Ankara swim, Chaco Canyon, and Signs

            One of my great joys of summer in Ankara is swimming in the outdoor pool at Sports International, my local fitness center.   

The pools (there are two) are open from early June til late September.  Because of a trip to the US (see below) and a recently diagnosed partially ruptured Achilles tendon, I couldn’t go until yesterday. 

I showed my membership card to the young man at the desk.

        “Your membership has expired,” he said.

        “What?  No one told me.”

        “They telephoned you.  On May 9^th.”

        “I was here!  Why didn’t they try again?”

        “I don’t know.”

“I’ll swim first, then go renew.”

“No!  You can’t swim!”

There was nothing to do but hobble (with my sore tendon) over to the main building, renew my membership, and hobble back to the pool building.  This time I was welcomed and the swim, with almost no one in the pool Monday lunchtime, was indeed glorious. 

Sports International sports a great array of signs, mostly warnings, cautions, and prohibitions.  Their number has increased over the years.  I normally pay them no attention, but yesterday, perhaps the result of that challenge at the reception desk, they rose up and angrily confronted me.

No smoking!

No food or drink in the pool area!

No diving into the pool!

Worthy members, please do not leave valuables in your car!  Thank you.

No parking!

Slippery floor!

        Staff only!

I recommend they add a sign I saw earlier this month in the garden of the Alderbrook Inn, halfway around the world on the Hood Canal (near Seattle):

 

        My Sports International favorites, though, are in the men’s locker room in the main building: DO NOT WALK NAKED and the poster with Michelangelo’s David  draped with a towel.

Its Turkish legend roughly translates as follows:

“Towel Culture.  The ancient Greeks walked around naked in the baths.  But that was in the 700s BC.  As for us, in public areas, let’s follow up-to-date rules and use a towel.”

        Non-Turkish readers will understand, I’m sure, that the Turkish male has a highly developed sense of modesty.  

        The outdoor pools (there are two) open in early June.  I couldn’t go earlier, because Marie-Henriette and I traveled to the US for tourism and a family visit.  The touristic part included a visit to Chaco Canyon, a spectacular archaeological site in remote northwestern New Mexico.  To get there, you have to drive over dirt roads the final 20 miles (32 km), a deliberate strategy on the part of the government to keep crowds away.  Once there, the national park (Chaco Culture National Historical Park) does have a paved road that gives access to a visitors’ center and to the main ruins.

The ruins at Chaco Canyon, excavated especially from the late 19^th c. through the 1930s, consist of “great houses,” smaller settlements, and kivas (ceremonial areas) built by the ancestors of today’s Pueblo, Navajo, and Hopi peoples in the 9^th-13^th centuries AD.  The great houses are huge: over 600 rooms (at the largest, Pueblo Bonito), multi-storied, and built with amazing stone masonry.  The finds – pottery, turquoise jewelry, etc. – are stunning.

        Why did people settle here?  Over the decades, interpretations have changed.  Early explorers believed the canyon was a locus of heavily populated villages.  Now, the great houses are understood as ceremonial centers used only for specific events.  People would come from afar, staying only temporarily.

        This interpretation will remind the reader familiar with ancient Turkey of Göbekli Tepe, the sensational ceremonial site in the southeast, not far from Şanlıurfa.  

Göbekli Tepe consists of stone-walled, round buildings, sometimes containing relief sculptures of people (stylized), vultures, scorpions, and predatory animals, startling images of unknown meaning.   The architecture recalls the kivas of Chaco Canyon and the surrounding region.  Like Chaco Canyon, Göbekli Tepe is thought to be a ceremonial center, revered by people coming from a large radius.  But the time difference between the two sites is huge: Göbekli Tepe, assigned to the earliest Neolithic period, is dated by Klaus Schmidt, the director of excavations, to the 10^th-9^th millennia BC.  Any correspondences must be coincidental, even if each may reflect a similar social dynamic. 

        Sign at Chaco Canyon: not so different from signs at Sports International (even if SI has yet to be recognized as a sacred site).  Göbekli Tepe is not yet so well organized for visitors, but no doubt in a few years it will be.