Turks are a cosmopolitan people. Nomads from the Russian and Mongolian steppes, their earliest known ancestors, began trickling into Anatolia tens of thousands of years ago. The merchant galleys of their Ionian Greek forebearers spanned the Mediterranean world 2,000 years ago from bases in Miletus, Ephesos, Samos, Chios, and Smyrna. The medieval Selçuk Turks (cousins of the Huns) built and patrolled the empire-spanning Silk Road, a fabled chain of caravanserais linking the Mediterranean world with the rich markets of the Caucusus, Central Asia, and beyond. Ottoman Turkey ruled most of the Islamic world for hundreds of years after that, and under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent occupied Hungary, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus and knocked on the gates of Vienna. The paths of travelers, traders, and invaders from every nation and every century criss-cross in Turkey more densely than in any other place on Earth.
For such a people, mere transportation is not going to be a problem. Nowhere is it so easy or pleasant for a tourist to travel by humble public conveyance. Every town of any size has a bus station (otogar), usually near the market square. There the traveler finds several competing bus companies, with agents stalking the lot to steer passengers to their companies' counters. While fares are always posted, a good deal of friendly negotiation is possible over prices and routes, even without a word of Turkish. Turks are traders from the cradle.
Scheduled buses leave promptly at hourly or half-hourly intervals from dawn until late at night (for about a cent and a half per kilometer, or two cents a mile). Night buses make the longer runs‑-8 to 12 hours--across the California-sized nation. Wherever passenger traffic is too thin to support the buses, the faithful dolmu_ (a van or occasionally an antique American car) takes over, cruising regular routes, picking up and discharging passengers. The name means "stuffed" (a stuffed pepper is a dolma), and that's what they are: crowded, friendly, and convivial. If you can't find a dolmu_, stand around for 10 minutes or so looking lost, and a yellow taxi or private car will pull up, offering you transport for fuel money and conversation. (Are you married? How many children? What do you do for a living? How much do you make? How much does a car cost in America? Do you like Britney Spears of ZZ Top?)
The buses are clean, air-conditioned, and well-kept, with white-doilied headrests. On longer runs they carry conductors, who seat passengers, help with luggage, and stroll the aisle offering bottled water and the ubiquitous weak Turkish tea (çay), in tiny tulip-shaped glasses. The conductor marks the beginnings of long trips with the graceful custom of splashing lemon-perfumed water on passenger's hands.
Last spring in the small Mediterranean resort town of Ka_, Ann and I booked tickets for the 800-mile overnight journey to Ürgüp, a small town in the Cappadocian interior, by way of Antalya, a sizable port and factory town about 150 miles eastward along the Mediterranean coast, and Kayseri, the main city of Cappadocia. (The Turkish national airline flies the Antalya-to-Kayseri route, and amazingly cheaply, but the off-season schedule did not meet our needs, so the night bus it was.)
We began our trip with good Turkish beer on the otogar terrace, overlooking the sun-spangled sea, with Ka_'s famous barber, whose shaves and massages are touted by the guidebooks. A burly man with broad, shiny red jowls that advertised his trade, he was unusually outgoing even for a Turk. He laughed and joked and breathed beery blessings on our journey, hugging me and wishing us many children.
At 4:30 pm sharp we boarded a shiny Mercedes bus for the leg eastward along the coast to Antalya. The driver offered us the right-hand front seat, for the best view. Such generosity is a matter of course in Turkey, even in the big cities. Turks are gracious to strangers, with a courtesy that bespeaks their thousand of years of culture. They pride themselves on "Turkish hospitality," which they count among the gifts of their nomadic past.
The road climbed straight up out of the seaside town, over a range of rugged hills, then met the coast, where it turned into a replica of California's Big Sur, but with even grander scenery and a narrower, more twisting roadway. (Ann and I‑-who, it happened, had driven Highway 101 in California a month before‑-called the Antalya coast "Bigger Sur.") Narrow palm-fringed valleys, with well-fed dairy cows and tomato hothouses, alternated with harsh brown promontories of cleaved rock that angled up toward the sky. Tourquoise coves held tiny fishing villages with miniature cobbled beaches. The blazing sun, low at our backs, splattered light across rock faces and seaside palms, leaving the valleys in purple shade.
We soon began to regret our front-seat view. The road was deeply scalloped in places, where the underlying rock on the sea side had crumbled away and the road narrowed suddenly‑-right beneath our feet, just beyond the floor-to-ceiling windshield! Back home, such damage would be grounds for closing the highway, but in Mediterranean Turkey the authorities simply place orange traffic cones to alert motorists of the worst cave-ins. The driver, smoking calmly and driving fast, swerved neatly to avoid each one, while we flinched and yelped.
The sunlight and scenery worked their soothing ways, though, along with the multicolored laminated plastic besmele on the dashboard. It invoked God's blessing with the opening phrase of the Koran, in Arabic, but written in Turkish letters ("BISMILLAHIRRAHMANIRRAHIM"‑-"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, ...") The besmele is nearly everywhere in Turkey. In homes and shops it hangs framed on walls in the gorgeous calligraphic Arabic known as Kufic script; in motor vehicles it tends to assume this more utilitarian form. It is a blessing invoked at beginnings, and unfailingly at the outset of each journey.
For good measure, a glass boncuk (a blue eye the size of a duck egg) dangled from the rear bumper, turning away envy and the evil eye. No Turkish motorist goes anywhere without its protection. I certainly would not drive that road without it!
Arriving in Antalya at dusk, we ate a hurried but delicious meal of döner kebap (the Turkish national fast food, long slices of spiced lamb cooked on a vertical grill, something like Greek gyros, in a loaf of crusty bread) from a wood-fired stand behind the station. (I asked for beer, but the bearded, skull-capped proprietor frowned and offered Coca Cola instead.) Stowing our bags in the bus's belly holds, we boarded the night bus to Kayseri (the Roman provincial capital of Caesarea, today the main city of the Cappadocia region, population 400,000 or so), about 600 miles away, dead center of the Anatolian plain.
We took our seats at the rear, the only non-Turks aboard. A short, middle-aged man in a grey suit left his seat about halfway up the aisle and trotted down the aisle toward us. "Oh oh! What's going on here?" I asked, sotto voce. For a second I feared some kind of anti-Western backlash from the recent elections (which had gone soundly to the Islamic party) or a Kurdish protest of American military aid to Turkey (a PKK bomb had killed a tourist in Istanbul a day or two earlier).
As he approached he smiled, bowed slightly, and spoke words of welcome (which our phrase-book Turkish was too weak to catch), then squirted each of us gently with a pocket-size flask of cologne—me first, then Ann. "Te_ekkur ederim," we responded. (Thank you very much.) Some of the other passengers‑-women in headscarves, men in pin-striped suits‑-turned and smiled in greeting as he strode back up the aisle. Scents and perfumes are an ancient tradition in Turkey; a man strolling down the street or talking in a tea house with a friend may offer a drop of cologne or rose water. It's a characteristic display of Turkish warmth and intimacy. It also helps cut the aroma of Turkish cigarets. Don't go to Turkey if you're trying to quit smoking. Every man smokes, it seems, and the offering around of cigarets is a standard social gesture. Turkish cigarets are made of good tobacco and are strong and highly addictive.
The bus pulled out at 8:00, precisely on time. As it climbed the steep valley in long switchbacks, we watched the moon rise over the sea below. Soon we were speeding northward through the dark across the huge Anatolian plateau, as black and as flat as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet.
The young conductor, innocent of English or German but eager to converse (especially with blonde Ann, it must be admitted), occupied the wide back seat, and seated us just in front of him. He offered coffee, cigarets, and bottled water. We shared our dried fruit and walnuts. A relief driver slept in a rear bunk behind a curtain.
I woke at about 3:00. A two-story brick station and restaurant, stood, seemingly alone, at an intersection of two roads on the vast and chilly black plain, silvered with bright moonlight. In the far distance I could see a big volcanic cone topped with snow: Mt. Ala, the young conductor said.
Cappadocia is a tremendous expanse of volcanic ash, riven by streams that have bitten through the soft rock to form canyons. Semi-arid but fertile and well watered, it is famous for almonds, apricots, grapes, and wheat. (In this country, one might compare its terrain and geology with the orchard and vineyard country of eastern Washington State.) Snow-topped volcanic peaks‑-the builders of this stark landscape‑-stand in a mighty rank to the east, leading upward toward the Caucusus.
Foreigners know Cappadocia best for the bizarre terrain of conical stone towers, shaped by erosion in the soft volcanic tufa. These "fairy towers" and the antique cave dwellings they house are the subjects of nearly every Turkish travel poster, and of coarse jokes by tourists and Turks alike.
Cappadocia‑-the name reportedly means "place of the beautiful horses" in Persian‑-was an early refuge of Christian faith, at least as early as the third century. Christian monks burrowed like prairie dogs into the floors and walls of remote canyons. Some of their communities hid, behind a single small entrance, five or six stories of granaries, wineries, and living quarters, and brilliantly painted churches, and hundreds or thousands of people. These snug troglodytes lay protected not only from the occasional Persian raiders but from the authority of the failing Roman empire and—later—the decadent temptations of Byzantine culture. Even the smoke from cooking was concealed, led upward into intricate labyrinthine chimneys, to dissipate in the rock itself.
At daybreak we entered Kayseri, a dusty, sprawling industrial town, and disembarked at the station, a big barn full of ticket booths, food stalls, and tea shops in the city center. We breakfasted on grilled cheese sandwiches and instant coffee, surrounded by our small pile of luggage, watching Kayseri's commuters pour into the station.
In the adjoining outdoor market area, the glancing morning light brought the medieval Silk Road alive again. Men in black skullcaps rested on the ground, leaning on their handwoven kilim backpacks. Head-scarved women in long colorful skirts and hand-knit sweaters sat on homemade rugs, drinking in the sun and sorting their produce for sale. Just here, perhaps, the market has assembled for two thousand years.
A cabbie approached. In English, he asked our nationality, and our destination. We agree on a price for the trip across town to the Turkish national airline office‑-80,000 lira, a little more than $2. The driver popped a tape into the dash, and the chilling voice of the American blues artist John Lee Hooker filled the cab. The driver asked if we approved. Yes, we agreed, "Mr. Hooker's is çok güzel" (very cool). "ZZ Top is very good also!" he declared. Yes, we averred. Boogie, children!
Then on to Ürgüp, a small town in the Cappadocian heartland, full of rock-cut dwellings and tourist paraphernalia. On the town square we found the government tourist office (most towns with any hope of tourists have one), which displayed a list of hotels of various prices. We chose the Elwan, an ancient stone building a few hundred yards up a cobbled hill, in the old town. We took a beautiful and quiet room with a shower and a balcony overlooking the old mosque and the town below. We splurged at 55,000 lira, or about $14, with shower and breakfast for two (the universal and delicious Turkish hotel breakfast of bread, cheese, olives, hard-boiled eggs, and fruit, with—of course—weak tea). Bus-lagged, we ate an early dinner and walked around the little cobbled town for a bit, aware that every eye was on us—the first tourists of the season, in a poor part of a poor country. The rug and trinket dealers were a little too insistent—Turks are enterprising, as well as gracious—but we'd learned to say "hay_r" (no) by now, and we enjoyed our stroll in the warm afternoon sun.
At sundown, we lounged on our balcony, comfortably drained of energy, and looked out over the town through a thin silver veil of suppertime smoke. I sipped Turkish vodka (Duke Ellington's favorite drink, and justly so). We admired the dome of the old mosque just down the cobbled slope, and the crumbling cave dwellings across the road, and reviewed the trip. It had been much more fun, we agreed, than the air trip could have been.
The town's muezzin stepped onto the balcony of his minaret and uttered the haunting call to prayer. ("Haunting" may be a cliche, but haunting it remains.) Unamplified (a rarity), it floated across the rooftops like a bird of peace. With that reassuring sound, night drew a curtain of comfortable oblivion.
