NANCY & JANE’S “TURKEY TROT”

Nancy & Jane in Cappadocia

1. Introduction

We flew to Istanbul in mid-November 2007 for the International Bead and Beadwork Conference where Jane was invited to present a paper on Turkish World War I prisoner-of-war beadwork. The trip provided a wonderful opportunity for us to explore Istanbul and Central Anatolia. We flew in before the conference to give us time to recover from jet lag and to take a three day tour of Istanbul.

Because we both love cats, some of the cats we met appear in our photographs. Anatolian evil eyes, meant to protect victims from envious or malevolent glances of others were everywhere, and we have photographed them in various places. Because we also love food, this travel account includes lots of food photos.

Nancy Ready to Go! Istanbul Cats Evil Eye Imbedded in Pavement

2. Our Little Hotel Daphnis on the Golden Horn

We stayed in Istanbul at Hotel Daphnis, three 110 year-old renovated rum warehouses overlooking the Golden Horn and located within a 10 minute walk of Kadar Has University where the conference was held. Here we are having breakfast with Deborah Zinn, the Communications Chair for the conference. An American woman living in Ethopia, she teaches beadwork to native women. Turkish breakfasts typically consist of a variety of cheeses, olives, tomatoes, sliced cucumbers, and bread with honey, jam and butter and tea or coffee.

Our room was on the top floor, reached by forty steps up a circular staircase. The decorative iron balcony overlooked one of the older parts of the city. We enjoyed our room, although the bathroom was an initial shock.

Nancy, Jane, and Deborah at the Hotel Daphnis Balcony of Our Room

Our Room WC and Shower Sink

3. Touring Istanbul

For our pre-conference tour we had a wonderful guide, Filiz Korkut, who showed us the highlights of Istanbul, an amazingly complex and layered city that has been inhabited for at least 5,000 years. Turkey is a mostly Muslim country. Istanbul alone has over 2,200 mosques, and the five daily calls to prayer broadcasted from the domes of the mosques can be heard from anywhere in the city. One of our first Turkish meals consisted of roasted chicken, eggplant in a tomato sauce, dolmas and a fresh green salad with shredded carrots. This restaurant also sold a large variety of pickled vegetables.

Filiz and Tour Group Our First Turkish Lunch

Pickled Vegetables

3a. Istanbul: Topkapi Palace:

One of the outstanding attractions in Istanbul is Topkapi Palace, the huge official and personal residence built from 1459-1465 by Mehmet II around four huge courtyards and inhabited by the Ottomans until the mid-19^th century. Military barracks and other official buildings, schools, libraries, living quarters and kitchens for the over 20,000 inhabitants who lived there at one time and extensive gardens (Turkey and not Holland first domesticated the tulip) occupy this huge complex. Interesting and unusual structures include a harem quarter, a circumcision room and a museum featuring an exquisite collection of precious objects decorated with immense emeralds, rubies and other jewels. We also loved practical features such as the brickwork.

Brickwork and Crossing Side Door Palace Entrance

Brickwork Arch Brickwork Dome

Kitchens Kitchen Chimneys

The beautiful tile walls from the early Ottoman period are as bright and vibrant as the day they were made.

Wall Tiles Ceiling of the Circumcision Room

Ottoman Tree of Life Tulips and Chrysanthemums

Four More Examples of Exquisite Ottoman Tile-work at Topkapi Palace

Modern cement pavements here and in other places in Turkey are frequently decorated with inset pebbles.

Pebble Pavement Patterns at Topkapi Palace

Pavement Patterns at the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul

We are accustomed to raking fallen leaves and were amused by the groundsmen at Topkapi Palace sweeping leaves from the sycamore trees with brooms. We were also fortunate to be able to capture a picture of this group of young women being photographed by one of their friends. The mix of clothes from the traditional Muslim dress to a very stylish Western style was very interesting.

Sweeping Leaves Turkish Girls

Here is our first view of the Turkish crow (Corvus cornix) on the grounds of Topkapi Palace. According to ancient mythology, this species did a favor for the gods and was given handsome plumage, while all other crows were turned black.

Turkish Crow

3b. Mosques and Churches

Other ‘must see’ sites in Istanbul include Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the Süleymaniye Mosque. Our favorite was the Süleymaniye Mosque, built from 1570-1557 by Turkey’s most famous architect, the Armenian Sinan, for Süleyman I. The engineering skills used to span the width of the dome give this mosque a lighter feeling than the Blue Mosque or Hagia Sophia. The columns on each side of the dome are fifteen feet in diameter. When Jane was in Istanbul in 1963, individual prayer rugs were spread out on the floors. Unfortunately, many of these old valuable rugs fell prey to thieves, and a uniform carpet has been installed. One interesting side-note is that blown ostrich eggs are interspersed with the gas [now electrified] lights on the large round chandeliers to prevent spiders from building webs there. We also liked the metalwork and the inlaid wood on one pair of doors.

Süleymaniye Mosque

Süleymaniye Mosque Interiors

Metalwork Gate Inlaid Wooden Door

The Blue Mosque is named for the blue tiles in the interior. Somehow we took only these two views of the exterior.

The Blue Mosque

A Fruit Vendor near the Blue Mosque

Haghia Sophia (Aya Sofya) is one of the world’s most famous buildings. The first building on this site was built in 404 A.D. First a Christian church and then a Muslim mosque, it has been a museum since 1934.

Hagia Sophia

These long coffin-like pieces in the yard of Hagia Sophi are two parts of a lintel portraying the Apostles as sheep…. Unfortunately, two of the Apostles appear to have gone missing.

Interior Views of Hagia Sophia

One of the most interesting features of Hagia Sophia is the employment of native Turkish marbles as major decorative features.

The last photograph, a portion of the marble floor with all its cracks, evokes memories of the thousands of feet of people of different faiths who have walked on it.

There are many pieces of superb metalwork here to admire too.

Metalwork Gate

The ancient “Good Luck Challenge” was fun for members of our tour. You put your thumb into the hole in the center and then have to go round full circle without removing your thumb. Here Donna Kato from the beadwork conference is successful after a demonstration of the proper technique from Filiz.

We also found an old Armenian church in Istanbul, much to Nancy’s delight. She imagines it is much like the one in which her grandmother and grandfather were photographed at their wedding in 1918. It wasn’t easy to find, located in the middle of a busy market behind large locked door-gates. We finally asked at the near-by Roman Catholic Church, and the guard there kindly walked us all the way to the Armenian Church, and translated for us to the gatekeeper.

Interior of Armenian Church

3c. Shopping: Bazaars and Rugs

An interesting diversion from historic sites was our visit to Nakkaş, a shop with fine rugs and ceramics. We saw a rug weaving demonstration and were able to see the materials used in making vegetable dyes. We bought a rug for our dining room. Our friend Kate Duncan also bought a lovely rug. Under the modern rug shop is one of Istanbul’s brick cisterns, built by the Romans to store the city’s water supply. Istanbul is dotted with these wonderful and interesting spaces.

Rug Weaving Demo Natural dyes made from herbs

Nancy Signing Off on our Beyshir Rug Kate Duncan Looking at Her Rug Receipt

Roman Cisterns underneath Nakkas Rug Store

No trip to Istanbul would be complete without a visit to the Grand Bazaar (Kapali Çarsi) founded by sultan Mehmet II in 1461 as a trading center for the Ottoman Empire. When Jane was there in 1963, it was a very mysterious place approached with some trepidation by a young woman alone with a resolve to see it. Not quite as long ago as this postcard taken in the 1930s, but it gives you the general idea.

Old Postcard of the Grand Bazaar

The modern bazaar retains some architectural features of the old bazaar but has more the character of a modern shopping mall with over 4,000 small shops. Each shop has its own specialties: dried eggplants and peppers, teas, spices, olives, cheeses, nut nougats, Turkish delight, cheeses (the feta cheese aged in the skin of the goat was particularly interesting), seafood, fruits and vegetables and a great variety of other wares.

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The Grand Bazaar in 2007 Spice Vendor

Dried Peppers and Eggplants Bags of Tea: Apple, Herbal, Rose Hip

Spices Henna

Olives Honey

Nut Nougats Turkish Delight

Cheeses Feta cheese aging in goatskins

Fish Market Fruits and Cat

One seller enlisted his cat as a marketing agent. She was on duty to encourage potential customers and would shake hands with the owner on command.

4. The Bead Conference

OK: back to the bead conference at Kadar Has University. Jane reviews her paper one more time. Here is Adele, my co-presenter, and her husband Don. My invited paper was on Turkish World War I prisoner of war beadwork. The focus of Adele’s talk was originally intended to be on the early beadwork in the Balkans and post World War I civilian beadwork, but our papers did overlap more than I had expected.

Jane Getting Ready to Present her Paper

Don and Adele Adele, Jane and Don

A particularly interesting exhibition at Kadar Has was one created by a beadwork artist who dressed mannequins in necklaces made from fruits, vegetables and nuts.

One evening a group of us, Valerie Hector (the Academic Coordinator for the conference), Juliette Leeb-du Toit and Kirsten Niesser from South Africa, Kate Duncan from Santa Fe, and Nancy and Jane, strolled the streets of Istanbul looking for a good meal. By chance we chose a wonderful restaurant, Mozaik, where we had our own private dining room with delicious food and great camaraderie.

Valerie, Kirsten, and Kate Nancy and Valerie

Left to right: Valerie, Kirstin, Nancy, Juliette, Kate and Jane

Jane had a traditional Turkish dish, “The Imam Fainted,” eggplant stuffed with ground lamb, pine nuts and currents. A wonderful persimmon pudding was served for dessert.

“The Imam Fainted” Persimmon Pudding

5. More Shopping and Eating

We visited the Arasta Bazaar the next day and bought a lovely pair of hand-embroidered pillowcases. These cats in residence were an added attraction to the rugs on sale at one of the shops.

We were introduced to the Tamara café nearby by one of the rug dealers.

Lunch was a sampler platter with a poof of wonderful bread, served as a balloon and collapsing soon to a lovely flat bread accompanied by some Lahmujan, resembling ‘pizzas’ (one with ground lamb and one with cheese), rice, roasted red peppers, eggplant and fresh salad.

Kate Duncan joined us later in the day to explore the Taksim area of Istanbul. We wandered up and down more market stalls and had a delicious dinner at a nearby restaurant.

In the Taksim Market Kate, Jane and Nancy

6. Wonder of Wonders: Chora Church

On our last day in Istanbul, we visited the Church of St. Saviour in Chora. This lovely small church has one of the finest collections of Byzantine mosaics and frescoes in the world, commissioned from 1315 to 1321 by Theodore Metochites, who restored an earlier 11^th century church on the site. The church was converted to a mosque in 1511, and many of the images were damaged during the iconoclastic period of the Muslim occupation. The church gradually faded into obscurity, and its lovely art was not re-discovered until the mid 19^th century. Restoration began in 1948. The mosaics and frescoes depict the ancestors of Jesus, numerous apostles, angels and crusader knights as well as detailed frescoes illustrating Jesus turning water into wine and Jesus resurrecting Adam and Eve from their tombs.

A column with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on each side A large view of the frescoes

The Ascension of Christ into Heaven/The Souls of the Damned in Hell The Twelve Apostles

Jesus raising the souls of Adam and Eve to Heaven

Joseph and Mary Jesus

The Twelve Apostles One of several crusader knights

Sadly, during the Iconoclastic period, Muslims destroyed some of the beautiful images in this wonderful church.

7. A Few final scenes of Istanbul before we embarked on our journey to Central Anatolia

A shop selling new tiles replicating many designs of the Ottoman tiles in Topkapi Palace; a Simon Rodia sort of collage of broken tiles; and one of Istanbul’s ubiquitous roasted chestnut vendors.

Modern tiles for sale Collage of broken tiles on an Istanbul building

Roasted chestnuts for sale

8. Ferry Trip up the Bosphorus

During our stay in Istanbul we took a ferry trip up the Bosphorus to enjoy the sights and have a lovely meal at a restaurant in one of the fishing villages.

Boarding the ferry Deborah, Jane and Deborah's friend Joan consult a map of the Bosphorus

Of particular interest were these medieval fortifications and old Ottoman posh residences.

Medieval fortifications Old Ottoman houses

9. From Europe to Asia……

There is a legend that the very first inter-continental flight was made by a man in the 16^th century who donned wings (like Icarus) and made a successful flight across the Bosphorus.

A view from our coach on the bridge that joins Europe and Asia.

9a. Beypazari

We persuaded our wonderful guide, Filiz from our Istanbul tour, to lead our tour of Central Anatolia. We set off with six other people from the bead and beadwork conference: Miriam Milgram from New York, her mother Edith Milgram from Washington D.C., Teresa Grana also from D.C., Mary Sue Foster from Kansas, Sue Maguire from England, and Diana Friedberg from Los Angeles for this new adventure.

Our first overnight stop was at Beypazari, a town of red-tiled buildings in a dramatic mountain setting. The view from the top of one of the mountains was breath-taking.

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Jane met her favorite Turkish cat here.

On the way to our hotel, we visited a local craft center where we saw women weaving textiles and rugs.

We stayed at a family-owned hotel, where the owners were very proud of the lovely rugs and kilims on the floors throughout the hotel. The streets of this town were very picturesque.

Jane was tempted to commandeer this hot motorcycle for a trip around town.

One of the special attractions of Beypazari were the lovely fabrics worn by local women. Similar fabrics were used in the market to display produce for sale.

Local woman on her way to market Varieties of dried beans for sale

Turkish casseroles

One Last Customer Evening Falls on the Market

The evil eye on the back of this truck protects its owner and his produce.

9b: Ankara

Our next stop was Ankara, the capital of modern Turkey. It is a very vibrant town that houses two of the most important cultural sites in Turkey. The award-winning Anatolian Civilization Museum displays artifacts from the complex layers of Turkish civilization dating back to the Neolithic period. There are many books illustrating the artifacts in this wonderful museum much better than we could, so we leave the pleasure of looking at the artifacts it contains to illustrations in published books.

Here are Filiz and Jane at the entrance with Miriam, Edith and Sue in the background. Next is a wonderful ancient Mother Goddess statue [ca. 5,750 B.C.] excavated at Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey.

Mustafa Kemal, a Turkish army officer who distinguished himself at Gallipoli, became the founder of a new Turkish state following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. This statue of him as a WWI officer stands in a central square in Ankara.

After his election as leader of the new Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal became known as Atatürk (“The Father of the Turks”) and introduced many secular reforms, including the Romanization of the Turkish alphabet, a multi-party democracy, the abolition of Islamic dress codes, and a civil constitution.

Atatürk died in 1938, and a mausoleum for him was built on a hill in western Anakara. Constructed from 1944 to 1953, the architecture of this monumental structure and grounds reflects the period in which it was built. It is frequented by Turkish visitors, school trips and is used for important diplomatic visits. The mausoleum reflects the continuing reverence for Ataturk who introduced so many modern reforms into Turkey. The photographs portray the monumental architecture and sculpture as well as a lovely group of local school children who came to visit while we were there.

A Group of Turkish School Children Visiting the Museum

9c: Cappodocia

We set out on our journey to Cappadocia the next morning. As we drove toward Cappadocia, we encountered snow flurries and, at the crest of one hill, a forest was magically encrusted with frozen snow.

Continuing on, we saw this typical Anatolian farmstead. Turkish families are very tightly knit, and preparations are made for the prosperous futures of their children. Forests of poplar trees are planted to be harvested when a son is married to launch him on a successful marriage. The women of the family weave rugs and store them as dowries for their daughters.

Dipping into another valley, this river ran through another mountain range. Egrets and other shore birds dotted this beautiful landscape and gave us an intimation of the wonderful tufa formations to come.

Edith photographing our first views of Cappadocia

Approaching Cappadocia, we saw the magical tufa formations that must have been an inspiration to Tolkien for his hobbit villages. We encountered a snowstorm at our first sight of these interesting geological features.

Mary Sue shelters Diana filming the tufa during the snowstorm

The insides of many of the larger formations have been carved out for human habitation. Most are very old and served as places of refuge for local inhabitants from the successive waves of Assyrians, Hittites, Phrygians, Turkic tribes from Central Asia, Mongols, Persians, Syrians, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Slavs, Greeks, Romans and others who swept through this region. Many of the larger habitations include grain storage bins carved out of the volcanic ash, facilities for crushing grapes and making wine, kitchens, food and water storage areas and animal shelters as well as living and sleeping quarters. We visited Kaymakli and Derinkuyu, two of the most frequently visited and accessible “underground cities,” but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar unexcavated dwellings throughout Cappadocia.

Jane stands amid snow flurries photographing the tufa habitations

Evil eyes were on display in abundance at the local market. This tree was hung with many of them. There were also trees on which tissues were left to bring good luck. We can’t remember whether good luck was in store for the person whose tissue blew away or the one whose tissue stayed in place until it disintegrated.

This woman displayed her beautiful lace pieces in a market stall on the rim of the valley.

s wois

The Gerome Open Air Museum has a wonderful array of churches and monasteries as well as dwellings carved out of the volcanic tufa by early Christians. The first photograph gives an idea of the scale of the place. Typical secular dwellings and churches are illustrated in the other photographs.

We were able to go inside some of these fabulous underground places. Here is Edith entering the doorway of one of them. The other photographs show a few of the interiors. It was very hard to take good photographs. These are the best of the lot. There were lots of ‘ups and downs’ as you can see in this photograph of Jane descending to one of the lower levels.

Edith entering one of the dwellings View from inside

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Jane descending to one of the lower floors Rooms carved out of the tufa

One of the special treasures of the Gerome Park is the “Dark Church,” sited high above the floor of the valley to protect it from invaders. Inside the intentionally humble exterior were these wonderful frescoes. They have been preserved mainly because the church was disguised well and not ‘discovered’ until the 20^th century.

Before we left Gerome, our group convinced another tourist to take a group photograph. In front are Mary Sue and Filiz. In back from left to right are Diana, Jane, Nancy, Edith, Miriam, Sue, and Teresa. Before we left, Jane couldn’t resist hugging a warm tufa column.

Here are some more of the magical formations of Cappadocian tufa. The suggestive tall columns are called Fairy Towers.

As we left the region with the amazing habitations, we saw more of the Central Anatolian plain on our way to Konya.

Along the highway this obliging camel, complete with ladder, was stationed to entice tourists to take the “walk of a lifetime.” Our bold adventurer, Teresa, obliged. The rest of us contented ourselves with taking photographs!

Our lovely refuge for that night and the next was the Yunak Evleri hotel in Ürgüp, one of the most interesting and beautiful hotels in which either of us have ever stayed. Our room was similar to the one on this postcard, but the bathroom ceiling was carved out of tufa.

The entrance to our room View from the upper courtyard

This was the best Turkish breakfast ever. This hotel served granola (much appreciated by Mary Sue), wonderful cheeses, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, a great selection of olives, fresh squeezed orange juice, soft boiled eggs, bread, and tea and coffee.

The friendly hotel cats were another major attraction. They cavorted in the shrubbery every morning. The snow on the pyracantha provided a beautiful backdrop for these photographs.

When it came time for breakfast, the whole crew took up their places waiting to be fed.

Diana and Sue took a daring balloon ride before the crack of dawn on the last day of our Cappadocia visit. Jane and Nancy and Mary Sue and Diana decided to take a dip in the Turkish bath arranged for us by Filiz the previous evening. The bath was run by a local family with the owner’s two sons providing massage and exfoliation services. We stripped down to red and white cotton cloths, and the sons were wrapped in similar red and white cotton attire. First, we sat on warm marble seats in a very hot room and poured a mixture of hot and cold water over our heads for several minutes.

Then we relaxed on a large heated marble table. The bath pictured here is from a similar bath in old Istanbul. We doused ourselves again and went into a steam room. After that, we waited and doused ourselves more while Mary Sue and Diana got exfoliated and massaged. After our massages and exfoliations, we sat wilted and relaxed and were treated to cups of tea by the owners of the bath. We were happy campers.

The next day we departed for Konya, our final Anatolian destination. The Konya Ethnographic Museum houses an absolutely mind-blowing exhibition of rugs dating from the 13^th to the 19^th centuries. Nancy took photographs of most of them, but here are details of a few rugs with unusual designs.

We had a lovely dinner with a local beadwork artist who came to discuss beadwork in Konya with our tour group. Here are Diana, Teresa and Mary Sue at the dinner.

Another Konya highlight was this demonstration by a local potter.

Some finished pieces

He also has a possibly unique and gruesome gallery of locks of human hair he has collected for many years.

We saw more demonstrations of rug weaving in Turkey. These women in Konya are weaving silk rugs.

It was especially interesting to see the processing of the silk cocoons. They are harvested and put into bags, steamed and wound thread by thread onto spools and then dyed. The poor silkworms who have worked so hard all their lives spinning cocoons are now dead little corpses martyred to the human love of silk.

This is a modern kilim being woven at the same shop. Unlike rugs, kilims are not woven in parallel rows.

Goodbye, group…. We’re headed home to California.

Left to Right: Diana, Teresa, Mary Sue, Jane, Nancy and Sue

10: The Flight Home

Whenever we have a chance to fly over Greenland in good weather, I try to take photographs to view the effects of global warming on this strategic geographical feature of our planet. We took similar photographs on our trip to Paris in 2006. Our 2007 photographs show much more visual evidence of the melting of the wonderful Arctic environment with grave consequences for wildlife, native peoples and the rest of us. We hope that we humans can work together to save the planet and to leave a legacy of peace to future generations.

FINALLY: We had a WONDERFUL time! I am thankful to Valerie Hector for organizing the beadwork portion of the International Bead and Beadwork Conference in Istanbul and for inviting me to be a speaker on one of my favorite genres of prisoner of war art from the Great War. Despite the operational/financial glitches experienced by some participants, the conference was a great success, and I am very pleased to have met some very interesting people and to have learned so much about decorative arts in areas unfamiliar to me.

We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Filiz Korkut. She was an intelligent and informed tour guide who helped us to understand the complex history of Turkey. She went out of her way to cater to special needs from members of our group ranging from medications to memory chips for our digital cameras. She was flexible and modified the tour if better weather conditions were predicted for the next day, and she also included some wonderful sites that were not part of the advertised tour.

That’s All, Folks!