Mission Accomplished

So the quest was successful. We got to Göbekli Tepe and that is where it should end, right? Well not quite. After our stay in Antalya, a fabulous road trip where we saw some really mind-blowing sights and met some interesting characters, and after we Tepe’d (here I make up a convenient verb), there was so much more to see on the long road home. Let’s start with Şanlıurfa, where there is a great souq, and where we really lucked-out on the hotel. The Turkmen Konagi is run by Burak and his Dad, Kamil. I can give you two very good reasons to visit this hotel and these will be enough to make you want to stay there should you ever find yourself in Şanlıurfa:

The Roof Terrace

It has the best view in town. You look down over the city rooftops where people sometimes sleep, towards Damlacik Hill opposite, topped by the castle that is still nearly still standing and a couple of Roman Pillars are silhouetted against the horizon. Below and to the right is the citadel to one side, a ramshackle desert-coloured splash of old houses. To the left is a mosque with two minarets, one clad in scaffolding after damage from the earthquake.

Between them, under the hill, lies Gölbaşı. This area commemorates the Prophet Ibrahim (PBUH), who was born in a cave over there, where his mother hid him for fifteen years from the Assyrian King Nimrod. Nimrod was told that a new leader had been born but failed to sort it despite having all newborns killed. But eventually he caught up with Ibrahim (PBUH). Nimrod threw him into a fire, but the fire turned to water and the coals to fish. So he threw him off the hill, but he landed in a bed of roses and came out without so much as a scratch. This is why today it is a holy site for Muslims. And why there are two large rectangular pools filled with fish backed by an iconic arcaded wall where lots of people are taking pictures of each other. But don’t try to catch a carp here. If you eat one, you will go blind, it is said. And there are carp-food sellers, trinket shops and a rose garden and the Mevlid-i-Halil Cave you can visit and cash dispensers and cafes where you can try the delicious menengiç kahvesi (a sort of coffee made from roasted pistachio beans) so good you end up having it twice.

I watched the sunrise one morning from the terrace.

The Vibe

Our room at the Turkmen Konagi is an 800-year-old chamber with a vaulted ceiling. In the courtyard is a 2000-year-old well whose water is still sweet and pure.  I know this: Kamil insisted I try it a from the chilled bottle he kept in his fridge. Breakfast is taken in the 800-year-old cellar, where you can also hide and shelter and find yourself safe from earthquakes like Kamil and Burak recently did. Kamil tells us to take whatever we want from the fridge to drink, just remember what you had and tell us at the end. Kamil loves the city, which he describes as a ‘mosaic’ of Turkish, Syrian, Armenian and Kurdish cultures, all happily coexisting. ‘While you are here’ he tells us, ‘this is your home.’ 

We spent our last afternoon, walking miles in a failed attempt to get Stu a Şanlıurfa football shirt for his collection. As usual, when we got back, Kamil sent us up to the terrace to enjoy the view and brought us some tea. He did this whenever we came back to the hotel. When we told Kamil about our afternoon, he regaled us with stories about his days as a referee and then phoned Burak to go out in a taxi and get one. Burak texted back with a photo to check the size and that the price was ok. In this way, Stu got his shirt, or rather shirts – he ended up with the home and away kits. The team had just won promotion to the top tier of Turkish football. Kamil was delighted and insisted on a photo of us wearing the shirts, and him, in front of their hotel.

In the Turkmen Konagi, we meet an American couple: Jack and his Japanese/American wife, Tomoko. It is not unusual for me to bond quickly to outrageously friendly Americans I meet on my travels. Jack and Tomoko are no exception. Mild-mannered, polite, softly spoken and fiercely intelligent, Jack speaks what seems like fluent Turkish (as well as Japanese and French). He has a shock of agreeably unruly white hair, and a lively glint in his eye, giving him the appearance of a mad professor. This is unsurprising. He is actually a professor. Of linguistics. But certainly not mad. I knew I’d like Jack almost immediately. We got talking about our respective ex-leaders. ‘The thing about Boris is that he’s clever,’ he tells me. ‘I watched him on a debate about whether Ancient Greece or Rome was the greater civilisation. And he was smart. Trump is just all about himself. But you’re right: they are peas in a pod. Compulsive liars.’ Jack was brought up in Turkey. His dad had worked for the State Department in the US Embassy in Ankara (the standard assumption is that he was a spy). Tomoko has an interest in Graham Hancock, so we had a lot to talk about. She finds herself a bit of a curiosity in Turkey as someone from right over the other side of Asia and people marvel about how far she must have travelled and are interested to talk to her about how and why she finds herself here. Jack is shortly coming out of retirement to take up a position in a University in Georgia after extended visits to Cyprus and France (Lyon, where Stu and I did our year abroad during our degree). We get to chatting about the restaurants in Lyon and the merits of French food, but not of the offal ‘andouillette’ sausages (made from pork intestines) and how squeamish people like us are about such foods. Tomoko smiles as she reminisces about brain soup (soup, that is, with a whole pig’s brain in it) or live fish. ‘We eat just about anything, if it is cooked well,’ she laughs.

Mount Nemrut – a Self-Obsessed Royal

We’re not talking about the House of Windsor here: we are talking about a long day trip out of Şanlıurfa to visit Mount Nemrut, the memorial to King Antiochus.  The road took us through Andiyaman, which has been badly damaged by the earthquake and looks like the result of a bombing raid.  Stairwells are collapsed and open to the skies. Outer walls have been shaken out and shops and business on the ground floor of the apartment blocks are abandoned.  At the edge of town is a new town of tents and shipping containers where people are now living.

Way up in the mountains, in a small village under an impressive hilltop castle, a man waves us down. He asks us to take tea in his restaurant/hotel as the tourists have stopped coming since the earthquake. We tell him we are on our way up to Mount Nemrut and will stop on our way back. And sure enough, he is there in the road on our way back, waving us down again. Stu accelerates and palms him in a firm ‘NO’ gesture, accelerating as we pass him… before slamming on the brakes and swerving back into the car park opposite. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him, getting out of the car, ‘my friend is a bastard!’ He saw the funny side and doubled up laughing. We had a cashew nut coffee and some food in his restaurant on a terrace with a sublime view of the castle. He was Kurdish and told us to visit his cousin’s nargileh (hubble-bubble pipe) café in Şanlıurfa which was very near to where we were staying. He even phoned his cousin and gave us a scrap of paper with the name of the place and wrote a short note to his relative. ‘I bet that says Get as much as you can out of these tourists, they tried to run me down,’ I tell him. He just smiles… pauses… and then tells me its meaning. Only a polite greeting. We did go to that café and enjoy a nargileh when we got back to Şanlıurfa. It had a great rooftop view of the hustle and bustle of street life below and people coming out of the mosque on that Friday afternoon. And no one tried to rip us off. So I guess he was right about that polite greeting.

Mount Nemrut is stunning. A huge 50m high cone of small stones sits atop a 2000m mountain and at its base, on each side facing the sunrise and sunset, are lines of statues. It was commissioned by King Antiochus in about 38BC, to commemorate… well himself. The colossal statues show him and those whom he considered to be his relatives: the Commagene Tyche (Goddess of fortune and fertility); Zeus-Oramasdes; Apollo-Mithras; Hercules-Artagnes along with an eagle (representing the dominion of King Antiochus over the skies) and a lion (representing his dominion over the earth). It puts you in mind of a scene from Star Wars and you can look all the way down and across to Lake Van from up here.

Alihoca

No doubt there are very good reasons for the drums topped with cones of spices that you see everywhere here in the markets. Some of these are familiar, but many are special spice mixes. Perhaps these are the secret special ingredients that set Turkish food apart. Turkish cuisine is quite simply exceptional. They often give names to the dishes that express this: ‘The Imam Fainted’ is one example, the implication being that the holy man was so bowled over by the flavour that he actually fainted on the spot. The ingredients are fresh and burst with such flavour that they make the supermarkets’ offerings back home seem watery and tasteless. The best we found was in roadside cafes and in Alihoca where we had booked an Air B&B night on the way back to Antalya.

Alihoca was on a road in the mountains that simply petered out further along and up. We got to the village and settled at a table outside a çay shop. Between our minimal Turkish and Stu’s A ‘Level German we found out that our B&B was 2 ½ km further along past the village. They wouldn’t let us pay for the tea.

Rustic, rural and ramshackle, Damla’s place turned out to be an idyll: various collections of waterways, buildings and terraces on stilts over the water and a large house, all under a couple of imposing mountains down in a narrow valley, basking in the dappled late-afternoon woodland light to the soundtrack of a lively, tumbling stream.

Damla was actually in Germany and had only been our contact because she was the one who spoke English; the place was actually run by her mum and dad and grandparents. Her proud mum got me to speak to Damla on her phone so that she could welcome us to the family home. Here also was her uncle, Sensu, a lawyer from Mersin who also spoke excellent English, and his Syrian wife with assorted children. They were all back for Eid and as we sat in the restaurant area, we watched the cat asserting itself over the dopey dog while the whole family, six of them in all, worked together, cutting and chopping and cooking and assembling for a good hour and a half. That was what the guy had meant when he said, ‘I am preparing a meal’ after we arrived. It was preparing and some. The result was unspeakably delicious – they had cooked a special vege dish when I told them I was vegetarian.

It was an idyllic spot to eat. We had a view of the large kitchen, open to the restaurant, as the family worked and chatted. Outside, a spring was gushing up and had been steered into a tiered waterfall, which in turn fed large pipes into three or four fishponds. There was a flash flood here last week and the muddy stream water got into the spring and the water from the taps was still a bit brown. Everything inside the cabins, which were on stilts above the water, was hand-crafted: from the log bed to the wallflower decorations fashioned cleverly from sawn-up branches. And they even had beers in the restaurant’s fridge. It proved to be easier to find a beer in the mountain villages than in the city of Şanlıurfa.

Taşkent, Butterfly Valley and Termessos

Taşkent is a university village, rather than town. Apart from the university buildings, there is a small shop which sold beer and we spent an afternoon in a park just drinking in the mountain landscape and feeling peaceful. The hotel, like many of the buildings here, clings to the side of a cliff face. In the evening, we watched the swifts darting and swerving in pursuit of their supper. The mosque-call is sent echoing back from the mountains opposite and in town the barber’s shop is doing a roaring trade in cut-throat-razor wet shaves, while the local pack of village dogs are chasing an interloper out of town.

Butterfly Valley was a long drive from here, back past Antalya and we reached there in the early evening. We got to right above the beach where the bell tents were pitched only to discover that the only way to get there was to take a boat from the town up the road and the last one left an hour or so ago. So, our ‘glamping’ accommodation for the last night never happened and we had to improvise a one-night stop in a small guest house. It was disappointing. The nearest we got to the butterflies were the wall decorations in the guest house.

But we did luck out on the trip back to Antalya, stopping off at Termessos. Termessos was a Pisidian city state. It was obviously quite sophisticated, with temples, marketplaces, stout city walls, cisterns and even an amphitheatre. The citizens had a bit of a reputation and in 333 BC saw off Alexander the Great who failed to take the city. After this, when the Romans invaded, they were not up for the fight and did a deal with Termessos whereby they would leave it alone to get on with its mountaintop business rather than try and defeat it.

Back in Antalya, we head back into town before our flight and take a last meal. The waiter recognises the Göbekli Tepe motif on my hat and is interested as he comes from the area. Even though the restaurant didn’t serve alcohol, he offered to go and off get some beers for us, which was served in paper coffee cups. It gave a satisfying symmetry to the trip: back where it all started. And what a trip it was!