my My Wandering

The steppe stretched apparently endlessly in all directions: rolling hills, meandering streams, wide valleys, scarce, poor hamlets consisting of small houses sharing the same light brown colour of the background, and rarely more rugged crests emphasising the arid vastness. The land was hardly fertile, as it was mixed with pebbles and stones, and yet, where possible, it was ploughed. Only sheep, grazing on dry grass, seemed to grant the view some other colour than the omnipresent light brown; and so, their black or white wool invigorated the traveler the way no rainbow feather parrot could have done. Other than that, a black dash alone drew one’s attention: the highway cut across the dry steppe like a black sword adorned with sapphires and lapis lazuli stones in the colour of the Iranian trucks plying it every now and then.

I had traveled by this highway some 16 years before, on a 36 hour bus ride. Back then, even though the scenery had been more desolate than now following some major floods that had pushed villages beyond their day-to-day poverty, I had looked with avid, innocent curiosity and a pure respect at the land and its settlements. I was harder to impress now. I had learnt to keep my distance, to be prepared, come what may. To wear my mask, even when close relatives died the same face mask fashion year. To always have some worse-than-now point of reference, whether it was about leper-struck, dying beggars in Calcutta, those people by their roadblock off Puerto Ordaz simply shouting ‘Hay hambre!’ or a child at Guelta d’Archei with an infected scratch nearing septicaemia and sure death because his family did not agree to him getting on our Toyota and seeing a doctor. I could rely on my experience and stay safe now, I had learnt to keep my balance no matter what. 16 years. I had grown up.

The sky was clear, the sun was strong and it created a certain glare when its light got filtered by the haze going up to about 1000 m. above the ground. And then, above this layer of haze, it showed up. Sovereign over its subjects, massive, with the snows up its high reaches glittering in the sun as if challenging those daring turn their head towards it. The very image I had first seen 16 years before. The same haze, the same sun, the same glitter, the same wind-swept steppe. But not the same stranger. For the stranger now wore a face mask promising safety but granting conformity and ultimately alienation. And a face mask never comes off easily, once one accepts it and puts it on, it is there to stay and the wearer becomes its deaf-and-dumb, numb subject.

The border town was dusty, apparently chaotic and busy, but one quickly and wilfully dived in its atmosphere, joining its street flow. With those big sacks of several types of raisins, pistachio, figs, dates and coffee placed in the open, enticing the passer-by. With grills placed in the street and bonfires across the bazaar the smoke of which blended in with that coming from unseen waterpipes, given the fact that cafes and restaurants were officially closed down. And even with shop owners hurrying to close down, late customers rushing home and streets turning lifeless in a matter of minutes, given the Saturday night curfew that granted the whole town a ghostly atmosphere just before 8 P.M. Which reminded me of the time a month or so before, when I had stepped into one of the usually fancy and busy, major bookstores in Bucharest looking for a guidebook, and asked the attendant where to find the travel book section. He had been so puzzled by someone considering foreign travel towards the end of 2020 to the point of needing a few seconds to recover and remember where to direct me in that nearly deserted bookstore. Here at least people could still congregate around those big samovars placed in the street and sip cup after cup of black tea, the fire making their eyes glitter through the veil of smoke and steam enshrouding them. And it felt enchanting to be offered rose water to wash the hands after meal or tea as opposed to the sanitising gel hysteria of the crumbling Western civilisation stumbling upon its own glory of times past while reaching its final stage defined by Historian Neagu Djuvara in his well grounded ‘Civilisations et lois historiques’ study.

I had flown using an award ticket and, as just days before Turkey had started to make public new Covid-19 daily cases (as opposed to only new daily patient numbers), with figures high, I had made a mathematical projection revealing that, if the infection ratio in Romania (the reference used by the Bucharest authorities) and Turkey had stayed more or less like that, in 3 and a half weeks I would have come out just before the Romanian authorities put Turkey on the yellow list confining travellers coming from there to a 14 day home quarantine. Of course, figures in Turkey might have gone up, those in Romania might have gone down, so I was fine with home confinement after being out there, after enjoying a while far from the contemporary hysteria generated by man that had got used for way too long to safety and comfort at all and any costs. But my home country granted me a buffer: it typically took the National Emergency Situation Committee (in a country like Romania, the very word ‘committee’, with its Communist tag, fit the picture exceptionally well) 3 to 4 days to copy the up-to-date, Bruxelles-issued worldwide infection ratio list and pass on a new regulation stating which countries qualified for the yellow list by comparison to the day’s ratio in Romania, regulation that took an extra day to be enforced. All that provided ample time to change my tickets, have new ones issued, or even travel by bus from the remotest corner of Anatolia to Romania if needed; I could therefore be saved by the Romanian bureaucracy, as Ken Jones put it in his epic book, only that I would add ‘incompetence’ to the recipe. What was going to happen in three and a half week time aside, Turkey had already enforced some travel restrictions, and those – as I was to see – were likely to be extended. I was fine with that as well, and the region I was traveling through provided enough isolation and far-from-the-madding-crowd air to allow one breathe, walk and ponder. So that when in Doğubayazıt I even got a H.E.S. number, a personal identification number Turkish authorities used to track down everyone during the epidemics, half the way between the epidemic spread analysis mainly used in most European countries and the individual QR code necessary to leave one’s house in China. While theoretically not required for foreign tourists, I was to see that almost all hotels and transport companies, even some museums would not take me in without it. Generally, as far as the logistics were concerned, I soon realised I was happy with whatever happened along the way or at the end of the road. Man’s task is not to build a glorious future (or sit comfortably on the cushion provided by his glorious past for that matter), but to make the best of the present, of the second he has been given and he instead mocks at.

‘I wouldn’t move back to Poland now, especially with the actual government in Warsaw, but even generally I wouldn’t go back to Europe, which seems to keep on going down every day. Here nobody has a problem with my blonde hair and fair complexion, and nobody makes a fuss about giving me equal rights to whatever either, things just flow naturally; back there people either look one up or down for being different, there is always a fuss, positive or negative, around those different’. Agnieszka had settled in Doğubayazıt years before, married a Kurdish man and had a boy that kept on freely running across the hotel lobby we were talking in barefoot, laughing and singing. One could have argued it was funny to see how far the public mentality alienation and the sliding towards pure extremism (be it the politically correct or cheap generalisation kind) was going in Europe or North America, only that it was not funny, it was backward and plain bad. At the end of the day, the 21st century Western civilisation with its purist, sterile doctrine preaching the freedom of whatever (including the freedom to insult someone for being different, to denigrate historic personae for being imperfect, to absurdly claim all men have the same abilities, understanding and skills, respectively to grant status by affiliation), such an apparatus only showed that mankind had not learnt anything from the failure of, among others, Communism, which had had more or less the same approach of the world.

The town of Bayazıt had been set up on the slope above the wide steppe for a reason: a strategic location, but one could have added the fresh air, as the winds sweeping across the highlands above the plain constantly blew the dust into the latter. So, while the modern Doğubayazıt (built from scratch once Bayazıt had been razed off by the Turkish army during the 1930 Kurdish rebellion) was either dusty (when dry) or muddy (when it rained or snowed), the hilltops and slopes around the Ișak Pasha Palace reigned in the fresh, cool air, commanding a generous view over the valley, still preserving signs of the old town in form of fading tombstones, collapsed house walls and terraces. The palace was a gem, with its walls of carved yellow-orange stone, its mixture of architectural styles and decoration motifs, where Seljuk, Persian, Ottoman, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic and Rococo elements complemented each other in a superbly harmonious manner. The tree of life on the Armenian structure tomb, the guarding lions by the harem entrance, the fine floral patterns of Persian and Western inspiration, the Seljuk portals with pointed arches and stalactites or the dash of colour on the mosque dome, all granted the palace a sense o diversity that could have hardly mirrored the region better. From that alone and contemporary doctrine would have a lot to learn. Seen from high on the cliff the now crumbling walls of the Eski Kala still clinged to, the palace surrounded by the old town on their prime location would have appeared in all their grandeur. 

But now mist was coming up and it soon started snowing, so that I soon started walking back the 6 km. into town.

‘I used to be a teacher here, my family comes from the old Bayazıt, but most of them left, my children are in Istanbul now, so I travel around, find old carpets, as frail or ruined as they might be, cut the better parts of them and make amulets; c’est pour le bonheur’, the old man in his small shop full of wool rugs said while bringing a thick wool pillow and inviting me to sit down, switching between English and French in a natural, enchanting manner. The way he stressed the word ’bonheur’, in a joyful, pure, almost childish way, as well as measured movements of his hands by which he carefully arranged his rugs as if they were his brethren, spoke more than a thousand words could have done. The discussion then easily slid from Kurdish kilim patterns to other aspects of Kurdish life:

‘The government should work with us, instead of putting us on a liste noire… The P.K.K… you see, the P.K.K. is my uncle, my neighbour, my cousin.’

However governments usually prefer look in disdain at and see scapegoats in consistent minorities, politics are about having someone to turn into an enemy, evil figure, while majority people always need someone else to blame for their own failures, my own country had its own (great) share of that with the Hungarian minority, so there was nothing new.

Leaving the old man carry on his cultural root reviving handwork, I stopped by a man with his samovar placed out in the street, to have a glass of tea and warm up a bit. When I wanted to pay the staple equivalent of less than USD 0.10, the man refused, placed his hand over his heart, smiled and said “Kurdî”. He did not and needed not say anything more.

‘Chip, chip, chip’, the sound of my crampons tried to compete with the howling wind as I approached the top of Ararat two days later. It was around -20C, there was a steady wind making it feel consistently less and the sky above was clear, with a strong sun making the final ice slope glitter. Except Recep, there was nobody around for miles on end, as the two camps we had passed by were empty, with only the wind playing at will. As there was a cloud layer going up to about 3500 m.a.s.l., nothing and nobody from the world of man below seemed able to reach us here. We had gone through sun, snow, scree, thermos upon thermos of black tea, several loaves of naan and the de rigueur Ararat wind to get here. We had seen Little Ararat with a cap of clouds, a sunset between two layers of clouds and a full moon mysteriously veiled by a lenticular cloud. All that in only two days.

As for the third day, dawn back in Doğubayazıt came with haze and the news that the government had put in a total week-end lockdown, which did not cover tourists, but affected for sure transport and other businesses, as well as let cities devoid of life. So short-term plans (i.e. made the day before) were changed for ad hoc decisions and bags were backed quickly, a rest day was wiped out and feet felt like moving: it was Wednesday and by Friday night I needed be far from the urban ado and back into the mountains where civilisation was thankfully replaced by fresh air, peace and no man-made zings to hide one’s face, eyes and ultimately soul behind. So I once again took it to the steppe, this time Northwards, crossing hill after dry, barren hill where every now and then a creek or marsh created a patch of short grass where next to always a few dozen sheep grazed at ease. Curiously, most sheep were black. People here did not seem to have the black sheep superstition. Or they had other more important things to consider than blaming an animal for their own issues.

Hopping from dolmuș to bus, respectively from ‘spas’ to ‘teşekkürler’ in Iğdır, popping out the passport half a dozen times at the gendarme or army checkpoints now joined by road police staff (in charge to check the ID and H.E.S. cards while making sure the Kurdish population was well aware it was under close surveillance), I reached Kars, with its atmospheric, dimly lit streets lined with many ruined or decaying Russian era houses and mansions. Two sounds were to stay with me for a long while in connection with Kars: the muezzin’s call for prayer that had a few stray dogs in the small park facing the old governor’s mansion start howling, respectively later in the night, the muezzin’s chanting Qur’an ayats in a highly clean and pure voice that had me stay in front of Evliya Mosque for a while, even though it was getting rather cold.

‘I was born in Kars, but my parents came from Dagestan. When things got really bad for them there, the family splat, some came here, others left to Azerbaijan and elsewhere, nobody stayed’, said Celil while giving me a ride to Ani.

‘Have you ever gone there, to visit the places your family comes from?’

’Never, it is too hard. There always happens something bad in that region. It is always impossible to be sure of anything’, he answered, his attention at the radio tuned in to the news.

‘Empire borders are always tricky…’

‘Yes, and we are not but poor pawns. But never mind that. You said you are heading to the Kaçkars, didn’t you? Do you need any help with things there? I have a friend up in Yaylalar…’

I had contacted all guesthouses I had managed to find without much success, and I had forgotten that things work best when you make a single step at a time, lean for support on the people you meet and take your time to breathe. A few minutes later, Ismail said I was welcome to his timber lodge, confirmed the Yusufeli dolmuș schedule for the following day and the fact that I might do some climbing to the high crests. I might. One needs leave something to relativity at the end of the day, and I was very happy like that.

Less than half an hour later I found myself in the middle of the very Central Asian landscape of steppe plateaus, dramatic gorges and the typical wind, war and earthquake-chiselled architecture. It could have been Balkh, Merv or Khiva. But Ani was grand, not only given the fine carved stone details of the churches there, but also the exquisite blend of styles, the harmonious coexistence of dwellings and their utility change over time. Its history filled one’s palate the way only a sip of Turkish coffee can: as the saying goes, black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love. One had an eerie feeling while walking across the vast plateau hosting the many ruins, with broken pottery, scattered fragments of carved granite and sandstone decorations, bazaar streets and half crumbling religious buildings – from a Zoroastrian fire temple to mosques or Armenian and Georgian churches. Contrary to the easy to stumble upon debate given its location on the border between two countries not willing to sort out their issues and get going with their existence as neighbours, Ani was neither Armenian, nor Seljuk or Kurdish. It was a world of its own, one created by all these and many other people that had gone this way for many centuries. And this is what actually made the visitor shiver in contempt. And it was utterly unnecessary to add anything while noting the very fact that a Silk Road bridge over Akhurian River now lay broken, while the two countries on its banks competed as far as which had the biggest flag or tallest observation border post, but did not have even one border crossing.

Back in Kars, as it was getting rather late and transport was dwindling, I decided not to move on that late afternoon, resolving to have the seventh glass of black tea of the day, respectively aimlessly walk around town, enjoy a çiğ köfte, a künefe and a glass of ayran. All that while looking at the city go on with its existence, from the many jewellery shop-like cheese and honey showcases to the many manufacture workshops down the side streets back of the glitz main avenues a pack of big, strong stray dogs lazily moved along every now and then.

Seeing the way a gloomy, high pressure day makes the smoke going up fro chimneys and stoves nearly instantly go down is enough to warm up one’s cold hands and feet. And so a day that was meant to be transport intensive was granted a more optimistic start. Only that it was going to get ever better as time passed. After crossing a snow-covered plateau, the same endless steppe, the road plied a more and more dramatic gorge, with arid or evergreen-covered cliffs, a beautiful turquoise creek and an impeccably blue sky above. Later on, the odd ruins of a Georgian church or a fortress located on top of a cliff granted the place a unique sense of isolation from anything and anyone not there and then. The serene atmosphere was however broken to pieces as we got closer to Yusufeli, with works on a gargantuan dam project turning everything into a dusty bowl dotted with trucks, huge heaps of scree and the pillars meant to support the new road once the valley was to be flooded. And old Yusufeli itself was simply waiting to be evacuated ‘one of these years’, as Ismail put it, with brand new quarters of uninspiring and totally out-of-place blocks already ready on the slopes and terraces above. Until then, especially as it was Friday afternoon and the week-end lockdown started in a few hours, the town was bustling, with cars, trucks, minibuses, pedestrians struggling to make their way down the narrow, single lane streets; and yes, it was dusty, a reminder of the concrete omen that was to wipe it off the ground.

It was sunny and nonetheless cool, yet, as we carried on upstream, the rugged snowy ridges of the high Kaçkar showed up. The valley we were following was generally quite narrow, with gorge sections alternating with narrow pastures where hamlets or summer cottages appeared. Old houses had their ground, sometimes also the first floor walls built of rough stone and the last floor built of timber, often with a generous balcony that acted as the main decorative part. Where the land allowed it, as narrow its stripe it might have been, terraces had been created and they were dotted with fruit trees or crops. Down by the blue stream, lines or groups of poplars with now yellow leaves glittered in the soft afternoon sunlight. An image of Panjshir Valley flashed through my mind, only that evergreen thickets made the difference. Ismail did all sorts of commissions with his van: apart from passengers, he ferried bread, cigarettes, medicine or other necessary items up the mountain with its rare and small communities; his blowing the horn in front of the bakery had the man there pop out his head, the order was short and it was delivered to the minibus in seconds. One needed not go to the top of the mountain to feel the highlander helping spirit. Some 2 hours after leaving Yusufeli, the valley opened up, with extensive pastures bordering it: we had reached Yaylalar and I soon found myself in a large hut, without a single patch of concrete in sight, as all walls and ceilings were panelled with wood. After a walk around the quiet hamlet, sitting by the stove, drinking tea and patting the big white cat that seemed not to have a single care in this maddening world was the most refreshing and equally relaxing activity I could have ever dreamt of. As Nasim, the owner, spoke next to nothing but Turkish, I still did not know what would happen the following day, I only knew a certain Ali was coming. And I did not care learn more. The fire burning, the cat meowing lazily and the absolute background silence were all that one needed.

Following an absolutely quiet night without a trace of wind or anything – and anyone for that matter – moving around, Ali did come. An elder, short but well built man who spoke next to no word of any language I did, but who did not actually need to, as his overwhelming kindness often made words unnecessary . On the other hand, the share of similarities with Turkish words in some of the languages I had some knowledge of (Romanian, Persian, Hungarian) proved to be useful and I felt very much at ease with him as his face reminded me of my Turkish origin grandfather coming from South Romania.

The sun was up, it was bitterly cold and the view was grand as we went up the wide Yaylalar Çay and passed through the next to deserted Olgunlar Hamlet, then reaching the summer settlement at Hastaf, where we had decided to sped the night in a stone hut. In the afternoon, as I went up the slope to enjoy the view of the rugged ridge we were heading to, I could hear the echo made by Ali’s joyous yahooing across the valley. As night fell and we retreated in the hut, we were quiet for a long while, each of us apparently looking towards the stove, but actually elsewhere, no other sound about but that of the cracking fire. When my eyes met Ali’s narrow eyes (isn’t it interesting that highlanders’ eyes are always narrow, while city folk have theirs always as wide as their camera lenses?), we just smiled.

We left Hastaf late, at around 8 AM (Ali had said that allowed for ample time, but it would prove that he had never planned to go all the way to the summit), and, by the time we passed the upper camp, Ali started to show signs of exhaustion: he complained about the half a meter or thicker layer of snow, he said we could never make it to the summit and back in time and he was ever slower. I decided to go for it alone, so we parted; it was obvious we were going nowhere in that pace. There was more and more snow as I advanced, especially past the saddle off the Deniz Gölü, and it required a lot of trail breaking. That, and finding the way all alone was pretty tiring, especially on the steep slope going up the summit ridge, as it got misty and it soon started snowing. I remembered my first hikes, with my father taking me along when setting camps in the mountains when I was a young boy, in the absence of someone to leave me at home with (my parents had divorced with us two children parted and they would never come to terms with one another until my mother died in early 2020, a few months later followed by my brother’s ending in a car accident). In the beginning it had always been a challenge to keep up with the speed of the high school pupils in my father’s groups, but life is about being up to what we commit to, we can otherwise carry on sleeping or doing nothing, a smartphone in hand or TV set in front of our eyes. After a steep way up the ridge through different consistency snow layers to deal with and a short scramble along its line of sometimes unstable rocks, I reached the summit at 02:30 PM. Together with the superb ridge it topped, this spot probably allowed excellent views in clear weather, but not now, when it instead allowed one’s imagination to step in before hands went numb due to the snowstorm shaping up.

On the way back, after doing again the quite tricky traverses down the summit slope and going up the saddle towards the Deniz Gölü, I met Ali: he was tired, dead thirsty, he humbly asked me not to tell people in Yaylalar that he did not make it to the top (he would be out of business for the summer treks he led), but had made it that far and did not make a fuss, which I appreciated. We went down together all the way to Yaylalar, where he retreated instantly: he was done. With all summit joy I felt, I could not ignore the broken heart Ali must have had for realising he could not make it up there in his quality of guide. On the other hand, it had been a tough day with all trail breaking, changing weather and not at all easy traverses. We parted with a hug and I just hoped it cheered him up a little.

It was a sunny morning as I started trekking up the Zamevan. The trail was pleasant to Karamolla, as it went among rosehip bushes and plenty of scrub. Vegetation, other than hay and weeds, was scarce past the hamlets of Karamolla and Körahmet, each with about a dozen houses most of which followed the typical structure of stone or timber structure. Just before reaching the last human settlement up the valley, the one at Satelef Yayla, I started going straight up following a quite steep foothill. Less than an hour later I got to a 3129 m.a.s.l. peak on the Murzut Crest; if the side I had come up from (South exposure) there was next to no snow and it was mostly grassy, the Northern side was steeper, rocky and full of snow. After a break in the cold wind to take in the rugged and impressive Kumluk Ridge, I started going down through the big snow, making a detour by the Okuz Gölü, which was large and scenically bordered by dramatic cliffs. Going down the Bulbul Deresi took a good share of trail breaking, but was fast and I reached the trailhead at Pișenkaya Yayla, overlooked by some decaying, but very picturesque timber huts placed on a steep scree slope by the treeline. The many traces of bears and wolves could have hardly fit better this remote place. I carried on down to Norsel Yayla and then took the dirt road up, passing by a few hamlets that looked lifeless in winter. As night fell I reached Saribulut Yayla and some 30 minutes later, as the dirt road turned South, I tried to find the trail going straight down the narrow crest to Barhal. What I did find – that would soon prove not to be the right way – slowly vanished in the dense forest full of beech, ash and oak shoots that made advancing hard. The slope got ever steeper and it was then dotted with cliffs, scree, walls to avoid or negotiate. Quite a few times I found myself on the verge of a vertical drop, the raging waters of the Hevek Deresi way down into the dark night. More than two hours later I reached the valley floor and the road, so that by 8 PM I got to Barhal. 15 minutes later I was knocking at the door of the guesthouse I had called, where Ahmet was stirred by the long route I had chosen, let alone the 2 hour delay due to the way down.

There was no sound coming from the outside and the morning showed why: a 10 cm. or so layer of fresh snow now covered everything: the trail going up to the guesthouse, the fruit trees around, the evergreen forest on the opposite slope. Finding the path going up to the old Georgian convent, I got there and carried on up the crest for a while more, then stopping and just taking in the view to in all directions, with those small clusters of timber cottages clinging to hillsides and crests in the tiniest place where a pasture allowed it. This was the absolute form of solitude and peace. It was as if the people settling there – even for the summer – centuries before – knew much better than contemporary man that nature supports them better than urban crowds and the fake comfort that comes with it. And the ruin of the 21st century ‘civilisation’ could not have been more obvious when seeing these hamlets quite often abandoned for good, with pastoral life turned into a pastime. Back down in the valley, I peeked into the old Georgian cathedral completed in 973 AD and turned into a mosque in 1677 AD, and then ended the day with an overwhelming communal dinner where I joined my host’s family around their typical low, round table.

The snow was melting and it was damp as I left quiet Barhal, had to put the mask back on and get to sophisticated man’s cobweb. Luckily, it would be an on and off day, as I got on the Erzurum-bound bus just to get off at the Oșkvank crossing and hitch a ride to the village hosting the respective church. A chartered taxi passed by and the man carrying a big sack of cereals that had hired it instantly agreed to take me on as well, so that minutes later I stood in front of the fine church. Even surrounded by a restoration work fence as it was, it was a gem, with fine bas-reliefs and an imposing outline well put together given its location on a smooth slope. Back on the main road, a bus coming from Artvin soon arrived and delivered me to Erzurum. If Barhal had been damp, Erzurum was cold and wet, there was a drizzle in the air and an omnipresent layer of dirty snow on the ground. But I had other priorities for the time being. First to find the school teacher hostel which was impressing in its own right, a 6-7 floor property the size of a large hotel, with a winding stairway and a vast lobby at a price of a youth hostel even for a ‘civilian’. Second, to find some börek and pide, which was easy. Third, to find the dental clinic I needed, as a few days before, when up in the mountains, one of my premolars had developed a quite significant cavity. 

Without an appointment and also with only a short time in town, I expected little and envisaged the hustle and bustle of going to my dentist back home just before the winter holidays. And yet, a mere 10 minutes after stepping into the modern, impeccably appointed clinic, I had been consulted, had a full mouth x-ray, had the whole issue explained and got scheduled for the following day at 8:30 AM when the very attentive doctor said everything would be sorted. And solved it was indeed, with a careful, step-by-step, imagistic-followed root canal treatment that took an hour and a half, to which useful advice and a just in case painkiller prescription were added, all that with Neșet Ertaș’s bağlama as background. The difference between the Western and Eastern approach could not have been starker. And so was the decline of the Western card castle, due to its obsession with time, control and comfort at all costs. As for my country, with its general mentality belonging and leading nowhere, East or West, I was just to learn that my father under cancer treatment was being notified without any explanation or plan on very short notice about the next treatment stage not because that was decided then, but simply because doctors did not care talk to one another, let alone to the patient, and considered that normal. What one might have considered a grand act of pure imbecility was nothing but a mere reminder of nearly all times I needed a doctor in Romania and of when pretty much everything they could fail in delivering they made sure they did fail in a blend of supremely sweet egocentrism, careless brutality and incompetent candor.

Back to it, Erzurum was lively, with thousands upon thousands of people walking up and down the main avenues lined with fancy and convenience shops, in a potpourri of neon lights, sounds and ads, with even the old madrassas and mosques being lit in bright colours, with music coming from pretty much everywhere and with the call to prayer naturally turned up really loudly to be heard despite everything and anyone else. Erzurum froze overnight, with sidewalks turning into virtual slides and a translucent sunlight making it all shine. The Seljuk architecture was expectedly impressive, but my eyes remained stuck not only to the superb stone carvings, but especially on the glazed minarets of the Yakutia and the Çifte Minareli Medrese that instantly took me way Eastwards, into Iran, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. After gladly accepting an old man’s invitation to tea, gulping some su börek and drinking boza while sitting (with all terraces closed and most park benches taken away due to the epidemics)on a fence in a construction site, I headed to the bus station for an over 8 hour bus ride across snow-covered highlands where the mist made heavens and earth turn into one. But as it got dark and the bus was rushing down the mountains towards the hills and eventually the plains, so did the ground, with snow withering out and eventually being replaced by mud and dust.

‘Alaykum salaam!’, answered the elder man of the half a dozen person group waiting by the empty taxi lot as I walked out of the bus station in Şanlıurfa and greeted them at past midnight. Noticing my big backpack he definitely considered to be full of a life story (which, given the mountaineering equipment inside, was not far from true), he then carried on, probably eager to have company on the way back home: ‘Arbil ‘aw Alsulaymania?’

‘La, la. Urfa’, I answered, even though I would have liked to have a different answer, one that would take me past Erbil, to places I had and had not been to some years before.

Eventually a cab showed up and they somehow managed to fit both their selves and their luggage in. A while later another cab appeared and I shared it with a young man into town, so that I quickly reached my hotel, to find out that all daytime buses on had been canceled: the weekend lockdown had its effects. Which left me to the only viable option, that of a night bus, one of the couple that were only in transit through town, while on very long (12-15 hour) routes, as those had not been canceled. Ticket bought, I dived into what seemed to be just another bazaar town, but was not. People wore masks here just down the main road with its neatly lined bazaar stalls and shops. When one stepped off into the maze of lanes, with their fragrances, colours, sounds and fascinating mingle of people and languages (as Turkish and Arabic blended in fluidly), the 2020 day in, day out obsession of the Western world not willing to come to terms with its ultimate ruin and failure, all that was but pastime. Terraces and restaurants were closed as the regulation asked, yes, but it sufficed to make a ‘no takeaway’ sign and they would show one some seat behind the counter, in a backside room, on the way to the kitchen or in a back yard, where the meal, pastry or künefe could be served, while a man with a tray full of tea glasses instantly appeared too. It was actually impossible to ignore the omnipresent men, especially young boys delivering fresh, steamy bread, tea, ayran, salep, cheese or one of the many kebabs that made the town famous.

The old mosques such as the Mevlid-i Halil and the Selahaddin Eyyubi were superb in their rather simple, but gracious take on their rough stone structure lacking tilework or paint patterns, while the Balıklıgöl was crowded with a potpourri of men, women and children dressed up in different styles, from the local men in baggy trousers and women in bright red or golden dresses joined by an equally colourful abaya and all the way to dark, conservative outfits including a black burqa side by side with their male companions’ keffiyeh. The Şanlıurfa street, no matter where, up towards the fortress hill, next to the religious sites, off the bazaar or in the old town with its tall stone fences and metal doors not allowing the briefest peek inside, was nonetheless extremely fluid. One could not, had not a single chance to feel alien, a stranger here. Everything happened quickly, hand-pulled carts with dates, tomatoes or cheese appeared all of a sudden, motorbikes were driven everywhere, people came and went, shops attendants shouted fro customers, children kept on running. This was no Istanbul or Prague and comme il faut phrases were not meant to please, the package was not more important than the contents, the real and original sense of the bazaar was still valid here. And yet, the city was not stuck to this sole face alone. There were at least two more: the new town, with its forest of new apartment and office buildings to the North and East, as well as the favela-like, extensive poor quarters just to the South of the fortress hill. And in between, two UFOs: the Archaeology Museum and the Mosaic Museum, both excellently appointed and presented, with the former being just as impressive in terms of display as were its Villa Amazonas mosaics coming from the archaeologically rich region around Şanlıurfa.

Empty old town streets and alleys with the stone pavement and stone houses plying them echoing of the faintest sound made by birds flying above. The plethora of signposts announcing this and that guesthouse, restaurant, unique baklava or supreme narghileh hang on walls in the old town like people caught up by the eruption of the Vesuvius in Pompeii. Voices, laughters, the odd song or sweeping sound coming from over those fences, from the unseen world during the weekend lockdown. A dead bazaar with only a couple of bakeries and a few kebab places doing deliveries. Closed shops, hairdressers, mobile phone service outlets, furniture or künefe venues. Chained, inert salep, coffee or tea stalls. No crowds, no ado, no rush, no smoke, no music, no mad traffic, no begging, no trading, no negotiating, no tea sipping, no dancing. A day before it would have been hard to imagine. But Hatay, the old Antioch, had been reduced to the stones its streets and houses were made of. Cars were rare, so were motorcycles – which was so strange -, only a handful of supermarkets, groceries, as well as a few takeaway restaurants were open. Police cars filled the gap, with one or two at every major crossing, as well as with frequent ones coming and going. Like many times before, the city was under siege. But this time the siege came from within.

There were two of them, sitting in a quite unkept, unsigned car parked among others by the Sermaye Mosque with its iconic carved wood balcony minaret. None of them wore a uniform or any sort of visible ID, yet they had some smart radio system. One of them got off the car and came to me as I was waiting for someone from the guesthouse to come with the keys. He scrutinised me, asked for ID, my purpose there, the guesthouse name and address, used the phone translator to inform me of the weekend lockdown and eventually let me be, making sure I remain by the guesthouse door. They did not work for the police and their business was definitely not the lockdown, but rather the nearby border. Back home we used to call them ‘blue eye boys’. But for the time being I did not appreciate much the fact that they were positioned right in the place where the old town alley my guesthouse was located met the main street, and I was to once again draw their attention when going out, supposedly just to get something to eat. So that afterwards I was to always go out by using the alley opposite that main street, crossing a good share of the old town and emerging elsewhere from it. I would be saved by the bend in the alley a the mere 10-15 meters between the guesthouse door and their location, which made my escape out of their eyesight, unless they went out of their car, of corse.

Other than that, being stopped by the regular police enforcing the weekend lockdown was avoided with a trick: I went out and bought the food I needed without putting it in my backpack, but keeping it in plastic bags. As many and as visible as possible: one for steamy bread, one for oranges, another one for ayran, labneh and tomatoes. I would then walk with a steady pace, plastic bags in hand; had they asked, I would have just been on the way back from the grocery. This way I could go the nearly 4 km. to Saint Peter’s Church and the Archaeology Museum, all around town, respectively across the bazaar and old Antakya. Churches were expectedly closed (and at the Orthodox one I was abruptly informed of that in the otherwise typical men-in-black, Orthodox manner) and so was the Archaeology Museum. But the old town itself was a gem that was – in a certain, selfish way – better explored as it was, with its fine old stone houses and their ornate patios, meandering alleys, unexpected decorations, fine balconies, metal decoration doors and prevailing mystery aura. Then there were the superb late 18th – early 19th century mansions, some decaying and others restored, as well as the delicately crafted mosque minarets reminding one of Aleppo or Damascus. And eventually here were the many cats and bougainvillea bushes in flower. Eventually, as always, atypical times like this – a blindfolded lockdown or a war – make one see things he / she would normally not, whether it is about small architectural details or human gestures, the slight wink of an eye, a trace of a smile, the falling leaves of a late autumn day. And a dance needs not necessarily music that can be heard.

Sunday morning. Everything seemed deserted and the old town alleys echoed of my footsteps. There were no taxis in the first stand, no taxis in the second stand. Not even a police car. Just the odd truck passing by and a handful of street sweepers here and there, sweeping the late autumn leaves, making heaps of them and then setting them on fire. A cool wind was stirring the fire and spreading the smoke. A street sweeper obliged, took out a battered phone, dialled a number, waited for quite a long time for someone to answer, briefly talked and then equally briefly said before resuming his work:

’10 dakika’.

A rather empty bus kept on going in a constant speed for more than 7 hours, crossing booming Adana with its forest of high rises the odd shepherd led his sheep in the shade of, then dramatic mountain ranges the ancestral rural and pastoral life of which had been changed for good by the highway, its many viaducts and bridges, and eventually extensive plains with the imposing Hasan Dağı to the East all the way to Aksaray. And then came the news that all buses on to Sultanhanı had been canceled. The road was rather quiet, with only trucks and very rare cars passing by, so that hitching a ride did not stand many chances, there certainly was a Jandarma checkpoint at the city limits which made drivers skeptical about taking strangers on board given the epidemics-related regulations and it would get dark in an hour or so. After lazying around in the empty bus station, I started walking the few kilometres towards the city centre where, past new apartment buildings, the appearance of some narrow and winding streets lined with the typical plethora of small businesses gave me hope of finding a reasonable – as opposed to the high rise I had passed by – hotel or guesthouse. Yet the hotel found me, as a mid-aged man, takeaway kebabs in his hands, asked me what I was looking for and then led me to his hotel, a small affair down a quiet street two blocks away. I dropped my bags and hurried to buy something to eat before the 5 PM compulsory shop closing time. Even once the lockdown was over, Aksaray would prove to be relaxedly slow-paced, uncrowded and airy, while surviving old, polished stone buildings scattered across town were particularly interesting, such as the fine, only apparently austere, fortress-like Ulu Mosque featuring some exquisite floral patterns on the façade, the elegant building hosting the governor’s office, with its fine turquoise tilework, as well as the jewel-like Vali Konağı with its intricate glazed and stained glass decorative patterns. 

Viewing the excellently preserved Sultanhanı caravanserai in the middle of open steppe asked some imagination, as it had been meanwhile surrounded by a town, but it was nonetheless an exceptional sight, with its summer and winter lodging quarters, the superb carved stone decoration above the gate and on the small mosque inside. It was however the main structure inside that stunned, with the similarities it bore with a Gothic cathedral. It was pouring and quite cold, so that before going back to the highway to hitch a ride on to Konya, I lunched right by the caravanserai gate, looking at the few large restaurants and souvenir shops designed for large touring groups that had not probably shown up for many months; I then realised that I had not actually met any foreign tourists at all, anywhere. Which certainly felt strange in a Silk Road outpost such as this.

Konya was different. Over 2 million inhabitants and seemingly just as many people in a combat-style rush, always on the run, foot on the gas pedal and hand on the horn. Nothing happened slowly here: even getting some börek actually meant having a portion thrown in a paper bag without having it sliced, without the trace of a smile, with an eye scrutinising the door for the next customer, while not having a Turkish ID number resulted in nervously being refused to be sold a public transport card twice (which was easily sorted out by more walking, including, at the end, to the fast train station some 4 km. away, but could have been communicated in a different manner). People were coming and going without minding the others, cars were rushing towards pedestrians trying to haphazardly cross those wide avenues, pedestrians were jumping off the sidewalk at the very last moment annoying car drivers that were blowing the horn as a result, cyclists cared neither for cars, nor for pedestrians, greetings were fast, short and a mere meaningless convenience, while the cold and wet weather outside seemed to perfectly reflect the local community, in a stark contrast with Rumi’s writings on love, openness, understanding and oneness with the divine. While this was a necessary – and welcome in a cynically pragmatic way – stage on the way back home to the time and power-obsessed society, my choosing Konya of all places to unwind for a couple of days seemed nothing short of strange. Only the Arab community down the poor lanes off Sırçalı Medrese Caddesi, with the typical hustle and bustle and dozens of curious children playing around, with those small kebab-falafel-fatteh venues oozing of conviviality and enticing smell, with their patrons always ready with a ‘servis’ solution even during the given epidemics restrictions (which meant one was discreetly sent to a small storage room off the kitchen where he / she could sit down and eat, without being limited to the takeaway option), only this experience seemed to grant Konya a sort of balance and a breath of otherwise natural, fresh air, the city was otherwise addicted to its mad race towards the future, with no interest whatsoever in its present.

And then, a certain image, a memory flashed through my mind, that of a dusty town one early fall afternoon, with a handful of people chatting in low voices, a few children quietly playing ancestral games and an old man, silent like the desert nearby, praying in front of the Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa Shrine. 21st century Balkh, Rumi’s birth town, could not have contrasted more with Konya, the place he lived most of his life and died in. While the former needed no artefacts and earthly possessions to be one with the unseen, the latter almost exclusively relied on earthly substitutes for attaining such a communion. Konya had replaced the esoteric dance with a show complete with stage lights, the way with those grand avenues lined with dozens of shops selling Mevlana knickknacks, respectively the state of mind with an Ashgabat style pyramid-shaped cultural centre the size of a football stadium; the very Rumi quote by the latter’s grand entrance seemed ironic: ‘Either seem as you are or be as you seem’. Appearances were highly valued here. History needed be either grand and commercially suitable or vanish: Konya was therefore razing its old (but fragrance-filled and authentic) quarters considered as disgraceful to make room for copy and paste grand projects complete with big boards showing the president’s image and his promising messages for the people. Let the future be bright, but what about the here and now?

The typical story read that old and new co-existed in Konya in a captivating way. One could not but wonder why there was need for that: old and new can become one if there is harmony and understanding; if they instead need co-exist as two totally separate matters, then there sometimes, somewhere occurred a rupture. A rupture from the past with only an illusion of the future in mind as the sole modus vivendi of a cardboard society. Because when the past is confined exclusively to a museum and the present turns into just a mad rush with the future as the sole goal of one’s existence, then the dimensions granting life meaning and beauty are wiped out, for man is left without anything to hold to: no past, no present and, in the absence of the two, definitely no future (well, other than a grand illusion).

And yet, an unseen figure kept repeating the call in the same constant, slow-paced, low key voice, as it had done for centuries for those willing to stop, open up and listen:

‘Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you’re perfectly free.’

Walking down the street towards Mevlana’s Shrine, I kept on playing with the pebble I had got from the top of Mount Ararat and a small piece of broken, turquoise glazed pottery I had stumbled upon in Ani, as if they were a string of prayer beads. All of a sudden, all ado around seemed to come to a halt and fade out as if the day had turned into the darkest epidemics lockdown night over this fast forward world, with everything being overwhelmed by an absolute sense of peace and silence.