Fragments of yesterday

May 14, 2014

We are, sadly, running out of time. We have to get back to Istanbul and we haven’t even explored the territory of the Hittites, the Phrygians, or, even fully explored the Ottomans yet. Nor will we be able to. We needed weeks longer than we planned to do all that we’d hoped. Turkey’s history is simply so dense: it is everywhere. As we were particularly bereft at missing Hattuşaş and the Hittites, which we’d been looking forward to as much as Çatalhöyük, we decided to compensate and head to Ankara, enroute to Istanbul, and visit their much acclaimed Museum of Anatolian Civilization, one of the top museums in the world.

Major mistake. To start with, Ankara is the capital of Turkey. It is full of pigeons. Aside, and little known fact: Turkey uses pigeon guano for fertiliser. I think they likely could get most of it from the streets of Ankara. And chaotic traffic of the frightening kind. Drivers oftentimes appear not to be able to distinguish the pedestrian thoroughfare from the roadway. And if they can, they seem not to give a damn. Drivers in Turkey are notoriously bad, but in Ankara they are anarchic. There simply are no rules to be observed. Red lights mean nothing. Double parking on driving lanes obstructing on-going traffic happens as a matter of course. They, most times, don’t even put their blinkers on to alert you that they have left their vehicle and gone across the road shopping. Nor do pedestrians observe any lights, or road rules. And there appears to be no policing of any of it.

When we arrived at our first stop the Ethnographic Museum was closed. It was Monday. Every Monday this month we have missed something special in Turkey because we happen to arrive on a Monday, which, unlike Sunday, seems to be a day of rest. We weren’t too sorry about this as someone had told us this one was all about Ataturk, which, quite frankly we could do without. His picture and his statues are plastered everywhere, like Mao’s, and we are well and truly over him. The Museum of Anatolian Civilisation was open. Partly. One very tiny hall. The rest were under wraps and not able to be visited. Someone said it had been like this for nearly two years, but I doubt it. I think they were just repainting and cleaning up in preparation for the summer, as the rest of Turkey is. But, I nearly wept. There was one tiny display of Hittite finds in this hall, and I coveted every piece.

It is hard to conceive that these Hittite pieces are 3,500 years old. The quality of the pieces, even the tiny ones in this one hall, is so superb it is no wonder Ankara’s museum has such a great name. Good design lasts. We fell in love with the lines of a Byzantine jug with its filter that is made of glass and have rarely seen anything so fragile, so fluid and yet so functional. And a bearded man’s head. He is from Hadrian’s era, so the piece is nearly 2000 years old, and is simply beautiful. So, in truth, the visit was not all bad.

We walked through the old part of the city and found the wonderful old bazaar, the Bakırcılar Çarşısı, famous for quality original and handmade copper goods. In every little alcove and behind many dusty shop frontages, we found copper artisans at work, hammering away at their pieces. We spent a lot of time just ogling. The bazaar covered many hilly lanes and alleyways and different streets were devoted to different products. One street was all about bathroom fittings; another about hardware; another about lighting. It reminded us of Athens. This alley was all about the cutlery.

Lunch, enroute, the next day was at Aksaray. We had passed through there a week before, enroute to Ihlara Valley, and ended up with a meal so delicious that we hunted the place down again in the heart of the city which was no mean feat, but was worth it. Both times the chef and the wait staff took photos of us with lunch to put on their Facebook pages.

oooOOOooo