Trip To East: Part I

By Brian FELSEN & Elif SAVAS

It’s very late and I’ve got my chai, and I’m going to type until I collapse and then go back to the island. Looking back on it, I see it’s long, but I wanted to tell you all about Elif’s family that you didn’t get to see your first time here, and about my take on Turkish politics from the papers, and of course our travels east - it started as a brief note about spending the last two weeks watching the Laz people procreate cows; following in the footsteps of the PKK; seeing ancient Armenia under military escort; and visiting a Turkish whorehouse; bit then I had to explain how we were traveling illegally with an adulterer, and then I started talking about the psychology of the four of us, and, well, here you have it. But it gets interesting after the first page or so and you can read it in pieces, and if you don’t like it, please recycle.

I also thought you’d like to know that Coskun is a bit of a wanker, and a manky-wanker at that. And that the Kurds were very nice to us, if not to the cows. But I digress. We went first east from Istanbul along the Black Sea coast and then south along the Georgian, Armenian, and Iranian borders before heading west. The first three days were pretty uneventful. We set out with Elif’s mom Dilek and her judge boyfriend Coskun on Tuesday August 18th in his newly-purchased Fiat (I’d forgotten just how bad of a driver he was.) After seeing Lake Abant at Bolu, we reached the town of Old Safranbolu, a town whose houses date from Ottoman times and it’s illegal to build new ones; some are wonderfully dilapidated, some such as the Kaymakamlar Evi (Governor’s house) have been restored. I especially liked the beautiful marble 17th century Cinci Hamam Ottoman baths and walked through all its chambers on clogs as men were taking their baths, although it was too scalding for us to stay. We bought a tub of blackberries from some kids on the side of the road, and I ate the whole thing - best I’ve ever had. I don’t really care for blackberries, but this was Garden-of-Eden stuff - juicy and embarrassingly flavorful. We stayed in Amasra, a town on two bays. It had a Byzantine-Genoese castle with a huge neon Ataturk head that lit up at night. The next day was spent just driving, averaging about 40km/hour and only getting better after Ayancik. We stayed at the Black Sea harbor town of Sinop. All evening, Turkish families with their kids were walking around on the strip, back and forth, eating sticky gummy ice cream, with music blasting from the gazinos (nightclubs) straight into our hotel rooms until about midnight.

The next morning, Thursday the 20th, we saw Sinop’s Alaeddin Camii, a mid-13th century Seljuk mosque that has a Spanish-Moorish-looking courtyard, as well as the Alaiye Medressi religious school. Heading east, the whole way we drove past hazelnuts that villagers were drying by the side of the road. We then reached the nightmarish city of Samsun, a rather disgusting Black Sea city, and Coskun did something that for the first time made me question if this man might be an asshole: he suddenly dumped us on a street corner and announced that he was going to stop by the army base there to visit his son who was serving his mandatory 18 months. As you know, Coskun is married but his wife is refusing the divorce since Coskun has been dating Elif’s mom Dilek for 2 years, and in Turkey if the woman refuses the divorce, it won’t be granted until three years of separation - during which time adultery is an imprisonable offense.

So we’ve been hiding from places where Coskun might be recognized. Now Coskun’s son hates him because of this and Coskun hoped he could affect a reconciliation, which proved to be a failure, for Coskun reappeared at the corner 1 * hours later with the news that his son wouldn’t see him. The entire time Coskun was gone Dilek bitched about being dumped at the corner rather than at a museum or something, but when he arrived, she disappointingly proved to be a paper tiger. She complained to Coskun that the corner stank of petrol - to which Coskun said ‘You didn’t come from a village, you know what cities smell like.’ But she felt sorry for him because his son wouldn’t see him, and she fed him cookies that were in the car. We were able to get a little bit of revenge further east on the Black Sea later that day at the town of Unye, where Elif announced she wanted to see her father’s uncle’s widow. The last time she saw Dilek, Dilek was pregnant with Elif. She was super-nice to us, plugging us with food and delighted by the surprise visit. We ate in an amazing lokanta in Vakfikebir, and stayed at the Best Hotel in Besikduzu outside of Trabzon. There we saw our first natasha - Russian whore. She was actually beautiful - tall, thin, skimpily dressed with high heels and bright red makeup. I totally would’ve gone for her.

On Friday the 21st, the trip started getting interesting. We went to Trabzon and saw the mid 13th-century Byzantine church of Aya Sofya, whose frescos are shockingly lurid for the period - its Ascension has abstract geometricalpatterns that look more out of the mid 20th century than the 13th. We went to the Ataturk Kosku, a Disney fairy tale mansion in a perfectly-kept garden - Ataturk stayed there on three occasions, so it’s like a George Washington house. I paid admission and gave the guard a million ($4) and waited for change, which was not forthcoming, because the guard refused to accept me as Turkish and kept the million, which would have been the higher admission rate for foreigners. Even after Elif told him that we’re Turks, he insisted that although I had an extended stay visa that I, at least, should pay foreign rates. Dilek screamed at him, calling him all sorts of names, and the guard capitulated, but this triggered a nasty fight between Coskun and Dilek; Coskun was embarrassed that Dilek would fight with a government official, and he pouted and refused to go to the upper floor of the mansion, sulking in the garden.

I found in the Rough Guide a site way off the beaten path - the 15th-century former Armenian monastery of Kaymakli, reachable only by a rough dirt road and a bit of hiking. I couldn’t believe how abandoned it was - it was in a tiny village of a few families and was actually being used by one of them as a hay-barn. As we walked up, a group of children let us inside, and we crawled on the bales to see the top frescoes inside - Jonah and the whale, Christ coming into Jerusalem, and lots of images of hell. I wonder: how does paint survive this long? It does seem interesting to me that the Armenian and Georgian churches (non-Muslim sites that are not obvious tourist attractions) have been left to the locals - perhaps the Turks don’t want to call attention to Armenian settlements lest Armenians claim land rights, but they are too embarrassed to destroy the monuments - so I guess they leave it up to the local elders to be the ones to lose face if the monument goes to hell. Elif says that the government even pays a small sum to some local to take care of it, and if that guy chooses to turn it into a hay-barn, so be it - but maybe the hay and its inaccessibility may preserve it even better than if it were a tourist attraction.

We then went to the famous (and thus preserved) 13th-century Greek Orthodox monastery of Sumela, clinging to the rock cliffs. We ate nearby some local food - a melted cheese and corn meal thing that tasted Mexican, as well as a crepe which would have had anchovies had they been in season. The drive up to the monastery was terrifying due to the steep, narrow road and to Coskun’s driving. We walked back down the hill rather than to ride with him. The frescoes of the church were much-vandalized but still beautiful. The sign by the monks’s original toilets said Original Bathrooms (Do Not Use)." Rule of thumb: if you see an enclosed area on a popular archeological site in Turkey, you can bank on there being a piss smell inside. Driving back from Sumela was like something out of Indiana Jones - we passed a rock quarry and then just as we turned the corner, we saw out the rear window huge boulders from it crashing onto the road right behind us.

Coskun then had the bright idea of getting some local rice pudding for which the Laz are famous, but we weren’t really east enough for there to really be any Laz around, so we ended up driving two hours up mountain roads until we found a place that advertised "Famous Rice Pudding." It was watery, and finally we decided to go back to Trabzon to see the Russian Market.

Unfortunately, with the Russian economy crashing even faster than Turkey’s, along with the closing of the Turkish casinos by the Refah party, in addition to the fact that Turkish men seemingly treat every Russian woman as if she were a natasha, Russian tourists have stopped coming to Turkey. Elif says they’re now going to China. Coskun bought binoculars, which took an hour until I told him how incredible they were and told the seller we’d buy them if he’d throw in a pair of AAA batteries for Elif’s mom. So we went to a Laz restaurant without Laz and to a Russian market without Russians.

We drove to Rize to stay the night, and Rize is very religious, with covered women and men with skullcaps. The Rough Guide said that unmarried couples would have problems booking a room in anywhere but the Turist Hotel. We checked in with Coskun in the car - me, Elif and Dilek showed our ID’s and said Coskun was parking. Unfortunately, the hotel was a shit hole, with roaches wandering the halls outnumbering the guests. Our room had trash all over the torn-up carpet and a toilet which was literally shattered. We found out from a worker there that the owner died and his son is just taking all the money and letting the vermin handle administrative and care taking duties.

The most interesting thing about Rize was that at quarter to midnight that night, the town was sending its boys to the army! The sendoff was spectacular: vans and cars with the 18-year-old boys and their friends, decked out in ribbons, flags and banners, honking their horns and driving by as if they had won the World’s Cup - and the boy’s families were on the streets, waving them on as the boys were being driven to the army bus or base. The boys were certainly going to fight the Kurds, and the families looked strangely happy, although I couldn’t read emotion off the mothers. It’s considered a great dishonor there if you don’t serve in the army, and if you die, you’re going straight to Muslim heaven - but the mothers must privately grieve. From what I can gather about serving in the army, it’s mandatory for boys but not girls; it’s an 18-month service but the army’s so desperate for money that you can pay to get out in 9 months rather than 18, which is a dishonor for villagers but not for city folk. Where you end up serving is by lottery system, but is weighted so that if you’re from the west you’re more likely to end up in the east (so they don’t have eastern locals fighting eastern locals in the Kurdish war).

Elif’s cousin …Ugur is from Istanbul but claimed residency on the Black Sea (his father kept his ID in Samsun) so he ended up serving his 9 months in central Anatolia rather than spending them, say, dead. I must here mention just how impossibly screwed-up, by design, Turkish politics is, and how much of a tightrope the country has to walk to survive. It’s different than it seemed when you came. In 1980 they were leaning socialist, which made America very unhappy. Apparently economic incentives were offered to not fall as a Soviet domino. Marshall law was declared, in September there was an army coup and they razed socialist communities in the north and murdered and imprisoned their leaders. To combat Turkish socialism, Islamic education and development was tolerated, encouraged, and possibly even funded until economic reforms took hold. (I now have a new perspective of how native Americans are when they woe a country’s turning fundamentalist like it was the country’s stupidity or ineffectualness that let it happen.)

Meanwhile, during this period, the Mafia had grown strong, hired by the government to kill off Armenian terrorists who were bombing Turkish embassies worldwide until the Armenians got their own country from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Years later Tansu Ciller came to power, an American-style Yale-educated technocrat, and she quite impressively amassed a $50 million personal fortune during her brief term. The Islamic Refah party took power partly as a reaction to her and the Mafia’s corruption. Refah shut down the casinos, which were overrun by Mafia (and had lots of shootings). Tourism (especially from Britain and Israel) plummeted and the economy worsened. Refah got cocky and encouraged even more Islamic education. This finally caused the army to threaten another coup and even a treason trial of the prime minister, who hastily stepped down. Turkey’s economy and Islamic status keep it from being in the EEU, and they have to improve the East because of its oil reserves and potential pipeline; also the farmers there live in poverty. Turkey also may need the East for protection from its hostile neighbors, as a Kurdish state would be so rife with internal disputes (four primary mutually-unintelligible dialects and mutual animosity) and unable to protect its borders (a similar argument to Israel not giving up territory to a Palestinian state). Because of ethnic and economic-level differences, the Kurds in the East feel their land is occupied and form the PKK, the Kurdish Worker’s Party, which is really a guerrilla organization. War ensues and Turkey needs money to buy guns to fight the war, as well as money to irrigate the East to economically improve it, which would put an end to both the strife as well as to the Islamic stopgap, which it meanwhile encourages to give Allah to the Kurdish males to distract them from the war. Inflation keeps skyrocketing. The PKK sells drugs to fund the war. The Turkish government does likewise, encouraging the Mafia to import drugs from Iran and sell them to western countries, and to use the Mafia to kill off the PKK dealers. But the Mafia gets too powerful and right now the MIT (Turkish Secret Service) is fighting the Mafia. To irrigate the east and finally improve its economic level, Turkey is funding the massive GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi - Southeast Anatolian development Project) to dam water from the Tigris and Euphrates. This pisses off the Syrians, to whom the rivers flow. Syria responds by arming and training the PKK. Thus things revolve and somehow hang together in horrible equilibrium.

Next: Trip to East; Part II

LETTER FROM HEYBELIADA

LETTER FROM HEYBELIADA II

Brian Felsen & Elif Savas web site:
http://www.elifsavas.com
(The web site content is on the documentary film, COUP (Darbe); which frames
1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 military interventions and coups d'etat in Turkey)

e-mail: darbe@altavista.net

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