Taking the long way

So, my last post left off on the way to Canakkale. Canakkale is the jumping-off point for both Troy and Gallipoli, but because we only had a week, we were skipping Gallipoli. We got in past midnight; the bus ride down was kind of nice, as the bus drove down the Gelibolu Peninsula before taking a ferry to Canakkale, and the bus itself was new and had satellite television instead of a DVD player. So we got to catch up on our Turkish news and soap operas.
Monday morning bright and early we struck out from our hotel to the minibus garage, where we hopped a bus for Truva (Troy, in Turkish). After a decent 30-minute ride through villages and along the coast, we arrived at the front gates, where we bought a ticket, flashed my MuzeKart, and walked down the access road to the excavation house and large wooden Trojan Horse model. It was a little tacky-wonderful, and had a cabin/playhouse thing built on top of its back. It would have made for a pretty awesome treehouse. D and I headed in, and started down the one path that didn't have Japanese tour groups. We ambled for a bit between bluffs and ancient stone walls helpfully labelled with "IV", "II", and "VII" to indicate which Trojan city that particular section was from. After rounding a bend, we got to the good parts: the Trench, where the German-American explorer who discovered the site bulldozed through most of the top cities to get to the Troy II layer, and temple remains, and city walls and entrance ramps. The interpretation was pretty decent, with explanatory signs up every so often. We were trying to take in everything, which wasn't quite the pace the tour groups were setting, so we ended up alternately caught up in a group and passed by them a few times over. About halfway through the winding path, we noticed a branching-off path with a small sign that said "CAVE" with an arrow. Naturally we had to check that out, so we wandered down to this little wooded area with a manmade cave that was probably used for water storage and later other storage. It was really pretty, and set off a bit from the main site. On our way back to the entrance of the site, we made a quick backtrack to see the main gate, which we'd somehow completely missed the first time 'round. Then it was back to the main entrance, where we killed time waiting for the minibus by checking out the 2 open gift stalls (it was clearly not the high season: there were perhaps 2 dozen stalls, but only the 2 were open). We could have bought many, many Trojan Horses, in a variety of sizes. What an opportunity...

Back in Canakkale, we wandered through town to the bus station, where we picked up tickets to Izmir before heading back to the waterfront, stopping en route to pick up some borek for a light on-the-bus lunch. We had time to check out Canakkale's Trojan Horse before we left, which was much more gritty and impressive than Troy's version: it was a prop from the Hollywood movie Troy, released a few years ago.

We trundled off to Izmir on an afternoon bus that got in a little later than we'd expected, and hopped a servis shuttle to Buca, the area of town where my Fulbright friend Deirdre lives. She's an English teacher at one of the universities in Izmir, and had offered to let us stay the night. We met up with Deirdre and stopped by her gorgeous flat to drop off our things before heading out for lahmacun and pide. We had a great evening catching up and chatting over wine and baklava, before heading off to bed so we could catch our flight the next morning.

Tuesday morning, we bade farewell to Deirdre and set off once again to Izmir's airport. We flew from Izmir to Adana, which was wonderful as a bus ride between the two would have been probably 12-14 hours. Not all that fun. We landed in balmy Adana and went straight to the bus station, where we hopped a bus for Antakya. A short 2 hours later, we disembarked in downtown Antakya and wound our way through the side streets to the Catholic Church, where we'd planned to stay the night. Antakya gets quite a few pilgrims passing through, so the Catholic Church in town has rooms for travellers that are really nice, and not very spendy (I can't recommend it highly enough, everyone should spend a few days in Antakya at the Catholic Church). I'd stayed there before, when I was in town in August for the Armenian festival in Vakiflikoy. When we walked in the courtyard, the place was teeming with Italian tourists, but we sat down and chatted with some of the Turkish kids that always seem to be in the courtyard til things quieted down somewhat. We spoke with the priest to arrange our room, dropped off our bags, and headed out to this hole-in-the-wall restaurant that I'd remembered as being excellent. The place is called "Hummuscu ve Baklaci", and it has 2 items on the menu, hummus and bakla. D's a vegetarian, so a place that didn't even have meat on the menu was a good choice. We walked in and ordered one of each, to split. The owner made both the hummus and the bakla from scratch in front of us. I'll spare the hummus details, as it's pretty well-known, but bakla is a thinner spread made chiefly from mashed bakla beans stewed in I believe oil, then mixed with spices, hot peppers, lemon, tahini, and garnished with pickled vegetables and tomatoes. They were both delicious. Fully sated, D and I wandered through the central part of town, along the river, to the bazaar district. I had been hoping to pick up another pair of the mad awesome pajama pants I'd found in Antakya in August, but they were nowhere to be found, so I settled for buying a shoulder bag, as mine gave up somewhere around Izmir. D found some decent scarves, and we had a nice chat with the headscarf shop employees before heading back to the Catholic Church. We'd intended to chill for a bit before heading back out to grab a late dinner, but ended up just falling asleep; after all, we'd travelled something like 1000 miles just that day. In the morning, we went out in search of breakfast and ended up in this tiny basement tostcu in a dilapidated business center, where we had the best egg sandwiches outside of West Africa. The lady running the shop wasn't quite sure what to do with 2 yabancis in her shop, and was quite anxious to hear what we thought of our sandwiches--we reassured her that they had been delicious and huge. After breakfast, we headed to the Antakya Museum, where we wandered through the impressive collection of mosaics, before grabbing our bags and heading to the Church of St. Peter. This is the first physical Christian church in the world, and is where the term 'Christian' was first used. I had tried to visit it in August, but it was closed. This time, we were able to take a dolmus most of the way there, but still ended up dragging our luggage up the winding road to the church's hillside perch. When we got there, the ticketseller said "Oh, I watched you guys struggle up the whole way; why didn't you drive?" We got our tickets (this was also a MuzeKart site, as was the Antakya Muze; that card was a Very Good Procurement) and entered the church. It was really nice and quiet, as we were the only visitors, and quite small: the original church had been added to by the Crusaders, who gave it a front wall with some pretty blatantly Crusader-era decoration. The interior had a spring in one corner, fragments of mosaics and frescoes, and an escape hole out the back, so that celebrants could get out if the nonCatholics in town decided to round them up during services. It was all pretty simple, of course, but just impressive with the weight of history. We stuck around for a bit to take photos and watch the city of Antakya, which spread out from the foot of the hill.

Once down from the Church of St. Peter, we walked back to a main road and grabbed a dolmus to the bus station. From there, we grabbed a bus headed to Aleppo, but that will have to wait for the next post. I have photos of the Istanbul part of our trip, as well as some of the Troy portion, up on Flickr; inshallah I'll get the rest up soon!
kib,
-R