Antep, Urfa, and Mardin

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September 8th 2011

Published: September 20th 2011

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AshCS

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Thy Gypsy Girl is the most famous mosaic in Antep because of the way the eyes follow you when you move. Some say it's a portrait of Alexander the great, though. I wonder if he would be happy to hear that.

Hitchhike to Gaziantep: 5 cars?
I am going to break this down because this will give you an idea of our hitchiking experience in southeastern Turkey.
Goreme to Gaziantep, home of the best baklava in Turkey.
Car 1
A young guy who was making labored breathing sounds as he drove and dropped us in the middle of the town he was going to instead of by the highway. Oh well. Thanks for the ride. We walked a k or so through town and this Turk who had worked in France and spoke pretty damn good French saw us as we passed by and pointed us in the right direction. Only reason I point out the incident is that this happens all the time (with various different languages). Turks are natural linguists. But I have yet to speak to a Turk in Japanese.
2 - Truck driver with his kid. Nice guy, he insisted on rambling on to us in Turkish (somewhat frustratedly) even though we understood pretty much none of what he was saying. His kid laughed. Wish we knew more Turkish.
3 - Guy and his buddy with excellent English. He was infectiously friendly and we chatted for a long

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while. He told us his background was Sufi. He was an advocate of peace and religious/cultural tolerance. Fitting, because he tolerated a verbal beating from his friend at the end of our ride. I'm not sure what the beef was (maybe that he barreling down the highway while talking on his cell phone?) but he was noticeably down by the time we got off and we let him go without getting a picture. 😞
4 - Truck drivers again, a very slow vehicle, but I somewhat unconsciously dubbed them The Odd Couple. We bumbled through sporadic conversations in hackneyed Turkish, English, Arabic, charades. We stopped for an Iftar meal, which was very tasty, and I made a faux pas in paying me and Ash's tab before one of the drivers got a chance. He was not happy. I apologized and played the dumb foreigner card.
Truck drivers (all of whom have been Kurds so far) have been very, very hospitable to us and have paid for some or all meals/tea breaks. They're very friendly and take excellent care of us, to the point that we feel a guilty/humbled by their generosity/care. More generally, people are careful to make sure we

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are getting to where we're going, often walking us over to buses and communicating with locals to coordinate other rides/transport, or calling their friends who they say speak English (by which they mean "this guy knows three words more than I do" to interpret for them. The friend always wants to know where we are going, and no one believes that we are fine being dropped off here, thanks, we can make our way into the city from here...).
5 - Had to get a long way from the edge of the city to the center of town. We stopped at the toll booth coming off the highway and the guy there waved down a ride for us to the bus station. Notably, the kid riding shotgun totally facepalmed when toll guy asked them to get us to the bus station. That's ok, adolescents' feelings (too many, too confused) and opinions (poorly developed) don't count. You're helping the dorky-looking yabanci (foreigners) with their oversized backpacks, whether you like it or not. Actually, he helped us very courteously with our bags at the other end, so maybe he was facepalming out of shyness?
6 - Got on a bus downtown, yet

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another French speaking Turk helped us out and even went out of his way to come with us and help us get to our hotel and negotiate a price (no, he was not a tout).
Unrealistic helpfulness. I will definitely be a nicer guy to tourists in Vancouver now, and probably to strangers in general.
Antep:
It's a big city, lots of energy downtown, hard to get in and out of by hitchiking, has a nice big park. The culinary capital of Turkey.
Mosaic museum - Fantastic. Beautiful, well-preserved roman mosaics barely rescued before a dam was constructed which flooded the site they came from. Some parts of mosaics had even been pilfered by artifact dealers and then were returned to the collection.They reside in a new museum which opened only a month or so ago and is only half open. They are still building a lot of the exhibits, but it is worth going to see the mosaics themselves. Entrance is only 3TL so it's not a rip-off either way. The museum itself is built behind the train station, so we had to scramble accross the tracks to get there. Strange place.
Baklava (Gullogulu?) - Excellent. Antep is the

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Dried peppers and aubergine in the market.

true home of baklava. Baklava where you can taste the pastry and pistachios, and not overly sweetened. Crunchily tender. It all makes sense now.
Lamacun - Really tasty. A kind of Turkish thin-crust pizza. with ground meat (usually lamb?), finely diced peppers, onions, garlic, and probably some spices.
Cookie shop - good cookies. We bought way too many. Ate some before lunch, packed the rest and brought them to Urfa where we gave them to a street urchin. More on that later.
Guitar shop - Lame. I spent half an hour playing new guitars that all sucked and couldn't stay in tune. They might as well have been made of plastic. I found one little old steel-string with good sound and action but the tuning pegs were f-d up. They warned me it was old, I pointed to my ear and said "But good!" They shrugged. Guitars sound better as they age. And they have more character. It was cute as hell. I should have bought the damn thing.
Iftar meal - Piss poor. Way overpriced, not tasty. Not even a little. Antep is supposed to be the gastronomic capital of Turkey. WTF, Antep?
We got the cuss out after

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two nights. Onto...
Urfa!
For a city that has a name reminsicent of a stifled fart, Urfa is pretty cool. But it is hot as balls this time of year. This is not an exaggeration, since I have just come from summer teaching in Saudi Arabia, where it is up to 55 degrees. Doing anything between the hours of 11 and 3 pm in Urfa was somewhat trying. We mostly took it easy while in town during midday.
Supposedly they tried to burn the prophet Ibrahim here, but the coals turned into fish. Abraham was subsequently hurled down the mountain, but then landed safely on a bed of roses, unofficially becoming the world's first base jumper. There is a pond and channels at the bottom where the coal-cum-fish still swim around, and are considered to be sacred (supposedly anyone who fishes from the pond will go blind). It is forbidden to hurt them in any way, unless an excess of food is harmful. Tourists (Turkish ones) wander the park, hang out, and fatten the fish all day. It's pretty atmospheric; the park is surrounded by a few nice mosques, and a castle towers overhead on the mountain, which is nicely

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lit at night. We sat our first night drinking tea and looking at the pond and the castle. We also gave our leftover cookies and baklava from Gaziantep to a beggar woman and her little girl. The little girl was evidently puzzled when I shoved the whole box into her tiny hands. The mother made a wailing sound. Hopefully a wail of delight? The woman didn't seem to be all there, and she and her daughter had definitely had a hard life. I'm glad the cookies made them happy. (Aside: During Ramadan you're not supposed to refuse beggars.)
The next day we ate some kebap. We hung out at our hostel with some other travelers (notably Quan and Tom, both lawyers, one from NY and one from UK who met a week earlier and became fast friends), wandered some backstreets, nearly got lost, and were annoyed by local children. They all yell 'hello!' at any foreigner they see and follow. It's cute for the first 5 minutes, but after a while it makes you insane. We climbed the castle, enjoyed the park some more.
We did a couple of day trips out of Urfa. One to Harran, a place with

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an awesome, very explorable castle and beehive-style houses, a style of construction thought to be many thousands of years old. We went with Tom and Quan. The cool thing about Turkey is that there are no guard rails anywhere, so you can climb to the top of old castles, three storeys up, and go right to the edge of the tower to look down. There are also sink holes through the floor large enough to swallow a small child. But kids here seem to be more resilient for it. Mind you, they are also a little feral. Our first day we sat at the top of the large hill in Urfa, near the castle, and watched little kids throw rocks off the edge onto the people down below. It was a few minutes before their parents bothered to stop them. They even managed to throw a few far enough to land in the courtyard of the mosque. I hope they didn't hit anyone, or if they did that it was at least comedically timed; "Please give me a sign..." THUD!
We also did a tour to Nemrut Dag, a mountain with fantastic views where a crazy ruler had large stone

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sculptures of many deities built (Greek and otherwise). The bodies are somewhat destroyed/discombobulated but the heads remain, some in very good condition. There are more anthropomorphic gods as well as birds, lions, etc. Some are highly detailed and combine different styles of sculpture.
We stopped at some other sites on the way, including the massive Ataturk dam (the one that flooded the lake from which they rescued the mosaics in Antep), the river Euphrates, which is a beautiful clear blue color, a Roman bridge, and Arsameia, the site of an old palace where there are still various stelae. In an early example of state propaganda, there is a well-preserved stela of Mithridates I and Heracles/Ares jerking each other off, indicating their mutual recognition, affection, respect, and most importantly, Heracles' divine sanction of Mithridates'... authority. (Ok, they were only shaking hands. But still. They were naked and definitely reaching crotchwards.)
It was a very, very long drive, and our little cube-car struggled up the hill (the driver brought water, which he periodically poured into the grill) but worth it when we finally got to the stone heads at the top of Nemrut. We watched the sun set over the plethora of

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Dried peppers and aubergine in the market.

stone heads atop the mountain. All we had been provided with for lunch and dinner was cheese melted on bread, now hours cold, and a melon. We busted out some emergency almonds and the other two guys on the tour (a really nice Spanish/UK couple) provided some biscuits. We piled back into the car (which smelled like wet shoes) for the four-hour ride back to Urfa.
Utterly exhausting, a shining example of what we've been calling box-ticking, getting a bunch of sight seeing and activities done without proper concern/time for actually being there and enjoying it, or doing something just for the sake of just being able to say you've done it or to get a good picture. That being said, I still did enjoy it a lot, but would have liked to have taken it a little slower, enjoyed the fantastic sights.
I should mention something about our quirky driver. He was sixty something or other, would go "Om..." and feign a more Eastern thank you, and he also enjoyed giving us options which were totally obvious. "We are stop here at hill, you look at the view take photos." There were three very obvious paths going around and

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Pigeon helps to flavour the lentils, or so I'm told.

over the small hill. "You can go left, right, or over the hill." Wow. Choose your own adventure.
He also constantly said, "Follow my finger" when pointing to places of importance (or of not-so importance):
Driver: Up there is castle of .
Evon: Yes, I see castle.
Driver: Follow my finger.
Evon: Yes, it's a wonderful castle.
Driver: Follow my finger.
Evon: I don't need to follow your finger, I can already see the castle! Actually, I'm pretty much done looking at the castle at this point.
Driver (to Ashley): Excuse me, he is not listening! Make spouse listen!"
Evon: I can see the fuggin' castle already! Yes, it's a castle!"
Driver: No, it's not. You not see properly, it's castle with a finger pointed at it. Dummy.
Oh, and let's not forget the classic: "Thank you driver" routine, where he prompts us to thank him for everything:
Driver: Here is toilet we stop make water. Thank you driver! Ohmm... (making prayer gesture). Follow my finger. Thank you driver!
Evon (exhausted): Thank you driver.
Ashley: You're welcome?
Sadly, he was also responsible for our crummy cheese bread lunch/dinner (bought at his cousin's restaurant, for twice what it was

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These are the little terrors who were throwing rocks off the edge of the castle hill.

worth, because he swore there were no other restaurants open even though there were three within spitting distance... oh well. Thank you anyway driver.)

Mardin
We hitchhiked to Mardin, with the same great help as before.
Mardin is a beautiful little town on a hillside erupting out of a vast plain. It's touristy but mostly in a good way, it still feels like a real town, it has not been totally Mickey Mousified (that is, real townspeople still do some real things that have nothing to do with tourism where tourists hang out). It has old buildings and mosques. We didn't tick many boxes in Mardin. We did go to an old Hamam (Turkish bath house) that is supposed to date back to roman times for a scrub, but Ash says it wasn't the ultimate Hamam experience (very short). I still enjoyed it though, had a layers or two of old skin scrubbed off me. It sounds disgusting but feels great. We went to a museum. Mostly we just enjoyed walking around town and drinking tea, enjoying the view. Perhaps most notably, we ran into a Vancouverite, Cole, who is into acting is best friends with a drama/jock guy

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(Steve Baert, the star of a popular BCIT bus ad) who I went to high school with. Ashley also knows some drama people Cole knows. In any case, it's just odd to have run into him in Mardin, of all the gin joints. He's the only foreign tourist we met (and almost the only one we saw) there. Most people don't venture that far east in Turkey, because the PKK will supposedly get you, as Laurren wrote to warn us when she found out we were there.
Anyway, after a couple of nights in Mardin, we decided we were tired of culture and just wanted to go to the beach to chill for a few days, and get some proper sleep. We got lucky and caught a very long ride to Mersin (Eastern Mediterranean)with a couple of truck drivers (again) who were very generous and extremely helpful (again). We are now in Kizilkalesi, a relatively small beach town with a castle you can swim out to. It's a little campy and touristy, but local touristy, and being September now, things have calmed down a bit. We got a pretty nice little room with a balcony and are gonna stay at

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least two nights. Yesterday we swam to the castle (the water is unbelievably warm, you could stay in it all day) and today we are relaxing. There is a host of touristy hings we could do, from parasailing to renting seadoos to riding on one of those big banana-shaped floaties that gets pulled behind a speedboat. Most likely, though, we will be lazy today and productive tomorrow.

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