The Aegean Coast

I spent this weekend travelling down the Aegean coast. The area along the Aegean Sea, which lies west of Turkey and east of Greece, is one of Turkey's most prosperous and historic cities. In Greek and Roman times, the Aegean coast was an important center of commerce and civilization, and the region retained a large Greek Christian population until 1923, when a "population exchange" between Greece and Turkey deported about 1 million ethnic Greeks living in Turkey in exchange for a similar number of Turks living in Greece. Although the region was hurt by the loss of the Greeks, many of whom were singularly skilled artisans, it rebounded and today is an economic powerhouse in Turkey.

On Friday morning, I flew with friends from Istanbul to Izmir on one of Turkey's marvelously cheap budget airlines. Izmir is Turkey's third-largest city, with a population of around 2.7 million people. It's located halfway down the Aegean, about 300 or so miles from Istanbul. From the Izmir airport we took a bus and a horse-drawn carriage to Ephesus. Ephesus was one of the largest and most important centers of commerce in the Hellenistic world and was later the capital city of the Roman province of Asia. At its peak, it had a population of over 200,000, making it the second-largest city in the world after Rome. After the harbor silted up and the sea receded, the city was abandoned, and today it's one of the largest and best preserved ruins of the ancient world. With an excellent guide, the city was really able to come alive, although some of the sights would have been breathtaking even without one: the meticulously reconstructed Library of Ephesus and the massive 25,000 seat theater. I found Ephesus, as well as the other ruins we visited, to be particularly compelling because they were very open for exploration. Except for a couple roped-off areas, you could walk, jump, or climb wherever you wanted. It felt like an actual city, not just a museum.

After Ephesus, we visited the nearby town of Selcuk. In Selcuk, we saw the ruins of the Basilica of St. John, a massive 6th-century church with even fewer-roped off areas than Ephesus, as well as the single column that remains from the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonder of the Ancient World. I think my description of the Turkish attitude towards historical sites applies as well to the Aegean coast as to elsewhere: they respect their history, and would never demolish, but nor do they treat it as a museum piece to be polished and locked away. Selcuk was a lovely town that also contained a charming museum of archaeology, an early mosque, and charming streets. In the town, we met a twenty-something Canadian named Alex, who was working in Norway and taking vacation in Turkey. We invited Alex to join us for lunch, and he ended up joining our contingent for the next couple days.

In the evening, we arrived in Izmir. Although Izmir is also an ancient city, a fire in the 1920s destroyed most of the historic city center. Izmir feels much newer and less crowded than Istanbul, with broad streets and lovely public plazas. There aren't a whole lot of tourist sites in Izmir, but there's a market with far better prices than the Grand Bazaar and a gorgeous waterside promenade lined with restaurants and bars. After a fresh fish dinner Friday night, while walking along the promenade, we met a large group of about 100 Turkish college freshman from three area universities. They were meeting on Friday night to get to know each other, and we chatted and played games with them before returning to the hostel.

On Saturday, we left Izmir for the ruins at Pergamon. Although not nearly as well-preserved as Ephesus, Pergamon was equally stunning because of its location: dramatically situated on the crest of a hill overlooking sapphire-blue lakes, rolling farmland, and the contemporary town of Bergama. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get to see much of Bergama: we were a bit behind schedule, and needed to travel about 2 hours north to Ayvalik, a for the night. Ayvalik is a quiet town of 30,000 situated on the Aegean coast, and populated mostly by Greeks until 1923. It evoked a feel reminiscent of how Orhan Pamuk describes the city of Kars in his novel Snow, although Ayvalik is certainly a far more prosperous town. With a little more time, we could have seen some of the Greek houses and churches, but we were only able to enjoy a delicious lokanta dinner and shoot a few games of pool at a local pool hall. Although my pool skills are somewhat lacking, it was a good time. In Istanbul, I rarely leave my comfort zone to interact with locals (particularly if they don't speak English) but in the pool hall I was able to breach the language barrier and befriend some of the Turks in the hall.

On Sunday, our previously leisurely pace began to catch up with us even more. We had to skip our planned stop at Assos (Behramkale), an ancient seaside hamlet, and rush up the coast to Canakkale and Troy on the Dardanelles straits. Troy is one of those places that you know is going to be underwhelming, but must visit nonetheless. Compared with Pergamon and Ephesus, there's very little to see: just some stone foundations and a reconstructed wooden horse. But still, it's Troy. About 20 kilometers up the coast is the modern city of Canakkale (about 100,000) residents, with another bustling waterfront and a charming, winding main street. We ate a deliciously fresh sea bass dinner along the waterfront promenade. As we dined inside the restaurant, we watched a man fishing off the promenade to catch more sea bass for the restaurant. With another day, we could have ventured across the Dardanelles strait to Gallipolli, the site of one of the most important battles of WW1. British, Australian, and New Zealander forces were attempting to open a sea route to their Russian allies, but were repelled by Ottoman forces under Mustafa Kemal, future founder of the Turkish Republic. The battle was critical in forming the national identities of Turkey, as well as the emerging nations of Australia and New Zealand.

On Sunday night, we took the overnight bus from Canakkale to Istanbul, arriving at campus around 7:30 in the morning. We slept some on the bus, which was actually quite comfortable (complete with TV screens and free snacks), but certainly didn't get a full night's sleep. I certainly needed a cup of coffee before class, but the trip was certainly worth it. If anything, we could have used another day.I try to live life in the way that will give me the best memories; five years from now, I won't remember being tired the next morning, but I will remember the great things I saw the day before.

Impressions of Istanbul, Part 1

I had never been to Istanbul before coming Koç University. Although I had heard wonderful things about the city, and barely considered the notion that I might not like it, I had very little on which to base my expectations. Most of what I knew about the city came from pictures, Wikipedia articles, and Orhan Pamuk novels. I imagined minarets soaring above narrow, picturesque streets of thousand-year old buildings; rows of ornate wooden houses lining the shores of the Bosphorus; throngs of elegantly dressed Istanbulites congregating on city squares late at night; and quiet yet exotic meyhanes nestled in remote corners of the city. What I imagined was something romantic, exotic, and cosmopolitan at the same time. In some ways, Istanbul has met these expectations, but in other ways, it has defied them. The real Istanbul is more authentic and modern, yet less exotic and romantic, than what I had imagined.

When traveling through Europe before I arrived in Istanbul, I sometimes lamented that the old cities of Europe feel almost too well preserved, too much like a Disney version of reality. As a tourist, you see a Prague and a Vienna and a Milan that are filled with perfectly restored buildings along immaculately clean, car-free streets crammed with restaurants and souvenir shops where English is the lingua franca. It's wonderful, but it's not an accurate snapshot of what Prague and Vienna and Milan were really like for most of their hundreds of years of history, or even what life in these cities is life for the average resident today. By contrast, Istanbul is a city that seems unconcerned with presenting a polished image to the outside world. It's a pragmatic place where things exist to serve the needs of ordinary residents. Immediately around Hagia Sofia, you see perfectly restored buildings and wonderfully manicured parks and streets lined with English-speaking cafes, but only a few blocks a way the city gets back to its everyday business. The Bosphorus is visually stunning, but it's also a major working waterway. Its harbors are filled with fishing boats and ferries, not yachts and tour boats. Istanbul today is what I imagine Chicago or New York or Vienna was like a hundred years: living, breathing, and working without pretense.

Although the citizens of Istanbul seem proud of their city's 1700-year history as the capital of three empires, they do not seem inclined to preserve the city as a museum piece. In reality, there is little that remains of Istanbul from before the Ottoman conquest in 1453, because the Byzantine Empire and Constantinople were then in a state of severe decline and were unable to maintain the grand Roman structures: the city's population had plummeted from over half a million in 530 AD to just 36,000 when it was conquered by Sultan Mehmet. With a few exceptions, those structures that remain are integrated into the fabric of daily life: modern roads run underneath Roman aqueducts and out of the Byantine city walls. This attitude has occasionally run afoul of UNESCO, which prefers ancient sites to be pristinely preserved for a eternity: the city's ancient sites are routinely placed on its list of most endangered sites, and restoration work has progressed slowly even on the Hagia Sofia. Yet there's something fascinating about seeing satellite dishes protruding from a 13th-century house built by Genoese traders, and who wouldn't want to stay in an Ottoman prison converted into a five-star hotel?

The authenticity of Istanbul is invigorating. Unfortunately, it comes at a price: while Istanbul has some architectural and natural wonders it is not, one the whole, a beautiful city. Browse through the pictures on the Istanbul Wikipedia article and you'll see something as stunning as any old European city. What these pictures don't capture is that, even in the wealthy parts of town, the historic buildings are mixed in with drab concrete structures and the side streets could use cleaning. Sultanahmet, the area surrounding Istanbul's great sights, is residential, working-class, dirty, and thoroughly unremarkable. The posh center of contemporary Istanbul, Beyoglu, has a bustling square, but it's probably the ugliest square you've ever seen: bisected by a major road, lined with horrendous 1970s architecture, and terminating in a blank wall at the west end. In Levent, the high-rise business district north of the center, the sidewalks in front of the 30-story glass towers could use repair. It's only once you step inside the ornate mosques of Sultanahmet or the chic restaurants of Beyoglu that you truly experience the elegance and wealth of Istanbul.

There's more I want to say about my impressions of Istanbul, which I will cover in Part 2 of this post. Istanbul is truly a city at a crossroads, between the East and West and between the first world and the third, and between modern and ancient, and this merits greater elaboration. But at the moment, I'm practicing what I like to call productive procrastination: doing something worthwhile (blogging) to avoid doing something else more pressing (studying for tomorrow's Turkish quiz). I will hopefully have a chance to return to this subject this weekend.

Welcome

A lot of blogs begin with long-winded and pretentious statements of purposes. I am going to try to avoid doing that. This is a humble weblog for me to share my experiences and thoughts while studying abroad at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and traveling around the region. My principal audience is family and friends who want to see what I've been doing, although the interested public is certainly welcome as well. I'm going to aim to update this blog about once a week, or more if I have something particularly interesting to say. Welcome, and enjoy!