Konya photos

Nikki's post described the group's time in Konya. Here are some photos of Konya. The first photo is of the tomb of the Mevlana. The interesting thing about this mosque/tomb is that it is officially a museum, but it's also a site of pilgrimage and worship for many sufis. So visitors mingle with worshippers, who are technically not supposed to be worshipping in a museum. The green tower is directly above the tomb of the Mevlana (Rumi).

This is a street scene of Konya. The atmosphere is very different from Istanbul.


This is a picture of the inside of the Alaattin mosque, that Nikki described in her post about Konya.

Nikki also mentioned the "forest of pillars" on the inside of the mosque. Here's a photo of that:
Wish I had some photos with this group in them. Photos of the group, anyone?

Pictures of Cappadocia

Here are some photos of Cappadocia to illustrate some of what Nolan described in his post. Note that I'm not with the group, so these are photos I took last year. Maybe one of the group members will be able to post some photos from this year, but at least you'll have an idea of what they are seeing from these pictures.
This is what Nolan is calling a "fairy chimney." He described the geology in his post, so I won't reiterate it here, but this will give you a good idea of what they look like. This one hasn't been carved to make a home or other building in it.

Here's a scene of some homes carved out of the rock. Many of these are still inhabited, though the government has been making people move out of them as part of an effort to preserve them.

This is a fresco in one of the churches in Goreme. The churches in this area are carved out of the soft rock, and many of the frescoes are still in fairly decent shape (except that the eyes are scratched out of many of them - depiction of people is forbidden in Islam).

More photos from our time in Istanbul

One of the things we did in Istanbul was to go to a carpet shop to learn about how carpets are made. Last year we met Cemal, who owns a shop in Sultanahmet. They have recently expanded their business and brought in a loom to make pestemals. Pestemals are thin towels made of silk and cotton and used in the Turkish bath (hamam). When you go into a Turkish bath they give you a pestemal to wrap around yourself for some modesty. Cemal has taught all of his staff to weave, and they have been weaving pestemals in the shop for sale in addition to their carpet business. Any time any of them don't have customers they go to the loom and weave. Turkey was traditionally a big stop on the silk road, but there isn't a lot of silk spinning and weaving there now, so this is part of an effort to maintain traditional handicrafts (though weaving is not traditionally done by male shopkeepers!) The loom is a large traditional one, but also quite functional, and the sight of someone weaving in the front of the shop tends to draw a crowd. Cemal also has a small spindle for spinning silk for demonstration (they don't actually spin the silk in the store. He says there are a very small number of villages where silk is still spun, and he contracts with women in those villages to spin and dye the silk for him). Here's a photo of Cemal at the loom
The yellow, blue, and white circle on the top of the loom is an evil eye. The evil eye is based on the idea of envy as a force that has power to cause damage or injury. The idea is that if someone envies something you have (your loom, your child, your success, etc), this envy is itself a strong enough force to bring ill luck on you. The evil eye repels the force of the envy. If the evil eye breaks, this means that it has repelled a particularly strong evil force, and you should consider that you have narrowly escaped something horrible.

Behind Cemal on the bottom shelf are stacks of striped pestemals that he and his staff have made on the loom over the past year or so.

Cappadocia

Well after finally reading everyone else's blogs and securing a computer and converter (thanks Ivan, Brandon and Ariel) I can relate to you today's events albeit probably out of order and how I remember them.

This morning began like every other under the Anatolian sun for me. Which means waking up, showering and then a morning dose of turkish music on Turkey's version of MTV. At 9 AM we boarded the bus and headed out to see the underground city. With its long tunnels, cool in the summer and hot in the winter, we were in for a journey. Labyrintine in structure it's hard now to imagine that people lived, cooked and pressed their wine down there. Don't worry while it may been deep underground it was well-ventilated.

After the underground city we visted some more Fairy Chimneys that make Cappadocia famous. Some with religious frescos dating back to when Turkey was prominently Christian. We learned from Dr. Clark, in his "Heaven Earth/ Theology Geology" talk that this region's fairy chimneys are created from compressed volcanic material produces by Anatolia's now inactive volcanoes. They gain they conical shape though from the presence of basalt stone on their caps. Tosun, our guide, further elaborated by explaining that this soft material is easily chiseled into and whole cities (mentioned above) can be carved into them. Dr. Clark further explained that Christianity it Turkey was largely ascetic in nature, with monks denying themselves any form of physical pleasure, allowing the body's to waste away in order to focus on the spiritual rather than material world. This monastic movement he explained is very different from Adventism which is more Old Testament in it's outlook (that physical pleasure isn't always bad), with our church's focus on health and nutrition it can be seen we favor a more holistic form of worship.

Another intersting event to mention was our visit to some of Tosun's friends who actually live inside one of the cones. While to many of us a rock cone may sound uninhabiatble their house was very beautiful. The owners had painted the inside rock white and even carved out windows and a fireplace. Not a bad way to live! Also there had an amazing terrace with a portico with white grapes dangling from above. After some grapes and Lunch we headed out to our last stop of the day Goreme Open Air Musuem where we saw some carved Christian churchs, complete with caverns and Nilmini's expressed favourite, graves!

The very last thing on the agenda tonight was Hayden and Sterling's presentations on Classical Ottamen and Arabesque music respectativly. It was informative, Hayden noting how Eastern instruments our more flexible able to do half and quater notes between Western notes and also utilize more "moods" than traditional Western music. Sterling explained how Arabesque music was created to address the nostalgia for folk music and sounds during Turkey's westernization.

Now I hope I've relayed everything as succinctly as possible, if not pray forgive as I am tired and using I borrowed computer (thanks again Ivan sorry you have to wait up for it)

-Nolan Hollis von Esch

Some photos

One of the days when we were in Istanbul we went out to a restaurant where I know many of the staff. Last year my mother-in-law really enjoyed the bread there, so her sole request when she knew I was going back to Istanbul was that I learn how to make the bread so I could teach her. Before the students arrived I had arranged with Yunus, one of the waiters at the restaurant, that I would come back some day and he would teach me to make the bread. So ... one evening when we'd eaten dinner there, Amanda and I stayed behind browsing in a store for cherry tea. After we were done we ran into Yunus who told us this was a good time for him to teach us to make the bread. Amanda was game, so we went into the kitchen of the restaurant and he and the cook proceeded to teach us the finer points of making "puffy bread." The cook was quite insistent that there was an art to rolling out the dough, and Amanda was putting too much muscle into it - it's a smooth, light twisting motion without much pressure (umm hmm ... obviously it takes practice). The dough needs to be thin before it goes into the oven. The idea of oven temperature or proportions of ingredients seemed foreign to them, so we got a list of ingredients and the idea that the oven needs to be hot (our closest comparison to the oven is something like a wood-fired pizza oven, which apparently many people in Turkey have in their homes). My mother-in-law and I will play around with the recipe and see if we can come up with something that approximates this bread. I'm going to try broiling it to see if it works (failing that, perhaps a metal box over a campfire?) One of the ingredients you might not expect to find in bread is yogurt (yogurt shows up in a lot of things in Turkey). There's also a coating of egg yolk and carbonated water and black sesame that goes on top right before it goes into the oven.

So, after the bread was rolled out thin, we baked it for five minutes and here Amanda is removing it from the oven:


Then Yunus brought it out to us and we ate it with feta and spiced butter (and tea on the side) as a sort of post-dinner snack. Yumm!

If anyone is interested, we'll let you know if we can replicate it.

Clearly apologies are owed ...

After a long flight home exhausted and nearly delirious I arrived at the Los Angeles airport to greet my husband and kids. The kids kept going on and on about a bag of bad tennis rackets and Pokemon and Alex and asking if I'd brought Turkish delight and chocolate eggs I figured I must be more delirious than I thought. Finally we got it all sorted out. They had read the blog that I couldn't access while I was on the plane, and they were very happy that I had Turkish delight for them (not so happy that I hadn't been able to locate any Kinder Surprise Eggs in Istanbul, but they seem to be getting over that).

So to clarify: no I did not drop you all. Let's reframe this: through nine days in Istanbul I helped you learn how to explore Turkey for yourselves, initially providing frameworks to help you understand your experiences and showing you how to get around, and then backing off some so you could do your own explorations. For this last part of the trip I passed you off to Tosun, a Turkish tour guide who is very competent and helpful, and I hope you are making use of his presence to talk with him about his opinions on some of the things we've already discussed.

I do apologize, though, if it wasn't clear to all of you that I was going home early. My kids are still little and for them having me gone for 11 days felt like "a year" (in their own words). I thought I'd made it clear to all of you that I was headed home at the end of the Istanbul portion of the trip, but apparently not (though I might have thought the 2 hour debriefing and overview of what to look for during the rest of the trip should have tipped off some of you if you were unclear on this!)

In any case, I have been very pleased to catch up on your travels and hear about your experiences through the blog. Do take some time to talk with Tosun and Şayeste about their views on modern Turkey. Try to set up a time to talk with them as a group about how they understand the "Kurdish problem," what they think of the current government, what they think should be the role of the army in Turkish society, and what they see as the problems and opportunities for Turkey at this point in time.

I know some of you have a hard time posting photos on the blog. I'll post more tomorrow.

Cappadocia, Turkey

Happy Sabbath everyone!

Today we had our second and last Sabbath here in Turkey. However, this time we spent the Lord’s Day traveling around Anatolia and checking out amazing new sites.

After having breakfast in hour hotel in Konya, we all got our luggage ready and boarded the bus that would take us to Cappadocia, our next destination. We left the hotel at around 9:30 and traveled east for about an hour until we arrived at Sultanhani. In this small town we visited the largest and best-preserved caravanserai in Turkey. Once inside the fortress, Nolan gave out a very useful presentation about the history of caravanserais in general, and the one in Sultanhani in particular. Apparently the Seljuks built this fortress in the 13th century and used it to provide shelter to the merchants that used to travel in the Anatolian region to trade or sell their goods.

By the time we finished taking photographs of the caravanserai, and drank a cup of tea in a teahouse across the street from the fortress, it was almost lunchtime. That had been planned ahead, however, and after heading east for about another half an hour, we stopped at a restaurant to eat. After about an hour, we were back on the road and we drove non-stop for another hour and a half until we finally arrived at Cappadocia. However, a short distance away from our hotel, we stopped one last time to check out Ushisar Castle. This place was unbelievable! The castle, along with other small houses and tombs, where carved out of huge rocks. The castle is situated up a high and steep hill, and the houses stand at the skirts of the hill and beyond it. The top of the castle provides a magnificent view of the city and other small towns and cities around it. It was particularly interesting to observe the contrast between the modern brick and cement houses and those that had been carved out of the stone that stood near them. It was a breathtaking experience!

After another short drive through the city, we finally arrived at the final destination of this day: Perissia Hotel. We all had a couple hours of free time and then it was dinnertime. A few delicious plates of food later, we all met in the lobby of the hotel for our last experience of the day: the Semâ ceremony (Whirling Dervishes ceremony).

As we approached the entrance of the caravanserai were the ceremony was about to take place, we all noticed the geometrical figures that were carved on the stone doorframes– part of the characteristic Seljuk decoration. We all walked past the entrance and into the courtyard. Past this courtyard, straight ahead of us, was the entrance to the hall where the Whirling Dervishes ceremony was about to take place. The whole group sat on the first three rows of the small and short bleachers, and from there we were able to watch first hand the magnificent ceremony. The instrumental music, the dervishes’ greetings, the reciting of the Qur’an, and of course, the whirling, all composed an exciting and interesting ceremony.

Experiences like the ones we had today are making this cultural trip evermore interesting and fun. Every day we’ve spent here in Turkey has been fascinating; however, now that we are traveling a lot more, days are now passing by faster and faster. We are getting closer to the end of the trip and pretty soon we’ll be back home. Nonetheless, I’m sure that we will keep enjoying and learning from this wonderful experience until the very end.