On the other hand, the tram is a lot less interesting a way of getting up that hill than the old mix of insanely packed articulated buses and dolmuses with drivers yelling their heads off at each stop. And the same goes for a lot of other things about the city: there seem to have been more changes in the last 2 years than in the previous ten, mostly in the direction of making it more like a European megalopolis on the model of Haussmann's Paris. It's got a long way to go but already there seems to be quite an unnecessary degree of orderliness creeping in.
The most dramatic change is on the fringes of the city: this must be the fastest house-building programme in the world. Whole cities of tower blocks are going up: you could drop Glasgow's Easterhouse among them and not notice it. Most built from prefabricated concrete panels: where are these made? One encouraging development is that they are starting to take on interesting shapes and layouts, closer to Newcastle's Byker or Safdie's Habitat than the Standard International Oblong. But no mosques. Who are they building these for? Surely most of the immigrants will be immigrants from the countryside for whom religion is still important? There's hardly even any open space left to build them. And transport links? There aren't any rail links out there, so the city's bus service is going to need enormous expansion to cope. And travel times are going to be of the same order as London.
We spent an extra day in Trabzon on our way back - Istanbul Airlines switched our flight time from 13.30 to 20.00 without warning, and we didn't want to travel that late and miss seeing Turkey from the air and arrive in Istanbul when most hotels would be full. So we had a chance to look at the Aya Sofya Museum in Trabzon. The fresco paintings here are astonishing - the faces are all individual, some of the earliest examples of humanistic art in the European tradition, while the narthex has a symbolic cross-vault painting of the Four Evangelists that looks somewhere in between Blake's illustrations of Dante and the op-art cubism of Vasarely. The postcards don't get anywhere near doing it justice. It far outclasses anything in the Aya Sofya or Kariye in Istanbul. /* Something else we found in Trabzon was 'sira', a very-slightly-fermented grape juice drink which is made by the same firms that make 'boza' in winter. Great stuff: we took 2 litres of it on the train to Budapest. I hadn't tried it before; it isn't very widely sold and, if Coke and Pepsi have any say in the matter, will shortly cease to exist. Coke and Pepsi advertising is *everywhere* in Turkey. I don't suppose it will be long before Turkey has babies dying of malnutrition from being fed on cola as in the UK. */
There was a display of gravestones in the garden around the church. Mostly Ottoman, some Roman and Byzantine. And one labelled as Byzantine but covered with Armenian script. I took a picture of it, complete with label.
Another VOLIM TE SARAJEVO inscription in a shunting yard.
A field of haystacks that have subsided unevenly so they look like lactating nipples.
We wanted to look inside the Georgian church at Barhal - it's the same desing as the one at Dortkilise but in much better condition - but the only person with a key was the muhtar and he was in Yusufeli while were in Barhal so we never got in. The Dutch butterfly collectors said we should have tried bribing the local imam but nobody at Barhal even hinted that he might have a key. This seems a remarkably coy attitude for a small village with a major monument on its hands.
We have just been through a very long tunnel, and on this train there are no lights during the day. What you need for these situations is a Bonker's and Groper's Guide to the Railway Tunnels of Europe, so you'd know in advance how much time you had.
I tried climbing one of the hills near Tekkale to get up to what I thought was another Georgian ruin. I was only wearing trainers: I gave up after a couple of hundred feet of scree. The stuff was coated with dried salt and full of sharp fragments of calcite. I got covered in stinging scratches and descending was even more difficult. Next time I'll bring hiking boots and a pair of gardening gloves.
More graffiti, still in Serbia near the Hungarian border: BBB (the Zagreb football team), 'Born to Kill' (in English), several occurrences of the symbol
> | c
-------------------
> | c
(the '>' symbols are actually backwards C's, so the thing is symmetrical). Somewhere south of Beograd: SRBA CAR, MRDA CAR. Lots of @ signs.
Welcome to Bulgaria: the border guards charged us 50% more than we paid going by bus the other way and then tried to fiddle my change. They didn't understand any English and seemed to resent being spoken to in Turkish. /* The chief guard was a loud-voiced woman who woke us at 3am with a torch demanding deutschmarks. Another movie stereotype. */ I went looking for the restaurant car and was rudely stopped from walking down the train by a monumentally offensive passport control geek who just ignored 'restaurant? restoran? lokanta?...'.
I miss that Turkish restaurant car - we only had it while on Turkish territory. Good food, cheap, comfortable and friendly, far better than any other I've seen (next best being the Lisbon-Porto express).
The toilet in the Turkish compartment was the best of a bad lot until someone (presumably one of the Poles) nicked all the toilet paper and someone else splattered diarrhoea all over it. The Hungarian one has a seat lid that falls down on your back and a crap-stained seat and the Bulgarian one smells utterly disgusting - its flush is about a teaspoonful.
One problem with that restaurant car: the only beer it had was Tuborg, albeit the bottled version which isn't quite as awful as the keg or can forms. The other main Turkish beer, Efes, at least attains mediocrity. The Turks haven't really got beer right yet. Surely some of the German returnees know what it's all about?
I am reminded of one of them we saw at the festival in Tekkale on Saturday - a Turk in goldrimmed spectacles and Panama hat who had picked, of all possible German archetypes, the comic-book Bavarian as a model to emulate. I suppose there is something vaguely Tyrolean about the yaylas of Artvin, but you half expected this guy to pull an inflatable euphonium out of his pocket. /* Like a lot of Turks who've been to Germany, he couldn't believe we knew hardly any German and persisted with it despite our total incomprehension. But then a lot of Germans get a bit miffed when I find it easier to get by in Turkish in Germany, too. */
The festival was quite simple: we all got up there (about 7km up the valley from Tekkale) by 9am. Just after we arrived a group of the men said the ritual prayers over a calf and killed it: very quick and painless, much like the technique used by the New Zealand slaughtermen in the the abattoir I worked in. What followed was a display of the most incompetent butchering imaginable. They started skinning it but tried to take the legs off as they went. One of them slipped and stabbed the animal in the bowel: this meant a dash to the stream to wash the leg and some bizarre attempts to ligature the cut piece of intestine. /* This bit was almost like a Monty Python send-up of a surgical operation. */ After much fumbling the limbs and torso halves were passed to the cooks, who chopped them into random bitesized chunks. Marion said she could have done a better job, but this was obviously men's work. The chopped-up calf was sprinkled with salt and pot roasted in four large metal buckets. The result didn't taste bad but was hardly the most exciting meal we've had in Turkey.
Tekkale has a zurna player but not a drummer (the usual accompaniment everywhere else in Turkey). While the butchery was going on some of the men did a brief line dance with a handkerchief: we'd seen the same zurna player performing for what seemed to be a stag night just before in Yusufeli (that dancing might have been a bit less accurate but was a lot wilder). Then we got a series of wrestling matches, from very young boys up to adult men. (Nobody much over 20, though, unlike the oil wrestling in the west of Turkey). Then a brief speech introducing the new imam and an appeal for funds for the new mosque. This was done in an effectively public way: men came up to hand notes to the fundraiser, who shouted out the donor's name and how much they'd given: applause followed. Out of two to three hundred men they got 3 1/2 million TL. I gave them 50,000 and one of the few other tourists there (Steve the Australian) did the same. We got a good round of applause for it.
We'd been eating bread and cheese by the stream with Cemil at the start, and he took us to his mother's yayla during the midday prayer meeting for lunch. A wonderful spread of pide (home-cooked flat bread), salads, honey, white cheese, kaymak (clotted cream) and fruit, all locally produced. The reason the butchery was so fumbled is quite understandable: most of the time the local diet is vegetarian, with the occasional small trout (these are ridiculously easy to catch with a thin stick, a few feet of fixed line and a spinning lure). /* Even sheep are rare here: the only one we've seen was being kept as a pet in Yusufeli. */ Sitting on cushions on the balcony of the yayla looking down the valley on to something like a Swiss picture postcard, this was a meal I'll remember for years.
After that we went back to the main gathering where the meat was being served. A small taste was enough for me, and the German and Dutch women stuck by their vegetarian principles and wouldn't even taste it (this struck me as boorish). The a couple of exhilarating rides in the back of a truck down the valley to Tekkale. For the second ride we had the calf's skin with us.
From that to the worst meal we've ever had in Turkey: the in-flight lunch on the Istanbul Airlines flight from Trabzon to Istanbul. This is cheap at 45000 TL (30 pounds) but better bring your own food - it's an internationalstyle plastic tray with a few slices of tomato, a roll, a piece of white cheese (the only good thing on it) and some slices of processed meat, one of which tasted very much like pork to me - at least I couldn't imagine anything else that could taste like that. Alcohol is one thing, but pork on an airline menu in a Muslim country? The following day I was belching sulphurously and Marion threw up: we suspected lahmacun we got late at night (not a good time) from a street stall, but the airline meal seems a more likely culprit in retrospect.
Back at the roadside eatery just inside Germany (1 km from the Czech border). Just remembered what we saw here on the way in: a busload of Polish tourists from Wroclaw. Something about them immediately suggested religiosity: on cue, a priest at the front of the bus pulled out a book and led them in a prayer session. /* By German standards this place was a pretty good deal, with nice goulash soup; it was mostly used by Turkish and Hungarian truck drivers in enormous rigs covered with pinups and other trucker kitsch. It has a supermaket-cum-dime-store attached to it selling all kinds of stuff, including lots of consumer electronics ranging up to laser printers, presumably aimed at people going home eastwards with money still to burn. */
We arrived at Keleti Station, Budapest, in the middle of the night. The train was mobbed by touts for yough hostels, all wearing vests advertising them and shoving leaflets into our hands. They were selling accommodation much the same way the touts at Istanbul bust station sell long-distance rides. We paid a fortune for a taxi ride to Nyugati station for the train to Prague, but got there in time with no trouble (there's less than an hour for the connection). The train was filthy: considering that Czech local trains are pretty clean and the Prague metro is immaculate, it looks like the Budapest cleaners just assumed that the mostly young Inter-Railers who made up most of the passengers weren't worth the bother. /* Four more gorgeous legs in our compartment, belonging to two young Dutch women this time. */
/* Almost all of the other tourists we met in Eastern Europe were Western Europeans, and the only non-western-European tourists we met in Turkey were Australian. It looks like this whole area of the planet has become an American-free zone except for a few bunches of them huddled together en masse for protection in the centre of Prague. The State Department's scare tactics seem to be working. What I found rather more surprising was how few Eastern Europeans were using the trains. */
Graffiti on a motorway bridge in Belgium: MOSLEMS BUITEN. Posters stuck on the next bridge: VLAAMS BLOK - are they the local fascists? /* Yes. */
Two rather uneventful days in Prague. The flat we're in (same area - Stresovice) is rather better - the owners were away for the weekend and their father let us in. Prague is an insanely difficult place to get food in - all restaurants close at 9pm, nothing opens before 10 or 11am, and it even gets difficult after 7pm. We had to resort to expensive bar food at a tourist joint (U Pinkasu) on Saturday night and missed out entirely on Sunday night. I'd have been happy with the basic Czech restaurant meal of pig and stodge but even that was hard to find (finally got it from the rather good stand-up eatery on Narodni truda). /* We did find ice cream, though. Lots of it. Prague must do the best ice cream on earth. */
/* In these last three days, we also wanted to visit U Kalicha, touristy as it might be - the pub featured in 'The Good Soldier Svejk'. It was closed for renovations. Just round the corner was a herbal medicine shop with a window display entirely devoted to a product called 'WANK' - if they'd been open I'd have bought a sample just for the box. I went up the Petrin Tower - one of Eiffel's designs, much like a scaled-down Eiffel Tower - and we went round the odd mirror maze nearby. We did some shopping, mainly for musical instruments - a C clarinet, two cello bows and a Strohfidel - and a big clay Golem as a souvenir of the Jewish quarter. The cemetery of the Jewish quarter was a tiny space with tumbling gravestones piled in heaps everywhere; lots of candles left by visitors, with little notes attached, mostly trite wishes for peace. Rabbi Loew got hundreds of these. The museum beside the cemetery had an exhibition of children's drawings from the Holocaust, which Marion liked but which I thought was mostly unilluminating and predictable. Jewish Prague being marketed as a big tourist asset: the only other feature of the city that gets exposure comparable to ghettoes and golems on T-shirts and postcards is Mozart.
And we made an afternoon trip to Kutna Hora.
This was a deeply strange place. We walked far longer than we expected to get to it - the Rough Guide doesn't make it clear that there are TWO railway stations, a main-line one out of town and a spur-line one in the centre. So we got off a Brno train at the main-line station and spent an hour wondering why things didn't look like the map. In the old centre everything was flaking stone, cracking unpainted wood, rusting iron, and overwhelming silence. I now know exactly what to imagine for the setting of Kafka's 'The Castle'. The silence extended far out beyond that into the modern blocks at the edge of town: even children played politely with hardly a sound. (According to a Czech Jew Marion met at a bar-mitzvah back in Edinburgh, this is normal for Czech children; they have always been disciplined to be seen and not heard). I wish I'd found this town at the start of the holiday, as its atmosphere was utterly unlike anything else I've experienced and I'd have liked more time to look round it and photograph it systematically. The supposed main attraction, St Barbara's Cathedral, didn't impress us very much, though we couldn't get inside; built on the we'll-have-one-each-of-everything principle of architectural ornament.
We couldn't get a meal there, either, because the only bar/restaurant we found was being run by one woman single-handed doing what would have taken six people in Scotland and naturally taking so much longer that we'd have missed our train back to Prague (which turned out to be free as nobody came to check tickets).
Kutna Hora does have a sex shop. I imagine that mummification must be a big seller and the vibrators have silencers. */
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Campin room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland TEL: 041 339 8855 x6854 (work)
INTERNET: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk or via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk FAX: 041 330 4913
BANG!net: via mcsun and uknet BITNET: via UKACRL UUCP: jack@glasgow.uucp
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
/* Extra notes written as I type this in are put in comment brackets like this; everything else is as I wrote it at the time except for a few trivial corrections of spelling and grammar. That includes the time sequence; it was sometimes a few days before I got round to writing something down, so events are very far from being in chronological order. */
|
|
