Lost on the Way to Armenia

 Tbilisi, Georgia. I had heard it's a nice place, but wow. Affordable, modern, historic, eclectic, creative, artistic...What's not to love? The country is bordered by Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and the Black Sea. The Caucus mountains dominate the border with Russia, all the way to sea level. There's glaciers and palm trees, all in a country a little larger than Massachusetts. I'm starting to really like this place.  Other countries erect monuments to soldiers, generals, military leaders. In Tbilisi's parks we find Rustavel, a poet. Lado Guliashvili, a painter. Giorgi Chanturia, politician and proponent of non violence. Sulkhan Orbeliani, story teller, teacher, politician.  Seeing Soviet era infrastructure and architecture is to be expected. Blocky, gray, concrete, cheaply built, often decaying. They ruled here in the 1920s. But there is also much wonderful, classic architecture, with ornate balcony railings, caricatures car...

We have spent the past two months traveling across Turkiye, starting in the west and moving, somewhat stochastically, ever eastward toward Armenia.  As most of you, if you have read any of the previous posts, know that I have a heritage of Armenian ancestry in Turkey.  As we moved eastward from the western parts of the country towards the central and eastern regions, I began, oddly enough, to feel "more at home".  Turkey is a large country.  It's 1,000 miles across, about the distance of Boston to Chicago.  It's 400 miles wide from south to north, about the distance of Boston to Washington, DC.  Just like in the USA, there are different cultural "feels" to specific regions.  Moving into the central and eastern parts of the country brought us into contact with people more similar to my family.  In Elazig and Sivas as well as in Malatya and Erzincan, it seemed like every other person on the street looked like my dad or my grandparents on his side....

Turkey has a storied past. We visited the archeological museum in Kars, the eastern-most city in Turkey. We've been experiencing similar discontinuities in museums and archeological ruins in other locations here.  The Silk Road came through here, and also through Armenia to the east. And a major hub of that trade network was centered in Greece. Like the Oregon Trail in the US, it was not one pathway. It also wandered through Georgia, Persia, Russia and some aquatic routes. It carried much more than silk and spices and pottery and other physical trade goods. It mixed people, brought slaves and livestock, transported ideas and religions, and occasionally brought diseas Over thousands of years, what it left behind was a patchwork of peoples holding different languages, religions, cultures, styles of dress, music, food, and so much more. Ironically instead of mixing with each other and growing and learning, they all hated each other and would routinely go out and wage war on each other...

Nobody visits Karaman as a tourist. It's a agricultural town, famous for apples. It sits at about a thousand meters elevation. Sprawling concrete apartment boxes. A hundred km from Konya, home of Rumi. Ah, but east of here is the town of Taşkale, the Manazan Mağaraları caves, and Inescu. And while there are no busses, and it's well off the tourist trail, it's worth visiting. Fortunately our hotel front desk knows of a taxi driver that we could hire for the whole day. Sold! At 9:00 our ride shows up. He's expecting typical tourists. We get in and off we go. His English is sketchy so we're making good use of Google Translate and a proprietary in-ear translation earbud called “EarDance”. Kristen tells him about her ancestors from Turkey, from Harput, Malatya and Azerbaijan, and that we're traveling all over Turkey exploring where those connections are. Soon enough we arrive at the Manazan Mağaraları caves. These date from 300-500 AD, or about 1400 years ago, simila...

June 7 Konya, The land of the Whirling Dervishes After a 10 hour bus ride from Malatya west and south across rugged mountains and long stretches of green farmland plains, we arrived, hot tired and ready to just relax in our Air BnB into the city of Konya. Once the beating drum of the Ottoman Seljuk Empire, it is now a city of whirling dervishes and tranquil parks, where the saffron glow of the day dissolves into cobalt nights. From the towering Alaeddin Mosque to the mystic legacy of Rumi, Konya is a bridge between the ancient past the modernity of the present day. From the main bus terminal, we donned our backpacks and walked the short distance to the modern tramway that whisked us into the heart of Konya, and, as it happens, only a few short blocks from our Air Bnb. The next morning, we made our way to the Aladdin Keykubad Mosque. Built on Aladdin Hill, it dates back to the 12 th century and serves as a spiritual anchor for the city. The Mosque itself is quite a pilgrimage sit...

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. The 12 hour overnight bus ride from Ankara to Elazig was miserably uncomfortable. The taxi driver from the b...