Lycia: Bouzouki Cruising and Two Very Different Kurds

Leaving Pamukkale, we drove across the valley to the city of Denizli and started climbing into the mountains. The next two hours were the prettiest driving we had done in Turkey so far, as the scenery became more dramatic and Alpine the further we climbed. It seemed like nearly every city we visited looked like a new country, and this was no exception. The mountains got steeper and grayer, and the Mediterranean scrub and olive trees were replaced with skinny pines as we passed over two mountain passes, both over 1,500 meters above sea level and our next destination.

Midway through the mountains, we stopped for lunch at the most beautiful restaurant I had seen in Turkey. Tables were arranged on a patio with a stream running through it, with a waterfall on both ends. The whole place was shaded by sycamore trees, after which the place was named - Çınar. We ordered grilled trout from a waiter who spoke shockingly good English, and it was so fresh it must have been caught in a nearby river. We had it with ayran, the super-popular buttermilk drink we had been drinking with most meals, which generally costs as much as water. As we were finishing our fish, a waiter came by and inexplicably gave us each another whole fish, but the check only charged us for two and came out to a measly 100 TL ($11.5).

We made it over the mountain passes and descended towards the city of Fethiye on the Mediterranean coast. Checking into the hostel left no doubt that we were in a beach town, as the hostel offered free yoga lessons, and everyone had long hair and seemed to be lounging around the TV in the heat of the day - many of them were sleeping in tents pitched in the yard. The hostel also had volunteers who had great advice about where to go, so we left our stuff and set out towards the village of Karaköy. Our hostel was in a suburb just to the north of town, and getting to the city required driving down a snaky road threading between steep hills. There was one lane in each direction, but the locals treated them and the shoulders as four lanes for overtaking in either direction (one overtaking car was even overtaken itself by a third vehicle) and the double yellow line down the middle as a mere suggestion. We left the city via a back route and passed over a small mountain on an extremely windy road. Past the top of the mountain, someone had left bottles and Jerry cans of water on the shoulder every few dozen meters, sometimes in groupings. This went on for several kilometers and I’m still not sure what the story behind it was, but it was weird.

Karaköy used to be called Levissi, and it was a Greek settlement dating back to the 4th century BCE. In 1923, Greece and the newly-formed Turkish Republic signed a population transfer treaty, which saw over a million Greeks removed from Turkey and several hundred thousand Turks removed from Greece to make two more homogenous ethno-states following mass human rights abuses from both sides over the previous decade. Levissi was one of many villages throughout the country which was vacated nearly overnight, leaving a shell of a place which has been gradually fading to dust over the past 98 years. We parked the car at the foot of a hill and started climbing up a dirt track. The track became rather difficult to pass, overgrown with thorns and thick bushes, but we eventually made it through to the town’s main street. Later, on our way down, we discovered that we had inadvertently bypassed the main entry gate with its attached fee.

The village was a very spooky place, immediately evocative of abandoned Palestinian villages throughout Israel. Small stone houses covered the hillsides, their tight spacing indicative of how lively the village must have been in the past. We walked to the top and visited one of the village’s two churches, which had beautiful arches and was the eeriest building of them all. To really explore the village, we needed to climb quite a bit, but many of the stone walls were crumbling and others were so hot from baking in the sun that we couldn’t place our hands on them. All in all, this made for number of adrenaline rushes as we looked for the best angles to get a view of the whole ghost town. We considered driving to the famous Blue Lagoon beach in nearby Ölüdeniz, but the fierce sun had done a number on us.

Driving out of Karaköy, we suddenly spotted two 7-foot tall ostriches in a random yard. I had no idea that birds could get so big, and these ones totally looked like dinosaurs. We stopped for ice cream in Fethiye and spent the evening chatting with a German girl named Linia and her Turkish boyfriend Sirhat, who gave us his take on the Turkish diaspora. According to him, Turks living in Europe vote for Erdogan in droves because they love his expansionary monetary policy. When they come back to visit Turkey with pockets full of Euros, they get a huge boost to their purchasing power. This part of the summer was peak homecoming season, and we had seen dozens of visibly Turkish families in cars with German, Dutch, French, and Austrian license plates. They all seemed to drive Mercedes or BMWs (and more recklessly than the Turkish natives) - but they’ll all still complain about how bad life in Europe is, said Sirhat.

The Twelve Islands That Were Four

Fethiye had the best supermarkets we had seen in Turkey, so we bought ingredients to make shakshuka for breakfast. We sat on pillows outside and ate until a bus came to pick us up. We had booked a “12 islands tour”, and we were the first stop (and only foreigners) on a long pickup route through the city. We arrived at the marina, boarded a ship, and sat down on the bottom deck. A man asked for our ticket and told us that we belonged on a different boat. He pointed at the dock, where about half our group was waiting, and we all piled in to another van. This driver was in a massive hurry, talking into his cell phone with his right hand as he elaborately shifted gears with the left and narrowly avoided other cars on the road. We cut across multiple lanes of traffic and slammed into a (soft) plastic barrier, signaling we had arrived at the other marina. Here, we boarded the creatively-named Summer and were permitted to stay aboard as it left port.

As soon as we started moving, what I can only describe as Turkish bouzouki music started blaring from loudspeakers in the ceiling (think stereotypically Greek music but with Turkish lyrics). We were the only foreigners save for a Russian couple sitting near us, but thankfully one of the Turks translated the gist of the announcements for the four of us. We sailed out into the natural bay the city is built on and marveled at the beautiful views of deep blue water, steep green mountains, and rocky islands.

Is Mickey Mouse haram?

Throughout the day, the ship stopped at four different islands (notably not 12, as every single tourist ship was advertising) where we could get off, swim, and sometimes explore by foot. The crowd on our ship was fascinating, a mix of Turkish families of all kinds, the class and religious differences apparent from the women’s swimwear. There were the highly secular, urban families in bikinis and tattoos alongside much more conservative and likely rural ones in full-body suits that looked like they were almost better suited for diving, often with integrated swimming hijabs in matching colors, and everything in between. A shocking proportion of visitors also couldn’t swim, entering the water with life jackets and various flotation devices, including a particularly memorable Mickey Mouse float ring.

Respect the hustle

We had lunch with one of the families, who very haltingly explained to us that the ship was docking for an hour and we had to be back by 2. After lunch, a little motorboat pulled up to our ship, its sole passenger selling horribly overpriced ice cream at 100 TL ($11.5) a pint. It could have been a brilliant business model, but nobody was buying. At the next stop, we anchored next to a bigger ship with a diving board on the top deck that was calling our name. We swam over to the other vessel and sat on the top deck without anyone paying too much attention to us. When I felt the engines rumble beneath us, we dove overboard and swam back to our ship, leaving behind at least a couple confused onlookers.

The cruise was great, but it was simply too long. The islands were all essentially the same and offered nothing on shore, and nobody wanted to swim by the fourth time we moored. Hungry and weary, we sailed back into the Fethiye harbor at 6:30 and got a ride back to our hostel. Finding a yoga class underway, we returned to town for another visit to our favorite Turkish supermarket for some evening snacks.

Roger Meets the Romans

We left Fethiye and took a right off the highway to Antalya to follow a coastal road. After some twisting and turning, we suddenly emerged on a natural bay, the road hugging the sheer rocky hillsides above the deep turquoise water. It only lasted for a few kilometers, but it was one of the most beautiful stretches of road I remember driving on. Sadly, there were also no places to pull off the road, so we have no pictures from it.

We passed a public beach and the traffic slowed to a crawl, allowing us to pick up a hitchhiker by the roadside. He introduced himself with a long Turkish name I can’t remember (and didn’t write down because I was driving), but he said his Kurdish name was Roger. He was starting medical school in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir next week, and was trying to hitchike his way back there from vacationing in Izmir. I had lots of questions I wanted to ask him, but his English was barely sufficient for small talk- though he did ask to see pictures of “Quds” (Jerusalem) on my Instagram profile.

A scenic hour or so later, we pulled off the road into the city of Demre. Before it was Demre, it was the site of an Ancient Greek city by the name of Myra, and we wanted to visit the ruins. We traveled a rather circuitous route to arrive at the ruins, since they were on the most nondescript side street imaginable, with greenhouses lining both sides right up to the entrance. There were a bunch of signs advertising “free parking”, and a man emerged from one and waved us in. He enthusiastically welcomed us to the parking lot and jogged beside the car as he pointed us towards a spot in the shade. When we emerged, we got the full Turkish salesman pitch. “Parking free. After, come here, I have coffee, fresh juice, everything. You want to go to Kekova sunken city? Harbor 5 kilometers, my brother have boat, 10 meters long with cabin shade, tour one hour, he take you there.” We said we would think about it and headed into the site.

Roger behind bars

We were getting closer to Antalya and we could feel it in the air, the car thermometer above 35˚ C (95˚ F) again. As appropriate for all exceedingly hot destinations in Turkey, everything at Myra was catered towards Russians. Passing another Intourist bus, there was a shop selling Russian Orthodox icons and juice stands with signs in Cyrillic. Even the vendors were calling out to the crowds in Turkish-accented Russian, which is a very strange sound combination.

Compared to the other Ancient Greek cities we had seen, Myra was tiny. Besides a fairly impressive theater with a capacity of 10,000, the place was famous for its hillside necropolis, elaborately decorated burial sites carved into the mountain and dating back to the 4th century BCE. We couldn’t walk right up to them, but the view from the ground was impressive. Roger decided that he hadn’t seen enough and slipped under a fence, where he found remnants of a wall that were undergoing restorations. He was apparently well accustomed to this, as he told us that he had hid in an ancient city the previous evening in order to sleep there after the park had closed to visitors. If only he hadn’t been wearing shoes, he would have been an exact Kurdish copy of my brother Eitan.

Impromptu Rock Climbing

After Myra, the highway heads inland, offering views of the craggy green mountains lining Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. We left the main road and drove down some very sketchy side roads that looked like they belonged in a 1960s movie until arriving at the very non-Turkish-sounding village of Olympos. Unlike other Ancient Greek settlements in Asia Minor which have contemporary Turkish towns and cities on their sites (Smyrna became Izmir, Ephesus became Efes, and of course - Constantinople became Istanbul, just to name a few notable examples), the modern village of Olympos has retained the name of the Greek - or more accurately, Lycian - city built there as early as 300 BCE. Starting in the 2000s, a group of Turkish backpackers decided to take advantage of the scenic surroundings, secluded beaches, and subtropical climate to turn Olympus into a cross between Rishikesh, Christiania, and Koh Samui. The entire area is a protected nature reserve, so they built wooden shacks and hippies from Turkey and abroad started coming. These days, it’s much more mainstream, but the area is still protected so you’ll find campgrounds and bed and breakfasts instead of chain hotels.

We said goodbye to Roger at the entrance to the ancient city and found our accommodations - the upper room in a two-story wooden hut (or bungalow? I don’t know the difference) which was a literal wooden oven in the afternoon heat. We left as quickly as we could, and walked down the village’s only street to find a gözleme vendor and some cold ayran. It was too hot to explore, so we retuned to our hut, set the air conditioning on maximal power, and had a siesta. When the temperatures had dropped some, we visited the ancient city, which was mostly a collection of stone walls and a small necropolis - a far cry from the splendid Roman cities we had seen previously, or even from Myra. Olympos lost much of its importance. Much of Olympos’ history is unknown, and some scholars have even suggested that the coastal city was destroyed by the Romans and replaced by a city on one of the mountains above it.

Past the ruins was a rocky beach, full of people soaking up the last rays of sunshine. We walked along the water and up a dry riverbed covered in a strange white film deposited by floods. The channel was lined with bamboo, fig trees, and grapevines - very different natural scenery from what we had seen in other parts of Turkey. It had been a fairly inactive day in the blazing heat, and we were feeling adventurous, so we decided to try climbing the ridge separating the riverbed from Olympos. We walked up the channel until we found an open campsite with access to the forest behind it, and started making our way up. It was tough, slow progress through the thick brush, and every plant seemed to have thorns, but we eventually made it above the main treeline and on to more exposed rock faces.

The rock was of a type I had never seen before, spiny - almost veiny - like so many leaves and razor-sharp. We carefully made our way up, making sure not to impale ourselves on the boulders, until we reached a fairly flat spot with a view of the valley. Since we had waited until the valley wasn’t getting direct sunshine to start climbing, daylight was rapidly vanishing, the mountains to the north gradually changing colors as the sun set behind the hills to the west. We were most of the way up the hill, but decided not to risk a descent in the dark and turned around for the slow climb down. After clearing another painful path through the trees, we emerged from the forest at a different campsite, attracting some odd looks from the people sitting outdoors. I was filthy, sweaty, and cut up, but it felt great to climb on an uncharted path for the first time in a long time.

Bets on Another Coup, Anyone?

We walked back to the beach, through the ancient city, and to our bungalow village (I have no idea how else to call this “hotel”). Unusually for Turkish accommodation, they served dinner, and we sat down next to the only English we heard in the outdoor dining area. Our companions were Simon, a very quiet civil engineer from Switzerland, and Önder, who turned out to be one of the most interesting people we had met in Turkey. A Kurd from Turkey’s far east, he finished law school in France, but decided he wanted to do something else and enrolled in an anthropology PhD program at Johns Hopkins. He graduated last year and now teaches at a Berlin university, despite not speaking a word of German (“I have plenty of Turkish and Kurdish friends who have been living in Berlin for years and don’t speak any German”).

He had buckets of criticism to level at the Turkish state, and after living abroad for several years had paid the government approximately $10,000 to get out of military service, where Kurds are brutally hazed, harassed, and bullied. This was for the best, he said, since the Turkish military “really only knows how to take over the government”. Like the others we had asked, he believed the AKP would lose the 2023 elections, “unless we have another bogus coup [like the one in 2016].” It felt like an alternate reality of what Israel could have been like if things were only a little different.

After a fascinating conversation over dinner, we decided to go out for a drink the three of us after a shower. We really wanted to visit Mount Chimaera, a mountain with geothermal flames in the area, but it was closed to visitors because of the risk of forest fires. There was a very happening-looking bar at the edge of town, but it was also full at 10:15 (likely due to COVID occupancy caps, but Önder maintained it was because we were three males). We ended up at a different place, where we had a riveting conversation about Middle Eastern history, geopolitics, and comparing the collective experiences of Jewish, Palestinian, and Kurdish people.

A band got up and started playing a song, and Önder lit up. "You should know the huge hypocrisy in Turkey,” he told us. “This song is by a Kurdish singer - Ahmed Kaya - who was treated horribly in Turkey and left the country to live in Paris, but now people play his songs as if nothing happened.” Indeed, the crowd was all having a good time, and our companion looked visibly disturbed. Back at our bungalow village, we sat on a raised platform covered in pillows, which was standard-issue furniture in Olympos, and chatted into the night.

Any insight into the name of this structure would be much appreciated