Get Your Fake Fruit, Liver and Wrestling
As our bus from Istanbul passed a statue of colorful fruit in a bowl, it was clear Edirne wasn’t going to be an average mid-sized Turkish city. As I sat in a creaky stadium and watched oil-covered wrestlers of all shapes and sizes dueling in the long grass, it was clear Edirne is a unique world city as well.
Shortly after passing the giant bowl of produce, my travel companion and I split because she had to make her quad-annual border run in nearby Bulgaria – a bizarre yet familiar expat formality of crossing the border for 15 minutes to get a new visa for three months. But this wasn’t until we had the world famous Edirne ciger tava — fried liver. It consists of small pieces of the organ lightly fried in sunflower oil, which is abundant on the Thracian plain. We went to Niyazi Usta, recommended to us by a local shopkeeper as the best ciger joint in town. It didn’t disappoint. Served alongside oral bonfire-inducing red peppers, as well as salad and bread, those little nibblers of protein goodness have an intense, gamy flavor that’s somewhat subdued by the slightly sweet oil. I made my friend, who is very picky about which meats she eats, try a piece. “Not bad,” she said to my surprise.
Afterwards, I pressed on to the outskirts of town to watch some dudes in leather pants get oiled up and roll around on the ground (it’s always how you spin it, right?), i.e. Yagli Gures, i.e. Turkish oil wrestling! Thinking it would just be a field and a parking lot, I was greeted with the Turkish equivalent of a county fair, only this centuries-old gathering had picnickers in every nook and cranny of the surrounding woods cracking sunflower seeds with boys practicing their wrestling moves, large rotisserie hens impaled by oversized stakes and sellers of acibadem (an almond-based Turkish cookie) walking around with their goods balanced on their heads. I thought I was leaving after hearing that prices to get in the stadium started at 30 bucks (I only had time for a short stay),but I managed to go around the back and snuck in a gate fronting the cheap seats.
Inside one can easily imagine what this competition looked like 649 years ago when the tradition began (it’s the longest continual sporting event in the world). Replace the creaky wooden stadium with tents and horses, and the collared shirts with Turkish robes and turbans, and you are back to a time when Turkish clans would meet from all corners of the empire. The loudspeaker boomed with names of wrestlers entering and leaving, much as someone long ago may have called out the names of athletes from tribes around Anatolia. “Mehmet Gucel…Tokat!” “Serdar Koseoglu…Antalya!”
Not being much of a wrestling fan per se, I couldn’t really cheer when something dramatic happened. Dramatic things happened infrequently too (or maybe I don’t know what to look for) because the oil made truly grabbing one another about as easy as grabbing fish out of water dancing on a slippery boat. People get into it though. But I had to leave. I wish I could’ve stayed to watch the final, heavyweight match was to be broadcasted on national TV, but my border running friend returned from her distinctly unique yet usual errand and we sauntered off to check out Selimiye Camii on top of a hill in the heart of town.
Built in the 16th century by the most famous Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan, Selimiye stands in the middle of a complex of a medrese, hospital, bath and market, though now mainly just a market filled with Edirne’s famous fake-fruit shaped soaps (hence the fruit statue). The patterns on its ceiling are breathtaking, and the complexity of the little nubs and cornices surrounding and below the dome are more intricate than those of other major Turkish mosques. Selimiye is my third favorite mosque behind the Ulu Camii in Bursa and Suleymaniye Camii in Istanbul (the latter of which should be fully restored by now!).
Another note about Edirne: perhaps because it is a frontier town less than 50 km from the Bulgarian and Greek borders, it seems like people are used to foreigners speaking Turkish. In most places, you are either totally fluent, or a total foreigner who knows maybe five words and how to count to ten. In Edirne, the pacing and intonation of the lighter skinned locals is more slow and clear.
Or maybe that’s just a reflection of the laid back, Balkan-esque farm life on the plain, where seeds are planted in the spring and
there is plenty of time to down raki in the evenings. Whatever it is, gazing out over the river and its ancient arched bridge toward a long, flat horizon, you can’t help but think what a taxi driver said to my friend on her border run: Edirne has got everything!
So What? Is Your Plan?
I have been getting asked this question a lot lately. “So…how long are you going to stay in Istanbul?” This is a totally fair question and conversation starter, and perhaps I struggle a little with the fact that I really am not sure how long I am going to stay here. It’s nice to have a canned, rehearsed answer for people. “I will be here for x amount of time, at which point I will do y, z and settle in r.” Bump. Set. Spike.
But what if your five year plan is not to really have a “plan” in the conventionally accepted sense of the word? What if you have gone through your professional and academic life and what you have done so far has not been intriguing enough to pull you in and invest many prime years?
So I guess you can say my five year plan (right now, hehe) is the following: travel, have new experiences, meet new people, hopefully find new passions, read and become a more well rounded person,keep up a blog (haha), exercise, eat well, take vitamins, enjoy natural surroundings, be nice to people, read and study a language (in this case Turkish).
Actually, the latter point reminds me of something else: I am at a double crossroads, if you will. I also ask, should I invest more time, and resources into my knowledge of the Turkish culture and language and getting an advanced degree here. This is certainly an avenue: become a Turkophile. Or am I better off bouncing from one country to the next and getting a holistic world view.
So its fewer places but a deeper experience, or more varied but shallower experiences. Well, when said like that, what is shallow and what is deep? You can live somewhere for years and fuck around, or you can travel to different countries, write about them, immerse yourself in them, garner opportunities. You can also mess around going country to country, party and meet lots of people and have single-serving relationships while sacrificing truly knowing a culture for personal and/or professional gain.
So I raise my glass like an Istanbullu at a meyhane, or traditional pub. Before me is a bunch of mezes, Turkish version of tapas, each different and delicious, each a metaphor for the things I’ve tried in my life, and things I have yet to try. So… What’s going to be my daily staple? Do I even need one? Am I lucky to even have this problem?
I invite your questions, ideas and thoughts…
Turkey’s Banana Republic
There I was at the border peering through to the other side like Alice (or Alex?) through the looking glass. On the other side was Greek Nicosia, and I was standing in Turkish Nicosia (Lefkosa). The no man’s land between the two wasn’t visible, only the canvas-like walls on both sides of a calm pathway that was covered in EU development slogans. Down 10 meters or so lay the bustle of another world. Fortunately I was born in the US so my little blue book was my ticket. Meanwhile most Turks are bound to their side, not knowing what lays yonder just meters away.
Lefkosa (I will refer to the Turkish side by its Turkish name) is something like a Middle Eastern village: sandstone colored hans (Ottoman guesthouses), churches that were converted to mosques (St. Sophia a beautiful example), and a rag tag group of other historic buildings and marketplaces make it seem very oriental.
Walk through the wormhole to the other side, though, and transport yourself to the city center of a medium-sized California metropolis.
There was a clean promenade of bonded pebbles below me; to my right were KFC, Starbucks, GAP, etc, underneath a glass pavilion (there were no global restaurant chains in the north). Workers pruned trees high above me. There is a charming pedestrian walking area complete with hanging bougainvillea and Greek-Cypriot souvenirs that make the place feel like the real Mediterranean thing, but otherwise the contrast was pretty stark.
There are reminders of the struggles gone by. The Greek side has a statue of Greeks apparently being liberated from a prison, among them a priest, a young boy, and women. Presumably it was an Ottoman prison (the description was in Greek). On the other side there is a statue in the new part of Lefkosa of Turkish soldiers that says “Unutmacagiz” (“we won’t forget”). There is a part of the Greek side where one can glimpse through the fence to the UN buffer zone and see a decrepit building with the shell of an old neon sign. Other than that, though, the two sides seemed to coexist like being in the world’s only divided capital was totally natural, at least on the surface. I saw some elder Greek-Cypriot men crossed over and cordially said hello in English to the Turkish shopkeepers, who returned the greetings.
Aside from my wanderings around the Greek side that afternoon, I spent all my time on the laid back, sometimes hastily laid out Turkish side. Girne, the main touristic city on the north coast, is Mediterranean splendor. It boasts a fantastic kale (castle) by the water that was used by various peoples since the Byzantines laid down bricks there to fend off Arab raids. The entrance is a mildly steep 12 TL, but the student rate is 2 TL with an ID. Unfortunately, unlike many small town historical Turkish establishments, one can’t just get away with saying one is a student, even if that person is a foreigner who can charm them by speaking Turkish. They are pretty strict.
The pretty white buildings in the town center make for a nice hour stroll, and there is a durum (wrap) place called Kebapcim that sells amazing seftali (shef tali) kebap (Seftali means peach, but in reality it was probably a corruption of “Chef Ali”), which is lamb meatballs wrapped in lamb stomach lining. MMMM! It’s a Turkish Cyprus specialty, and it really is meat-acular.
Fortified, I sought a scooter rental place, thinking that could be the best way to get to a good beach (there aren’t any, really, in Girne). But this was hard to come by and I was content to take a dolmus and have the driver drop me off at whatever beach he deemed pleasant. Fortunately, he forgot to drop me off at the one he liked. That was fine. The one he liked was a club/beach of blasting music and lounge chairs. Bah. So I asked for another one that was “daha sakin” (calmer). He took me to the end of the line, where there was a rocky beach with a backdrop of a meadow and rolling hills, all of which were still green in the middle of April.
Unfortunately, public transportation is abysmal in N. Cyprus, and this constricted the amount of exploring I could do. Intercity buses and dolmuses stop at around 7 pm, and I was skittish about renting a car as it is expensive and they drive on the left side, which I have never done. Drivers with “right-side reflex” are the biggest triggers of accidents on the island.
Nevertheless, thanks especially to the hospitality of my couch surfing hosts Hakan and Onur, I had a relaxing time in N. Cyprus. Next time I go there, it’s off to the Karpas Peninsula for some solitude!
Getting a Jump on Spring, Ağva Style
It’s a great feeling to explore those cities which aren’t printed in Lonely Planets or blogged upon on travel sites. It gives one a feeling of originality, even if the trip wasn’t some long adventure (and thanks to an invitation from a friend to tag along, of course). And its extra nice when you get a jump start on the seasonal crowds, when spring is just beginning to leak out of the canister of winter.
Agva (pronounced Ah-va), however, can in no way be classified as unknown to Istanbullus, who, on summer weekends, choke the windy hill roads enroute to this cozy Black Sea town and beach, roughly 75 km northeast from the middle of Istanbul, passing villages populated by herders and Gypsy girls washing clothes by the side of the road.
This seaside village that is to the day tripping delight of the city’s middle class isn’t too exciting in and of itself, but it fronts a very pleasant stream where you can rent paddle boats and cruise past a unique, hand-powered ferry system that pension owners constructed to shuttle guests/customers from one side to another using a series of ropes attached to pulleys. We ate a delicious breakfast of menemen (scrambled eggs with spices and veggies and oil) at the same waterfront restaurant that rented us our paddleboats.
Though it was still a bit chilly, one could still imagine the summer Turkish crowds packing the sand with their sunflower seeds and mini-barbeques on that March afternoon. Nevertheless, on that day my two friends and I were the only people on the wide flat beach as far as the eye could see, a treat that is never taken for granted living in our 14 million plus metropolis.
And it is a fine beach — If you like ocean-type beaches with rougher surf, course sand, driftwood, etc. Agva and the surrounding coastline resemble my native Oregon coast in certain ways, were it not for the plastic water bottles washing ashore, reminders of how Turkey lags behind places like Oregon insomuch as giving a damn about the environment.
On the way back, we stopped to have dinner in Polonezkoy (see my earlier post) at a restaurant and garden with pleasant views of the rolling pastoral countryside. The first blossoms of white and pink were in bloom — the first hint of rebirth and renewal of the new season — as we dined on barbecued chicken.
I am reminded of Tom Waits lyrics: “You can never hold back spring. Remember everything that spring can bring!”
(see also this guy’s post about camping at Agva)
A video CV
Hi. Check out my new video CV for English lessons. This video is also found on my “about me” page. Feel free to pass it on to others and let me know what you think: