Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Been a long time gone, Constantinople.
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks.

They Might Be Giants

Our group of fourteen met in the unlit courtyard of the hotel, shivering against the chill and questioning our resolve.

At five a.m. a white passenger van arrived. We clambered inside, glad for the communal warmth.

The driver spoke no English. He distributed bags of packaged breakfast snacks—croissants, energy bars, and cartons of fruit drink.

The van jolted over stony single-track roads during the half-hour ride to the launch site. Occasionally, the headlights of other vehicles flashed through the windows, but I could see nothing outside. No lights, no moon.

We left the outskirts of Mustafapaşa and eventually descended into a long valley, where numerous vehicles were parked in fields along the sides of the road. Occasionally, blue flames flared in the distance.

Finally, the van stopped and we climbed out, stumbling over rocks in the dark. Nearby, a gigantic nylon sheath sprawled on the ground like a collapsed circus tent.

The crew stretched it out and positioned powerful fans in front of an opening. A bubble began to form. Crew members crouched inside of it, tugging on cords, kicking open the folds.

As the pouch slowly filled with air, it wallowed on the ground. The fans were replaced by propane burners, which shot long tongues of flame into the balloon’s cavity.

The bursts illuminated the inside of the sack and it began to resemble a huge incandescent bulb lying on its side.

The process was repeated in the fields around us, as dozens of limp bags glowed internally and intermittently like fireflies.

In the beams of vehicle headlights, our crew tilted a wicker basket and attached it to the swelling balloon.

We climbed into the basket’s compartments, each of which fit just two or three of us. In total, the gondola held thirty people—twenty-eight passengers and two crew. Surely, it was too much weight.

Our balloon was tethered to an off-road vehicle. By the light of the burners, I could see the ground crew studying our situation. Then, I realized they were looking up at us. Somehow, imperceptibly, we had risen.

It was time to release our hold on earth. The pilot dropped a ballast bag to the ground and fired the burners. The tethers were untied. Slowly, gently, and with the roar of the burners in our ears, we ascended. We were free.

The day before I asked our tour guide, Volkan, if he would be joining us. “No,” he said. “I will be in my room praying.”

Transcontinental

Due to its strategic location on the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black seas, the ancient region now known as Türkiye (preferred spelling) has been at the crossroads of cultural exchange since ancient times. The world’s oldest-known stone structure, built twelve thousand years ago, still stands within its borders.

Türkiye links two continents—Europe and Asia—and was home to various tribes, kingdoms, and empires, including the Greeks, Romans, Turks, Mongols, and Ottomans. Two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and twenty-one UNESCO World Heritage Sites are located in the country.

Türkiye ended World War II on the side of the Allies. Its War of Independence in 1923 kicked out the monarchy and founded a republic with no state religion.

Modern Türkiye lives in a rough neighborhood, sharing borders with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Syria, Greece, and Bulgaria.

The country is a charter member of the United Nations and an early member of NATO.

Türkiye is roughly the size of Texas with three times the population (eighty-six million). Eighty-five percent of its citizens speak Turkish as their first language. Twelve percent are Kurds.

To navigate the geography, culture, and language, I joined a two-week tour. We started in İstanbul.

Lost in the supermarket

Nowhere are the lumpy ingredients of Türkiye’s melting pot more plentiful than in İstanbul, the largest city in Europe.

The city was founded as Byzantium in the 600s BCE by the Greeks. The Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, renamed it Constantinople after himself. In 1930, the city’s name was changed again to İstanbul.

Today, sixteen million people of every ethnicity sprawl onto two continents. Two-thirds of the city’s citizens live on the European side. I bumped into many of them in the Grand Bazaar, a microcosm of the larger city.

From the neighborhood of Karaköy I crossed the Golden Horn on the crowded Galata Bridge, ducking airborne hooks as fishermen cast into the river for anchovies.

In the old town, I got lost for a couple of hours in the gritty, crowded bazaar, one of the world’s oldest shopping malls. Locals and tourists alike jam the twisting canopied lanes, browsing housewares, carpets, spices, leather goods, jewelry, clothing, and souvenirs. 

Aggressive merchants confront shoppers in the street with pick-up lines. Freelance traffickers hawk bottles of water, rearview-mirror danglers, and stacks of cheap towels. Tourists swarm and sweat.

Local men sit on boxes smoking, drinking coffee, and playing backgammon.

For my kids, I bought eye-shaped amulets, called nazar boncuğu, to keep evil spirits away. The creepy blue eyes have been wielded in Türkiye for more than five thousand years.

Nearby, the culture-blending Hagia Sophia is nearly fifteen hundred years old. Completed in 537 CE, it took turns being Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic until 1453. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the church was converted to a mosque.

Architecturally, it is one of the most influential buildings in the world.

Built by a Roman emperor and modified by Islamic sultans, the mosque has a massive dome, snap-on minarets, and twenty-three-foot bronze doors. Hagia Sophia can hold up to twenty thousand worshippers. 

I ate a sweet rice pudding at Lale, the Pudding Shop. Lale got its nickname in the 1960s when hippies paused in İstanbul while on journeys of self-discovery.

Mothers and sons

One man, Osman Ghazi, founded the Ottoman Empire in 1299. For over six hundred years, it ruled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa. For four hundred of those years, the reigning sultans lived in Topkapı Palace in İstanbul.

I visited its harem.

Let me explain. 

The most powerful resident in the harem was not the sultan, but rather his mother. Other residents included up to four wives, many children, hundreds of concubines, and one hundred castrated guards. 

The sultan’s mother ruled them all. She carefully chose her son’s partners, as any resulting male offspring would join the queue for the throne. Each of the sultan’s liaisons with wives or concubines was documented in writing. Mom carefully protected the survival of the dynasty.

For the family, the system worked. The empire lasted through thirty-six descendants of Osman Ghazi.

Only a few of the concubines (read: slaves) became involved with the sultan. Most of them were servants. They hauled water, stoked fires, and tended to members of the family.

No one else was allowed inside the harem’s walls.

For most of the sons of the sultan, growing up in a harem was a death sentence. One of their grandfathers, Mehmed II, legalized fratricide in the late 1400s, allowing potential heirs to kill their brothers when claiming the throne. Last son standing.

When Mehmed III was crowned in the late 1500s, he had nineteen of his brothers strangled to death. The youngest was eleven. Thus, the family tree was constantly pruned.

Usually the dirty deeds were done by paid assassins, recruited from among the sultan’s guards.

The harem has over four hundred rooms, including dining rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, schools for the kids, doctors’ offices, mosques, and a private outdoor courtyard.

The harem complex nestles inside of two larger walled courtyards, which together enclose nearly three square miles. Once, five thousand people lived inside of Topkapı.

The outer courtyards housed the mint, armory, barracks, stables, offices, library, and kitchen.

The palace is lavishly designed and decorated with domed ceilings, golden canopies, stained-glass windows, crystal chandeliers, indoor fountains, reflecting pools, mother-of-pearl inlay, Delft tiles, Oriental vases, and Venetian mirrors.

In the treasury are displayed some rather difficult-to-trust Old Testament relics collected by sultans over the centuries, including Moses’s staff, Abraham’s cooking pot, David’s sword, and John the Baptist’s bones.

Founding father

The next day we boarded a small riverboat and headed up the nineteen-mile Bosphorus Strait.

The Bosporus connects the Black Sea in the north to the Mediterranean in the south. Currently, Ukraine is attempting to wrest control of the sea from Russia.

Along the shore, we passed numerous signature projects of the sultans—fortresses from the 1400s, and palaces and mosques from the 1800s.

We passed the mausoleum of Barbarossa, the admiral (or pirate, depending upon your perspective) whose naval victories secured Ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean Sea during the 1500s.

Turkish fleets fire salutes when they pass his tomb. 

We disembarked on the Asian side of the strait and bused to Ankora, a five-hour trip.

Every half-hour Volkan announced, “We are still in İstanbul.” (The city of İstanbul spreads over two thousand square miles.) 

The United States has a handful of founding fathers. Türkiye has but one—Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

During World War I, Mustafa Kemal distinguished himself as a military leader. Following the war, he helped drive the Ottoman emperor into exile and led a movement against the divvying of the region by Allies. In 1923, he was named president of the new republic.

Once in office, he tackled an aggressive agenda of reforms, aimed at westernizing Türkiye.

Kemal helped write the republic’s constitution. He abolished the influence of Islam on the government and separated church from state. He established diplomacy with Europe.

He advocated for the rights and safety of women and children, outlawing polygamy and granting women the right to vote and run for office. He made primary education both free and compulsory.

He adopted a new Turkish language, replacing Arabic script. Minorities were allowed to maintain their own languages in private.

Kemal was George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, and John Dewey rolled into one.

The Turkish Parliament granted Mustafa Kemal the surname Atatürk in 1934. It means Father of the Turks.

He died in 1938 at the age of fifty-seven.

Seemingly every town in Türkiye features a statue of him; every school, office and factory a photo of him. His image is on Turkish lira.

We stopped in Anıtkabir to visit Atatürk’s tomb.

The road leading to his monument is lined with sculptures of lions, representing twenty-four Turkish tribes.

The walkway ends at a plaza capable of holding up to fifteen thousand people. Its floor is composed of various colors of marble resembling a Turkish carpet.

Atatürk’s sarcophagus rests in the Hall of Honor. Beneath the hall is the Independence War Museum. We arrived in time to watch the brisk goose-stepping of the guards in the oppressive sun.

Trading places

In central Türkiye I stayed in Mustafapaşa, a village of around thirteen hundred residents. Dating to the 800s, Mustafapaşa lists two hundred historical buildings, including stone churches, monasteries, and schools. Orthodox Greek merchants once lived in the village’s mansions.

However, when Türkiye became a republic, those citizens who did not identify as Muslims were required to leave. The countries of Greece and Türkiye agreed to a “population exchange” affecting the lives of over 1.6 million people. None of the refugees had representation on their behalf. Most were forcibly removed.

In Mustafapaşa, the exchange occurred in 1924. My hotel, once a Greek home, became the residence of a Turkish family. Some have criticized the exchange, describing it as mutual ethnic cleansing. Others have said the act may have prevented future massacres.

Above the chimneys

I peered over the side of the hot-air balloon’s basket. The sun had not yet emerged, but the glare from just below the horizon revealed a firmament full of huge floating globes, as if from a giant bubble machine. We were surrounded by dozens, over a hundred, our pilot said, of balloons launched from the valley below. 

On the ground, three different wedding parties in formal wear posed for photos, using the inflatables as colorful backdrops.

Our pilot goosed the burners to ascend to fifteen hundred meters, almost a mile high. The sun rose and kindled the colors of the assemblage around us. Between burner blasts, the silence was complete.

On a mild breeze, we drifted south through the valley, where another element of the experience captured our attention. Below, a cityscape of Dr. Seussian-style rocky spires reached toward us. We hovered for an hour over the Göreme Valley in Cappadocia, home to a surreal moonscape bristling with fanciful rock formations.

The formations are composed of tuff, a rock produced from volcanic ash, fused by heat and compressed over millions of years. In Cappadocia, water and ice have eroded the rock into thousands of fantastic shapes—pillars, pinnacles, and pyramids.

In the American Southwest, similar formations are called hoodoos. In Türkiye, they are “fairy chimneys.”

Even more intriguing, the chimneys are riddled with man-made (fairy-made?) holes. Tuff is soft, as rocks go. Consequently, humans have been carving caves out of Cappadocia’s hoodoos since the Bronze Age.

From the basket, we spotted thousands of hand-carved openings in the honeycombed rock. Behind them were homes, warehouses, monasteries, even multi-level underground cities.

Cappadocia, the heartland of Türkiye, is a warren.

Life underground

Eventually, our hot-air balloon pilot maneuvered us near a landing spot on a stony ridge. From above we watched the chase crew racing along dusty tracks to meet us.

We had been instructed how to position ourselves for a hard landing: face to the rear, crouch below the handrail, grip tight. Impressively, with some maneuvering by the crew, the pilot landed the basket upright and square on its trailer. No need for a crash-landing procedure.

Breakfast back at the hotel featured local foods—tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, melon, olives, scrambled eggs, goat cheese, bread, yogurt, honey, and coffee.

Time to explore Cappadocia’s underground cities.

We took a back road southwest through open grassland and stone-block towns. Shepherds and goatherds sauntered after their flocks. 

Harvest time in ag country—apple orchards, melon farms, and hay fields. Kurdish workers camped under blue tarps along the road. Pipes bristle from the sides of hills, ventilating underground warehouses that store potatoes.

The Phrygians may have been the first to excavate caves in the region, some twenty-six hundred years ago. During Roman times, Christians hid churches inside the soft volcanic cliffs in order to worship in secret.

Soon, the Göreme Valley hosted hundreds of subterranean churches and monasteries.

I visited a few of them. Square-cut openings in the cliff faces lead to narrow passages and dim sanctuaries. Altars and alcoves have been sculpted from solid rock. The walls and ceilings are chalky white, level and plumb. Many of the monasteries feature blocky dining tables and benches hewn from the rock.

Some of the surfaces are covered with colorful religious frescoes, dating from the 1000s CE. The paintings at Karanlık Kiliseare are in particularly good condition, as the church has no windows.

The need for protection from Arab raids led to the development of multi-level underground cities. One of the larger ones is Kaymakli, started in the 700s BCE.

The tunnels of Kaymakli are low-ceilinged, skinny, and steeply inclined, designed to thwart invaders. Navigating them requires Chuck Berry-style duck-walking. I crept through the holes like a mouse through a wheel of Swiss cheese.

On the first level below the surface are living quarters and stables. A heavy millstone is available to roll into place and prevent further progress. On the second floor is a church with seats carved into the walls. Kitchens, wine and olive presses, and a metal shop are on the third level.

The number of storage rooms on the fourth floor indicates the possible population of the city. Kaymakli could have held up to five thousand.

The passages continue deeper, but currently only four levels are open to visitors. 

Kaymakli is connected via five miles of tunnels to another underground city—Derinkuyu. It is large enough to have sheltered up to twenty thousand people—plus their livestock.

Above ground, we hiked thought the mushroom-capped hoodoos of Paşabağları Valley (also known as the Valley of the Priests) and the phallic-shaped pillars of Baglidere Vadisi (also known as, wink wink, the Valley of Love).

Open mosque, locked motel

We met at a mosque in Güzelyurt with an imam and a muezzin. They were in their young thirties, one married, one engaged, both dressed casually in tennis shirts.

An imam is the mosque’s prayer leader and guidance counselor—similar to a pastor. A muezzin chants the call to prayer over the minaret’s PA system.

We removed our shoes at the door and sat on the carpet for a question-and-answer session. Lots of questions from our group about the rights of women in Muslim society. Before we left, the muezzin demonstrated a morning call to prayer, which echoed beautifully under the dome.

In Sultanhani we visited a caravanserai, built in 1229 CE. It was large enough to shelter three complete caravans—the men, their camels, and their goods—for a night. In the center of the courtyard was a small mosque.

In the rear was a large room for sleeping. Each morning the gates stayed locked until every traveler was satisfied nothing had been stolen during the night.

In a whirl

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, known simply as Rumi, was a poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic in the 1200s. He was born in what is now Iran.

Rumi has been described as the world’s most popular poet and is perhaps the best-selling poet in the United States.

It is believed Rumi would spin in circles while reciting his poetry, and it is this turning movement that inspired the creation of the Mevlevi order, also known as whirling dervishes. Everything in existence, from electrons to planets, revolves toward the truth, according to the order.

Dervishes believe achieving a trance-like state in their worship through physical exertion brings them closer to God.

In Konya we visited the former lodge of the dervishes, founded by Rumi’s followers after his death in 1273. Now a museum and shrine, it houses Rumi’s sarcophagus.

Inside the complex are individual living cells for dervishes and a dining hall used for educating and performing the music, poetry, prayer, and whirling that compose the Sufi ritual.

The dervishes wear tall conical camel-hair turbans and long white robes that twirl outward when they spin. At the cultural center in the town of Pamukkale, dancers whirled to the accompaniment of a flautist and a drummer. A turban, representing Rumi, stood alone on one side of the floor. The dervishes bowed solemnly to it.

Rumi’s epitaph reads: “When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.”

Santa’s bones

We climbed into the Taurus Mountains, bald stone above evergreen forests, and crossed a pass at six thousand feet. Hot tea and gözleme, a savory turnover stuffed with spinach and potatoes, for lunch.

Over the centuries, Roman ruins have often been mined for building materials, leaving behind picked-over carcasses. The ancient theater of Aspendos, the best-preserved in the world, is the exception. It was built in 155 CE and holds up to eight thousand spectators.

Aspendos’s theater has been continuously repurposed and thus maintained, once as a palace, once as a caravanserai, and now, again, as a venue.

A schedule of upcoming ballet and opera performances hang on the outside wall.

The archaeological museum in the coastal city of Antalya displays five thousand artifacts, including some bones purportedly belonging to Saint Nicholas of Myra. That Saint Nick. Nicholas was born in a Greek seaport that is now a part of Türkiye. He was a Christian bishop in the late 200s and early 300s CE.

Saint Nick is the patron saint of an odd mix of believers—sailors, repentant thieves, brewers, pawnbrokers, and, of course, children. His reputation for secret gift-giving (Secret Santa?) merged with the traditions of England’s Father Christmas to become the modern figure of Santa Claus.

Life among the ruins

Ancient Greek and Roman historical ruins are found not just in Greece and Italy, but in many countries throughout Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. Türkiye may be home to a plurality of them.

One was uncovered in 1958.

Turkish photojournalist Ara Güler was assigned to document the opening of a new dam. On the way home, his driver got lost and they spent the night in Geyre, a remote mountain village.

While asking in a local coffeehouse about a place to stay, Güler noticed men playing backgammon on top of an ancient Roman column capital. He asked the players where they got the artifact.

They replied, “Oh, this ol’ thing? There are hundreds of them in the fields.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

The next day he found villagers sitting on stone seats in an ancient theater, riding donkeys on Roman road pavers, and stomping grapes in sarcophagi. The village of Geyre had been sitting on the ruins of a Roman city for hundreds of years.

Güler took photos of the architectural remnants and sent them to multiple publications. Kenan Erim, an archaeologist from the United States, was intrigued. He visited Geyre and identified the ruins as the ancient city of Aphrodisias. He devoted the rest of his life to excavating the site.

New Orleans is known for jazz and Memphis for blues. In the ancient world, Aphrodisias was known for its marble sculpture.

Nearby quarries provided the raw material. The city’s art schools trained the carvers. And Aphrodisias’s sculptors became famous—the best of their day. Roman aristocrats throughout the empire demanded busts and statues from Aphrodisias as status symbols to adorn their atriums.

In the 200s BCE, Aphrodisias was named for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. The city’s centerpiece was the temple built in her honor. I walked the city plan, marveling at the remnants of gateways, temples, the council house, the thirty-thousand seat stadium, the theater, the agora, and the baths dedicated to Roman Emperor Hadrian.

Playground of the rich and famous

Another day, another ruin.

One of the four main centers of the Roman Empire, along with Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, was Ephesus.

Located where the Menderes River met the Aegean Sea, the city kept moving as the river changed course. The name Menderes gives us the word meander, which is what the river does.

The city was built by the Greeks in the 900s BCE. Ephesus grew to become the second largest city in the Roman Empire with up to one hundred thousand residents. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis, stood in Ephesus. (Not much is left of the five-story temple except the foundation.)

Ephesus’s significance attracted the superstars of the day.

Alexander the Great marched through its gates. In 33 BCE Marc Antony and Cleopatra strolled into its center from their ship in the port.

The Apostle Paul preached in its theater, which held up to twenty-five thousand spectators, the largest in the ancient world.

More recent attractions include Elton John, Julio Iglesias, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Sting, Jethro Tull, and Luciano Pavarotti.

Paul resided in Ephesus for two years, and while there, wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians. He wrote a sequel, the Epistle to the Ephesians, while imprisoned in Rome around 62 CE.

The Apostle John also lived for a time in Ephesus and may have written his version of the Gospel while in town. Ephesus is mentioned in the book of Revelation.

I walked into town on Marble Road, past the theater and the agora, before turning uphill.

Priests Road is pedestrian-friendly, as the gate at its head was designed to be too narrow for those obnoxious chariots to enter.

I toured the remainders of temples, baths, fountains, gates, the council house, and some excavated Roman homes with vestiges of mosaic floors and frescoed walls.

Along the road, a carving features Nike, the goddess and athletic-shoe namesake.

Most interesting to me (and likely to my librarian daughter) was the beautiful Library of Celsus, built around 125 CE. Its facade has been carefully reconstructed from the original pieces. The library once held nearly twelve thousand scrolls. (The fines for overdue scrolls are hefty.)

In hot water

The village of Pamakkale appears to be a ski resort. A row of shops and restaurants on one side of the road face sparkling-white, snow-covered mountains.

It is a mirage.

Water from hot springs runs down the cliffs facing the village.

The water deposits minerals, which crystalize and accumulate, eventually turning into limestone. The crystal-encrusted rock is white as snow.

Beyond the cliffs, the ancient city of Hieropolis grew around the springs, due to the belief that the minerals in the water healed various ailments. But many patrons of the spa died, as is evident by the large necropolis at the city gate. “It didn’t work,” Volkan said.

One source of hot water was a gaping hole in the ground—a cave that the Greeks believed was the entrance to Hades, the underworld. They built a temple nearby to curry favor with the god Pluto. In modern times, it was determined the cave also emitted toxic gases, which may have contributed to the high mortality rate. 

Nevertheless, Hieropolis grew to a hundred thousand inhabitants, a huge city in its day.

I walked the mile-long Roman road passing remnants of arched gates, temples, fountains, and a fifteen-thousand-seat theater, built in 129 CE. The city’s big draw is its geothermal swimming pool, which once sat beneath the roof of a temple.

Centuries ago, the temple’s Doric columns toppled into the pool. They are still there—and visitors are welcome to swim among them.

Türkiye’s tourism industry is adamant that Cleopatra once bathed in what is now marketed as Cleopatra’s Pool. Historians have yet to find proof. 

If she did take a dip among the crowd of SPF-slathered, Efes-drinking, pool-noodling tourists, I trust she wore her protective amulet.