Lost on the Way to Armenia

May 5. Eskişehir. By Gary Winter has returned, especially at higher elevations. We left Izmir yesterday by bus, five hours, up and over some mountain passes where temperatures dropped to 6C and there were a few centimeters of snow on the ground. It won't last as today warmed up a bit and tomorrow even more.  Riding the bus helped me realize how very rugged not just this country but all of Europe is. Taking the cruise ship along the coast of Spain, France, Italy and Greece showed a mountainous coastline. Our month traveling Spain two years ago and France last year showed us a deeply crenelated topography. Dr. Suess (no, not that Dr. Seuss, notice the spelling) aka Edward Suess 1831-1914 from Austria noticed the same thing.  A chain of mountains including the Atlas in Morocco, the Pyrenees in Spain, the Alps, all of Turkey, Caucusus, Hindu Kush, Himalayas, and all the way to Indonesia. Not only that, but he looked at fossils in those mountains and correlated them to what other ...

May 4  Travel to another country means strange foods, strange customs and just a few items from some bizarre alternate universe.  Sometimes these seeming oddities are easily observed and other times they sneak up on you when you find yourself committing some social faux-pas and recognizing it only after everyone has given you an odd look, called you out for it or yelled at you.  Let's run through some of these and see what you think..... Canary Islands, Spain We're taking the public bus around Tenerife and Gary and I are waiting at the bus stop just as the next bus arrives.  The bus is a shuttle bus because they are doing some kind of track work on the trolley line so we have to take a shuttle bus.  It's free so we don't have to pay.  The bus pulls up to the bus stop and the front and rear doors open to let people off and, I assume, to let people on.  As a matter of efficiently moving people, in Boston, if all doors open for a free shuttle bus, you jus...

It is well known to many and likely to you, the dear reader, that the lands that include the present country of Turkey were inhabited and occupied by many nations over the years.  Some of the more recent occupants have been the Greeks, the Armenians, the Kurdish, various Syrian Peoples and others.  While it is not the purpose of this post to provide a detailed history of what has become known as present day Turkey, I instead intend to point out what we have seen and what is relevant to our visit to the coastal Mediterranean city of Izmir. As you likely know from previous history lessons or from my recent post on our visit within Turkey to the ancient Greek City of Ephesus, you are well aware that the coastal portions of Turkey were occupied in whole or in part at one time by the Greeks.  Over time, and with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the Greeks were relieved of these places.  Present day Istanbul was once known as the Greek city of Constantinople and the ci...

May 3, Izmir. By Gary North along the coast is the city of Izmir, once called Smyrna, our next destination. Unfortunately we both have come down with flues, which hampers our ability to get up and get out and about in the morning. This too shall pass. Izmir is much bigger than Kusadasia, and is built around a very nice harbor. It too has ancient Roman ruins, and when the other two silted in, Smyrna continued on. Empires rise and fall, and after the Romans came the Ottoman Turks with a large empire over much of Arabia plus Turkey and other areas at various times. By the 1900s, their empire was dwindling. The final straw came when Greece tried to re-take western Turkey through the port of Smyrna, known as the Grecco-Turkish war. They advanced many miles inland but were turned back by Turkish forces. The Greeks were Christian, as were the Armenians, who lived in villages throughout what is now Turkey, so the Armenians aligned themselves with the Greeks. Around this same time t...