A mid-summer stroll in Ulus and a day trip to Kaman (Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology)

        August 1st, the midpoint of summer.  It has been hot here in Ankara, and despite a cooler weekend, the result of a huge storm in Istanbul last week, hot days are predicted to return.

A nap in Ulus

        I was in Ulus last Wednesday, in particular to pay the semi-annual car tax.  An electronic panel registered the noonday temperature as 38 C (= 100 F).  As my last stop I headed for the huge covered market, looking for vişne (sour cherries), to make vishnovka, a Russian sour cherry vodka. Vişne are hard to find at our local markets; they are not for eating like sweet cherries, but are used in cooking, for jams and for fruit juice, all fabulous.  I also bought one kilo of apricots from Iğdır (impossible to explain in English how this name is pronounced), a province in far eastern Turkey, famous for its apricots and for Mt. Ararat.  The greengrocer gave me one to try: sweet, succulent, sublime.

        The Ulus district is entirely different from Bilkent, where I live.  It’s traditional Turkey, for people with modest incomes and a conservative bent, with little shops of all sorts and the city’s religious epicenter, the 15th-century Hacı Bayram Mosque. 

Sign: "This street goes to the Hacı Bayram Mosque"

But Ulus has an interestingly complex texture.  As the heart of ancient, medieval, and pre-Republican Ankara, Ulus has Roman ruins (the Temple of Augustus and Roma),

Temple of Augustus and Roma

Seljuk mosques (of which the Arslanhane Mosque is the greatest),

Inside the Arslanhane Mosque

Ottoman buildings (the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations is located in a restored han, or commercial building, of the 15th century), imposing government and bank buildings of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, the much-treasured early parliament buildings of the Republic, and now an impressive cluster of museums. 

Sign: "History comes alive again in Ankara!"

I bring my Byzantine & Islamic Art & Archaeology students here in November, for a half-day walking tour, in and around the medieval citadel, but that route has been set for years. Only if I am by myself can I see the city freshly.

Ankara citadel: Byzantine fortifications

        Is Ankara a great city?  I don’t usually think so, but walking around Ulus makes me wonder.  I’ll take up the issue with you later, after I finish reading Alexander Garvin’s recent book, What Makes a Great City.  Garvin doesn’t discuss examples from Turkey, though, not even Istanbul.  Instead, he concentrates on public spaces in European and North American cities.  Nonetheless, his insights deserve the attention of those interested in the pros and cons of Turkish cities. 

So-called Column of Julian (later 4th century), in Ulus

        Driving back from Kaman a few weeks ago, we noted that the posted population of Ankara is now just short of 5 ½ million.  That’s incredible.  I remember the city from the 1970s, with a population of a mere one and a half million.  The character of the city still seems to me pretty much the same, even with intense traffic, sprawl in all directions, sporadic clusters of high-rise office and apartment buildings, and a handsome airport.

        Kaman, a city of some 30,000 a two-hour drive southeast of Ankara, is notable in archaeological circles for the multi-period site of Kalehöyük (under excavation since 1985) and, nearby, the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology (founded in 1998), an archaeological museum, and a Japanese garden.  The museum and the garden are open to the public. 

Inside the Kaman-Kalehöyük Museum

Although Kaman is not far from Ankara, driving there gives you the feeling of going to a very remote place.  After turning east off the main north-south Ankara-Adana highway, the countryside starts to empty.  Towns, such as there are, are off the main road.  Indeed, our archaeobotanist colleague whom we would see at the Japanese Institute told us the land is not particularly fertile, accentuated by the deforestation of recent times (late Ottoman into the Republic).   For agriculture, government subsidies are needed.

        We did note a new feature as we drove along: at least three mescit, or Muslim chapels, next to the road.  In the old days, if someone wanted to pray in a remote spot, he stopped his car on the side of the road, got out, and prayed, using a little prayer rug if he happened to have one. 

One of the new mescit / chapels bore a prominent dedication to the martyrs of 15 July, those who died during the attempted coup d’état last year.  July 15, whose anniversary was recently commemorated, is being held up as the heroic moment in Turkey’s recent history.  The Atatürk Boulevard entrance to the Meclis in Ankara, the Parliament, is now marked by one-meter high blood-red blocks that say: 15 Temmuz Destanı (the July 15th Epic). 

A commemorative poster, 

which makes the art historian me think of:

        We crossed the Kızılırmak, the longest river in Central Anatolia, at a point used for centuries for fording the river.  Above a 13th-century Seljuk bridge is a promontory which the Hittites used as a fortress.  This is the site of Büklükale, under excavation by the Japanese Institute. 

View from Büklükale down toward the Kızılırmak River, with the

Seljuk (lower) and modern (upper) bridges

        I had forgotten to buy water before setting out from Ankara and before long I was getting thirsty.  There was nowhere to stop, though, without driving off the main road into one of the small towns in the area.  Eventually I saw a sign, Büfe/Market, and we pulled over.  I went in, took three small bottles of water from the refrigerator, and asked the older man on duty, “Ne kadar?”  (“How much?”).  He look at me ... paused ... then said, “Two liras.”  I paid, thanked him, went out.  I thought, that’s not right.  Two liras divided by three; what would the price per bottle be?  Normally, one pays 50 kuruş ( ½ lira) for a small bottle, or perhaps 75 kuruş or even one lira in the city.  But not two liras for three.  A tiny rip-off, but a rip-off nonetheless.  A suprise, for these days, now that the taxi stand at AŞTİ, Ankara’s central bus station, has cleaned up its act, the only place I might expect such behavior would be the top touristic districts in Istanbul.

        Eventually we reached Kaman, and soon after, the road for the Japanese Institute.  You can find the Institute's web site at: 

http://www.jiaa-kaman.org/en/index.html

The Institute is a magnificent facility, offering space for processing, conserving, analyzing, and storing finds from the three excavations and a surface survey that the Institute runs during the temperate months.  The projects are run in sequence: Büklükale first, Kaman-Kalehöyük second, third Yassıhöyük (located to the east, not far away), and, fourth and last, the regional survey.  Our visit fell between the first two projects, so there weren’t many people around.  But we had come to visit an Australian archaeobotanist who studies plant specimens from Kinet Höyük as well as from Kalehöyük, and we greeted Kimiyoshi Matsumura, the director of the Büklükale excavations, and two Bilkent MA students analyzing Iron Age ceramics from the excavations at Yassıhöyük. 

Autumn at the Japanese garden, Kaman

We had tea, and we visited the flotation machine (a series of large barrels with water and sieves, designed to recover seeds and other plant remains from soil samples) in the shelter of trees a few minutes’ walk away.  The lively conversation continued during a nice lunch.  After lunch, we were given a tour of the laboratories, study spaces, library, the grand lecture hall, and the storerooms.  It’s a place devoted to archaeology; clearly there is no time to do anything else.  And it’s a great testimony to the vision of the Institute director, Sachihiro Omura, and his wife and fellow archaeologist, Masako Omura.  May the Institute long prosper!

         

May Day: a holiday, cuisine, elections, proverbs, and homage to the late John Freely

           Today is Monday, May 1st, a national holiday in Turkey.  It’s pleasantly warm here in Ankara, but cloudy and rather muggy, and indeed the predicted thunderstorm has just burst forth.  For my university, this is the first break since classes began last February 6.  I felt a huge relief.  A three-day weekend, at last!  My fellow staff members, not to mention the students, surely feel the same.  

            I profited from the extra time by making a nice dinner yesterday evening.  Included was “siyez bulguru,” which I was preparing for the first time.  “Siyez bulguru” is “einkorn,” a very old form of domesticated wheat, dating even back to the Neolithic period thousands of years ago.  I bought some in Kastamonu, a city four hours by car north of Ankara, during a trip last November.  I was looking for wild mushrooms, a local delicacy, but a shopkeeper told me that because the autumn had been dry, mushrooms were scarce.  Would I not like to try this other local specialty?  I followed the recipe on the sack.  As for regular bulgur, you sauté an onion in butter and vegetable oil, add some tomato paste, water / bouillon, salt, red pepper, and the dark red-brown siyez grains, cook the mixture for 15-20 minutes until the water is absorbed, and then let the grains sit for 15 minutes.  Delicious: a chewy texture, but with a very nice flavor.  For an archaeologist, the chance to eat this grain which you usually only read about in textbooks was very exciting. 

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It has been quite a year for elections.  Brexit, Trump vs. Clinton, the Dutch elections in March, the referendum here in Turkey on April 16, and now the French elections (Round One over; Round Two this coming weekend).  It’s emotionally draining, even if you don’t have the right to vote in a particular country and are watching from over the fence.  If your side loses, it can be a shock.  Here in Turkey, the result of the referendum on proposed changes to the constitution was close: 51.4% for, 48.6% against.  The “no” position did very well, considering the restrictions its proponents encountered when they tried to explain their views.  “Yes” took the conservative, pious, provincial heartland of the country, whereas “No” won in the biggest cities (Istanbul, Ankara, and, by a big margin, Izmir), the Mediterranean and Aegean coastal areas, Thrace, and in the southeast.  The Çankaya district in which I live, Ankara province’s largest with over 600,000 voters, went 78% “no.” 

The country is divided – but then so are the UK (with Brexit) and the US (with Trump) and, so it seems, France.  Reaching out to all, to losers as well as winners for national unity, seems not to be in the air these days.  It’s a winner-takes-all mentality.  Here, we are still living under Emergency Rule (recently renewed for another three months).  Yesterday, a new round of purges was announced: nearly 4,000 civil servants, including 400+ academics, were fired. That makes some 140,000 dismissed from state and private jobs since the attempted coup last July.  In addition, Wikipedia was blocked, because of (I am reading now in a report in today's “Hürriyet Daily News”) “two English language pages which claimed that Turkey channeled support to jihadists in Syria.”  The Turkish government has requested Wikipedia to remove these pages; until this is done, Wikipedia will remain blocked, even the Turkish-language version.  Wikipedia has been a godsend for teachers and students in particular.  How will we live without it?

One benefit from the referendum was a reacquaintance with the vast and colorful world of Turkish proverbs and sayings.  After complaints of irregularities in the referendum and cries for a recount, the president, refusing all protests, used the expression, “Atı alan Üsküdar’a geçti.” Literally “The one who took/stole the horse has already passed Üsküdar,” this means: “It is far too late now (to rectify it).”  This expression was new to me, but two Turkish friends with whom I was playing bridge the other day confirmed this was widely known. 

What other Turkish expressions use “at” (“horse”), I wondered?  I checked my Redhouse Turkish-English dictionary.  Lots, it turns out.  At random, I plucked out two, to test on my friends:

“Atın bahtsızı arabaya düşer.”  Ah, yes, they liked that.  Lit: It is an unlucky horse that has to pull a wagon.  Meaning: Some people do not get work suitable to their talents.

And one more: “Ata nal çakıldığını görmüş, kurbağa ayaklarını uzatmış.”  Lit: A frog saw them shoeing a horse and he stuck out his feet.   Meaning: He/She wants things he/she has no right to expect.  My friends didn’t know this one, but they burst out laughing, enjoying it.

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I was sad to read of the recent death of John Freely, on April 20.  Freely (1926-2017) was a professor of Physics at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University (aka Bosphorus University, formerly Robert College) and a prolific author of books on travel and history.  [Sadly, his biography on Wikipedia is blocked today in Turkey: “Hmm, we can’t reach this page.”]  I must have met him, at least in passing, although I don’t have a precise memory of having done so.  Nonetheless, he was a legend among Americans living in Turkey, for his long experience here and his love for the country, so I feel I knew him well.  When Marie-Henriette and I first spent a year in Istanbul, in 1974-75, Strolling through Istanbul, the guidebook he wrote together with Hilary Sumner-Boyd (orig. 1972, revised 2010), was our essential companion as we explored the old parts of the city.  I have just taken it off the shelf, and am leafing through it now.  What pleasure it gives!  The warm, friendly language; the level of detail; the privilege and joy of penetrating the secrets of this great city . . .  it’s still a truly marvelous book. 

Extended break -- coming to an end?

I see with a shock that my last posting dates to August ... 2016.  An extended break, a hibernation longer than a bear would undertake in winter.  The result of priority given to other activities, many of them obligations (such as teaching)?  More likely, I just ran out of steam.

I now feel some stirrings.  Time to wake up, open the eyes, look around, watch, see; time to stretch and move.  Time to write again. 

It's spring, this first Sunday in April.  Spring has arrived early in Ankara this year, a surprise, considering how cold and snowy December and early January were.  Today the weather is glorious: sunny, not a cloud in the sky, a crystal clear view over the city to the mountains beyond, no haze whatsoever from dust or air pollution.  Temperature: a delightful 18 C / 65 F. 

Also encouraging: things accomplished recently, several at long last. I paid overdue car taxes at the tax office in Ulus.  No line, and a warm smile from the man behind the counter.  At the Kızılay metro station (now named the 15 Temmuz Kızılay Milli İrade İstasyonu / the "July 15th Kızılay National Will Station" -- honoring successful resistance to the attempted coup d'état of last July), I bought (for 5 TL / approx. US $1.50) my free pass for public transportation (buses and subways), a privilege Ankara offers its senior citizens.  My card, with photo, says in big letters: 65 YAŞ ("age 65").  A brutally frank reminder of passing years, but for free transportation, who's to complain?  And our ice box, which stopped cooling, is now repaired.  We have retrieved our frozen foods from a refrigerator in a guest apartment two floors down, and brought in everything else that we had temporarily stored on our balcony (nature's own refrigerator, at least in this season).

I have received my voter's card for the upcoming referendum on April 16, in which Turkish citizens will be asked to vote "Evet" ("Yes") or "Hayır" ("No") for changes to the constitution that strengthen substantially the powers of the president.  The push for Yes (the position of the president and of the ruling party) is seen in countless billboards across the city.  On my way to the Ulus tax office, I stopped counting at 30.  As for No, I saw nothing on my way to Ulus, but later, crossing the city, I noted one small bus parked boldly in the center of Kızılay, with a big Hayır ("No") on its side, and one banner hung between trees in Kuğulu Park, with the picture of a young girl and the slogan -- if I remember correctly -- "Geleceği için" ("For her future").  The publicity is definitely lopsided.  Does this mean a giant win for Yes on April 16?  Who knows?  We'll see.