Talking Turkey

From our new apartment-hotel unit, we have a fantastic view of the Antalya harbor, hills, colorful apartment houses, Ottoman era fortress, the Kusadasi sign (a Hollywood sign knock-off) and a giant statue of Mustafa Kemal, aka Ataturk, Turkey's iconic founder and first President. The Mediterranean sparkles in the sun and the moderate-size city hums with a distinctly Turkish-city vibe.

Inside, the plumbing all works, there's soap in the bathrooms, the windows give off a fantastic breeze and the electrical wiring seems to function properly. Sure, they forgot to give us towels or sheets for the sofa bed. And the cleaning staff missed someone's forgotten shirt in the closet or the vegetables and bread in one of the kitchen cabinets. But these things are surmountable.

We are now up on the fourth floor – which in the US we would deem fifth floor since here the ground is "zero" which means we need the building's small elevator. Only, the elevator doors can't open on the fourth floor (or the first for that matter) so we need to go up a floor to catch the elevator to get downstairs and vice versa. But that too can become part of the memory of the odd place we stayed when we visited Kusadasi. We have a collection of such memories from our travels and they add color. When I suggested perhaps we throw in the towel (if we had one) and go to the nearby Doubletree, pay more but earn points – Emily said no, we don't want to be the Americans who go and stay at the American hotel. We'll go for the Turkish establishment, quirks, warts and all. I like that she still feels that way and that we can model it for our children.

After our late night, everyone slept late and we didn't get going until about 11am. We decided to walk the 11 minutes Google estimated down to the city center and explore the Kaleci (the old town) and get some doner kebab (the Turkish equivalent of gyros and shawarma) for lunch. Emily and I were excited to be in a town with a kaleci as we have fond memories of our stay in the Antalya kaleci nine years ago. It turns out Kusadasi's kaleci is far more commercial than Antalya's with knock-off brand-name clothing stores, leather goods shops, souvenirs and the occasional rug shop dominating the place. Only if you turn off one of the main walking roads and look up a bit can you make out that the buildings are old, beautiful Ottoman-era houses. There are no long, windy streets and alleys leading down to the water like Antalya – but instead a perfectly boring gridded layout. But on a few of those walking streets, far enough away from the main crowds still remain some restaurants serving traditional Turkish cuisine in beautiful courtyards and gardens. A little taste of a traditional kaleci.

That's of course the irony of the kaleci and what Turkey sells to tourists. People don't come for the fairly average, almost forgettable streets of modern Kusadasi – or most towns for that matter. They don't care about the banks, barber shops, mechanics, optometrists, local cafes housed in blocky cement buildings – the trappings of modern daily life. Tourists want the Ottoman past – the yalis (Ottoman era mansions), hookah bars with lounge-cushions, 15th century hammams (Turkish bath houses where you get scrubbed and massaged like nothing else you've experienced), mosques, grand bazaars, windy footpaths and old stone fortresses. Throughout central Kusadasi, you can't walk 20 feet without finding a man in a costume and fez trying to sell you Turkish ice cream scooped on a long, metal pole (made sticky, we learned today, because the recipe uses mastic – a natural gummy sap popular in the region). Moreover, one of the biggest draws to Kusadasi – the thing that pulls in the cruise ships all summer – is Ephesus, the ruins of an ancient city and one of the world's great archaeological sites. Aside from some of its beach resorts, what Turkey sells most to its tourists is not its present, but its past.

The problem is that it doesn't have as much of it as it could. In 1923 after 623 years of being the seat and center of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate, Ataturk declared the modern Republic of Turkey he was faced with a problem many new countries in the 20th Century faced – creating a new identity for his people. The Ottoman Empire was a diverse collection of people spread over a vast expanse from Southeastern Europe to Persia to the Middle East and parts of Northern Africa. Istanbul in particular was a metropolitan mix of people from throughout this empire including Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Arabs, Persians, Albanians, Bulgarians and more. Turkey was a country of Turks – but exactly what was a Turk anymore? The Seljuk Turks who started the Ottoman Empire were no longer their own distinct lineage – Turkey was really a melange of people. 

To make the whole thing work, Turkey had to be full of Turks. So the easiest way to do that was to magically make everyone into Turks which meant a one-two-punch of giving people Turkish names and heavy doses of state propaganda telling them they were Turks. Like an ethnic amnesty program, anyone who wanted to be a Turk – and therefore be part of the new Turkey – could. Most did. 

But in the years of economic and political struggle Turkey faced through much of the 20th Century, the yalis burned, particularly in Istanbul and were replaced with cement-block apartment buildings. Roads and highways needed building, big business required office buildings, consumers required malls and old neighborhoods with character weren't seen as historic gems, but problems to be solved. So much of Turkey became what we might consider generic – with a few great iconic pieces of history preserved – largely in Istanbul.

So here we were today in Kusadasi, walking through a largely whitewashed kaleci. It was fine, but without the charm we might have liked. The day was sunny and breezy, though and the harbor gorgeous. We stopped at the mall along the harbor and got our first Starbucks in more than a month. It's hard to find real iced tea without sweetener in this region of the world! We also checked out the Grand Bazaar, though it was really a collection of clothing shops and not the spices, art and food shops of a real Turkish bazaar. 

In the late afternoon, Emily and I had work to do – so we headed back to the hotel and Matheus took the kids swimming at the pool. No matter where we go, swimming time is a top priority for them and they had been asking for hours. I guess the Ottoman architecture of the fortress at the harbor was not their priority…

Tonight as we head to a traditional Turkish dinner, we plan to play a game of finding three things that are different from Greece and three things that are the same. Sennen is already saving up his observations. For this trip, that's the real point – to expose the kids to something a little different than Greece – to get a sample of Turkey and to maybe be curious enough for us to come back another time, ideally to Istanbul, one of our favorite cities.