doğu (the east), part i

i mean, i know i start from the beginning, but wow- this trip out east has been the highlight of all turkey so far. with one tragic exception (i lost something very special to me, grandpa's hat, and i'm trying to track it down at the bus station, but hopes are dwindling and i'm slowly making myself feel okay about it), the trip has been utterly amazing.
so, from the beginning, this will long:

the long train ride on the doğu expresi terminated for me at divriği last saturday morning, where i went to the ulu camii (mosque). it is one of turkey's world-heritage sites, and rightfully so. the carved exteriors are stunning. i can't say more than that about it, since i'll have to rely on pictures to get it across (which, by the way, i've given up on posting before i get back. so you'll have to wait until i show them to you in person or get around to putting them on facebook a few weeks from now).
after this, the next bus was several hours away. i wanted to go to malatya, but that was even later, so i decided to go back to sivas. in between, i met a really cool guy hakkan, who had lived in london for four years and therefore spoke flawless english. it was a real pleasure to pass the time with him. we hiked up to the castle, he beat me at backgammon while we drank tea, we wandered around the city and chatted (he's also a galatasaray fan, oh yea!), had some soup, and were on our way to sivas.
i stayed the night in sivas, where the entire town was crazy over preparations for the sivasspor-galatasaray match which was basically to decide the championship.

the next morning, i wandered around sivas a little, and really enjoyed the town. i snapped pictures of a few of the old mosque and other selçuk complexes, as well as the sivas congress, one of the important sites in the foundation of the modern turkish republic (as i've admitted, i'm a secret atatürk fan due to my studies of nationalism), had a tea, and made my way to malatya. in malatya, i went through the bazaar and bought some dried apricots, which is what the town is famous for. also, i found a really atmospheric place with chairs lined in front of a television charging 2 lira to watch the game. it was a very exciting match, with galatasaray winning 5-3. this weekend is the last game of the season, at home, and all they have to do is tie to clinch the title outright. go galatasaray!

monday, i took the bus to the town of kahta (well, first i stopped in a dusty half-way point whose name i don't remember). at the halfway point, i made the aquantaince of two guys from hong kong. i ended up being the organizer and translator (scary, considering how bad my turkish is, but they didn't know a lick, and had just come from syria) for our new group of 3 as we made it to kahta and then up to the town of karadut. i really enjoyed the karadut pension. the owner was really friendly, and i seemed to be able to have something that resembled a conversation with him in turkish. his son spoke fine english and was our driver up to the summit of nemrut daği (mt. nemrut), the point of this leg of the journey. some may have seen pictures of the giant statues of kings and gods up at the top of the highest mountain in the area, as they are the iconic picture of eastern turkey. these things are seriously cool. some egocentric king of the kingom of commagene, right before the roman takeover of the area, had them built. and you're on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere and can see probably to syria. in addition to the two guys from hong kong (i never got their names), a group of kurdish guys were wandering around the top and wanted to take a picture with us. it's an interesting addition in my pictures to the collection of lions, eagle heads, kings, and zeus statues.
we made our way back down the mountain and had a nice pension dinner before calling it a night.

tuesday, we went all the way down the hill to kahta, where i parted ways with the two guys from hong kong. and here is where i threw my itinerary to the wind and went to the real southeast at the advice of the people from the pension, who said it would be quicker to get to van via (şanlı)urfa. urfa is known as the city of the prophets. in the hour and half i had before my bus to mardin, i saw the cave where job suffered and the well that God sent to ease his pain. the mosque there is utterly beautiful, and i had myself a drink from the sacred waters. from there i rushed to the area where abraham was born, and although i didn't get down to the cave, there is this strange story about abraham where he is supposed to be tortured by king nemrud, and the hot coals are turned to fish and he is flung from the mountain onto a bed of roses. so there is now a park with roses and a beautiful pool with carp. interesting, to say the least, and i loved being in the 'city of the prophets' if only for a little and even if the taxi driver overcharged me.
from urfa, i took another bus to mardin. as my travelbook says, 'everyone loves mardin!' and so did i. in all honesty, the reason for going there was a restaurant which the book raved about. it's called 'cercis murat konağı' run by a woman who has almost single-handedly made it okay for women to work outside the home in mardin, as well as opening the first licensed restaurant in the southeast, and being the head of the mardin tourist group. i had a pommegranate salad, quince with lamb (before coming to turkey, i didn't even know what quince was), some very tasty wine, and an orange-flavored dessert: yum! after this, i made my way to the hotel for the night.

wednesday morning i wandered around mardin, photographed the fortress and syrian orthodox church, putzed around the bazaar, and found my way to the minibus station intending to go to van via diyarbakir. instead, i took a minibus to midyat, then another to batman, and finally a bus to van, thereby swinging around in the southeast, which is a completely different landscape. while i would have liked to have gone to diyarbakir, it's probably better i didn't... also, there was a guy who wanted to talk to me the whole way from midyat to batman, and again, my little turkish managed what could be called a conversation. he was very adamant about how bad bush was for the region. coming along the south of lake van, the view is spectacular. the mountains were beautiful and i caught my first glimpse of the church of the Holy Cross on the island of akdamar. once at van, i checked into my hotel, had dinner, and wiped out pretty quickly.

thursday i started my day with a typical van breakfast, which is one thing van is famous for. in addition to the usual cucumber, tomato, and feta, there was this other semi-sweet, very creamy cheese with honey and walnuts, which was really good. after this, i made my way to the van museum. it houses a whole lot of urartian artifacts, which i duly photographed, including lots of cuneiform stelae. i'm a textual junkie, and love cuneiform. additionally, there were artifacts from the nearby site of tilkitepe, which i once wrote about in a paper about 'early armenian connections to the middle east.' most famous of these are the 'redware' pottery, which i was very excited to see (yeah, i guess i'm an anthropologist/archaeologist getting excited about pottery). there was supposed to be a one-sided thing on the 'genocide of the turks by armenians' which i didn't see, probably for the best.
after the museum, i took two minibuses to get to the akdamar harbor. on the boat there was a couple from japan and their kurdish companion who worked at the van museum. okay. this is the singular highlight of my entire trip, even after today's excursion. watching the beautiful church of the Holy Cross get closer and closer as the boat covered the distance between the harbor and the island, i definitely teared up a little. the church is beautiful. i mean, its perfect. its done in the really round manner that is seen also at ani, but not really throughout modern-day armenia. there are hundreds of reliefs all around the church, for which it is most famous. the frescoes inside are relatively well-preserved, and, being recently rennovated, its just plain beautiful. i sang a couple hymns inside, and the acoustics were tremendous. additionally, almost every rock on the island has a cross of varying levels of intricacy etched into it. superb, superb, i love it, i sat on a rock just staring for probably 20 minutes. it was honestly hard to get back on the boat and leave, but it did start raining a little...
i should have gone with the japanese couple to hosap castle, a little further south, but i wasn't sure i wanted to take that much time. instead it took me awhile to flag down a bus and get back to van. luckily, it was only sprinkling.
upon returning to van, i made my way to the castle, which is huge! i played and climbed around for awhile. i missed the few cuneiform inscriptions, which is too bad, because, like i said, i'm a bit of a text junkie. but it was fun to climb around on the ancient urartian fortress and capitol of their empire, imagining all the history. and, it started raining a little heavier and it had been a long day.
i made it back to the hotel and slept soundly.

friday i woke up early, decided i didn't need to see hosap castle (a kurdish castle to the south) or çavuştepe, another urartian site, and got on a minibus to doğubayazit. getting of the minibus, a french couple whom i had seen at the van museum the day before approached me about sharing a taxi to the ishak pasha palace, the reason for stopping in doğubayazit. i told them there were minibuses up, and we made the journey together. so, the travelbook describes this as the 'perfect fairy-tale palace' and it didn't dissapoint. the rounded mosque dome in the center of the palace with beautiful engravings and a beautiful hue of stone made it very breathtaking indeed. again, the pictures will have to do in place of my inadquate description. the french girl (melanie) decided it was her favorite place in turkey.
we had lunch together (the guy's name is adrian) at the recommended (from the guy at the karadut pension) urfa kebab salon, and had some nice conversation. they are working on a master's thesis dealing with turkish nationalism. best of all, when i mentioned that my roomate was a french phd student working on a thesis dealing with the '70s in turkey, melanie said, 'oh my gosh! nicolai?' so yeah, the world is yet again proved very small. she had met nicolai a few months before. apparently he goes to a very prestigious school and they were quite impressed by him. a really cool encounter! we parted ways, as they were going back to van, and i was on to kars.
the bus ride to kars included me snapping a picture of ararat since it was mostly shrouded in clouds when we had been at the palace, and alternating rain and snow depending on our altitude. made it to kars in the evening, and in being rushed off since i wasn't sure where i was going exactly, this is where i managed to leave the hat. again, i've visited the bus company office a couple times, but i'm losing hope- but again, also being okay with it. i wrote a poem or two and decided the level of reflection on various things brought about by the loss of the hat made it okay. checked into the 'otel kent,' had a pide, and read to about midnight.

phew, today. woke up, wandered around kars, went to the bus company office, bought some börek from a really friendly woman who told me the price in english after asking where i was from. she told me 'goodbye!' and brightened my mood a little.
but what really did it was ani. i had to pay the full fare by myself since there were no other tourists that had e-mailed the driver, but it was totally worth it. ani was the capitol if the bagratuni armenian dynasty from around 890-1100 (very apprx.), known as the 'city of 1001 churches,' had a population of around 100,000 people rivalling constantinople at the time in terms of size and cultural importance, and it gives it name to more armenian girls than i can count. this was a very, very close second to akdamar. you walk through a gate passing the massive city walls into an open expanse of grass that was the city, without a half-dozen or so churches in various states of disrepair on the plain. the starkness of the whole place was really incredible, with one round church having exactly half of it left. the church of tigran (not the great ancient king, the church's benefactor) was the most spectacular, completely full of very well-preserved frescoes. i had to sing a hymn and record it while panning the frescoes, even if it took up around 100 pictures in the card. another round church is perched on the edge of the gorge- which, by the way separates turkey from armenia, and you can see the armenian-russian watchtowers that mark the border. it was interesting throughout this whole portion of my trip (van to ani) to contemplate how close i was to armenia, with yerevan just on the other side of ararat. the cathedral is absolutely huge and still stands, albeit without its dome. another round church was also stunning. more partial ruins of three other armenian churches, including one cut into the rock are on the western part of the city. in addition to the armenian churches, there were excavated bazzar streets, houses, a couple selçuk mosques, a selçuk bath area, and the one remaining wall of a georgian church. i can't really convey the size of the site (again, without the pictures), but think 100,000 people. this was really the pinnacle of armenian architecture and early medieval civilization, and ani holds such an important part in the collective memory (one patriotic folk song about yerevan calls the new capitol 'mer nor ani' -'our new ani'). for awhile, i sat on a rock looking around, almost in disbelief that i was at ani. what a wonderful experience!
upon returning to the city, i snapped a shot of the kars castle, but didn't hike up because i wasn't in the mood for fighting the rain that has started coming down. i also took a quick visit to an old armenian church in kars which has been converted to a mosque, as well as an old selçuk bridge- before ducking into the internet cafe for an update.

okay, phew, i am spent writing this, and my eyes hurt. although its probably still raining, its time to have a pide or döner. most likely, i'll take it easy this afternoon, reading in my room, before heading to trabzon tomorrow. after i make my way to the sumela monastery near trabzon, i have no more particular sites to see, so i'll slowly make my way back to istanbul via some of the pretty and small towns between central anatolia and the black sea. would you believe me if i said i was counting down the days to home?