Lost on the Way to Armenia

Early June. Elazig. Kristen's grandmother was born in Harput, just up the road from Elazig. At age 5, perhaps 4, her parents were killed as part of the Armenian Genocide. As an orphan she, with many other orphans, walked across the Syrian Desert and eventually onto a ship to the United States. But I'll let her tell that story. It's very emotional. The town of Elazig lies in the southeastern part of Turkey. There is irrigated land all around, growing fruit: grapes, apricot, white mulberries, plums, peaches, and more. The province of Elazig is also home to many mines, including copper, cobalt, manganese, marble, feldspar, lead, tin, and a bit of silver, and even less of gold. In an earlier post I commented how similar were all the cities that we stayed in were. We've broken that pattern, if only slightly. In the cities in western Turkey, every block had several shops selling Doner (like a Greek gyro sandwich), Kebap (shish kebab), and Lamacun (lamajun, sometimes call...

June 1 I wasn't ready emotionally to feel what I did in this part of the trip and that's where this story gets interesting. Grandma was born in Turkey just prior to the Armenians being extirpated from the country. My dad's side of the family was said to be of Armenian descent so, naturally, I believed that all my relatives were obviously from Armenia. I could not have been MORE wrong. My grandparents and my great grandparents from my dad's side of the family were all from south-central Turkey and lived in and around the towns of Harput and the cities of Elazig and Malatya. It was quite the surprise to me to wander down the family ancestry tree and learn that they were from cities in Turkey and not from anywhere near modern day Armenia. Of course I needed to visit the towns they were from and that's where we headed to next on our tour of the country. About to board a bus for a 12 hour overnight trip to the birthplace of my grandma The 12 hour overnight bus ...

 Along Turkey's north coast  Limestone cliffs descend  In tourism we're engrosed  Watch the fashion trends Black Sea gently rolls  Tourists and buskers mingle  Trinket shops extol Hoping for coins to jingle. Amasra the town is named  Twas once Roman then was Greek  It's Turkish now reframed  Of history we shall not speak Looking at the view  Enjoying restaurant eats  Jostling tourists too  Stroll up and down the streets. Amasra. It's a pretty little town. Neat concrete apartments, supported by throngs of tourists from Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir and other cities in Turkey. Very little tourism comes from outside these borders. Speaking English with very little Turkish is a serious handicap. We're getting proficient with our translation apps though. We've been in tourist towns all around the world, and similarities abound. Small shops open for long hours, many of them selling the same trinkets as their neighbor. As if someon...

May 26 We're in Ankara, Turkey. This is the capitol of the country as well the financial and administrative hub of the country. It's also the place where I would have my cataract surgery. What? Yes. One of the reasons for coming to Ankara was to take advantage of the excellent medical capabilities and technologies that also place this country in high repute by foreign travelers seeking medical care. The cost is significantly lower than in the states. In fact, the cost to have my eyes done with new state of the art lenses would have been $14,000. The same procedure with the same equipment here in Turkey was $6,000. I got my cataract surgery done in Turkey Meanwhile Gary got some dermatology surgery done. One visit was all it took, and $1400. In the US it would've been three separate visits: a GP, dermatology consultation, and the surgery, spaced a month apart if you're lucky. With separate bills for each. All this to get a dermatological cyst removed? How a...

  Gary here.  I first learned of the existence of Cappadacia in about 2010. I was doing research on bicycling around the world, which I managed to do one quarter of, but that's another story. So I was reading other cyclist's journals. People have been just about everywhere on this planet upon a bicycle and written wonderful stories of what they saw and did and experienced. A couple cycled across Turkey and stopped in Goreme, the gateway town for this place. Being touring cyclists and aficionados of stealth camping, they spent the night in a cave. I was fascinated. This place immediately went on my bucket list. So here we are in Ankara, and Goreme is a three hour bus ride away, so why not! So, just what is Cappadacia? During the Miocene, nearby volcanoes spewed out tremendous volumes of ash and small rocks. It settled on the land, still hot, and as it cooled it solidified into tuff. Tuff can be anywhere from impenetrable to fluffy, and this massive deposit was just right. Har...

Gary's post. It's about the 10 th of May. We're in Eskişehir Turkey and I'm sharing here an observation that I've had thoughts of before, but here it coalesced. Homogeneity. Erasure. Culture. I've seen plenty of it in the US. Sure, the downtown area of Portland, Maine is quite different from New Orleans or St. Augustine or Charleston. But head out into the suburbs and you cannot tell which downtown you happen to be near. They're the same. The same fast food. The same big box stores. The same failing mini-malls. The same car dealerships. The same little league diamonds. The same suburban churches.   Walk the sidewalks here in Eskişehir or Izmir or Kusadasia, and there are jewelry stores, shoe stores, green grocers, a shop selling nuts and dried fruit, another with bread and pastries, or kabobs and doners (wraps, like a gyro), clothing, etc. It's all very different from a pedestrian way in the US, but here, it just repeats. Sure there's an area which ...

Our time with our host, Yasin, in Izmir was coming to a close.  We had one more day together, albeit a rainy one, and spent most of it hanging out with him and his friend, Eren from Istanbul.  We prepared and collected the necessities for a "picnic" and headed out to the waterfront of Izmir using an "under the table" Uber service to arrive at a pier with hundreds of small fishing boats tied up.  Scruffy Turkish men of considerable age occasionally appeared as we sauntered along the pier as the biting wind and the drizzle fell from a gray, overcast sky.  As we passed, they seem undisturbed and never looked up as they mended fishing nets or spliced rope while sitting on makeshift chairs derived from various objects related to the fishing trade they were part of. Fishing boats dating the pier in Izmir Fisherman men's his net   At the end of the pier, about a 5 minute walk from where we had been dropped off, a structure appeared.  Some tables were lined outside...