Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Ani, the City of One Thousand and One Churches, is why we came all this way to eastern Turkey.  Ani was a city on the Silk Road that reached its peak of influence around the turn of the first millennium.  At the time, it was noted to rival Constantinople and Baghdad for splendor and strength, which would be like rivaling New York and Tokyo, today.  It was the size of Venice, and several times larger than Paris.  Now it is a beautiful ruin in the steppe, and a reminder that things come and go and are forgotten.  The place itself has been inhabited for untold thousands of years, as attested by the archaeology museum in Kars.  Ani as a city rose to prominence in the 5th through 11th centuries, and was a capital of various Armenian kingdoms and empires over this time.  A series of conquests and reconquests led to a general rerouting of Silk Road trade, and Ani was essentially abandoned by the time some Italians started poncing around acting like they were the second expression of classical Greece and Rome.  Then it was forgotten.  But it is still there.  It's about an hour car ride from Kars, and costs 5TL ($3) to see.  I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Arches integrated with the walls of the city.  Steep canyons protect 3 sides of the city.  You can see the remains of a cave village in the facing canyon wall.  There are 2 types of rock used for building, here, it seems.  There is red rock, and black rock.

Church of St. Gregory, Ani.  It is actually a pretty safe bet with any church here to guess "St. Gregory."  There are several.  This is the most intact one.

The canyon that forms the border between Turkey and Armenia, with the inner castle of Ani atop the hill on the right.  You still aren't allowed by the castle, which is under military control.

Some of the stonework on Ani Cathedral (or, Church of the Mother of God).

Church of The Redeemer, Ani.  One half of it was destroyed by lightning in the 1950s.  This is not something you see every day.

Some frescoes.  These are very different than any I've seen before: Medieval Armenian, I guess.

Convent of the Young Virgins, overlooking the canyon.

Bird singing and sitting on some ruins with Ani Cathedral in the background.

Hawk sitting on the city walls.

Armenian crosses carved in red and black stone facade.

The caravanasery (left) and another church of St. Gregory (right).  A caravanasery is a place where caravans on the silk road could stop for rest and protection.  Apparently there was a rule: 3 days were free lodging, but after that you had to pay.

Panorama of the site of Ani.

One last thing: Did you know the silk road was actually a road?  There's a bridge at this place and a segment of the road that comes up from it to the city.  It then continues out the gates on the other side of the city.

And off...

We left Goreme, today, and flew via Istanbul to Kars.  Kar, in Turkish, means "snow."  Turkish people we met elsewhere thought we were crazy for coming here.  It's so cold!  There is no airport!  Well, no.  It seems okay, and there is definitely an airport.  What it IS is very near the Armenian border.  For Turks in the rest of the country this is like Afghanistan, or the moon.  One visits Kars to visit Armenian cultural sites that lie within Turkey.  This is sensitive stuff! Anyhow, Kars is in the steppe, which is vast, and undulating on a huge scale.  We saw Mt. Ararat as we landed at the airport.  There is a castle here, too, and not a fancy-pants castle, but a defend-this-plain-for-you-are-otherwise-alone castle.  Kars is a city that reminds me a lot of Russia.  It was, in fact, used by occupying Russians a hundred years ago.  Here are a couple more pictures of stuff from Goreme, and one preview picture of Kars.

Here we are by a crater lake in Cappadocia.

Katy in a rock-cut church at the Sileme (we think...) monastery near the Ihlara valley in Cappadocia.

Katy made a friend!

View of Kars and the steppe that don't do it justice.  The mountain is in Armenia, I think.

The Beaten Path

So there are places that are touristy because they’re convenient and people are lazy: Las Vegas, Tijuana, Niagara.  Then there are places that are touristy because they must be:  Yellowstone, Everest, Cappadocia.  How can you hear this place exists and not want to see it?  When we were getting ready to go to Turkey, most of our American acquaintances seemed to think of it as somewhere between Afghanistan and Moldova travel destinations go.  It is, however, well on the beaten path for European travelers.  Going to Istanbul is like going to New Orleans or Miami, going to Antalya is like going to Cancun, and going to Göreme is like going to Moab or Durango.  What I’m saying is that a big part of a visit here is avoiding the feeling that you’re just part of a herd being processed, and I think we’ve done a fine job of that, so far.

First things first: We went to the Göreme Open Air Museum.  This is a UNESCO site that preserves the largest rock-cut (cave) monastery complex in the area and its frescos, which are the finest of their kind, which is 900-1000 year old Byzantine.  The frescos are stunning.  I have never seen anything like them.  They are clearly medieval, and clearly related to both Roman-type liturgical art and Russian style iconography.  What is most remarkable, though, is that (to my untrained eye, admittedly, and kind of in the dark) they seem to use quite sophisticated perspective techniques, and also have a naturalistic approach to depicting people’s expressions.  You are not, unfortunately, allowed to take pictures of them.  Here are some pictures of things we did and saw around Goreme:

Some of the so-called "Fairy Chimneys" of Goreme.  Katy calls them "Cappadokes."  I promised I'd explain the name.  When people were hiding in them, they would still light fires, and light and smoke would sometimes be visible to people who lived nearby.  I'm sure these people were smart enough to realize it was actually people living in them, not fairies, but it makes for a nice name.

The entrance to the Dark Church in the open air museum.  One of the most impressive things ever, it has to be seen to be believed.  Sorry, no pictures allowed.

We were allowed to take pictures of these simple proto-frescoes, which were made before the monks here were rich enough to engage professional artists from far away.  This is the dome of a rock-cut church.

More Cappadokes.  When you can see the big open rooms from the side like this, that is because part of the fairy chimney has collapsed, exposing the ant farm inside.  Otherwise, they would have elaborate and often hidden entrances.  This is also why most (but not all!) people have moved out of these things.  Not pictured, people carved special rooms for raising pigeons, which they used for their eggs and poop (for fertilizer).  We told our guide that Mike Tyson raises pigeons, and she thought this was absolutely crazy, but would mention it in future tours.

Ballooning is one of "the things" you do in Cappadocia.  It turns out to be totally worth it.

I never get bored of this sort of scene.  Unfortunately, the day we ballooned was pretty overcast, so the pictures aren't great.  We went through deep canyons, over mountains, landed in the remains of an abandoned rock-cut village, etc.

View straight down from above.  Note the arch.

Katy and our guide in Kaymakli, the underground city we visited.

I chickened out on a horse ride because, honestly, I was terrified.  Katy carried on.  To regain some lost pride, I rented a mountain bike and set off up some random canyon and mesa.  At the top I was confronted by this awesome view (yes, I had to go a little further to avoid a picture of powerlines, but whatever.) this is Mt. Erciyes, highest of the three volcanoes that made this place what it is.

Picture Katy took while riding amongst the Cappadokes on her FIREBREATHING TERROR STEED.

Proof that I had a bike and rode on a trail in Turkey.

The old village of Cavusin, near Goreme.  Lots of these caves are still used for storage, it turns out.  I saw a few people using them as garages, as well.  Many are, of course, tourist attractions as well.

Crazy fancy pigeon that Katy saw.  It has feathery feet!

Night picture of Goreme village from our hotel.  We have so many pictures it is ridiculous.  I don't even know what to include.

The Slow Boat to Smurf Village

As all things end, so did this:  With an overnight bus trip to a place where people live in caves.  Really, more like lived in caves, but I’ll talk more on that in a bit.  First, the bus.  Not bad at all.  Some years ago, in part of its ongoing quest to reach “European” levels of “development,” Turkey made a choice.  The terrain here is extreme, and high-speed trains were not going to be a great choice.  Low speed trains would be limited by the fact that they are HUGE and require a branching-spokes type map, and if the trip on each segment is long (as it is in extreme terrain), they are obnoxious and nobody wants to use them (see: USA).  They opted, then, to make Turkey’s TGV be a network (a DENSE network) of long-range bus routes subject to uniform standards, and that run like clockwork.  What I’m saying is that our bus was on time to the minute, and had a, well, not flight attendant, but like that.  The seats were assigned, and the vehicle itself was a shiny new-looking Mercedes motor coach…  carpeted with Turkish carpets.  It still took 10 hours, but hey.  Whatever. 

Arrival in Göreme, main square:  Rent this, rent that, book any kind of tour imaginable, best café, real best café, etc.  This is not an undiscovered place.  It is early in the morning, though, and we are tired, so we head straight to the hotel to check in and get some rest.

The hotel we booked is the Kelebek, Lonely Planet’s pick for mid-priced accommodation in Göreme.  It has been put together from several old cave homes that are attached by tunnels.  Yes, that is correct.

A long, long time ago, well before humans came to these parts, there were three great central Anatolian volcanoes, and they erupted and buried this whole area hundreds of feet thick in various layers of ash and lava.  These became tuff and basalt, respectively.  Water did its thing for millions of years and cracked and eroded the basalt.  When the tuff was exposed, being much softer, it eroded very quickly in comparison to the basalt.  Over time this formed very tall stone towers capped with basalt.  In these parts, these things are called “fairy chimneys” for reasons that will become clear, sort of.  In other parts, the basalt is more-or-less intact as a capstone, and in yet other parts, all the basalt is gone and the tuff eroded freeform into formations the locals just call “cream.”  The general effect is sort of like Bryce Canyon NP in the US, but that is where the similarities end.  First, this is basically a network of valleys in the central Anatolian plateau, which is not a forest but a hotly-contested plain on every major trade route of the past few millennia.  Second, people saw these crazy stone things and saw a place to live.

It turns out that tuff is really easy to dig out, even with tools made of obsidian, which it even comes with automatically.  Once dug out, the newly exposed surface subsequently hardens due to oxidation and becomes much stronger over the course of a couple days.  Pre-literate people took to living in caves here, as elsewhere, but unlike elsewhere, they could shape their caves more easily than they could find building materials in the surrounding areas, so they never moved out.  They built rooms, tunnels, ovens, storage areas, places for livestock, defensive positions and things like that into the hillsides and rock outcroppings.  Skipping forward, now, to recorded history, Christians fleeing from early efforts at persecution found this place just past the edge of civilization where they could hide effectively in caves.  Thus was founded what seems to be a serious proclivity for building monasteries in large cave complexes with churches, convents, secluded chambers for hermits, pilgrims, the whole monastic shebang, really.  Obviously, once they got big, they couldn’t be hidden anymore, but they were founded here (so I’m told) because on this plain, frequented by passing armies, you can see for miles, and any structure would be noticed.  Anything built into the ground, however, was not going to be noticed from a distance.  Eventually there were hundreds of churches, lined with frescos, hermits, pilgrims, and you know what?  They’re still there, just with pilgrims changed to tourists.

It makes sense, then, that the monasteries wouldn’t be the only underground attractions.  Indeed, at some point in the last few decades (I forget when), a local farmer looking for a lost chicken that he could hear squawking but couldn’t see, found it at the bottom of a ventilation shaft for an 80 meter deep underground city that once held 3000 people.  Looking around a little more, several of these cities were discovered, and archaeologists began studies and excavations.

The underground cities were places that entire towns (also caves, just visible from the outside) could flee to, with their livestock, in the event that hostiles were approaching, leaving an apparently abandoned village behind for their enemies to gloat over.  Their underground places were hidden, but also designed to be nearly impossible to attack, with narrow single-file stooped position access tunnels, arrow slots in the floor where defenders could fire upward at entering parties, and giant stone discs that several men could roll into place only from the inside.  Ventilation shafts were vertical and hundreds of feet deep, doubling as wells.  How well did all of this work?  Unfortunately, that is lost to history.

People here continued to live in and build their caves until the 1960s, when the government essentially condemned the cave houses (The landforms are made by erosion, which continues to happen, but faster, once they are mined out, and collapses involve hundred ton boulders & such).  They then moved into more typical houses right next to their old cave villages.  Recently, many of the old caves that are still in particularly good condition have been converted to hotels.  The economy is tourism and farming (most famously apricots, but also wheat, pumpkins, and mulberries).

This is the very short version of the history of Cappadocia, which is old Persian for The Land of Beautiful Horses.  We have now been here for a couple of days, so in the next post I’ll show some pictures of what we’ve done and seen.

The Last of the Lycian Way

Our last day hiking on the Lycian Way was spent on its most iconic segment:  The Gelidonya Point Lighthouse walk.  This is a coastal walk through wilderness that passes by a lighthouse on a very acute-angle peninsula sticking into the Mediterranean, and there are famously 5 islands off the coast that have prevented the area from being used for major shipping since classical times.  As with all of these coastal walks, there were steep, shortish uphills and downhills, and contour-hugging segments above small bays.  The vegetation was pine forest with occasional olive trees and other things.  The water is as blue as anything can be, and the bays are turquoise.  It is a very fine, very satisfying, and not particularly easy Mediterranean coast walk.  I would just like to point out something I’ve noted over the course of walking these 6 days in old Lycia.  This is not really the middle of nowhere.  A near miss could leave you in Antalya  (pop. 1 million.  Ugly, ugly city) or at one of the resorts stretching as far as the eye can see along the coast from there (hundreds of thousands of beds, all-inclusive type resorts, and not the nice ones).  But go a little further, and suddenly it is real wilderness.  The quiet of it is amazing: The sort of silence I’ve only heard a couple times in the US.  Our walks started and ended in villages, and we were transported to them by minibus.  Turkey is not home to a particularly quiet and retiring people.  But often, as in every-day-often, it would happen that if I stopped walking the only thing I could hear was my own heart beating disappointingly fast.  That doesn’t obviously count the basically continuous experience of having distant waves, wind, and birds being the only sound.  In some sense, a big part of this country is still a simple place.  And that is why you should hike the Lycian Way.

Here are some pictures to make you jealous.

View of the point with the lighthouse all tiny-like

Things like this are pretty much everywhere

You-know-who walking through the woods

Two more days of walking you haven't done

Yesterday and today Katy and I walked two particularly good segments of the Lycian Way.  Yesterday, it was Olympos to Adrasan (which is where we’re staying).  Here are two representative pictures. 

It was a great walk, one of those classic start-at-the-ocean-end-at-the-ocean-climb-a-huge-hill-in-the-middle walks.  We climbed a steep hillside after starting in some ruins, had a great vista from the ruins of a fortified camp on a headland, and then descended a steep canyon into a plain full of small farms.

A few words about Adrasan:  I mentioned before that where we are staying caters mainly to pensioners.  This is true.  These are not, however, chatting about early-bird specials while really thinking about the next bingo game in Phoenix-type pensioners.  A conversation I overheard today went like this, “so you’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, then?” “Oh yes, of course.”  We have also been told (very convincingly; I’m looking into it) that Namibia is absolutely the next place we should go.  Here is a picture of Adrasan Bay.

Today, we hiked over the saddle that connects Mt. Olympos with the rest of the mountain range.  Here is  a picture of Mt. Olympos SHROUDED IN MYSTERY.  

As someone who loves forests, I totally geeked out on this.  We had to tap a variety of red and green mana, but we saw a few cool things.  First, we started at higher elevation than most of these other hikes, a couple thousand feet.  The forest here, as below, was pine trees, but big, old ones.  We then clilmbed up.  As the elevation got higher, the ground got rockier, and we got into the region where clouds (fog, depending on where you’re standing) are there more often than not, a remarkable change occurred.  The pines were replaced by old, gnarled cedar trees.  MASSIVE old gnarled cedar trees.  The were far apart, and the branches stacked in a way that made them look like pagodas.  There were 2 types, and I don’t really know what they were.  P at the tree line, the trees became exceptionally huge, but were flattened and prehistoric looking.  The change was repeated in reverse going down the other side, with the addition of monstrous plane trees, including Yggdrasil, itself.  The fat base part was easily more than 10 feet wide.  We were met at the end of the hike with cold beer.  Now that is walking support.  Tomorrow is our last day on the Lycian Way, and we will walk the iconic lighthouse walk before heading off to Capadoccia, which promises to be BANANAS.

Approaching the cloudline on the slopes of Mt. Olympos

Prevalent wildflowers

Katy making an Arnold in a mysterious forest

Cedars running into the treeline

Descending

Yggdrasil, the world tree.

South Pacific and Santa Claus

So yesterday we walked all day through the rain.  The scenery was like this:

So what I'm saying is we were in Indonesia.  Did you know they speak Turkish in Indonesia?  We passed a lot of these:

They smell pretty good, and I was wise to premedicate with claritin.  At last, we ended up here:

Which is a treehouse in Olympos where we had tea, coffee, and gin and tonics.  It was exhausting.

Today, we went to some SURPRISING places.

First, we drove 2 hours and went to the church of St. Nicholas.  Yes, THE St. Nicholas.  The 2nd century bishop from Lycia who became well-known for delivering gifts of dried apricots to poor children.  THE St. Nicholas who was subsequently adopted as the patron saint of children, fisherman, and, apparently, the city of New York (I just know what they tell me).  THE St. Nicholas whose legend was subsequently spread via Genghis Khan's hordes to Hungary and Finland, where his legend grew and acquired some reindeer.  Truly, the original celebrity saint.  His church was built over an older shrine in mid Byzantine times, so this isn't an original early Christian monument, just only a bit more than a thousand years old.  Anyhow, in the church there are domes with frescoes:

A tunnel for elves:

And, of course, Byzantine mosaics for you to walk on:

After St. Nicholas, we went to an even more surprising thing:  A city that sunk in the ocean, but is still poking out just a little.  This is in Kekova, and you have to take a boat to see it.  Apparently, during an earthquake, or some other mighty geologic catastrophe, this whole city, which held a few thousand people, sunk enough that the coastal hill it was on became an island, and most of the city ended up underwater.  The parts above water became goat enclosures.  It is really quite remarkable.  Here is a place where you can clearly see the walls of a very large building a few feet below the surface.  The water is quite clear.

From here we went on a fine hike, with minimal getting lost, through some coastal pastureland.  Pictures:

Second to lastly, we went to the ruins of Myra, which was a large Lycian capitol.  The Lycians, as I may have mentioned and forgotten, are quite famous for carving great tombs of limestone for their ancestors right inside their cities, and often right into the ground, hill, or cliff their cities are built on.  Myra is the finest such example, and they also had a very large Greek-style theater that is the largest in Turkey, and in the best condition:

Lastly, for this brief and picture-heavy update, the people who owned a cafe let Katy hold their puppy: