aspects of the Ancient Olympics I think should be returned to the modern Olympics.

The first is Athletic Nudity. The Greeks competed buck naked, slathered in olive oil. The origins of this practice are murky. Thucydides said that the Spartans "were the first to bare their bodies and, after stripping openly, to anoint themselves with oil when they engaged in athletic exercise." Other sources point to the Athenians, whose government, after a guy tripped over his shorts while running, decreed that all sports should be conducted naked.

The explanation for the nakedness, according to John Mouratidis, was to either to "inspire fear or horrify their enemies." He quotes L Bonafante suggesting that Hellenistic nakedness resulted from the "apotropaic use of the phallos, gestures against the evil eye, etc." That et cetra is enticing--what other apotropaic uses can the phallos be put to? But we must move on.

My reason for advocating a naked Olympics is transparent. No one worries about the evil eye anymore, and there have been no notable short-tripping incidents in any Olympics I can remember. But I think that athletic nudity would make the games more entertaining, more beautiful, and more exciting. Especially the pommel horse.

A Pankration competition depicted on a vase.

The second ancient innovation is Pankration, which is Greek for "savage unrelenting beat-down." Actually it is Greek for "all powers." Pankration was a mix of boxing and wrestling, whose rules were easy to learn but hard to master. Two men squared off against each other, trying to inflict so much pain against his opponent that he would submit by holding up his index finger. The fighters could do anything to inflict this pain--barring biting and the gouging of the eyes, nose and mouth--and while they did not have weapons, in later years, the pankratiasts wrapped their fists with leather and metal. You heard right, they could do anything. They could kick the stomach or the testicles, they could inflict chokeholds and armlocks and brutal throws. Many competitors died.

Pankration produced its heroes. One man won a match even though he was dead. Arrachion of Phigalia was in the Pankration finals for the third time running, and after an evenly-fought bout his opponent held him in a neck hold from which he could not escape. Arrachion's trainer called out "What a fine funeral if you do not submit at Olympia!" With that, Arrachion twisted his body around, kicking his opponent's foot, breaking it. His opponent, in unbearable pain, gave up the match. But Arrachion had broken his own neck and lay there, dead. His limp head was donned with the laurel leaves of victory, and he became a legend across Greece.

Modern-day Mixed Martial Arts (or MMA) is similar to Pankration. The sheer undaunted brutality of these competitions should be enough to inspire the "pity and fear" that Aristotle said good tragedy should inspire in us. So why not let it become an Olympic sport?

The third innovation that the ancient Greeks can give the modern Olympics is not as cool as nakedness and bloodthirsty lawless death-matches. It's poetry.

The ancient Olympic Games were closed by a competition among poets to see who could best praise the winning athletes. These poems, called epinicians, were dreadfully popular, and have survived thousands of years.

In the modern Olympics, art competitions were held from 1912 to 1948, for sport-inspired architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and literature. The competitions were called off because, in the opinion of the Olympic committee, the artists were all professionals. The 1952 Olympics in Helsinki boasted a non-competitive art show, but without the agony of struggle, victory and defeat, the artistic side of the Olympics sputtered out.

Modern art is moribund, sealed air-tight in an ivory sarcophagus of academic rigor and bloodless cerebral muttering. Our generation might be one of the first in human history for which poetry has no popular charm--and the fault is the poets, who insist on being daringly arty, when they should work to be beautiful. A poetry competition celebrating the accessible agony of athletic competition, done in all the languages of the world, would help a little in giving feeling back to poets.

Short Of Giants

2012-07-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

In the 17th Century there was a shortage of giants in Europe, and only one man was to blame. The giant-greedy Fredrick the First of Prussia.

Fredrick was into war. And he had assembled a regiment of extraordinarily large soldiers called the ‘Grand Grenadiers of Potsdam.” The king’s agents fanned out across Europe, on the look out for tall men who would be offered huge amounts of money to join the regiment. If they refused the king’s generosity, they would simply be kidnapped. Diplomats trying to get on his good side learned to send Freddy larger-than-normal men to add to his regiment. Every year the Russian Tsar Peter the Great—who stood at six foot seven inches tall himself—would send the Prussians fifty giants. Once, when Peter took back an especially large specimen and replaced him with a shorter one, Fredrick refused to speak to any Russian diplomat for months. “The wound,” he explained, “is still too raw.” Fredrick even tried to ensure a race of giants by forcing all the tall men in Prussia to marry and breed with tall women. In this way, he collected over 2,400 giants.

A Grand Grenadier in all his mitred glory.

King Fredrick didn’t let his giant army just gather dust in a cupboard. He trained with the regiment every day, and showed them off to foreign dignitaries. Whenever he was feeling gloomy, laying in bed ill or morose, he would have the regiment march through his rooms—led by the regiment’s mascot, an actual live bear. But protective of his huge charges, Fredrick would never let them fight in anything close to a real battle.

The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

Two weeks. One country. Five people. Three thousand kilometers. Three pairs of sunglasses lost. Sunscreen. Goats. An excessive number of kebabs. And as many historical monuments as a land settled for over twelve centuries could throw at us.

If you're into that sort of thing, you can read the diary on your e-reader of choice.

Day One: Trabzon and Sümela Monastery
In which our heros assemble and visit a monastery clinging to the side of a mountain. Also, impromptu mountain dancing.

Day Two: A Lesson In Turkish Automotive Adventure. Afterwards, Erzurum.
Our heros brave the Turkish roads, heading to the city Erzurum where they find a madrassa, and three kumbats. They also figure out what a kumbat is.

Day Three: Scavenger Hunts For Car-Bound Tourists.
Driven crazy by boredom, the adventurers play a scavenger hunt in the car. Spoiler alert: the winner of this game is this blogger's girlfriend, who always wins everything.

Day Four: Mardin, Too Marvelous.
The heroic travelers venture to the hilltop town of Mardin, overlooking the Mesopotamian plain. This is pretty marvelous.

Day Five: Urfa, A City Of Pilgrims, A City Of People.
The birthplace of Abraham. Cannibal fish. Columns. A spice market. What more do you want from your travel writing? Bears? Well there are no bears. Tough luck.

Day Six: Gobekli Tepe To Gaziantep, The Old To The New.
The heros find the oldest temple in the world, and then see a lot of mosaics. Because they're cool like that.

Days Seven And Eight: Roads. The Decapitated Gods Of Mount Nemrut. More Roads.
Sunrise over the tomb of a once-great king is sandwiched between a ton of driving. In an excised scene, the heros are ripped off by a hotelier who looks like a mob boss gone to seed. But you have to use your imaginations for that, because this scene has been edited away, in favor of the more picturesque bits of travel more appreciable by the masses. Also, a whimsical ranking of Eastern Turkey.

Day Nine: The Mysteries of Cappadocia, Unanswered and Beautiful.

The province of Cappadocia is incredibly beautiful, and the heroes join other tourists in appreciating this beauty.

Day Ten: Beneath Cappadocia.
A venture into an underground city leads to a discovery--underground cities are dark and a little scary. But mostly dark.

Day Eleven: Konya. Rumi. Peace. Tourism.
The city of Konya is a site of pilgrimage and veneration and high school field trips and grumpy old ladies.

Day Twelve: Sunburned Myth: Pamukkale and Aphrodisias.
The heroes venture to two sites of world-heritage-worthy beauty and wonder, and get hideously sunburned in the process.

Day Thirteen: All Inclusive, Wi-Fi Extra.
Taking a break from cultural-minded explorations, the travelers check into an all-inclusive beach resort, where they feel alienated, drink too much, and end up winning a bottle of wine in a contest of stupid tricks, then leave, half-thinking that none of it even happened.

Day Fourteen: The Day Of Ruins. Ephesus And After Ephesus.
Pro-tip: Ruins described in this section are a metaphor for how the travelers felt after two solid weeks of beauteous sight-seeing. Also there are real ruins. The approach of civilization is symbolized by a Starbucks at a road-side strip-mall.

Day Fourteen: The Day Of Ruins. Ephesus And After Ephesus. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

This is day fourteen of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We woke up that morning with headaches, thirsty, feeling like we had just passed through a strange dream where we were honorary citizens of a fairyland where the days were not days and if you ate the food you would loose all ambition and memory….

We checked out of the resort hotel, ripped off the orange wristbands, and then drove fifteen kilometers to the ruins of Ephesus.

Once a city of 250,000 people, one of twelve cities in Ionian League, one of the seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation, its Temple Of Artemis one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Ephesus was a great city of antiquity. Now the great theater is in shambles. The houses of the citzens are buried in the undistinguished earth. Only a single pillar of the fantastic temple remains.

Between the parking lot and the ticket office a dusty road was lined with shops selling over-priced trinkets and food. A man called in the diaphragm-forced monotonous call of street-hawkers “Cold water ice cream fresh orange juice” over and over without ever stopping for breath. Lines of tourists were pouring out of the site, feeling the late morning heat. It was hot. We tried to find shade where we could.

The entrance of Ephesus will be familiar to anyone who has visited a Roman ruin. There were milestones, grave stele, sarcophagi with chunks taken out of them like they’d been gnawing, and the unmatched ancient detritus of an old city—mantles, columns, capitals, bricks and the like, made into semi-organized piles for the archaeologists to sift through at some point in the future.

As my friends looked at the informational plaques in front of a small collection of Roman milestones, I studied the other tourists. Most were down the path, out of the ruins. They looked drained and tired, done with the ancient ruins behind them, done with grave stele and informational plaques, done with the sun, waving brochures in front of their faces to cool themselves, marching on, their only hope the tour bus waiting in the parking lot and maybe a ridiculously-priced fresh orange juice from the man in the tourist bazaar to give them a little refreshment. Is this what we travel for, I wondered? To limp back to our hotel rooms with empty faces and cameras full of photos? I saw nobody who could be mistaken for happiness. I saw no sense of epiphany.—No openness in people’s eyes. No excitement or curiosity or wonder. I just saw faces sweaty, red and bloated from the heat.

I remembered seeing a tour group motto: ‘Create Your Best Memories.’ And maybe that’s what we were doing at Ephesus.—We were making memories. It didn’t matter that now we were hot, tired, and uninspired. I didn’t matter that at the moment we felt like a piece of wrinkled laundry hanging on a clothesline in the hot sun. It mattered that we had seen the lost grandeur of a once-bustling city, and held that image in our minds, and that later in the comfort of a dinner party we could tell our friends about it.

Ahead of us on the path was the huge amphitheater, the rows of seats stretching high up the hill. This was one of the biggest ampitheaters in the ancient world, able to seat 44,000 people. Now a smattering of sight-seers climbed the rows. A blue crane framed it, part of the structure covered in scaffolding and mesh.

We went into the theater and my friends fanned out with their cameras drawn, looking for a memorable image, But the only thing I felt was the profound and rising heat. I hid in a small shadowy corridor, fanning myself with my hat, watching the other people crawling around in the sun.

The acoustics of the theater are still great, and as we prepared to leave for the next monument, a Korean tour group gathered in the center of what had once been a stage and like that all at once they started to sing. Their voices were humble and beautiful, carrying clearly up to the others on the higher seats. “Saranghe,” the song repeated. “I love you.”

And then it was out of the shade to be returned again to the sweaty sun. The path was lined with mantles with lines of dentals and egg-and-darts. Clay plumbing eased its way out of the dry dirt. Around us was history. I looked for shade.

The biggest symbol of Ephesus today is the great Library of Celsus, whose magnificent facade faced the east so that early-rising students repairing there to study could make use of the light of the morning sun. As the rest of the sun-worn tourists meandered up the stairs, I found a pocket of shadow in a depression next to an old wall. There I crouched and appreciated the library. Eight columns decorated with almost every effect available to the Roman mason made up the first floor. Four statues of toga-clad women stood between each pair of columns, representing the virtues, looking out with Roman stoicism at the melting mass of sight-seers below them. It was wonderful. I didn’t have to use my imagination to wonder at how the library had once looked. It had looked like this, with people craning their heads to look at the top—only it was in a bit better repair.

Once we had inscribed enough memories to feel satisfied, we walked to the Terraced Houses, which required the purchase of an extra ticket.

It was worth it, and not just because the complex was covered with a roof that kept the sun off us for long enough that we could feel human again. The Terraced Houses are a well-excavated stretch pf the rich part of town. The first house we look at a reconstructed pericourt—an interior courtyard—with a basin, a broken aedicula, the walls hung with plaster stained ochre and yellow, bits of cracked marble tile arranged on boards put on stacked blue milk crates. Archeologists here are sifting through 120,000 jig-sawed shards of marble floor, trying to piece the court back together again. A cat prowled its way across the floor—off-limits to humans—looked up at us, and meowed.

The marble wall of the next pericourt had been completed, and it is stunning. We walked up the terraces, beneath the clear plexiglass walkway mosaics clear in white and black. On the walls of the houses were stunning frescos in white, maroon and orange, with a drooping vine providing a splash of green. Heads with lank hair and gaping mouths, ribbons in curls and whorls. Birds surrounded by flowers, a cupid, a posed Apollo, a room of the nine muses where each panel had a different muse, the paint still fresh after two thousand years. Two thousand years of burial. Two thousand years since the artist’s brush touched the wall. Two thousand years since those rooms were background for human life.

This was a different view of Roman life than the one you could usually see from the monuments and graves. This was a personal Rome, a Rome of pleasures and daily life and dinner parties. Staring up at a fine mosaic of a lion and a calf’s head, I could imagine people walking over it, talking about some important Roman thing, nodding, coming to agreement. In my imagination I filled the rooms with people bathing, playing sleeping, welcoming visitors, arguing, laughing, dreaming. Some of the walls had been scratched with graffiti from Roman times. Names, poems, declarations of love. I wondered what ruins our civilization might lead, and whether future generations would faithfully preserve the scrawls we left on bathroom walls.

When we left the Terraced Houses, the heat was even fuller, and we made our wilted way up the steep climb of the Curestes Street, ignoring the temples and columns that lined our way. At the top I waited in the shade of a fig tree while my friends looked around the upper half of the city by themselves. I was too hot, too tired, my head full of too many dreams to look at any more ruins.

-&-

Then the rest of the day was full of driving. Ephesus was the last big tourist site of our trip, and we felt too tired, too broken to glut ourselves on Pergamon or Troy, both of which lie further north. We talked, but we really wanted to sleep. We drove, but we really wanted to go home. The next day we would board a car ferry and go back to Istanbul, to the city in whose wonders we had worked and slept. But we weren’t sad. We had seen beauty, we had seen Turkey, and it was time to be ourselves again, to lay on our couches, open up our books, and forget about the wonders of the past.

-&-

View Larger Map

The next day, on the way to the car ferry, we saw the first signs that we were nearing the great metropolis where we made our home. A Starbucks in an off-road strip mall. The first Starbucks of the whole trip. We pulled in and got lattes. We were back home.

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Day Thirteen: All Inclusive, Wi-Fi Extra. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

This is day thirteen of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We checked into the hotel, and after collecting our money and passports and handing out keycards, the receptionist wrapped orange plastic bands around our wrists with small ceremony. That was our initiation, even if we failed to realize it. By virtue of those orange pieces of plastic, we has the right to all the pleasures and indulgences on offer.

The hundreds of people packed into the towering seven-story hotel buildings and the 354 hotel rooms, all were initiates like us, and all were devoted to the simple pleasures of open bars, buffet meals and swimming. There were five restaurants, snacks in the afternoons from two cafe, a bar where drinks were free until midnight, and a nightclub which we never dared enter.

Our room looked out at the Aegean sea, which lapped hungrily at the 300 meter long strand of private beach bounded by the hotel. The beds were large and comfy, and beside it next to the button for the beside reading light was a button which cycled through mood lighting: red, blue, white, green.

Our first night there we spoke with a middle-aged British man at the bar. It was obvious that he had spent the entire five days of his holiday trying to get the bartender’s attention, loading up on one free drink after another while his wife nervously laughed beside him. We asked him if he had visited Ephesus, the ancient Greek city not more than ten minutes drive away. He frowned and said no. It turned out that he hadn’t left the hotel at all since he got there. “I travel a lot for my job,” he explained. “I’m just here to relax.” I’ll admit it. I scoffed at him. Getting trapped here seemed like a moral failing, one that we would be immune to.

People asked us how many weeks we were staying and when we explained that we were only here for a day we got odd looks, like a day wasn’t even a unit of time—like we were mere fever dreams, to pass by harmlessly in the well-slept night.

The first thing we did was get massages. At this point, it was already noon. My masseuse covered me with a towel, folding it over piece by piece to lay bare whatever region of my body he was working on. And it was work that the man was doing. His forehead glistened with sweat. He grunted softly with effort as his fingers pressed into the knotted meat of my back, and sighed as he rubbed oil into my sun-dried skin.

The most I moved was to flip over so he could get at my front. I felt like a commodity, a lifeless, intentionless lump of relaxed material. I had no will and no responsibilities. It felt good.

After he finished, I was told to relax. No problem. I lay face down on the massage table, my breath slightly choked by the towel plugging up the face hole, but not choked enough to make me worry about it. My thoughts stilled. I stayed like that for an indefinite amount of time.

We ate at the buffet, loading our plates too high with salad greens, fried whiting, sardines, olives, curried turkey, pide, cheese, fruit, and cake. We ate not because we were hungry, but because it was time to eat. And eating wasn’t exactly a pleasure, it was an oblivion. We shoveled food into our mouths, not talking, looking at nothing, pausing only to order another beer or refill our water glasses.

Then it was to the swimming pool. We played in the water, diving down to the bottom of the pool where there were windows looking out on the cafe below and waving at the people. Time passed in the water. Then we laid in the shade, reading. Time passed in the hot shade.

I drank. It was free, so I drank. I drank a lot. I drank more than I had all year. I drank so much that I couldn’t hope to count how much I drank. I started at eleven with a beer, and by two I had reached a nervous tipsiness with helps of generous glasses of raki, gin and tonics, and something I ordered by just slurring ‘green drink’ at the bartender. I managed to maintain this tipsiness until a little bit after dinner, ducking away from my friends to order whiskey and cokes and sucking them down to the ice by the poolside.

Everything was catered to us. When you left the bar, two staff members stood politely at the door to pour the drink from your glass into a plastic cup so that if in your drunken stupor you dropped your drink, your glass wouldn’t break. Nothing was denied you. Extra food, more alcohol in your cocktails, a game of darts, a pillow for the sun-chair. A tribe of orange-shirted staff called animators prowled the pools and the bar-area throughout the day, rounding people up for games of volleyball and bocce ball, always smiling, always leading people in chants, their eyes glinting with unnatural enthusiasm.

Two things were refused: time, and the rest of the world. And these were refused with an evangelical insistence. There were no clocks anywhere, and the sun hung high and bright in the sky, giving the resort the look of an eternal afternoon. We had no idea what time it was, how long we had been at the poolside for, how long it was until dinner and then sleep. And since everything was provided for you at the hotel, why would you need to go anywhere else? Why would you need to visit the supermarket? There was a convenience store in the shopping arcade strung between the reception and the main dining room. Why would you need to see the ruins of the great city of Ephesus down the road? They were just stones, and here there was life and young women in bikinis. Why would you need to talk to your friends? Fun was here, joy was here, contentment was here.

The only thing that you needed to pay for was wifi, and that was only available on the first floor lobby with a pitifully weak signal. A few men opened black IBM laptops at the circular tables, struggling for a connection. We told ourselves we would get the internet, check our e-mails, ponder the next leg of our journey.

But we never got around to it. Wifi would connect us to the outside world, where we could read e-mails from work and talk to our families. As we settled into our sleepy acceptance of food and drinks and sunlight, the desire we had to talk to anyone else dwindled, flickered, and died.

Like that, we were overcome with the time-blind hedonism of the resort. It felt like we had been there a week and that we would be there forever—or at least until the end of summer—but we had only been there for eighteen hours, and we would leave the next morning.

-&-

At night, my friend was chosen for a competition. Boys against girls. Five a side. They sat on the stage of the theater, young men and women from all different countries. The men were drink-worn, wearing sporty clothes and competitive faces. The girls were in high heels and dresses. They played a series of games. A drinking race. A paper airplane competition. A game where they raced to blow up balloons and then sit on the balloons to pop them. A game where they tried to get as many people as possible to stand in a small space. The games were impossible and absurd, but as soon as the competition started, I was fired up. I wanted my friend to win. I cheered. I sipped from my drink. The Fabio-haired Animator clapped his hands and chanted “Tempo! Tempo!” as if it was a magic word, and it felt like a magic word.

The staff would ask me how I was doing and all I could do was shrug. Of course I was doing good. I wasn’t working. I had all my needs catered for me. How could I suffer from anything?

And when I said this, they would nod like they understood.

But they were at work. And their work was to cater to the grotesqueries of my pleasure.

There were swarms of waiters in white and black button-up shirts and bow-ties manning the buffets, refilling drinks, cleaning the filthy tablecloths, trying to keep proud expressions on their faces. There were bartenders forever rushing from one drunk man to another, getting them slowly and profoundly drunk. There were the Animators, organizing their seven hundredth game of bocce ball, calling out to everyone to have a good time. This was their work, and I felt like it was awful. But then my sleepy hunger would lap ay my mind, and I would just lift myself up, hulk myself over to the bar, and order another free drink. Like that I achieved freedom from worry.

The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.

Day Twelve: Sunburned Myth: Pamukkale and Aphrodisias. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

This is day tweleve of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

The olive-planted hills rolled on, behind them the far-away jagged mountains. The landscape looked mythical—the kind that Heracles and Odysseus might have romped around in before there were cars, and roads, and helpful signs to guide the wayward tourist to photo-worthy sites. Against a hill in the distance we could see our destination: a huge slope of white, as white as snow, seemingly cut into the rock. This was Pamukkale—Cotton Castle in Turkish. Behind the white, crowning the top of the hill were the ruins of a Roman city.

We parked the car and walked towards the entrance. We could hear people, but the cicadas and the crickets susurrating in the summer heat were louder. Ducks led ducklings padding across a pond in a park at the bottom of the hill. And above us was that startling band of pure white.

We slipped off our shoes before walking up Pamukkale—you have to go barefoot. The sun was hotter than it should have been, reflecting off the white cliffs. The limestone was wet with cool water, which eased the heat a little.

I took off my sunglasses just to see how things looked. The white was too white. A thousand times whiter than the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper. A whiteness so pure it made me squint and pull away.

Man-made pools staggered up the hill in ascending plateaus, the water the majestic blue usually only seen in advertisements for beach hotels. In the folds of the rock, the white was sometimes tinted a subtle pink. On the higher ridges, stalactites and stalagmites of limestone met to make hungrily grinning mouths.

“Seeing natural phenomena like this, it’s not surprising why people need to invent gods,” my friend said.

And seeing it, so strange, so different, so unexpected, you need to think of an explanation for it. Eternal curses against the landscape itself, the anger of Zeus, ancient aliens. The accepted explanation is that the springwater is supersaturated with carbon dioxide and limestone, and as the water bubbles over the mountains, it forms dribbles of stone called travertines. It’s true enough. But it doesn’t explain the wonder.

-&-

A head-scarfed mother led a half-naked toddler by the hand while he splashed in the pool, her other hand holding her skirt up, the hem brushing the surface of the water. Next to her, a pair of Russians, bejeweled and bikinied, poured water over their big breasts, and then indolently laid face down in healing clay. A large-bellied Italian stood in front of his wife’s camcorder and lustily narrated the scene behind him. A line of Chinese made their way up the hill like ants, in street clothes, holding their shoes at their sides, a tour guide barking liked a provincial official. We played around in one of the lower pools, slapping the jelly-like white sediment over our bodies and observing the other tourists.

But I was impatient where I should have relaxed. While my friends enjoying the feeling of the warm water and the majesty of the scenery, laying on their backs, staring at the sky, I was hunched forward with my hands around my knees, wondering whether the higher pools were any better. Were we just wasting our time? Was the really amazing stuff just a little ahead?

I left my friends and climbed alone to the higher pool. It was the same as the lower pool where my friends were. I looked over at them below me. And then I looked above me as the parade of tourists continued, a tutti-frutti splatter of swimsuits and skin.

The heat was incredible. The light was magnified by the limestone and the sun glinting off the waters. I could feel my skin burn and crack.

At the top, a waterfall pushed over the edge of the hill, and person after person lined up next to it to snap photos. No one stood under it, though. I cut in line and made funny faces while reveling in the warm water.

After climbing Pamukkale, we made it to the ruins if the Ancient Roman city of Hierapolis. A tourist trap has been planted here. A broad pavilion, called Antique Pools, welcomes the sunburned tourists to buy overpriced ice creams and coffees. There was a booth where for 30 lira you could get a video of you and a friend flying on a magic carpet through the tourists sites of Turkey. In the pool itself—which you have to pay to enter—people lounge on the Roman columns, fallen, broken, and submerged in the water.

-&-

On the way from Pamukkale to Kusadasi, we took a small detour to visit Aphrodisias, one of the best preserved Roman cities on earth. The place was completely silent. Besides the attendant who sold us our tickets, we could see nobody. For a moment, it was easy to believe that there was no noise at all, and that the place had been untouched for thousands of years. But after a moment, I realized that I simply couldn’t hear the noise of people. The cicadas were wild. The birds sang. The grass sashayed in the hot wind.

The entrance was lined with the detritus of archeology: emptied sarcophagi decorated with funereal scenes, mantles from the tops of walls, grave stele. Iconoclasts and demon-wary Christians have defaced most of them, snapping off the noses of the carved figures, rubbing away the faces, scrawling protective crosses in the rock.

A stack of marble mantles stood in the shade of the building with as much ceremony of out-of-use deck chairs. They are decorated with faces, still expressive, their eyes still happy and lecherous, their cheeks still full or hollowed, their expressions knowing and arch, gluttonous, pedantic. Between them run garlands of stone fruits. These mantles are stacked three high and four deep. A lazy brown cat wandered in between them, looked up at us, and gave a lazy meow.

We descended some steps to the Sebasteion, the temple to the cult of the Divine Emperors. High friezes, triple porticos, a courtyard, all stood reconstructed in the empty summer heat. Only a tenth of the building stands. Looking at it, I tried to imagine what it was like when it once was real.

We moved on to the Temple of Aphrodite, the city’s patron god. A gate remained, towering as high as a small hotel, proud and marble and white in the sun. In another stretch of the Temple, tumbled marble columns scarred by fire lay in the vine-choked ground. In 500 AD the temple was converted into a church, and people prayed here until the Seljuk Turks came around 1200 AD and emptied the city.

The city is vast. It is amazing. It is stunning to think of the labor which once raised these stones, and the lives which once pulsed through these streets.

The tops of my feet had been so sunburned that they looked like plums. My arms felt like they’d been turned into Brendan Jerky. My girlfriend forgot to put on sunscreen at all and so she teeters on uncertain legs, her whole bare back red, sweaty, asking for water. We are dusty and travel worn.

But the city is also boring and hot. The ruins are just ruins, and it takes a bit of mental effort for me to see the wonder in the bricks and the marble porticos, effort that I don’t have after twelve days of travel, and after the sun reflected off the limestone, and after the driving, and after the beauty I have already seen.

We hurried through the ruins, past the theater and the agora, past the Hadrianic Baths where archeologists labored in the heat. Then we circled around to the entrance and retired to the museum which—pleasure of all pleasures!—was air conditioned. It was only there, once we were comfortable, that we could appreciate how sun-baked, dehydrated, over-traveled, and tired we had become.

The museum was filled with the artifacts of Aphrodisias that were too fine to leave out in the open air and the unshaded sun. There were statues, friezes, monuments, and coins, the broken pieces fit together, the scenes explained with helpful informational plaques. Where the items have been badly damaged, they provide small helpful drawings that show how the site would have looked like when it was whole.

Most of these fine antiquities blur together, passing by, undistinguished even by their age. We have seen so much already. But some touch me. I wonder why. It is not by virtue of their superior craftsmanship. I can hardly tell what separates a good statue from a great statue. Some works of art just touch me, and make me curious again when for whole museums I have been bored.

Here it is two statues of boxers that excite my attention. Their strong arms and chests rippled with tough-toned muscles. They hold themselves with the proud and beaten posture of someone who has fought with their whole heart against defeat. But time has defeated them, when no opponent could. One is missing its forearm, his shin is broken, his face has been cracked in three pieces, and is only half-recovered. His bald head and empty eyes make him look like a man losing his power, surprised at how quickly he became so old. The other boxer suffered from a shattered leg, a lost neck, and a head cleaved in two. They stare across each other, silent.

In a hot side-room of the museum, the friezes of the Sebasteion have been restored and put up on pedestals. There are dozens of them, showing emperors and gods. One frieze depicts Day, Hemena, a cloak rising behind her head, lifted by a gust of wind symbolizing the epiphany of the gods. Her face has been gouged away and her hand snapped off her body. Beside her stands the god of the Waters, Oceanus, also throwing a cloak to the wind behind his head. His features have been dulled by rain. But these two friezes are lonely. When they stood up on the porticos of the Sebasteion, Day would have been paired with Night, together representing the eternity of the Roman Order. Oceanus would have been paired with the earth, and show how the Roman Empire commanded the lands and the seas. But now these two great symbols stand lonely and broken, symbolizing only the eventual victory of time.

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We felt broken. We felt tired. We limped out of Aphrodisias to our car. Then we drove up winding mountain roads, feeling more broken and more tired as the sun sets over the mountains, as we pass through more kilometers of mythological landscape. We passed over the top of a mountain road to find the Agean Sea spread out before us.

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There we improbably checked into an all-inclusive beachside resort to wash the salt off our bodies and sleep the sun out of our minds with an all-you-can drink bar and an army of holiday makers. Tomorrow it’s going to get weird.

Day Eleven: Konya. Rumi. Peace. Tourism. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-13T20:08:00.001-07:00

This is day eleven of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

As we drove into Konya, the old capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, a broad avenue led us into the center of the city. The conical top of a turquoise tower pierced the modern skyline. This was the mausoleum of the sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, called Mevlana in Turkish, and Rumi in English—or ‘the guy from Rum.’ Because of him, for the past eight hundred years the city of Konya has been a sacred place where people have come to find the true nature of reality and the love of god.

Konya was first settled by the Hitties, and like the rest of Asia Minor it has been sacked and settled by waves of war. The name Konya itself is a Turkification of the Greek’s Ikonion. The Greeks thought that Perseus defeated the native population with an icon of the Gorgon’s head, making it safe for them to settle.

The main attraction of Konya is the Mausoleum of Mevlana, or Rumi. Rumi was a thirteenth century Persian poet. Fleeing the mongol tide that was pressing up against his home in Persia, Rumi’s family swung down to the Gulf on the pilgrimage of Haj, before going north east to settle in the safety of Rum. Here Rumi studied, thought, prayed and wrote thousands of pages of fine poems about love and god. His poetry touched people in a way that words rarely do. In 2007 Rumi was declared the most popular poet in America—this Persian-speaking Muslim who lived in a Turkish-ruled city named after the Byzantine Empire which had named itself after Rome.

After Rumi’s death, his followers turned his poems and philosophy into a religious order known as Mevlana. Mevlana’s most conspicuous right was the Sema Ceremony, where adherents would fast and then whirl themselves into a confusion, the fabric of their broad skirts fanning out, one hand held up towards god, the other held down to earth. But the Mevlana were more than just a picturesque dance. Neophytes would put themselves through a grueling thousand-and-one days of service at Konya before they became dervishes in their own right, cleaning, cooking, fasting, praying and studying. The Mevlana became a force in the Ottoman Empire for seven hundred years after Rumi’s death. Dervish societies popped up everywhere the Ottoman Empire was, and the hypnotic whir of the Sema ceremony continued.

Except when Ataturk created the Turkish Republic, he put an end to the Mevlana, closing the doors of the dervish halls, confiscating the treasuries of the ancient foundations, banning the ancient ceremonies and devotions. Rumi’s tomb was secularized and turned into the museum it is today.

And despite the sublimity of the architecture, and the holiness of the relics held there, Mevlana’s tomb is a museum, not a place of living religion. The line for tickets was confused—more like a child’s crayon scrawl than a line—while the single ticket seller on duty contended with a mess of tourists pressing against his window, holding out bills, shouting in Turkish.

When we finally were able to exchange our lira for tickets, we walked through the turnstiles to a garden. There, a 14th Century tomb of one of Rumi’s followers stood with crumbling walls and the flash of striking turquoise tiles. We followed paths cutting through gardens planted with rose bushes, and then passed into the large marble courtyard surrounding Rumi’s tomb itself. In the center of the courtyard was a marble fountain bubbling with water, at which people bent down to wash their hands, feet and faces. A sign hanging on it said that it was built in 1512 and then restored three times since then.

We slipped blue plastic shoe condoms over our feet and went into the tomb itself. The first room was small, but it was decorated with framed Arabic calligraphy extolling the virtues of study and divine devotion. Some pieces done in gold leaf on actual gilded tree-leafs, the veins and stems turned to metal.

And then the main room, a broad hallway that turned around itself like a boxy U. It was busy. Busy with students, pilgrims, and tourists. Busy with prayer, and curiosity, and boredom. Alongside the walls were stone sarcophagi of religious teachers topped with green turbans, and people clustered around these, their hands open to the sky in prayer.

At the far end of the hallway was a crowd, surprisingly quiet for so many people. They were at the tomb of Rumi himself.

The sarcophagus was tall as a man, huge, covered in an age-darkened brocade embroidered with golden Koranic verses. On top of the sarcophagus were two large turquoise turbans. Behind it was an amazing tile wall, in blue, red, green and gold, whirling with calligraphic snippets of the Korea, Persian-looking fruit trees, and hypnotic shapes. Next to this was a rank of display cases, holding Rumi’s shoulder strap, his finely pressed high-collared cloak, and three of his plain brown felt hats, all supposedly eight hundred years old.

In the next room was a collection of objects meant to inspire the veneration of the pilgrim. There was an illuminated genealogy of Ali, gilded Korans with footnotes and glosses snaking in the margins at angles to the text. A series of silk rugs hung along the far wall. One was from the 16th Century, and the calligraphy on it bragged that it was made near the tomb of Ali, whose power was so great that 100 Alexanders should bow to him. There were reliquaries containing beard hairs of the prophet, and grains of rice on which the name of god had been written. A compass pointed to the direction of the Kaaba. A Koran the size of my thumb nail was displayed next to a Koran the size of a child’s bike.

Some of the people crowding the hall were in the throes of religion. They swayed back and forth on the balls of their feet. Their cheeks were wet with weeping. They pressed their hands to their faces, stunned at the intensity of their own feeling, and then lifted their hands again to heaven, to pray once more.

But other people were just there, passing through the rooms because they were tourists and that’s what they did. A blonde in heels with a headscarf just thrown over her head laughed on her cel phone, half-heartedly glancing at the illuminated manuscripts.

Outside the Mausoleum, the cels where dervishes once accomplished their devotions have been filled with representative objects and informational plaques. A pair of tongs hung on the wall. These were carried in the dervish’s belt, used to let shopkeepers know the dervish deserved a fair price without bargaining. There were ornately decorated horns, which the traveling dervish would blow to announce his arrival in a new city. There were hats and robes, axes and books and musical instruments. In the rooms closer to the kitchen, mannequins had been positioned to stand in for the dervishes who had once lived there. Here was an old bearded man studying. Here a young man cooked. Here another man prayed.

Everywhere we went we had to fight against the crowds. People gibbered, they yelled, joked, took pictures posing in front of the holy books, the tour guides held up flags and waved them to get people’s attention. It was strange to think that Rumi’s contemplative poetic philosophy, which hoped to peel back the illusions of the bustling world, should fall like this to the beautiful venalities of tourism.

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When Rumi was alive he wrote poems. He wrote about his worries and his joys, his friends and his thoughts. But there was something special in the way that Rumi saw the world and in the felicity with which he expressed himself. All he did was scribe words on paper. But these words have lived on far longer than his body, being translated and retranslated and published and read and studied. They have survived not only because they are beautiful, but because they have something true in them. And this truth has helped people see through the fog of their petty daily worries, to the broader beauties of god and love.

But so why is it here at Rumi’s tomb where generations of pilgrims have bent their heads in supplications, all I can see are the tired herds of tourism? Why is it that there are no quiet places to sit and wonder? Why is it that there is no truth, no matter how many informational plaques are posted next to the priceless relics?

But it is a museum only. It celebrates things that once were. It can no longer be new.

And truth must always be new. Only something new can us out of our daily blindness to appreciate the unusual reality of the world around us. Only something new can stir beauty in our eyes. And to be new, it must be different, striking, dangerous, and a little sick. Rumi’s tomb is old. The relics are covered in dust. The books are hidden under glass.

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On the way back to our car we passed by a craft shop. In the window felt dervishes hung from agate wind chimes, turning in the breeze, ringing softly. The walls were busy with necklaces, scarves and painted glass. My girlfriend insisted on stopping. The owner was devotedly sewing a small patch of fabric, and gently looked up from his work to offer us tea. I said we had to get going. He insisted, and we sat, appreciating the colorful rush of his shop. “When I was a boy,” he explained, “I always loved colors. And my mother would complain. What are you doing always looking at colors? Why are you obsessed with colors? But now, you see, I have filled my shop with colors.” On the walls were depictions of dervishes spinning, the Kaaba black and imposing, a peacock, and they were beautiful. We drank our tea, talked, and were happy.

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Again we drove. We drove to Pammukale where we stayed at a thermal spa and rested in the warm limestone waters, trying to forget everything, surrounded by Russian, Asian and Turkish tourists, who also settled themselves into the pools, wincing at first at the heat, and then closing their eyes. The fountains spilled warm water over us, the sides dripping with stone.

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Day Ten: Beneath Cappadocia. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-10T20:56:00.001-07:00

This is day ten of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

In the shallow part of the late morning we pulled out of our hotel, setting out for the deeper parts of Cappadocia. The cities fell away, and the English road signs, the tour groups, the restaurants, the ATV rentals were all replaced by irrigated farmland.

Time passed like it does on long drives.

“Slow down,” the guy in the passenger seat said all of a sudden.

“What is it?” the driver asked. There were no other cars on the road.

“Slow down!” again, with more insistence, pointing ahead of us.

And then we saw it. A huge flock of sheep taking up both lanes of the otherwise empty road. We pulled over. Bringing up the front of the flock was a sheep dog, its tongue happily lolling out of its mouth. The sheep followed, their bells ringing with every trot, the full udders of the momma sheep swaying back and forth. Th shepherd brought up the rear, with his crook hitting the asphalt step by step. Following him was a second sheep dog, more dutifully drooping its muzzle to the ground, ready to urge on stragglers.

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We descended into the underground city of Kaymakli, a complex cut eight floors deep into the soft volcanic rock. Once it could have been home to over three thousand people. Now the upper levels of this subterranean metropolis are used by locals for storage—a honeycombed ancient attic. A portion of the city has been made safe for tourists. The walls have been strung with lights, the sloping steps have been reinforced with concrete and steel, and almost every turn has been marked with helpful signs.

As soon as we went inside the heat of the day lifted, and we could smell damp stone. The hand-carved walls were uneven, branching off to various rooms like the arms of a tree. The corridors narrowed as they went deeper, until in some places you had to bend over to pass through them, or fall onto your hands and knees. Hollowed out into the soft rock were storage rooms, wine presses, a church, living rooms, graves, and a metallurgist.

Deeper into the city, we marveled at a huge ventilation shaft. It was about the size of a comfortable chair, and the left side of it was dotted with hand-and-footholds climbing all the way down. We turned the flashlight into to the darkness, but the light got lost in the depths. We had no idea how deep the shaft went, or how high.

And it stunned us to think that all of these sloping passageways and huge stone caverns were carved by people. That someone had not only climbed this vertiginous ventilation shaft but excavated it from the living stone. Ancient Christians had done the majority of the work here, retreating to the caves as a defense against persecution. But the Christians had only expanded and improved on cave structures which had existed long before them, going as far back as the Hittites. The caves were safe. They were a good place to hide from the shifting tides of empire.

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Our next stop was the gorge of Ihlara, a broad tree-filled gash in the rock whose sides were speckled with windows and rooms that once were the seclusion of early Christians. Around eighty thousand people once lived here in lonesome safety, in four thousand houses carved into the sides of the rock, praying at over a hundred churches.

As we walked to the ticket office a large crowd of high-school girls burst through of the turnstiles. The first group was dressed modestly in headscarfs, clucking softly to themselves. One girl stopped at the gift shop and put on a cowboy hat over her hijab, laughing to her friends. The next wave of young women were dressed in western fashion—in camisoles, skinny jeans and shorts. I think they were from the same school, but they looked like they came from two different worlds.

We paid for our tickets and made our way down the three hundred steps to the bottom of the gorge. The whole sky was cloudy. The wind tasted of cloud, the far-off mountains behind us were capped by clouds, and the clear sunny heat we were used to was dulled by clouds.

We visited the Agacalti Church, which was caved into the cliff wall in the eleventh century, propped up with four arches, and decorated with a small dome. The walls were frescoed in white and orange paint, with the robes of the prophets drawn out in turquoise. Jesus loomed above us in the main dome, holding a blessing with one hand and a book in the other, surrounded by winged spirits who were perpetually dragging the resurrected messiah up to heaven. None of the figures had pupils in their eyes, and so they stare, empty, forlorn down onto us. The church showed its age. The paint was chipped in places, a passageway had fallen, the lower parts of the wall had been scratched with crude graffiti.

We followed the steps further down to the bottom, a long line of tourists ahead of us and behind. But when we reached the gorge the other tourists turned left to a nearby church, and we continued forwards, crossing the fast-flowing river. After a few minutes we could no longer hear the noise of the tour groups. Around us was the solitude of rocks and trees, of dust and bugs, the burble of water and the empty noise of wilderness.

We climbed up to another church carved into the farther cliff-face. This one was less well-preserved, more isolated, less protected. Three entrances with finely carved archways led into a darkened interior, the ceiling drooping with cobwebs. Passing the weak flashlight against the walls we could make out the remains of the white and orange paint that had once brightened the walls. A greek cross on a pillar. Geometric patterns crawling along a ceiling. As we went deeper into the ruin, the daylight was swallowed by the shadows, and we found the side-rooms and the small passageways completely dark. The flashlight tried in vain to illuminate these big empty rooms, and we stopped on the threshold, peering inside, wondering what had once been there, trying to imagine what the church might have looked like back when it was filled with the noise of living.

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On our way out of Cappadocia we passed by another fairy chimney site. We stopped the car at an overlook and took pictures of the rock which fell like folds of fabric in an art-student’s texture study, honeycombed with floors, walls, windows, and doors.

It was amazing, but we had been looking at amazing things now for ten straight days, and in the late afternoon with four hours of driving ahead of us, we only enjoyed the scene briefly. We quickly folded ourselves back into the car, passed by a parking lot full of tourist buses, empty besides their drivers, who lay idle in their driver’s seats, either napping the afternoon away or texting, ignoring the ponderous photo-worthy spires rising into the air above them. They, too, were tired of beauty. We drove onwards to Konya, where we would spend the night.

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Day Nine: The Mysteries of Cappadocia, Unanswered and Beautiful. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-09T21:23:00.004-07:00

This is day nine of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

In the early morning, the sky of Goreme is filled with the busy twitters of waking birds and the far-off hoots of sleepy owls. Across the road from our hotel, an old woman eased her way out onto the terrace of her house, where she plucked cucumbers from the green burst of her garden. A hot air balloon slowly lowered itself through the blue sky. In an hour, the other tourists would come out of their rooms and sit down for breakfast, but for the moment I was alone, savoring the silence and the view of this strange city, too beautiful for words, too beautiful to even be a real city.

In the East, we felt like we were the last tourists on earth. Children gawked at us, waiters asked us curiously where we were from and then frowned when we said ‘America’, the English was halting and uneasy. But Goreme, in the ancient province of Cappadocia, was a tourist Disneyland. We were helpfully provided with English signs, English-speaking shopkeepers, internet cafes, car rentals, knick-knack shops, and bars presenting authentic all-you-can-drink ‘Turkish Nights’ complete with belly dancing.

Normal turkish life was absent, or at least hidden. There were no dolmuses, not small bufes with rotisseries of doner turning in the heat, no cram schools for the kids. I would like to say that I was disappointed to have everything around me be so safe and so accommodating, but after a week of adventure, it was a small relief to have a place where I felt like I belonged.

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Goreme is famous for its fairy chimneys, large protuberances of rock erupting from the earth ten or fifteen stories into the air. They look like hundreds of giant fingers, reaching up from the gorge of Goreme. The rock is made of soft volcanic tuff, and over thousands of years people have carved houses and churches and cities into the stone. Because of this, these bizarre towers of rock are often crowned with windows and pigeon holes, doors and stairs, that make them look alien and wonderful.

We drove towards the city of Urgup, passing by farmland rich with apricot trees, pumpkin and melon patches, grape vines, and wildflowers. We parked on the side of the road next to Devrent Valley, a forest of fairy chimneys. The powdery white paths that climbed the side of the valley were dotted with tourists. They looked like ants scrambling up a pile of sugar.

We followed the tourists. The fairy chimneys rose around us, strange, curious, like nothing we had ever seen before, like nothing we could explain. Some were thin, some were thick. Some looked like mushrooms with fat steps and tiny hats. Some were stubby cones. Some looked like perky breasts with tiny nipples, others looked like snaking phalluses.

After lunch we headed on another hike, this time in Pasabagi, a burst of roof-shaped fairy chimneys surrounded by a broad plateau. A group of older Korean tourists were herded past an old church cut into the rock. A band of Japanese tourists in fedoras, sports coats, man purses, bluetooth headsets and space shoes looked like they have been dropped in the canyon straight from a better future, gazing about themselves in every possible direction pointing camcorders and cameras.

We ducked into the church, behind the mass of Koreans. The walls were scored with carvings, blackened with the soot of fires and candles, inlaid with alcoves, fountains, settings, and foot-and-hand holds that lead up to a second floor. It looked like a Flintstones house.

Then we wandered up the snaking trail, going higher, getting farther away from the tourists, gaining a better view on the amazing landscape, and I tried to describe the things that I was seeing. But I had no names for them, no way to put into words the odd collection of the pillars of earth except that they were different, picturesque, otherworldly, novel. How did these things even happen? I didn’t know. They were as likely the work of a bored artist, sketching out an alien landscape as they were a product of the geologic forces that accounted for such everyday things as lakes and mountains.

And then all at once I didn’t care to solve the mystery of what created the fairy chimneys. They were beautiful, and I was silenced by their beauty.

It just felt good to be walking in the kind sun, away from the city, out of the car, going out of earshot of the babble of languages. After the boredom of yesterday’s ten-hour drive, our hike returned us to the realer world of walking and sweat.

We were silent. But this was not the grumpy silence that had overcome us before. We were silent because our lips were dumb to the pleasure of our legs and feet and skin as they walked surely over the uncertain ground. And so what use did words have? I didn’t want to understand how the fairy chimneys were formed, or who had carved out those rooms of rocks, or the history of invasion and conquest that scoured the landscape. I just wanted to walk and look.

We made it to the topmost point and looked out for a moment. Then we walked gingerly down the loose slope.

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We ate dinner at the Top Deck Cafe, a year-old restaurant of stupendous hospitality and warmth—the best dining experience I’ve had in a whole year and a half of living in Turkey. As we stood outside the restaurant, looking over the simple menu, the owner and chef Mustafa Ciftci swept us into the kitchen, where he showed us all the food that was on offer that day. There were succulent lamb chops, chicken soup, mezze—Turkish appetizers—and vegetables. Mustafa’s wife Zaida worked in the kitchen, while the couple’s two daughters provided us with menus and brought us to our seats on the floor along the wall.

The restaurant was a traditional Goreme house, a cave carved into the solid rock. The eldest daughter, took our orders, and soon our small low-lying table was spread with a beautiful mezze plate of rice-stuffed vine leaves, home-made humous, chicken salad, eggplant, and a half-dozen other dips, spreads and nibbles, which we tucked into hurriedly, hungry from travel and the hike.

Soon our main dishes came. I got the lamb chops. The meat was so soft that when I picked up a bone the flesh simply fell off onto the plate. The couple sitting next to us from New Zealand said it was the best lamb they’d ever had. And they were from New Zealand, where there are more sheep than people.

As we ate, a conversation bubbled amongst the tables around us. In the far corner an American man and a Turkish-American woman who were spending three weeks exploring all of turkey. Next to our cushions were the Kiwis, who were sleepily full. They were taking a year off everything to go see what they could of the world. At the table to my left sat an older Dutch couple who were about to brave the wonders of the east. We swapped stories of traveling Turkey, and jokes, and advice, and the restaurant was noisy with good-natured laughter. The restaurant had the sort of conviviality you always want when you’re traveling. Everyone was kind and happy, willing to talk and to chuckle. And it had all happened so naturally.

When the meal was done the younger daughter brought us tea and the guestbook to sign. The book was thick with compliments in dozens of languages, sentences upon sentences, pages upon pages. It was amazing that the place had been open for only a year, and received this much good-will. I picked up the pen, but for the second time that day my words failed me. I couldn’t say anything. The meal had been fantastic, the conversation friendly, the atmosphere open. But I couldn’t write. I couldn’t spoil the magic of that dinner by putting it into words. So I wrote only a sentence, and passed the book on. We drank our after-dinner teas and prepared to head to bed.

As we left, passing by the kitchen which stood next to the front door, we stopped to pay our compliments to Mustafa and Zaida. We ended up standing there, chatting to the whole Ciftci family—mother and father and two daughters—until past ten at night.

“This cave is actually where I was born,” Mustafa told us, pointing to the far right corner of the dining room. “There.”

The Ciftcis treated us like old family friends. We showed them how to get English books on their iPads but soon ended up playing the Baby Monkey (Going Backwards On A Pig) App. Our conversation fluttered with little tangents and jokes and digressions. And for a moment it didn’t feel like we were in a restaurant where we had paid for the pleasure of eating, but at our friend’s house, chatting in the sleepy time after dinner. We left reluctantly, pulled to our beds by tiredness and the promise of another full day.

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Days Seven And Eight: Roads. The Decapitated Gods Of Mount Nemrut. More Roads. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

These are days seven and eight of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

The narrow road cut through the crests and troughs of the rising shadow-filled mountains, and our car bravely made its way forward. A half-moon hung in the sky, softening the sky's broad darkness. We were tired, and quiet mostly. It was three in the morning, and we had been traveling together for exactly a week.

We didn’t know whether we were going the right way or not. We hadn’t seen a sign for a dozen kilometers or so, and the road looked too obscure, too uncertain. A white panel van passed us, speeding up the winding road. “That’s a tour bus,” I said, straightening up in my seat with rising hope. “We’re going the right way.”

“It’s not a tour,” our navigator snapped. “Tours couldn’t have vans that small. It wouldn’t be efficient.”

Maybe we were getting a little grumpy. We had woken up too early. We had been in the compact car for too long. The silence came over us, and kilometers sped beneath us.

And then in the East the darkness changed. A thin band of orange broke against the horizon, dropping off into blue, which smeared into the nighttime black. It was the first touches of morning light. We were racing against it.

By four thirty in the morning we parked on a steep parking lot filled with tourist vans. The night was cold and windy. My only pair of trousers had ripped back in Mardin, so I was wearing nothing more than salmon-colored shorts and a thin T-shirt. I had failed to have the foresight to wear shoes instead of sandals.

In front of us was a mountain peak, a darker imposition against the moony night. This was Mount Nemrut, one of the most famous sights in Turkey.

Hints of sunrise. Photo by Jenna Staff.

We walked up. It felt good to walk. Walking kept us warm. The path was steep and pebbly, and we could see almost nothing in the morning darkness besides the growing band of light to the East, and the dim outlines of the rolling hills beneath us, and the dark shape of the peak to the left of us. It was beautiful, but we were tired, and maybe too tired and too cold to appreciate the beauty. We said little to each other. We passed by other tourists who were puffing their way up the mountain, pausing for breath against a pile of stones. One group, bundled warm in blankets and coats, looked at my T-shirt and short and could do nothing but laug.

By five we made it to the Eastern Platform of Mount Nemrut, and the first light of the day was spilling out against the stone peak. The heads of decapitated gods stood before us, each as tall as a man. The heads of five men—gods and kings—were flanked by an eagle and a lion. They all looked out towards the morning empty eyes. On the rise of the hill behind them stood the five bodies of these heads, indistinct blurs in the morning darkness.

Heads, before the dawn. Photo by Jenna Staff.

Mount Nemrut is the mausoleum of Antiochus the first of Commagene who lived in the first century BC. Antiochus’ small kingdom was a mixture of Persian, Greek and Armenian cultures that had torn its independence after the Roman Empire defeated the Seleucids. Antiochus, whose full name was Antiochos, a just, eminent god, friend of Romans and friend of Greeks, declared himself a god, and planned that after his death his body should be moved away from the people and closer to the gods. He chose Mount Nemrut. Here he established a group of priests who would celebrate his birthday and his coronation once a month, for all eternity.

The heads depict Greek-looking kings with Persian hats. There is Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes; Zeus-Oromasdes; the king Antiochus himself, god-like a pround; Heracles-Artagnes-Ares, a queen, and Tyche-Fortuna herself. Sometime after Commagene’s inevitable fall, once the birthdays and coronations were forgotten, these heads were broken off and tumbled down to the terrace below. They were only rediscovered in the 1880s, when a German Engineer found them while looking for transport routes for the Ottoman Empire.

The heads slowly became illuminated by the rising morning light. The shadows deepened their features. The stones became more alive. You could now see the curls of their beard, the arrogance in their eyebrows, the peak of the eagle’s beak, the fierceness of the lion’s eyes.

On the terrace a motley of people jabbered at each other. Everyone snapped pictures, and posed for pictures, and clucked at each other about how funny the pictures looked, and crowded around the good vantages for photos.

We moved onto the Eastern pedestal to look out across the mountains, still dark with nioght. There we had a moment of repose, and pulled the blanket up around us against the cold. The light on the horizon became thicker, and now you could just make out the swell of red that would become the sun.

As the light grew, slate-colored lakes started to shimmer in the valleys below us. Then all at once it was bright enough that I could actually see the pages of my notebook. Seven vans pulled up to a special access parking lot below us, and they disgorged a pilgrimage of tourists who climb up the steep path, just in time for the sunrise.

Then the salmon-colored light swelled over the mountain. Sunrise was coming. The crowd silenced.

Like that—in a moment—it was day. The sun peeked over the ridge of the mountain before it resolutely lifted itself up out of its mountain bed. More photos were snapped. A man posed for a novelty shot where it looked like he was holding the sun between two pinched fingers. But despite all that, it was beautiful, and for a moment I felt a sympathy with the other tourists. We were all feeling this beauty.

Sunrise. Photo by Jenna Staff.

And then the tourists evaporated, like morning dew. We walked around the peak of the mountain, suddenly alone again, admiring the stone heads in the cool morning light. Then we walked around the peak to look at the Western Platform where another set of decapitated heads faced the setting sun.

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This, for eight hours. Photo by Jenna Staff.

Then it was days of driving. We drove from Gaziantep to Adiyaman, and then to Mount Nemrut. Then we wound our way back, retracing our steps, heading West to the dream-like province of Cappadocia.

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Again, it was a day of Turkish road travel. We passed a car with its passenger seat packed full of sheep. A minaret sprouted from a boxy factory. Road workers hid from the heat in the small shade of tree planted on the median strip of the road.

As we moved west, the earth rose to become a rolling Medeterranian farmland of olives and grapes, before peaking to become a series of craggy, pine-lush peaks. The setting sun hit a splatter of clouds, marking the edges of the clouds white.

Then all at once the hills fall away into a stone-littered scraggly mud-splattered expanse rising with rocks and dust. Ahead of us lay mountains, dark and broad. We were leaving the East, with its rough brilliance, into the more popular tourist-areas of central Turkey.

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In the style of Maximum Fun’s Jordan Ranks America, we ranked Eastern Turkey.

Standing tall at number five is “Hello, money!” the two words known to every single barefoot child you may happen to run across.

Making a strong debut at number four, it’s goats. They’re cute, their shaggy, they seem to be content where they go, they make great cheese. The consensus is: goats are great. Why don’t we have more goats? Can we get some pet goats or what?

An old favorite retains spot number three. You guessed it, it’s the shalwar, the Turkish farmer’s M.C. Hammer pants. Baggy, with a crotch that dips past the ankle, nothing says “fashion” like these centuries-old trousers.

A surprise at number two! It’s horrible drivers! Passing you at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour as you make a blind turn down a mountain road! Demonstrating fantastic feats of steering-wheel acrobatics on roundabouts! Honking while you’re stopped at a red light! The drivers of Eastern Turkey will give you the ride of your life!

Taking the top spot at number one it’s Kebabs. Lunch and dinner, why would you want to eat anything else? These flame roasted skewers of meat can be angelically good or give you food poisoning. But one things’ for sure: it’s the only thing on the menu!

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Day Six: Gobekli Tepe To Gaziantep, The Old To The New. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

This is day six of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We turned off the Urfa highway and suddenly the modern parade of gas stations and stores fell away, revealing a landscape of mud-brick huts, lavender-scarfed peasants, green irrigated farmland, with the hard dry roll of unimproved hills in the background. The asphalt quickly turned to dirt and rocks. Barefoot children played in the fields while their mothers worked in the heat.

This could have been almost anywhere in the plains surrounding Urfa. And in some ways it felt like it could have been any time, too. Peasant children had probably been playing in these fields for thousands of years, ignoring the tides of kings and princes who had claimed the Urfa plain.

The car clattered up hills, and soon the village shrunk in the background. Our poor over-worked compact car, stuffed with five full-grown humans and their baggage, struggled. Soon the winding hill leveled out, and the road bulged into a parking lot.

We stepped out onto a high, wind-blown hill. Here was Gobekli Tepe—the oldest temple on earth, built over 11,000 years old.

We were met with a middle aged man named Veyal Yildiz, whose family has farmed Gobekli Tepe for generations. Our Turkish friend spoke with him a while, and we were worried that we would not be allowed inside—Gobekli Tepe is no museum, but a working archeological site where the ruins of dead civilization are day by day being pulled from the earth. After five minutes of greetings, where are you froms, and what is your names, Yildiz gave a nod and led us to the excavations.

Twenty circle-shaped structures have been discovered under Gobekli Tepe’s dry soil, and four have been excavated. Large sculpted limestone monoliths three meters high poke from the dry ground, most of them shaped like a pot-bellied T. They are arranged in circles, with two pillars standing in the center of the circles. Many of the pillars are decorated with carvings eked out of the rock with flint tools.

A stone circle, older than bread. Photo by Jenna Staff.

This site is older than Babylon, older than Stonehenge, older perhaps than agriculture itself. The people who made it were probably hunter-gatherers who had not yet resigned themselves to settled life and government. Somehow they dragged the eight-ton slabs of rock up from the quarry a hundred meters away, and then shaped the rock, with only hand-made flint tools.

A path ringed its way around the four open excavations. Veydal pointed out the interesting carvings. Here are lizards, foxes, sheep, donkeys, snakes, and boars; nets, pelts of animals, and birds. On a number of the T-shaped rocks, hands clasped around the front of the spines, and at the sides, you could make out the crooks of bent arms.

At first the rocks just looked like rocks. But slowly the monoliths took on human characteristics. The tops of the Ts become the nods of massive heads. The hands clasping the spines of the T seemed to be resting on bellies, the foxes around the base were pelts covering the privates. Here, Veyal pointed to two monoliths standing next to each other. “They think that this one is a man, and this one is a woman.”

We walked to the very top of Gobekli Tepe and sat down to rest in the heat. A wish tree hung with scraps of plastic bags shaded us from the heavy sun, and four graves piled with loose stones shared the shade with us. We looked out across the dry landscape, and I thought about the people who built this mound. No one knows who they were. No one knows what language they spoke. No one knows why they spent so much time dragging stones up a mountain.

Only five percent of the whole 22-acre site has been excavated. Klaus Schmidt, the site’s devoted archeologist, thinks that even after fifty years of work we will still only know the vaguest outlines of this huge temple.

We were the only people there. We saw no cars. No tour buses. Veydal said that about five people a day come here, to Gobekli Tepe, the oldest sacred place on earth.

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A new black-asphalt three-lane toll road took us from Urfa to Gaziantep, the third largest city in Turkey. As we dove into the city we encountered the worst traffic we’ve seen since Istanbul. Every one of the million citizens of Gaziantep seemed to push their way through Istasyon Caddesi, Gaziantep’s pulsing artery of traffic and trouble, the cars merging and honking and swerving before suddenly stopping to let pedestrians hurry across the road.

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Our GPS told us to take a left down a road clogged with construction. We circled around, looking for another route, but this too was blocked with earth moving machines and torn-up cobblestones. We parked the car at a random parking lot and lugged our bags through the busy streets, reluctantly taking a room at the first hotel that we saw. Our room was decorated in the style of a 1970s-era Turkish pimp, and the air heavy with the stale smell of cigarettes.

There were sights to see, of course. Why else would we come? The old archeology museum stood proud and ignored across the street from the sports stadium. The museum was had once boasted some of the finest mosaics in the world, but these had been moved to the new museum, so now it was a lonesome place, with emptied, echoing spaces, informational plaques whose corresponding objects were missing, plaster marks on the polished floor.

Gaziantep is arguably one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. People first settled here in the third millennium B.C., and since then they have been trading, eating, marrying and dying, leaving behind the litter of their life which was then unearthed, identified, and set under glass for display. We looked at the old cut-stone sarcophagi, the piles of old coins, the grave stele, the old glass-ware, the broken potsherds, the marble heads.

A lonely corridor was lined with grave stele from a half-dozen passed civilizations. The rocks showed gods and warriors who had not been celebrated or worshipped for thousands of years. Carved into the rock, their features worn by rain and the indifference of time, they eat, drink, banquet, fight, hold emblems and pieces of food and weapons, cups, trinkets and grapes. Sometimes I caught a particularly fine detail—a eye that lifted with joy, a hand delicately holding a trident.

Kings enjoying themselves. Photo by Jenna Staff.

But nobody else was at the museum. I was a little indignant. The stadium next door is busy with men eating kebabs and talking about sports, but here, where the monuments of history stand, there is silence.

But then again, why should people care about the past, when the past is dead and they are alive? Like the figures on the stele, they too must fight and drink and feast and die. When the stele and the statues in the museum stood alive in the open air, they were not monuments, they were pieces of daily life. The people of their time appreciated them with the same lazy eyes with which we now look at billboards and street signs. So why should the musty virtue of antiquity make these cracked slabs of rock suddenly worthy? Why should I expect people to turn their backs on the fun of their lives to look at dusty rubble?

After the old museum, we went to the new museum a twenty minute walk away. We plodded along the tramway, passed under the train station, and skirted the slightly sketchy neighborhood around the train station. Then out of the obscurity of the low-rent apartments, the mass of the museum imposed itself, huge and white, not yet even a year old.

Most of the mosaics had been rescued from Zeguma. Zeguma was a Greek city perched on a crossing of the Euphrates river. It became rich with trade, and over the centuries its citizens became rich, built their villas and their fountains, and laid their houses with mosaics of startling beauty. Their patron god was Fortuna, the goddess of luck, and so the wheel of fortune repeats itself along the border of mosaic after mosaic, a tumbling interlocking circle. Zeguma was taken by Rome and the city grew even more. But the wheel of fortune turned, Rome became weak, and in the third century Zeguma was overrun by the Sassanid Empire, burned, its greatness lost. People lived there, but they lived in the shadow of a great city, people unable even to remember the distant greatness of their ancestors.

The Wheel Of Fortune. Photo by Jenna Staff.

The city wallowed in obscurity until the 1990s when archeologists discovered the city’s well preserved frescoes and mosaics. But the careful excavation of the archaeologists was slow—faster were the antiquity traffickers who ravaged the new discoveries before they could be preserved.

Fortune was still crueler to Zeguma, the city who had once worshipped her. A new dam was built, and the city was set to be flooded. An international consortium of archaeologists flocked to the city to rescue what artifacts they could, finding seals and statues, lifting frescoes and tiles—but when the dam was finally opened over three tenths of the city was submerged and destroyed.

Those mosaics that had been salvaged were moved here, to the new museum in Gaziantep, and they stun the visitor with their incredble craftsmanship. They show the strange gods of Asia Minor in all their glory and folly. Oceanus and Tethys pose, swimming with dragons and snakes. Europa is eternally being dragged off with Zeus the bull. Eros and Psyche sit on a couch, and Aphrodite is birthed from a clam-shell. These fine works were once on the floors of dining rooms and bedrooms, stepped on by the sandals of visitors, submerged with fountain water. Now they were on the wall of a museum, to be admired.

Oceanus and Tethys pose. Photo by Jenna Staff.

We see these gods marring, posing, eating and arguing. Eros and Psyche sit on a couch and the expressions on their faces look like they are sitting at home and they can’t exactly decide what to watch on TV. Eros has his hand lightly on Psyche’s back, and Psyche has her left hand open imploringly, like she’s just about to suggest that they put on a rerun of Olympus’ Got Talent.

They are like us. And I imagine that the long-dead city of Zeguma must have once been a lot like the city of Gaziantep: bustling, commercial, and hot; the citizen’s lives rich with traffic and trouble, the people only sometimes pausing to admire the work of their mosaics and fountains and frescos. And then they move on to the real beauty of their daily lives.

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Day Five: Urfa, A City Of Pilgrims, A City Of People. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

This is day five of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We woke up in Urfa, the heat already rising, and gorged ourselves on a huge Turkish breakfast with three kinds of cheese, roast peppers, katmer—a delicious sweet green pancake—honey, eggs with Turkish sausage, olives, cool kaymak, tomatoes, cucumbers, french fries, and a basket of bread that the dutiful waiters insisted on refilling again and again. We started to talk, but our tired conversation was overcome by the TV, which played a selection of the most manufactured US pop, and soon we just ate, and craned our heads around to gaze gap-mouthed at the latest Keisha video.

The city if Urfa is a palimpsest of names and histories stretching back over a eleven thousand years. In 1984 the city was renamed Sanliurfa—Glorious Urfa—in honor of its tenacity in the Turkish War of Independence. Urfa itself was named after the biblical city of Ur, Islamic scholars believing that this was legendary settlement where the prophet Abraham once lived. Before that, Urfa was called as Edessa, a bustling metropolis of the Byzantine Empire.

After breakfast we headed outside, but the heat, even this early in the morning, burdened our shoulders like a real weight.

We walked through the busy, broad streets, passing medieval towers, remarkable mosques, women dressed in purple headscarves with noses pierced with gold. An old man in droop-crotched shalwar pants putted his motorbike up the sidewalk at a little more than walking pace. We stopped in a shop hanging with dried peppers and eggplant husks, selling three different kinds of famous Urfa hot pepper in three qualities—’Home’, ‘Lux’ and ‘Extra’. The city gave us too much to look at, and too much to think about, so that we walked around like people half-asleep, snapping photos of this oriental scene and that one. It is hard to recognize Urfa’s monuments, bazaar and people as real living things, and not merely touristic photo opportunities.

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Close to the bazaar is the sacred quarter of the city, a lawny tree-shaded expanse of marble courtyards, mosques, fountains and benches, filled with families and pilgrims. The people here were conservative looking. There was hardly any bare-headed women. Many men were dressed traditionally, in saggy shalwars and bright lavender head-wraps.

Urfa is a city of pilgrimage. According to Islamic tradition, Urfa is the birthplace of the profit Abraham, and this scared complex full of indolent tourists presses up against the cave in which he was supposed to be born. There are two small doors entering this holy site, one for men and one for women, and a tired security guard sits in between them, dealing with questions and donations.

After taking off my shoes and ducking through the entrance to the sacred cave, I walked into a small room crowded with feet and shoulders. At the front of the room a thick plexiglass barrier covered the dim grotto—the place of the birth of the prophet Abraham. Children and old men washed their hands in the sink in the right corner, and then hold their palms face up in prayer. The room smelled lightly of feet. I tried to sidle up to the window so I could get a better view of the green-painted stone platform that stood in the grotto, but I was worried that I was getting in someone’s way, and interrupting the seriousness of the prayers, so I left.

Outside I stood a moment in the heat, waiting for my friends to finish their explorations, watching the kids dip their feet into the fountain.

“Well, that was boring,” someone says before we walk off to our next site.

In the shade of the mosque abutting the shrine, two men laid asleep or ill, their coats thrown up over their heads against the sun, their feet bare and black with callouses.

We wandered two minutes or so from the Cave of Abraham before we made it to the Sacred Fish Pool. Tradition says that the cruel king Nimrod tried to catapult Abraham into a burning pyre. But God turned the fire to water, and the coals to fish and landed safely Abraham into a rose bush, so accordingly Urfa’s scared quarter is decorated with a large rectangular pool full of holy fish. We took tea beside the fish pond. Young men pushed boats to the fountain in the center of the pool, propped a ladder against it, and climbed on top of it, unwinding a long green hose with which they cleaned.

Cleaning the fountain. Photo by Jenna Staff.

The water was a soft green, and well-fed happy looking carp bobbed their heads out of the water. Urfa’s heavy sun was mottled through the trees, and the wind blowing over the water gave a freshness that eased the heat. The carp would crowd around the edge of the pool, waiting for the tourists to throw them a handful of fish food, opening and closing their yellow-lipped, toothless mouths. A pudgy fish food seller had positioned himself under an umbrella, carefully measuring brown pellets from a hessian bag at his feet into small metal tea saucers and plastic baggies. He had the radio on, that softly blared with the latest international pop. Keisha came on and he subtly tapped his foot, while his mustachioed face kept the same hard mercantile expression.

I walked around the pool, looking at the carp. Then I saw a knot of fish, jostling and nervous. In the center I could see the pale white gash of flesh. The fish were fighting over a fish corpse, tearing at its scales before dragging it to the bottom of the pool where it disappeared.

Fish! Sacred fish! Photo by Jenna Staff.

The Urfa citadel stood atop the hill, looking over the scared gardens. We had to climb it. According to the informational plaque that stood in front of the ticket office, the citadel was first built in 9500 BC, but it was more likely erected first in the time of the Roman Empire. Each new ruler of Urfa renovated the citadel, adding monuments and improvements to the old edifice of strong rock, so that the place now stands as a patchwork of stones and arches of different ages. Two tall Corinthian columns topped it, beautiful and strange, like a set goalposts for some massive invisible football game in the sky.

Urfa. Photo by Jenna Staff.

Once we reached the top of the citadel, the whole city was laid out in front of us like the spread of food at a hotel buffet. The watered healthy green of the trees in the sacred gardens sprouted in tufts, the glinting metal domes of the new mosques in the distance, the clouds clutched against the horizon, and the burst of new development around the city’s edges high and glassy. Behind us was what looked to be a slum, a crumbling mess of concrete shanties propped together with rotting wood and tarps. A mother led her child out of a dark doorway and took down a piece of washing from a clothesline, ignoring the ancient castle in whose shadow she lived.

We walked back to the hotel by way of the maze-like bazaar, checking the prices on trinkets that might serve as good presents for the folks back home. The stalls were busy with shops of every kind, gold, tea, shirts, cups, plates, bags of cheap tobacco as yellow as bread, folk crafts, fabrics. And the winding passageways were cluttered with people as varied as the goods: peasants from the surrounding countryside, rich conservative tourists in fashionable hijabs, and us, the short-clad, picture snapping sun-burnt barbarians. Two women in headscarfs budged their way through the crowd, each shouldering huge rolls of thick grey foam as big as a donkey.

In the bazaar we met a hustling sixth-grade shopkeeper who, like the majority of men in the city is named Ibrahim, after the prophet Abraham. He was short for sixth grade, and when he relaxed he looked like one of my students during the break between classes. But then his eyes would glint with the penetrating canny of a businessman. His English was simple yet confident in a way that suggested he learned things very quickly. We tried to bargain, but Ibrahim just smiled, and his prices were fair, so we all bought a little thing from him—a Turkish coffee pot, a sugar dish.

I interviewed him in a combination of my haltering Turkish and his English. His favorite school subject was Math. He liked Ben 10. I could easily imagine him then as one of my own students back in Istanbul, his life a clamor of schoolwork and friends and breaks between classes. But as we were talking an urchin sidled up to Ibrahim’s store and started to finger some of his goods. Ibrahim’s boy’s face hardened. He barked. The urchin cringed and melted back into the crowd. Once the threat was gone, the child in his eyes came back.

We got him to pose in his shop. “Be a businessman,” I said. He set his face as hard as he could, crossing his arms over his chest. He was proud of his shop, of his stock of goods.

By then the heat of the day was up. We splashed around in the hotel pool until the evening.

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Harran is a small village nine miles north of the Syrian border, a good half an hour drive from Urfa down a straight new road lined with rich green farmland. We turned down a smaller road, following first the signs for Harran, and once we found Harran, we followed the signs for ‘Tourist Center,’ keeping a look-out for the touristic sites we’d read about in the guidebooks.

But Harran is not a museum. Harran will only reveal itself slowly. Harran is a living village, where people work, marry, have children, and try to live the same as they had for centuries. The new addition of tourists drawn by the city’s distinctive beehive mud huts will not change that.

We stopped and asked a man for directions. Directions where? Directions to Harran. To the mud huts. To the sites that we had to see. He smiled curiously. We were there, he explained. We nervously regarded the mud-colored huts and the rank of cheap eateries on the roadside. Could this be it? I thought of turning back around, returning to the safety of our hotel. The man still stood helpfully at our open window, and after a moment he offered to find us a guide. We don’t need a guide, we decided, and the man shrugged, pointing down a dirt road. There’s where you can go if you want to see the village, he said.

Our car rumbled over the uneven, potholed dirt road. Around us were dozens of those hand-made mud-brick huts crowned with kumbats—large distinctive domes found in only three other places on earth. These huts have become symbols of Urfa. But we felt uneasy. This was no museum we were driving into. This was life. Women were slowly walking home from the fields. Children were playing bare-feet in the dirt behind their houses. And through it all clambered a dusty, small blue car filled with foreigners snapping pictures out their windows of this very authentic village life. A trio of dirty young children ran barefoot in the plume of dust we left behind, jumping with exuberance.

We returned to the main road and parked. Long-haired goats chewed on something in the muddy embankment. “I guess this is it,” one of us said. We ventured up a dirt road to look around and we were quickly met by a class-room’s worth of small children, sullenly selling good-luck charms. We tried our best to ignore them, but they followed a few steps behind us, polite and silent. A small girl with huge eyes not more than seven years old had a baby tied to her back with a blue handkerchief, and the handkerchief would sometimes slip, so she would foist it up again. She wasn’t trying to sell anything to us, or to ask us for money. She, like us, was looking.

We have interrupted these people’s lives and we don’t want to interrupt them any more. We turn back, get the number of the tour guide from a food truck, and wait by the car while the children orbit us with a quiet curiosity.

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A man led us past a honey-colored tumbling stone castle and into the heart of Harran. The castle was first built by the Hitties who established there a temple to Sin, the goddess of the moon. When the Romans replaced the Hitties, they converted the temple into a church. When the Umayyads took the castle from the Romans, they made the church into a caravansary. Now the castle stands empty and crumbling, a monument to nothing, while children play in its shadow.

We parked next to a large mud hut with eighteen kumbats rising into the late afternoon sky. This was Harran House, a traditional hut made to satisfy the curiosity of tourists. Outside camels, cows, horses, goats and chickens mingled with tea-drinking men.

We were introduced to our young guide Eyup. We walked a little up a grassy hill towards the crumbling foundations of a once-large building, a huge crumbling tower rising beside it. Eyup told us that these was the remains of the world’s first university, amd there—he pointed to the far corner of the ruins—was a the library, a legend of the world, which drew scholars from across the world to study alchemy, religion, and astronomy. The tall tower, still standing, its top broken like a cut reed—that was once a state-of-the-art astronomical observatory. One of the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh was unearthed over there, by that hill. It was here that the Roman Emperor Crassus was defeated by the Parthians, and had molten gold poured down his throat.

We climbed a mound that rose beside the ruins, where weather-worn stone walls were being scraped out of the earth, the ancient bricks the same color as the falling light. Beneath this hill, Eyup told us, lie the ruins of eight successive civilizations. It is strange, I think, looking at the ghostly shape of the excavated old city, how bricks look pretty much the same over the whole span of human history. They look exactly like bricks.

This done, we returned to Harran House. We went inside the first kumbat where Eyup dressed us up in traditional clothes and we posed for pictures.

The inside of the house looked much bigger from the inside than it did on the outside. The walls were hung with mementos. In the kitchen it was cups, lamps, and a goat skin used to make the traditional Turkish yogurt drink Ayran. The man’s salon was covered in old rugs and pillows. The marriage room decorated with tapestries, a trousseau and a wedding dress hung on the wall. “The house is hot in the winter, and cool in the summer,” Eyup told us proudly.

After that we rested in the declining light, drinking tea and talking. We asked Eyup about himself. He is in high school. He has 14 brothers and sisters. He speaks Arabic, Turkish and English. He learned English from speaking with tourists, and he dazzles us with the snatches of Italian and French he’s picked up from other passing travellers.

Before it felt like we were trespassers into Harran’s daily life, but now, we are guests, sipping tea, letting the night rise around us. People have been drinking tea here, I think, since the silk road wound its way up from China and first brought packets of tea to Europe. The sunset bulged, the color of rose-petal jam, blowing the fresh night wind over the landscape. The sun burned the sky orange and purple, flooding the day’s last light over the nearby ruins. Here, I thought, we had seen something more than ruins, more than a citadel, more than the legendary birthplace of Abraham. In Harran we were welcomed to look at a glimpse of real life. It was not the remarkable and preserved touristic life of travel brochures, but a real life that like the ruins of Harran, had been built atop the past.

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Day Four: Mardin, Too Marvelous. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is day four of the Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

Mardin clings to the side of a mountain, looking out over the Mesopotamian plains and the meander of the Tigris below. But Yenishehir—the New City where our hotel was—hides behind the old city on the easy flatland, a wealthy spread of new apartment buildings and restaurants.

A five minute drive brought us to the base of the old city, and we stepped out of the car to admire a view of the bread crust-colored buildings and the crowning mass of the citadel that stood at Mardin's peak.

Local legend has it that Mardin was founded before the Great Flood. The earliest archeological excavations date the settlement at least back to 6,000 years ago. And it’s easy to see why people wanted to live here. The plains keep you fed. The mountain keeps you safe. It is a wonderful place to build a city.

But the mountain could not keep Mardin safe forever. And over the long history of war and empire, generations of generals have stood on the Syrian plain below Mardin and looked up, lustily envying the strategic brilliance of this mountain town. Here are the names of the civilizations which have conquered Mardin, one after the other: the Subarians, the Hurrians, the Elamites, the Babylonians, the Hitties, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Seljuk Turks, the Artukids, the Mongols, and then finally—in the 16th Century—the Ottoman Turks who themselves were replaced by the Turkish Republic in the beginning of the 20th Century.

We turned from the city to the Mesopotamian Plain behind it. After driving through the hilly plateau for so long, the flatness of everything was stunning. The plain stretched to the horizon utterly untroubled by hill or rise or roll, completely flat, squares of wheat-colored farmland broken by squares of dark irrigated land, dark cloud shadows moving slowly from one end of the plain to the other. The dusty horizon joined with the sky in an indistinct haze, like the world couldn’t exactly decide what should be land and what should be sky.

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We climbed up alleyways of stone steps, the roofs of the city rising above us at various angles, two or three nipple-tipped minarets piercing the skyline in the distance. These streets were not made—they grew up over the slow course of decades and centuries, going where they would—not necessarily going straight to anywhere in particular—but just going. And so we walked without any other direction but up, marveling at the ancient-looking character of the buildings around us.

Mardin looked exactly how I imagined an ancient Near Eastern city should look. The houses were old, with finely-made arched Ottoman windows, clustered together like mushrooms. Many were in various stages of disrepair: cracked walls, gaping windows. We passed under a drooping stone balcony supported dubiously by a nest of wooden planks and plastic pipes. “Careful of the scorpions,” our Turkish friend told us as we stumbled up through a pebbly patch of waste land. It was easy to imagine that we were back in the Twelfth Century.

But then small details would force the modern world back: spent Cheetos bags fluttering in the street, the sound of a Turkish soap opera blaring through an open window of an ancient-looking house.

An exceptionally happy young man on a donkey strolled by us. Polite girls in loose headscarfs said hello to us. We said hello back and followed them to the nearby mosque,—the Abdullatif Camii. There were a gaggle of girls in the mosque’s front courtyard lingering under the shadow of a vine trellis, asking us questions and giggling. After a few minutes a young woman peeks her head out of an open door and announced “Girls! It’s time!” The girls are enrolled in a summer Koran course at the mosque. But the girls dawdled as much as they could, asking us foreigners our names, laughing, posing for pictures and then running away from pictures and hiding their smiles behind their hands.

The mosque was old, the outside decorated with beautiful clay work in the Artukids style. We ventured inside the mosque, and look around for a moment before heading out again into the dry desert heat.

We came to a main street, hung with plastic awnings, blaring with staticy radios barely picking up ancient music, vegetable sellers sitting at their shop doing their accounts by hand, and somewhere in the distance the anxious braying of a donkey. The feeling washed over me again: this could be a hundred years ago, or a thousand. Or it could be today.

And then I realized I had been wrong about Mardin. Being in Mardin was not like being transported back in time. Instead it was like being smeared through time, at once living in the present and the past—as if time which normally is so punctilious and fussy had gone sloppy and forgetful.

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There are things to do in Mardin, important cultural landmarks that the guidebooks insisted we check off our lists—but it was more rewarding to simply fall through the alleyways and let ourselves get lost in the remarkable feeling of the city. Nevertheless, we were tourists, and so we had to do touristy things.

First we went to the Mardin Museum, which boasted artifacts from the area’s six thousand years of human settlement. Looking into the glass cases showing paleolithic tools, I felt a sense of sadness. Because what survives from the ancient world? Clay and metal and nothing more. Stone axes, broken shards of curde jugs, small statues, thin metal needles, a stone toy cart, obsidian cutting tools still sharp after six millennia, baked clay writing tablets and seals—and nothing much more from the clamor of human life. A few small cuneiform inscriptions show the grubbily commercial origins of writing. They are nothing more than contracts, announcements, statues, and deeds.—They come from before the time that writing had become art. I wondered what would survive of our life, after the centuries pulled their forgetfulness over our civilization?

After the museum, we tried to find Ulu Camii—the Great Mosque. We were directed down a merchant-clogged alleyway selling an oriental range of sundries: sheep and calf heads in plastic bowls, black with rot, flies buzzing around the eye sockets; repair shops and metal workers, a ten-year old fixing a saw blade onto a machine tool; a metal worker stamping patterns onto a plate by hand; cages full of ducks and baby chickens, squawking; cookware, plastic pipes, woodworking tools; kebab restauranteurs carving off slices of meat; tea shops; clothes shops; anything a person might need.

We got to the mosque a few moments before the call to prayer, and the broad courtyard was filled with locals washing their feet in the fountain. We decided to wait in a nearby cafe until the prayers were over. There we looked out over the Mesopotamian Plain again and drank Mirra Coffee—the most bitter sip of coffee that I have ever had in my life. A serving is little over two or three teaspoons, and the taste stayed in our pallets for at least half an hour.

Our refreshment done, we visited Ulu Camii, remarked about in guidebook after guidebook. But after having enjoyed the city for the majority of the afternoon, I was disappointed by how boring the great mosque was. It was a large mosque made of white stone, decorated in high Artukid style, the walls crawling with amazing calligraphy. But the inside of the mosque was bare and cool, and I couldn’t feel excited for it. We splashed water over our faces at the fountain, and then left to again plunge into the city.

Our final act of tourism was to climb to the top of the city where the Mardin citadel perches, looking over the Syrian farmland. We rested there, snapping photos of ourselves against the grand backdrop of the valley where civilization began.

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We had planned to do more around Mardin: we would find a city where an ancient bridge crossed the Tigris river; we could tour a working Syriac Christian monastery; we could admire an ancient mosque. But once we got back into the car, we shrugged off all our remaining touristic plans. We didn’t want any more cultural heritage: we had had enough. We were full of beauty already, and full of wonder, and our camera full of pictures. Insisting on seeing more striking sites would be too gluttonous. Instead we followed the wide new road west, to the city of Urfa, some three hours away.

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Day Three: Scavenger Hunts For Car-Bound Tourists. The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary

2012-07-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

This is day three of The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary.

We drove. We drove. We drove.

We left Erzurum at eight thirty in the morning, bellies half-full from a soup breakfast and heads half-rested from our lumpy hotel pillows. We hopping into our little car and drove. Through the rolling mountains we drove. We drove through the grasslands waving in the wind. We climbed hills and skirted valleys, passing through market towns and farmland, dusty villages of a single building and military bases clinging to mountain faces.

We stumbled into Mardin at eight in the evening. We had been driving for the whole day. We grumbled at each other, hungry and testy, with aching backs and strained tempers, taking the first hotel we saw. It had been twelve hours of driving—maybe more—and at the end of it I almost forgot anything had happened. As I thought about it more, I could only make up a collage of disconnected images, but I could make no story out of them, nor could I impose any sense.

I had thought that yesterday had been empty. Today was empty, truly empty. We often saw no cars at all for half an hour or so. We would pass lumbering trucks overloaded with bags of cement.

As soon as we left Erzurum the landscape became as green as a cartoon lawn. Teepees dotted the hills—the homes of cowherds who followed their stock along the plateau. But the greenery soon turned sun-light yellow, and the heat came.

As our small car put-putted its way south, the cows on the side of the road turned to sheep, and then the sheep turned to goats, until finally the goats became small children, who pushed to the shoulder of the road, holding out plastic bags of sour plums to the passing motorists.

I remember a heap of burning garbage on the side of the road, clung with black birds. A small puppy sat contentedly in the heat, looking playfully at the birds like that pile of garbage and those birds were the whole world.

For a few kilometers the road was a confusion of donkeys inching their way up the shoulder. There were cars, but no people. “Who on earth is herding these things?” Three donkeys lay in pile of dust, the sun beating down on them. “Are they dead?” The one nearest to the road reared its head up lazily, flicked back its ears in annoyance, and then laid down again. “Are they dying?” “Are they napping?”

After eight hours we stopped in the metropolis of Diyarbakir. While my friends took pictures of the huge citadel, the mosques, and the guileless street-children who followed us through picturesque-tumbledown alleyways, I remained grumpy. “Hello! Hello! Hello!” The children called after us. I crossed my arms over my chest and reminded everyone that it was probably time to go.

But my memories didn’t seem enough—not enough for twelve hours. And really, a lot of the time stretched on in a bare wasteland. Five grown humans sealed into a compact car whose radio doesn’t work. We ran out of jokes. We developed headaches. We grew testy with each other.

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For those of you considering a drive from Erzurum to Mardin in a day—don’t. Or at least get a big car. You might save yourself a mental breakdown by playing Anatolian Road Warrior Scavenger Hunt. The rules are simple. Each object can only be found once. Spotted objects earn you anywhere from one to five points. At the end of the day the person with the most points earns a free dinner.

1 point:

More than 10 cows.

An overloaded truck.

A farming vehicle driving through a town.

A car passing itself. (The “Self Pass.”)

A two-minareted mosque.

2 points:

More than 10 sheep.

Two meat restaurants next to one another.

A woman doing farmwork by the roadside.

A car passing another car that is passing. (The legendary “Double Pass.”)

A vegetable seller.

3 points:

A person running.

An idle road worker.

A driver standing up.

A Mercedes.

A car properly using its turn signal.

4 points:

A person reading a book.

Improbable child!

A car with fur seats.

A person with blonde hair.

A man peeing in public.

5 points:

Dogs having sex.

Another group of people taking a photo of something.

Guns.

A woman driver.

Another foreigner.

Enjoy!

The Amazing Awesome Anatolian Road Trip Diary continues...

You can also get the whole series as an e-book.