Around Asia Minor

In 1977 I finished my PhD, aged 24, and after a desultory year of waiting in the wings for "something to turn up", filling in time helping other people do research, I was given the chance to go and fool around with science in the wilds of rural Turkey.
When I got off the connecting flight from Istanbul to Ankara, Neil, my companion, said "Well, you got here then?" Apparently the Turk Hava Yollari shuttle had a propensity to crash and only the day before had skidded off the runway at Ankara with a burst tyre. Six months later it suffered a major fatal crash on the same runway.
Having got over that, we spent the first few days making preparations while staying in the British Institute of Archaeology. Though far from being like the grand palaces of British culture in Rome and Athens (it consisted of two apartments in a modern block), the British Institute was a typical repository for washed up expatriates. There was, for example, Rothers, an expert in Coptic grave inscriptions, who was forever mopping his florid brow with a spotted handkerchief. I shall always remember his description of being in a head-on train crash somewhere near Kayseri: "there was a frightful jar" he said, making windmill gestures with the hand that held the spotted handkerchief. I reflected that it was probably a very good thing that most Turkish trains at that time went no faster than 15 km/hr.
The delays in setting off for the field were occasioned by having to patch up the British Institute's Landrover before we could use it and needing to obtain Turkish work permits so that we could do our entirely unremunerative research in the middle of nowhere. We sat for hours in dusty offices looking at faded portraits of Ataturk on the walls, drinking little bulbous glasses of chai and waiting while a pompous official transcribed my grandfather's name, place and date of birth and other such useful details into a register and onto a piece of pink cardboard. I still have this document and it is enchanting how by dint of spelling mistakes the official managed to make my name, and the names of my forebears, seem entirely Turkish.
When all that was done we set off for the Konya basin. We made reasonable progress, despite the tendency of large TIR lorries to force us off the road and into the adjacent ditch every time they came towards us in the opposite direction. As each hour passed we drove deeper into areas that Europeans did not frequent. It was quite an exciting and novel experience: Asia Minor in the raw. Every so often we were stopped by roadside policemen, intrigued by the vehicle's 06 Ankara number plate. Initially, they were rude, inquisitive and officious, but we had a Turkish geologist called Mustapha with us, who worked for the Government's Mining and Oil Consortium, Maden Tektik ve Arama, and he got a local artisan to paint us a signboard with 'MTA' on it, which he put in the front windscreen of the vehicle. From then on when the policemen saw us they stepped back a pace and saluted. Such is the power of oil.
Konya was a dusty but vivacious city of a quarter of a million in habitants. A fragment of a Seljuk king's 14th century mudbrick palace reposed under a hideous reinforced concrete canopy in the middle of a roundabout. Women with rotund figures wept and went into a trance outside the shrine of the Whirling Dervishes, in which the tombs were surmounted by impossibly large turbans and the atmosphere was curiously musty, like a Victorian drawing room that had not had the windows opened for decades. But the ancient colonnaded mosques were cool and agreeably dark inside, while outside the heat, dust and brilliant light made one's head spin.
Neil, our fearless leader, who was struggling to finish his PhD on the basis of the research we were doing, made a work plan and squared it with the local authorities. In his spare time he went to the Kwaffuer next to the Konya bus station. It was curious how he went in looking typically Anglo-Saxon (he was blond) and came out looking utterly Turkish: I didn't think that a haircut was capable of doing that to a person. Fortunately, my own hair was quite short and I had no intention of metamorphosing into an ersatz Turk.
We lodged at the MTA camp, an apartment on the tenth floor of a modern high-rise block. The lift was broken and it was a long trek up the narrow stairs to the tenth floor at the end of an exhausting day in the field. On the ninth floor were a couple who seemed to enjoy having an argument and burning their dinner with clouds of smoke. One evening on the television news there were dramatic pictures of a fire in an apartment block in Ankara in which 26 people were burned to death. The television crew seemed to enjoy filming the work of the rescuers who were laboriously putting together pieces the charred bodies on stretchers. It did not make one feel very safe, there on the tenth floor looking out at the city spread below. In the street underneath, a child of about eight years of age was trying to drive an articulated petrol tanker with the legend 'Dangerous Liquids' painted in Turkish on its side.
The roads went straight as an arrow across the Konya basin, but somewhere in the middle, for no apparent reason, there was a bend. Naturally, there was a lorry upside down next to it. This reminded me of the coach journey from Ankara to Istanbul, in which every time the road curved at the bottom of a hill there one could see the carcasses of burnt out wrecked coaches strewn around the bend. We drove with more circumspection than the truck and coach drivers evidently had. Yet even so, we became bogged down in the waterlogged tracks of the former lake basin we were studying. Only by putting Neil's jacket under the back wheels of the Landrover did we manage to effect an escape. The jacket disappeared into the mire as the wheels spun, but we lumbered successfully out of the rut. Despite this, the work progressed steadily.
The women of the Konya basin were clearly very handsome. Their large, dark eyes peered out inquisitively at us from beneath their brightly coloured scarves as they tilled the fields. It was my first encounter with the system in which hard manual labour is done entirely by women while men do the important tasks like sitting around all day in Chai houses chatting, smoking and playing cards. The more adventurous women brought us plastic buckets filled with ayran, liquid yoghurt, to drink, and very refreshing it was too.
After a couple of weeks' work in the Konya area we migrated down to Karaman, close to the Taurus Mountains foothills. We checked into the Salvation Palace Hotel, a miserably primitive hovel whose one point of interest was a large sign that said, enigmatically, "Dogs are not allowed in the Yoter". We speculated for hours on what the 'Yoter' might be, but all we could think of was that it was something that had a propensity to trap unwary canines.
While in Karaman we took a trip up to the top of the great Black Mountain Kara Da . This was a nerve-wracking experience. It was a very long way and the only route up was a narrow and precarious shelf that had been carved out of the red volcanic soil by a bulldozer. On the top there was a communications and television relay station. When we arrived there, we found a broken-down Landrover, one that had evidently only just made it to the top before expiring. The men who controlled the radio relay station rushed out when they saw us and demanded to know whether we had any spare parts for their vehicle. We had nothing that they could use and so they slunk dejectedly back into their control room.
On the way up we passed through Bin Bir Kelise, the Land of a Thousand and One Churches, where there were the remains of about 36 religious buildings that dated from the Christian diaspora during the times of the barbarian invasions of Europe and the siege of Constantinople. One of these spectacular Romanesque buildings had had its barrel vault reconstructed and was in use as a farmhouse. The farmer sent his four-year-old son out to greet us with cups of yoghurt. This child also had a sling, and while we ate the yoghurt he demonstrated how he could kill a bird in flight at 40 paces with one swift movement of his arm that sent a stone buzzing angrily through the air on a perfect trajectory. So remote was the area that if he had decided to kill us too no one would have been any the wiser. Remote it was, but although the inhabitants of Bin Bir Kelise had no electricity, they had a dog called 'Joe' after a dog in one of the Turkish television's sitcoms.
From the top of Kara Da , ancient extinct volcano, one could see vast areas of the Konya basin spread out below. In the crater were two groups of nomads each with a tent. Closer observation revealed that the black tent was for black goats and the white tent for white ones. How very oddly symmetrical!
Coming down the mountain was as nerve-wracking as going up it, but we eventually arrived unharmed on the dusty, flat land of the Konya lake basin. Neil was so relieved and elated at having made the trip successfully that he accelerated to 90 km/hr. It was a most unwise thing to do, as in the middle of the dirt track we were travelling on there was a narrow ridge of dust. He caught it with the left front wheel and immediately lost control. We swerved off the road and landed with an ear-splitting bang in a two-metre deep ditch. Amazingly the Landrover stayed upright and that is the only thing that saved our lives, as it had no seatbelts. We got out, flexed our legs, whistled a bit and looked long and hard at the sky. When our nerves were calm again we took out some shovels and dug a path to get the vehicle back on the road again. Fortunately the Landrover was undamaged and so we could proceed on our way. I ended up with a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder, being constrained for a few days continually to relive the moment when the road in front of my eyes suddenly wove around and disappeared from view as we plunged into the ditch. But it wore off. The lasting legacy of this incident is that it was written up and published in a compendium of wisdom about geography, which the Royal Geographical Society produced with the intention of enticing school-leavers to take degrees in geography. While the incident certainly demonstrated the drama of field studies in geography, it would not have induced me to become a geographer (though I was already one, of course).
Before leaving the area we drove down the ancient silk route to Beyºehir Gölu. This lake was so full of milky sediment that in the sunlight it had the brilliant colour of lapis lazuli. Against the red, yellow and grey rocks of the foreshore the effect was spectacular. At intervals caravansarai appeared by the roadside. I particularly remember walking around Sultanhan , which was so large and imposing that it reminded me of one of the great European cathedrals, perhaps one with Romanesque origins, as there were stone lions at the gate.
In the countryside snakes slithered across the stony ground and fields of opium poppies, with their bulbous purple flowers, stirred in the breeze. In the villages, women knotted carpets and talked in low voices (no doubt about us). As the sun went down we checked into the only hotel within a 100 km radius. It was a new building but poorly equipped. I insisted on occupying the single bed, which meant that Neil and Mustapha, in the double bed, had the only blanket while I got the only sheet. And it was cold that night.
We visited a Hittite archaeological site where a fountain fed a small lake from a bas relief carved millennia ago in the Abyssinian manner, though anomalously with frontal representations rather than profile ones. We sat in a small depression in the ground, a sort of natural amphitheatre, to eat our lunch and, such was the attraction and novelty of European foreigners, that a nearby village emptied out and we had an audience of more than 200 marvelling people as we sat there and ate bread, cold meat and grapefruit. It made for an uncomfortable sensation, rather like being in a huge goldfish bowl.
Back in Konya we concluded the research by surveying our way across an early Byzantine graveyard, which had been thoughtlessly quarried for road-mending aggregate. The digger had ripped the end slab off a 1500-year-old cyst burial and from inside pieces of jewellery, bones, fragments of skull and shards of brown pottery cascaded out. As the morning wore on a dust storm began and worked itself up until we were completely enveloped in sand which abraded our faces and shut us into a claustrophobic world in which the ghosts of horsemen and warriors seemed to be coming at us out of the graves.
We also did some surveying on Çatal Hüyük, literally 'fork mound', one of the most famous 'tells' of the Middle East. It was once thought to be the world's oldest city, but much depended on how one defined urbanism. At the time, 1978, half of it had been excavated. The form of bull-shrines was still evident in some of the mud-brick walls that had been brought to light. Shards of yellow pottery with ochre-red zig-zag patterns on them littered the ground. Neil told me of an apocryphal story about the archaeologist who had done the excavating. He said that he had been travelling on a train in rural Turkey and in front of him was a girl whose jewellery was exactly the same as that which he had excavated at Çatal Hüyük--artefacts some 9000 years old. She told him that she had more of it and offered to show him. They alighted at a rural station and he allowed himself to be blindfolded and taken to a room which contained a fabulous ancient treasure. He was taken back to the station, which was far away, blindfolded, and was never able to find out where the treasure was kept. The story has all the hallmarks of a modern legend, but it is an alluring tale.
As we were leaving Konya, we suddenly found ourselves trapped in a national Islamist demonstration. We were in the Landrover at a road junction and demonstrators were coming at us down all the roads but one. They were clearly very angry and there were thousands of them. A large contingent of soldiers were marching down the other road and were about to bring their rifles up to their shoulders. Neil panicked, but he had the presence of mind to put the Landrover gears into low ratio four-wheel drive and so we set off across a ploughed field. It may have saved our lives, as the army did indeed open fire and there were fatalities.
On the way back to Ankara I succumbed to Ataturk's revenge, the effect of eating contaminated food in a wayside restaurant. It was one of the worst bouts of such illness that I have ever had, and I was in such a coma that I felt nothing of the ruts and potholes as we travelled along the Middle East Trunk Road. I was also suffering from a swollen ankle, caused when I fell into one of the holes in the road during an impromptu power cut. The Turks were importing electricity from Bulgaria but they were not paying the bill and so the Bulgarians were turning off the current. This led to a rotating programme of power cuts, which meant no electricity in Ankara in mid-morning, when it was not a catastrophe there; but in a rural town the lights would go out without warning in mid-evening, and that is how I had my fall in the ensuing pitch darkness.
Nevertheless, I limped off to see the Vadiden Bir Gürunuº, the Valley of the Thousand Chimneys, the fascinating erosional landscapes near Kayseri. I took a young English girl I met at the British Institute with me for company. She seemed a bit of a wimp but in fact she turned out to be much tougher than at first appeared. She needed to be, as rural Turkey at the time was quite primitive. We stayed in a miserable hotel at Nevºehir, and I shall never forget the sound of the Muezzins' impassioned chants as at five o'clock in the morning they echoed off the surrounding hills. From a starting point in Uçhisar, 'castle mound', we walked down into the valley of Avcilar and admired the cones and mounds of the eroded volcanic deposits, so often compared to a lunar landscape. The Byzantine cave-churches had been heavily vandalised by Italian tourists.
And so ended my first contact with the Middle East. My overriding impression of Turkish culture was that the life of single human beings had relatively little intrinsic value. Indeed, there seemed to be almost a contempt for human life. Moreover, there was nothing European in the broad landscapes and mud-brick villages of central Anatolia. But it was a world of colour and history. Visiting the National Archaeological Museum in Ankara, Turkey seemed to be a place that had had 13 major civilisations but was currently in search of just one--a harsh view, perhaps, but a realistic one at that time.