After our extended stay in Asia we have finally found our way to Europe and being rather budget little birdies (Kiwis) we are obviously sticking to the cheaper regions. With a desire to see a few ancient bits we have come to Turkey. First stop Istanbul:
After trialing the "no lonely planet guidebook" approach in Malaysia, we have determined that it sucks and it is much easier to get around with a little bit of local information in your pocket, otherwise you waste all of your holiday time trying to figure out A) where you are, and B) how to get out of A). So with a first night booked in Istanbul we made our #1 priority to obtain said book. Fortunately we found one in the book exchange at our hostel in Sultan-ahmet (main tourist area) and Jane's light fingers (not really) saw to the rest.
Turkey is a real jewel for the traveller in that it has a long history of being a fabulously wealthy and developed country, but has been laid low by the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire 80 years ago so that it is now a relatively cheap place to travel to with lots of amazing stuff to look at. Our hostel in Sultanahmet was situated about 200m from Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), a huge Cathedral built in just 6 years 1500 years ago when the Roman empire had relocated to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what was then Byzantia. With an immense domed roof (60m tall and 35m diameter) that has survived earthquakes, schisms, Crusaders and Muslamicists as well as a fair number of clergy just dying to be struck down by an appropriate act of God it is an incredible piece of work. Matched in some ways by the equally big but spring-chickenesque 400 year old Blue Mosque next door, and somewhat remarkably by the huge basilica cistern - a 1500 year old underground water storage tank just 100m from these two previous monuments and more than a hectare in area it lay hidden and forgotten for a thousand years without collapsing, now filled with a little water, massıve carp and Italian tourists.
We hung out in Istanbul for a few days while booking a tour for the rest of Turkey, filling in the rest of our time with a number of wholesome activities (given that drinking is so expensive here) including: A boat cruise up the Bosphorus (channel linking the Agean sea via the Dardenales channel and the inland Marmara sea to the Black sea). The Bosphorus is just 650m wide at narrowest and 35km long and has had tremendous strategic importance ever since trade began 5000 years ago separating Europe from Asia. It has remained one of the places to hang out and be seen for the despotic conquerer/empire builder on the move. We stopped to climb to the Yoros castle overlooking the Black sea entrance, pretty run down now 700 years after its heyday, a little rock climbıng required to get up on it. We were a lıttle chuffed to see this same castle being used in a turgid and incomprehensible soap-opera on the bus a few days later.
We also spent half a day at the Topkati palace in Sultanahmet, this was the home of the Ottoman rulers for hundreds and hundreds of years and is a huge shambles of walls and buildings now turned into a museum that houses some fascinating stuff, be it jewelry, weaponry (A 2m long greatsword!) or kitchens. The one catch is that in the bad old days was that to gain entrance to most of this stuff (particularly the harem) one could not be in possession of ones knob. That's right, shoes at the door and no dick's allowed. Actually even Turkish women were generally out of luck in getting in as it was illegal to turn a Turkish women into one of the Sultan's play-things, there being prohibitions in the Koran against enslaving or shagging muslim women, not that that extends to dirty infidels taken as slaves of course.
There was a further half a day wandering around the huge grand bazaar - many hectares of old streets and roads that have been roofed over for centuries and now houses huge numbers of shops selling clothing, jewelery and other sorts of useless crap that makes women all weak-kneed. However all hope was not lost, as just over the Golden Horn (an inlet off the Bosphorus) 1km away was a massive area of engineering shops selling huge varieties of male oriented stuff, including an underground mall full of gun shops that sold flick knives and automatic weapons. Not something you see every day in our ever-so civilized countries ('Merica excepted).
That's about it for Istanbul, we headed off for our tour of Turkey. First stop Gallipoli, very knowledgable guide from Anzac House, good tour, but personally pretty depressing. I won't try to be glib or sarcastıc about it. It was a popular war fought mainly by volunteers (on the English side at least) who wanted to see the world and had their heads filled with Jingoistıc crap that made it OK to kill the other guy (a view they generally lost very quickly when presented wıth the realities of war). But I fınd the sentiments espoused by the memorials hollow. Glory? Remembered Forever? Gave their lives for freedom? I see no glory in their deaths, we don't remember the names of the dead as much as their brothers who lived to a ripe old age, and it is hard to justify fighting for freedom in this campaign (Turkey only joined with Germany because Britain and Russia had decided that they were going to break up and take control of the Ottoman Empire post WW1). We won't be so willing to fight wars for money or land again will we? (OK so that was a little sarcastıc).
The saddest thing about Gallipoli, of which the world remains generally ignorant, is that it may be one of the main causes of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide in which the Turks and Kurds massacred 1-1.5 million Ethnic Armenians living in Turkey that the Turks decided in this time of strife (as their Ottoman Empire was dying), were potentially dangerous (Christian) sympathisers with the British. To that end Gallipolli's 120,000 armed and mainly volunteer soldiers killed is an insignificant sideshow to the greater tragedy it may have created.
There are many parallels between this Gallipoli conflict and the campaign some 3500 years earlier and 20km south on the other side of the Dardenales (narrow strait leading from the Agean to the Black sea) as the Greeks took on Troy. Similar heroics and heros (the Turkish leader who rose through the ranks at Gallipoli and saw off the Brits was Ataturk - father of modern Turkey. Just quietly he was born in Greece, though with the residual enmity between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus the Turks won't mention it), the same strategic goal (forget Helen's 1000-ship launchıng face, it was the entrance to the Dardenales, important because square rig sailing craft could only enter the Dardenales when winds were favorable), and of course same bloody body count. There are now monuments to the fallen on both sides of the Dardenales; near Troy there are two man made hills that have stood as monuments to the Greek victors for 3000 years, will Gallipoli's endure?
We stayed the night in Cannukale, a great seaside town near the narrowest point of the Dardenales and more strategically relevant in the last 2000 years since sailing techniques improved, and went on a tour of Troy a few kilometers away. Troy is a fascinating place; a slowly expanding city rebuilt about 10 times between 5500 years ago and 2000 years ago as it recovered from various cataclysms and wars, before it lost strategic relevance and was covered in dirt and lost for a Millenium. There is amazing detail to be seen in the small portions that have been excavated. Rough unhewn sloping stone walls in the 5000 year old bronze age era, tidy masonry from 3000 year old Homerıc era iron age tools, details and features that align with descriptions in Homer's Illiad. Standıng at the spot where King Priam likely watched Archilles kill his son Hector, Wow. No they haven't found a horse, but they have the mock-up from the 2004 movie on the waterfront in Cannukale, besides which the horse is generally thought to have been a seige engine for knocking over the tall vertical mud brick walls that sat atop the cruder sloping stone foundation walls of Troy. So much for legends and warnings about greeks bearing gifts, it's a good bet the guys in Troy saw that one coming. Troy is a real treasure and deserves a look in at least once in a lifetime.
Next stop: (after an 18hr bus ride!) Cappadocia.
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