Tag: Turkey

The Iron Rule – thou shall not (easily) pass (at least not in Turkey or Bulgaria)

TEN THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT BULGARIA

Sofia coffee rating (note, based on limited sample) – 6/10 at 2 locations (for ranking system see here):

  1. Baker Brothers, ulitsa Georgi S. Rakovskiâ 44, 1202 Sofia Center, Sofia – 6/10
  2. The Rainbow Factory ul.Veslets 10, Sofia 1000 Bulgaria 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria – 6/10

The train which we boarded in Istanbul stops at the Turkey/Bulgaria border – and, refusing to be outdone by the Australian rail system, this train is old and slow and leaves from some part of Istanbul far from civilisation – a 45 minute bus ride from central Istanbul – what Australians would call woop woop.

The station which is not a station (Sirkeki)

The train, itself, is some form of exercise in Turkish logic. My carriage is numbered 483 even though the train contains just four carriages. One assumes this is designed to confuse foolish yabangee (foreigners) since, no doubt, Turks understand this logic.

The border is where modern nationalistic, autocratic Turkey meets the remnants of the centralised monolithic communist state and its obsession with bureaucracy and control. Never let it be said that the era of easy globalised travel has reached the Turkish, east European and Balkan borders.

Here, the obsessive nationalism, paranoia and xenophobia of some or all of these countries conspires with an antiquated infrastructure, and a disregard for the modern desire for speed, to ensure that no traveller shall go unpunished for daring to cross the border.

Pulling into Kapikule on the Turkish border we are first disembarked at 2.30 am. All of the 30 odd people on the train to Sofia are woken and de-trained in the dead of night. There is no purpose to this that could not be achieved by a single immigration officer boarding the train and politely requesting passports and ID cards so that they can be checked against the database to ensure that we haven’t just fled from Daesh controlled Syria.

Having evicted the passengers from the depth of their sleep and the warmth of their beds, those passengers arrive on the platform only to find that there is nothing that resembles officialdom, anywhere within rifle shot, and no sign of a passport office.

Eventually we discover that they have hidden the passport office on the other platform cunningly hidden by the train. On discovering this we all head, sheep-like, for the crossing over the rail lines where, we have noted, various railway staff and security personnel are crossing.

They shall not pass. Turkish and Bulgarian customs posts

But, no, this is not acceptable since there may be a train passing this way sometime between now and Christmas. A phalanx (well 3, at least) of Turkish security/police shouting “you shall not pass” and waving their AK47s, ALRs or Uzis blocks our way.

So, we are forced to march 100 metres east, through a tunnel with harsh, flashing, white lights which would, undoubtedly, have sent survivors of the Gulag Archipelago into a frenzy and then 100 metres back to the passport office which is, as the crow flies, a mere ten metres across the lines and platform from the train.

Here we queue as the indolent passport officer scrutinises us at his leisure, while his colleague, standing next to him, is, presumably, taking his annual leave. Very slowly, arguably to avoid RSI, he checks each person off against a list of passengers after which we are allowed to return to the train.

Should any of the passengers marked as being on board the train not appear at the passport control the train shall not leave. In their wisdom, however, this turns out not to be a problem, since our train sits at the station for a further 90 minutes while the Turkish locomotive which, clearly, does not have a visa for Bulgaria is changed for a Bulgarian locomotive.

This gives Turkish immigration plenty of time to search the train for errant passengers. In the process they wake us twice, for light entertainment, presumably to check that no passenger has transmogrified into a refugee or alien from space or smuggled a refugee on board while the train was standing at the station.

In addition, to ensure that no one actually has the presumption to try and sleep, the locomotive changing exercise takes the full 90 minutes and involves, apparently, smashing the new engine into the carriages repeatedly. The purpose of that ritual is unknown unless it is some form of crash test using live passengers as dummies. As it is the entire trainload of passengers suffers a form of horizontal whiplash with their heads being violently catapulted side to side.

The end result is that what could have been a pleasant nights sleep is turned into the sleep equivalent of coitus interruptus. What is, theoretically, pleasurable is interrupted to ensure that Turkey does not lose anyone which it wishes to protect in its internment centres and that Bulgaria is not impregnated by the arrival of unwelcome guests.

The detritus of the Communist era. Decaying building and half finished buildings everywhere

Arrival into Sofia is at 8.30, an hour later than scheduled. Mussolini clearly never visited Bulgaria. Here we are disgorged into a railway station that appears to be a practice run for building Bangkok which, as any person who has visited Thailand knows, is the world leader in ugly concrete structures.

To ensure that every passenger knows that they are in an ex-Soviet satellite state the front entrance to the station is adorned with a large-ugly-concrete-something that apparently served to use up the left over truck load of concrete when they had finished the station.

Sofia – welcomed by a very concrete station and an large ugly concrete something

Bulgaria can’t quite decide whether it is Sovexit or Eurentry. The result being a sort of schizophrenic society which retains large slabs of the former Soviet society, culture and architecture, like a brutalised lover that can’t quite bear to throw out the photo of their tormentor.

The Soviet Union is a bit like someone s/he didn’t really love or even, really, like but to whom s/he has a type of sentimental love/hate relationship. On the other hand s/he doubts the bona-fides of the EU, the new flash lover who promised much but has so far delivered far less than the marriage vows described.

This is reflected in the visual and economic aspects of Bulgaria and, even Sofia. Rural Bulgaria is old agricultural Europe. Depopulated with abandoned houses everywhere as people have fled to “better” lives in the cities. Then as you approach Sofia you move into the old Soviet Union. Abandoned factories and warehouses and, everywhere, piles of litter, building waste, industrial poisons, the detritus of a society that cared/cares little or nothing for the environment.

Then, finally, there is central Sofia a pleasant, small modern city strewn with the monumentalism of the Soviet Union and the religious fervour of a part Catholic and part orthodox Christianity.

In this context symbolism is everything and the bigger the better. From the massive Orthodox Cathedrals, the latter with more gold on the roof than that hoarded by every Indian on the planet. For the environmental and social destruction wrought by its obsession with gold and gold leaf, the churches should be doing penance until the second coming.

Sveta Nedelya Orthodox Church

When it’s not the churches hoarding the wealth of society in its land and buildings it’s the grandiose neo-fascist symbolism of the ex-Soviet Union and its satellites celebrating the theft of millions of lives in their monuments to their so-called communism. That communist society was more akin to modern day neo-liberal capitalism, in other words more a controlled klepocracy than anything resembling socialism.

The Russian Orthodox (Alexander Nevksy) Cathedral. More bling than Sarkozy

If, however, you ignore the religious and political follies that created these various buildings they are undoubtedly fine specimens of their type. The Russian Church, the St George Rotunda, and the Cathedrals of Sofia are all worth a visit if you are passing through, as is the Russian memorial, the Presidents Building and the ex-Communist Party headquarters. At the President’s Building if you arrive just before the hour you can enjoy a remnant of the Soviet era in the spectacle of the goose-step driven changing of the guard.

Always hard to leave your authoritarian past behind. The changing of the guard at the President building

The nadir of this obsession with big and grand can be found at the Eagle Bridge which though by no means the largest symbol of stalinist excess is a suitable folly. This fine bridge adorned by four magnificent eagles spans a concrete drain containing a rivulet. This rivulet contains about as much water as the Darling River, in Australia.

For those unaware the magnificent Darling River, below Cubbie Station has been largely drained to within an inch of its life.

Monumentalism everywhere both ancient and modern, including the famous Eagle bridge and the river (ditch) it runs over)

Cubbie is a cotton farm in Queensland which has been allowed by Government to pretty much destroy the Darling River by extracting so much water, along with some other culprits, that the second longest river in Australia is now an empty ditch. Cubbie, extracts billions of litres of water to be wasted on a cotton crop. It’s a typical Australian plan. Take one of the world’s iconic rivers on the world’s driest continent and suck it dry for a crop that would be better grown almost anywhere else in the world.

Nevertheless, despite being burdened with a large quantity of cynicism, I found Sofia, a pleasant city to visit. Most of the major attractions within the city centre boundary can be walked around in a day and the city is clean, open, populated with numerous gardens, has a good public transport system if you don’t feel like walking and is stacked with interesting buildings, if that’s your thing. It does have its idiosyncrasies among which are the paving of streets and public areas with large quantities of yellow pavers.

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The famous yellow pavers. More slippery than an Australian politician. Old communist party headquarters at rear.

These pavers not only are a distinct vomit yellow but are specially designed to ensure that, should it be wet, no visitor to Sofia shall walk the city without sliding and falling on them at least a couple of times. This presumably is an economy building exercise since injured tourists, unable to walk, stay longer and spend more money. While I didn’t witness the large number of rear end collisions that presumably occur when cars try and brake in the wet, these accidents, one assumes, these also add to the GDP in much the same way as wars and earthquakes.

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Ai am the Wei and the truth and the life -inside Ai Weiwei’s Istanbul exhibition.

Images from this post can be found here:

En route to Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Sofia

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Ai am the Wei and the truth and the life -inside Ai Weiwei’s Istanbul exhibition.

“Life is art, art is life, I never separate them.” Ai Weiwei (AWW)….and everything is political.

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If you take the view that I do, which is that even drawing breath is a political act, then Ai Weiwei’s exhibition, in Istanbul, is a great expression of the philosophy that Art is Life and that everything in life is political.

I slipped, almost literally, through the front door on a rainy, slippery, Istanbul day. For a cultural illiterate, such as I, who normally can’t tell the difference between Mahler and Wagner or between a Rembrandt and a Vermeer and who thinks a Concerto is a brand of Honda car, an Ai Wei Wei exhibition is perfect.

You don’t need to know anything about art or about Ai Weiwei. You just need to know something about life and politics. Everything else is explained.

Vases as columns against a backdrop of scenes depicting refugees, emigrants, prisoners and other similar groups

The exhibition is eclectic ranging over the Sichuan earthquake, Palestine, tigers, refugees, freedom of speech, the destruction of his studio,  attitudes to power and authority, Chinese labour camps, beatings, stone age tools, war, iconoclasm, still life, traditional art.

For those who haven’t been to an Ai Weiwei exhibition here is a virtual tour……

Countries as art and political statements – as you enter you are greeted  by a map of China in ceramic. It’s a form of jigsaw, and it’s really reflective of the rest of the exhibition in the way it binds together art and political statement – with interesting bits of information about the use of iconography as political dissent.

Much of the exhibition utilises common place objects as a link between the everyday and the political and cultural. A coat hanger is used as the basis for a portrait and car window winders are used to demonstrate the absurdity of totalitarianism. The Chinese Government attempted to prevent protests, while driving through Tiananmen Square, by removing all the window winders from cars.

Between 2008 and 2011 Ai Weiwei became the subject of political persecution by the Chinese Government. This began after his investigations of, and blogging about, political corruption.

This involved corruption that had allowed shoddily built buildings to kill tens of thousands of people during the Sichuan earthquakes in May 2008. The dead included 5000 schoolchildren killed by poorly-built schools throughout the region. AWW named each of the dead children.

There are echoes of history in his subsequent detention. His father, the famous Chinese poet, Ai Qing, who was exiled to the Gobi Desert, said in 1946: “I believe that art and the revolution must go together; they can never be separated. We are political animals, and sometimes we write as political animals. If the revolution fails, the art will fail, but in as far as is possible the artist must be a revolutionary. As a revolutionary and as an artist he must represent his times.”

Left: the earthquake zone, centre: ceramics recreating twisted metal reo from the buidings

Ai responded to the deaths in Sichuan with a series of angry blog posts, and by the next year had set up the Citizens’ Investigation on Sichuan earthquake. The police responded by making a threatening visit to Ai’s home. A few months later, when Ai was in Sichuan to attend the trial of an earthquake activist, police broke into his hotel during the night and beat him. He was left with a cerebral haemorrhage that required emergency brain surgery.

AWW filmed part of the earthquake zone and he superimposes on the images a series of negative responses that he received from officials when he tried to get information on the impacts of the earthquake and who was responsible.

A part of the exhibition uses the beating and the brain scans, that led to surgery, as as the basis for two ceramics using a scan of his brain.

It was during this period that AWW was arrested, as he was boarding a flight to Taiwan, and then detained for 81 days. Subsequently he was barred from overseas travel and the studio he had been invited to build was torn down by the Chinese Government.

In, literally, 24 hours, the entire building was demolished, razed to the ground and the rubble trucked away so that not one shred of evidence of the buildings existence remains – a sort of instant re-writing of history. You can see at left, below, the building before demolition and then the paddock shown after the building’s removal at right, below. AWW documents the process in a video.

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From here the exhibition moves on to document a series of images of AWW’s response to authority, in a very simply and symbolic series of images of iconic buildings which in some form or other represent wealth, power or images of a society’s culture…such as, in the case of Australia the opera house. In each AWW stands with finger raised as we all wish to do to authority figures, much of the time.

Similarly he uses images, such as those of massed crabs, to document mechanisms of secret protest against authoritarian regimes. Chinese people use the word for the crabs as a synonym for censorship as the word for crab sounds similar to the Chinese word for “harmonious”. As such it refers directly to Chinese attempts to create a harmonious society via censorship.

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Massed crabs

Following AWW’s arrest and detention he was put under house arrest and then had his passport removed so he could not travel abroad. At the start this was done to prevent him receiving his Nobel prize. His resistance to the removal of his travel rights is documented in a series of images of flowers. His use of flowers is perhaps resonant of the famous 1967 images of George Harris and Jan Rose Kasmir using flowers in the face of the rifle barrels of National Guardsman.

Jan Rose Kasmir (left and centre photographed by Marc Riboud) and George Harris (right photographed by Bernie Boston) – at a rally of 100,000 against the Vietnam war

Over a period of 600 days Ai Weiwei placed flowers in the basket of his bicycle to protest against the loss of his passport. His use of flowers as a symbol of protest is repeated in a number of works in the exhibition and the centrepiece (centre, below) is a wall-papered room showing each of the bunches of flowers that were placed in the bicycle basket.

The rest of the exhibition follows similar themes using a variety of artistic mechanisms to document his views on Palestine through his videos of the last tiger, starving in Palestine’s zoo, following the Israeli blockade (the tiger was later saved), and documenting the treatment of refugees and other groups around the world (bottom images).

[wpvideo pxeYAuer]

 

All these images on Flickr here

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Pinara: In the Valley of the Living Dead

Sometimes, when travelling, one comes across extraordinary and special places. In this particular case not just because the place is, in itself, extraordinary and special but because it was empty. As I walked through the streets of this long dead city, following the footsteps of people who live 2000 years ago, there was an utter stillness, amplified only by a very gentle breeze and the distant sound of goat bells.

There was, literally, not a single other person in the entire city. Even the ticket office was deserted. It was empty of tourists, of noise, of crowds, of a single reminder of the crowded world we live in. Despite this you have no sense of being in a tomb. On the contrary one has the sense of being surrounded, everywhere by the Lycians and memories of their lives.

Pinara was settled when a group if Lycians decided that Xanthos, the largest of the Lycian cities was becoming overcrowded. It’s about 20 kilometres as the crow flies from Xanthos. The place they chose is one magical location.

(For more detail about the Lycians read this post)

Drive up over the crest of the hill and the whole of Pinara is laid out before you. Not in the sense that you can see all the remaining buildings but, there, laid out before you, and completely surrounded by escarpments, is the bowl, in the mountains, which the entire city sits.

It’s impossible to know what the city would have looked like in it’s heyday, whether it would have been largely devoid of trees, but today it’s an enchanted circular valley full of fallen buildings, great rock tombs and pines.

Pinara

I arrived in Pinara, on December 5. It was a glorious winter’s day. Sunny. 20ºc. To get there you drive up the valley below, turn off the sealed road and go a further 2 kms along a roughish dirt track.

From the car park it’s about 800 metres to the Roman theatre. Above along the main road through the city lie all the main buildings, or what are left of them, scattered in among the pines. And, surrounding the city, the famous rock tombs, some hundreds of metres up in the cliff faces.

At this time of year the sun never gets high and at 2 pm it is starting to dip towards the escarpments which surround the city. As you walk through the fallen stones the sun pierces through the surrounding pines which, themselves, are being stirred by the faintest of breezes. You have that sense that you sometimes get, in a suddenly deserted house or building, of the original inhabitants being just around the corner.

If you get a chance to visit this magical ancient city, do so. But go in winter or when there are few crowds.

The full set of images of Pinara and other Lycian Cities can be found below:

 

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The Art of Nothing

Nothing: nothing to do, nothing to fix. No work to go to, no garden to tend. No meetings to go to, no dance classes…absolutely nothing to do except watch the world go by.

It’s perhaps the greatest indulgence of travel, especially travel where you hang out in a place or places for a long time. Sit on the great meeting place of the Bosphorus, the great melting pot of Istanbul and watch the people and the ships go by.

Such is my pleasure, at least for now. I can stand or sit in the autumn sun and watch the leaves fall. Watch the gardeners in Emirgan Park planting the bulbs for the Spring Festival. Just ahead a single worker is marking out into which areas which colour bulbs will go.

Planting out bulbs for Spring

Up the hill a couple are practicing for their wedding day, this coming weekend and the photographer is taking a few pre-wedding photos. Other wedding couples walk the paths.

The fishermen cast their lines as they do every day along the Bosphorus, hundreds of them line the water catching God knows what from the murky waters below.

Into the distance a line of ships shimmies up the Bosphorus heading for the Black Sea just an hour away. At this time of day they are all heading north. In a few hours the line will reverse and head for the Mediterranean. Oil, bulk carriers, containers.

The cafes are full. The men play backgammon. Families pass, soaking up the autumn sun. The call to prayer starts, the sound flowing up the hill from the minaret framed by the Bosphorus Bridge.

Just nearby a group of older homeless men are listening to four young Turks playing guitar and singing

Each five minutes a ship from a different country passes along the Bosphorus and under the bridges linking Europe and Asia while, if you stand and listen carefully, you will hear a dozen different languages in 30 minutes. The main road is a melee of traffic, Mercedes and BMWs mixing with the ubiquitous scooters. Traditional Turkish cafes sit just up the road from a mess of McDonalds and Starbucks. Across the road Ai Wei Wei is hanging out his latest exhibition in the local museum.

The park is a blaze of autumn colours and sunlight peopled with walkers, sitters, basket ballers and the emptiness of the off-season, absent of tourists.

Turn left out of the park entrance and head down past old Ottoman buildings.

Just on the left part of that past is being redeemed – an old Ottoman building – forbidden from being knocked down is being renovated at huge expense. Right takes you up the cobbled street past the car wash and the hairdresser, along past the giant old plane trees and past a bit of the old Ottoman past boarded up and yet to be redeemed.

Finally the last 100 metres and it’s back to the flat. All in a walk of just a kilometre, easily strolled at quarter pace in just 30 minutes.


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Europe 2017 (Episode 5): The Black Sea, the Beach and the Bosphorus

As an Australian there are few more bizarre experiences than visiting a popular European beach. Yes, there are remote(ish) beaches in Europe and beaches with surf. Some of the Atlantic beaches of France meet these criteria. But if you want a cultural experience utterly foreign to the average Australian then accept an invitation to a popular city beach or swimming spot near a major population.

This is, to the average Australian beachgoer, as instant coffee is to the Australian coffee snob or as a British national park is to an Australian wilderness area.

The key to the experience is to take every single thing one might expect from Australian beaches and invert it. Space, solitude, waves, free access, freedom, quiet, nature, walking, wind. None of these are on offer. In essence the aim is to take the urban experience and transfer it to the coast adding just one thing, saltwater.

European Beaches: no solitude, no waves, no space, no nature

We leave Istanbul at 10 am. This is the first difference. Almost nothing starts early on a weekend in Europe, whereas for me the one of the joys of the beach is the early morning light and solitude. It’s forty minutes to the Black Sea, if one is lucky. If the traffic is bad it can take 90 minutes. But no one who lives in Istanbul would really care, since it can take two hours to travel 5 kilometres, along the Bosphorus, on a bad day.

The aim of the urban European beach experience, it seems, is to remove almost any element of the natural. If you can concrete it, do so. An urban shopping experience, at the beach is one element, through the creation of a food court on the beach, among other things. Removal of any risk is essential. Avoidance of quiet is a critical element.

The louder, the more populated, the less natural and the more urban the better. Even better have motorised hang gliders pass over every ten minutes. If humanly possible, offset the unpleasant natural hum of the ocean with regular passing jet skis. If they happen to mow down the occasional swimmer to provide some light entertainment so much the better. One less person with whom to fight over the beach lounges.

As you approach the beach you can hear the bass from about a kilometre away. It sounds more like the average Byron Bay doof than a beach. We park and follow a stream of beachgoers, longer than the average airport security queue, down to the beach entrance.

The first impression does not lie because, while the beach is technically public, somehow private companies are allowed to control most of the beach and charge for entry. To ensure this, fences and security guards are employed. They are not employed to keep you and I safe from imminent terrorist threat. Instead they are charged with  keeping the food and drink franchisees safe from economic terrorists who might undermine their economic security by bringing bottled water or food onto the beach.

 

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And every beach shall have multiple cafes, bars, boom boxes and dance floors cos that’s what beaches are for

Once our contraband (water) has been confiscated we are allowed onto the sacred shore. Here, for our $10 entry fee we can fight with the hoi polloi for our share of the beach furniture. With the advent of climate change it’s about 45ºc in the shade, so an umbrella is essential.

We haven’t arrived early but, fortunately, manage to find four of the five remaining beach chairs. These are vacant because because they are immediately adjacent to the largest of the beach loudspeakers. This ensures that not only can we not hear the ocean but we can’t hear each other either.

Since we cannot talk to each other, this leaves the sole remaining, non-swimming, forms of entertainment as reading and trying to re-position one’s beach umbrella to keep in the shade as the planet revolves.

Access to the beach, which remains forty metres away, is complex since it involves passing through a teeming maze of people and beach furniture (assuming furniture can teem) apparently set up to prevent any direct route to the water. If you weren’t hot before you left your seat you are by the time you reach the water.

This is partly because you have fried your feet on the white hot sand, having failed to bring any water tolerant footwear, and partly because fighting through the crowd to actually get at the water is more difficult and sweat inducing than being first at a bargain bin at a Boxing Day sale.

You may swim if you can fight your way to the water

Once at the water, the nanny-state regulations Australia look like a paradise of risk taking. Technically you are not supposed to go outside the restricted (buoyed) area in case you (a) drown or (b) get your head taken off by passing high speed boats/jet skis or (c) get run down by a supertanker heading for the Bosphorus.

As a result you can’t actually get more than waist deep because the water depth in the Black Sea increases by about 1 centimetre for each 20 metres that you head out to sea. So you are halfway to the Ukraine before you are neck deep.

Nevertheless I take my life in my hands and, abandoning all hope of rescue should I start drowning, I head out into the 15 centimetre surf. Once I am chest deep, and thus outside the marked area, I am subjected to numerous and repeated urgings from both the onshore lifeguards, in their tower, and the surf patrol on their board to save myself from imminent death by returning to the safety of the buoyed area.

However being blond/grey haired and light eyed I am able to ignore their urgings by posing as an idiot tourist, shrugging and waving my hands about. Hopefully they think I am a north-Italian since we wouldn’t want the Turks to think badly of Australians.

Beware of rips and do not swim outside the rubber duckies, due to dangerous, large, surf

Despite both the costs and risks of visiting the Black Sea, we nevertheless pass a pleasantly indolent day doing nothing. I finish several chapters of my book Birds without Wings an epic of Turkey’s years between the 1880s and 1930s. Judging by the number of slaughters of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Kurds etc etc, it is a wonder that anyone at all survives in Anatolia and its surrounds.

Our day at the Black Sea follows on from our sailing trip with a local group from InterNations. Had this been a commercial trip it would arguably have fallen foul of the Trade Practices Act.

This is because the promotional email advertises it as “sailing” around the Prince’s Islands in the Sea of Marmara, just south of the Bosphorus. In reality the sailing boat does not sail and we don’t go anywhere, anyway, but anchor firmly for the entire day off Heylbeli Island which is in the Sea of Marmara, close to Istanbul.

Sailing, Turkish style. Put down the anchor and do nothing

Nevertheless this form of stationary sailing trip has the great advantage that (a) no one gets seasick (well one person only) and (b) we don’t have to put up with a diesel motor all day. Like the trip to the Black Sea, the sailing trip allows our group to indulge the Turkish passion for socialising, lying in the sun getting skin cancer, eating, music, dancing and swimming.

Despite the unforeseen passing of a sedentary day on the ocean waves, a pleasant, albeit overlong, day of doing nothing is enjoyed by everyone. It allows everyone to drink too much, eat well, keep cool with repeated swims and for the men to regress to being ten year olds. They do this by repeatedly jumping off the highest part of the boat much to the apparent pleasure of the women watching them from the water, who encourage the regression to adolescence.

As the day wears on the music becomes progressively louder and eventually the crew manages to persuade the increasing inebriated passengers to commence dancing, an invitation to make fools of ourselves. This invitation is stubbornly resisted by Kaylee, her nephew, Jesse, and I who all require substantially more alcohol before we can be persuaded to overcome our inherent northern caucasian inhibitions. After all one wouldn’t want to enjoy oneself too much.

Let there be dancing – except for Australians who must not enjoy themselves

As evening falls we fire up the diesel for our return to Istanbul a trip which is leavened by the entertainment of a typical day in Istanbul traffic but transferred to the water . This where our skipper decides that he has been offended by another boat which has failed to give way, as required.

This allows us all the hilarity of witnessing a Mexican standoff where both boats come to a standstill mid-ocean while the two boat captains harangue each other for five minutes from a distance of 20 metres. Fortunately, not being the US, neither are armed so we all survive.

This post is the fifth and last in the series “Europe 2017, from Corsica to Bosnia”. Links to previous posts in the series are below:.

  1. Corsica
  2. Florence
  3. The Balkans
  4. Mljet

For the Flickr archive that contains all all the images from which the photos in this post were selected click on the links below:

Black Sea

Bosphorus/Sea of Marmara

 

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Istanbul: across the European and Asian divide: Riots, Ramadan and revolution

I normally sleep well on planes; but then often I have two or three seats. There is a technique. First, check in online and book the very rear of the plane, selecting a row that is completely empty at the time and near other empty rows. Not the back row because the seats rarely recline due to the bulkhead wall behind it, but the second or third row from the back.

If the plane is not fully booked, the back will always be emptier because people find it noisier and bumpier so, even though the difference is marginal, if there are going to be empty seats they will be there. The back of the plane is also safer. Invariably, if anyone lives, they are most likely near the back. This is God’s punishment for the rich and selfish and, even if you die, you can take consolation that the rich bastards died first. Even better if the rich bastards are Liberal Ministers.

In 747s and some other planes the narrowing of the planes means the seats are only two wide on the sides so you get a mass of space next to the window for books, shoes etc making this the ideal space for a long flight.

Then you must always make sure you are the very last passenger on board. Wait until the third or fourth final call or when they actually call you name. Then board – this gives everyone else the shits, of course since the first passengers have been boarded and waiting, for at least 30 minutes. Everyone else will already be seated so you can see if there are any empty or part empty rows. Don’t worry about your allocated seat just head straight for the vacant spaces. If there aren’t empty seats naturally you take your pre-allocated seat.

On this occasion, I don’t sleep so well. Kaylee, with whom I am travelling, has discovered the joys of traveling next to someone you know, which is that you can raise the armrest and take up half of your traveling companion’s seat as well as your own. Having claimed she never sleeps on planes, she now sleeps like the proverbial log for at least half the entire journey.

I, on the other hand, do not sleep as well as normal. But there is consolation in that there are fewer complaints from the traveller in the next seat about having nearly drowned en route. This occurs, normally, as a result my standard travel sleeping technique, which involves looking like the local village idiot with my mouth wide open and drooling in a stream over the adjacent passenger

The drool as you travel technique is less problematic when travelling with Kaylee, as I can drool on her rather than a complete stranger. This leads to less embarrassment all around.

We fly Turkish Airlines which, contrary to the stereotype of Turkey as still being chaotic and relatively poor is excellent. New planes, efficient and friendly service and, miraculously, a video system where the sound you “enjoy” while listening to films doesn’t sound like someone first smashed the system and then submerged it.

I enjoy three films en route. One of my choices is the Book Thief. It’s a classic tear-jerker which means that, aside from being great and informative, is a bad choice because I spend half the film weeping and surreptitiously wiping my eyes since I have never managed to get over my childhood indoctrination that boys don’t cry.

The plane sweeps over the Bosphorus with a view south over the Sea of Marmara and north to the Black Sea. If one can ever say that a view from a plane is a taste of history, this is it. Constantinople is truly part of the cross roads of history; a history which has led us to the current morass in Syria, Iraq, Iran and throughout Europe. In one glance you can see, metaphorically, where two great empires, two continents and two religions collided.

Below the waters lie the wrecks of British and French warships, the Bouvet, Ocean and Irresistible, which were sunk by mines and the battlecruiser Inflexible which was damaged by the same minefield. The loss of Bouvet and two other British battleships during the 18 March attack was a major factor in the decision to abandon a naval strategy to take Constantinople, and instead opt for the Gallipoli land campaign.[10]

The subsequent defeat and break of of the Ottoman Empire then led (in its most simplistic form) onto the creation/independence of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran and the establishment of the borders of Turkey and Greece and from there to the present morass in the middle east.

We land at Ataturk Airport, in European Turkey, in the very early hours of the morning and we take a taxi to our AirBnb accommodation just a couple of minutes from Taksim Square. Our host, Dev, meets us at 6am and, as we invariably found with AirBnB, gave us a great welcome including a wealth of information including a recommendation to go to the Gay and Lesbian Pride March, that evening.

After a short sleep we take to the streets walking up the Bosphorus for about six kilometres towards the Black Sea, under the bridge which joins Europe and Asia, and onto the Bosphorus-side suburb of Bebek.

The walk provides a form of Turkish smorgasbord incorporating as it does, European coffee stops, traditional Turkish tea houses, advertising for Galatasaray Soccer Club (named for the area around the Galata Tower), markets, the Bosphorus, museums, ancient palaces and a myriad other miniature experiences of the richness of Turkey, with the biggest downside being that much of Bosphorus side walk is blocked by private or Government property and buildings.

A taxi back to the Hotel gets us back in time for the Pride March and we walk the 10 minutes up the hill to Taksim Square, just adjacent to Gezi Park where massive protests against a proposed shopping centre flared into riots in 2013 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezi_Park_protests).

As we arrive at the top of the hill the march is leaving the square and heading down the road. It gets about 50 metres past us and then, just as quickly, hundreds of people start sprinting the other way as a phalanx of riot police come up the road, batons drawn. The brutality and deaths of 2013 are apparently very fresh (http://tinyurl.com/ow5n4zn).

We move with the protesters back to the square that is blocked on every side by riot police. Just a month after the election in which the authoritarian Government of Erdogan lost its majority (but the Justice and Development Party remained the largest party), it is trying to assert itself by banning the rally and march and preventing it leaving the square.

As an Islamic Government, it is also affronted by the fact that the rally is occurring during Ramadam but, as with most things in Turkey, it’s not as simple as an Islamists vs. Secularists issue. Many of the protesters were wearing headscarfs and other Islamic dress (later we were bemused at the beach to see women in bikinis and headscarfs).

Refusing to be moved on, we are all soon confronted by water cannon. Kaylee, in her wisdom, deciding the water pressure in our AirBnB is insufficient for a good shower, goes to investigate the efficacy of water cannon, before a friendly Turkish woman advises us the perhaps it would be wiser to move in the opposite direction.

At this point the tear gas starts and people start scattering and then re-grouping nearby.

The rally is, apparently, also a spectator sport and thousands have gathered higher up the hill to view the action and the crowd surges back and forth, eventually breaking through the police lines on the far side of the square.

This is a victory of sorts and it issues down the streets by Gezi Park. Now the rally begins to disperse and move into the nearby bars as dinner approaches. We take ourselves off for a couple of gin and tonics and then on to dinner. An eclectic first day in Turkey moves to a close.

 

 

 

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