self-inflicted

Gosh it's been a while since I blogged. As my time in Turkey draws to a close, (six days to go), I've been plagued by this nagging feeling that I should write a post that will elegantly encapsulate my experiences here on the Eastern reaches of the Black Sea coast. But I can't. The thing is, so many little things have happened, which I want to remember and launch into the blogospehere for all eternity. The said theoretical eternity may bring up complex metaphysical questions, but suffice it too say that I should have written about them as they came along, instead of leaving them all to the last minute. Isn't that always the way with me.

Tonight I had dinner with some new friends. They are an old couple who teach in the same department at the university- urban planning - and throughout dinner their smiles and carefully measured words, and appealingly open-ended questions- "What is America like?" - made me want to volunteer to be their adopted granddaughter. The Professor invited me to dinner to say thank you for editing some papers for him. I must admit I expected it to be a boring duty-driven evening, but it turned out to be very pleasant. A little glimpse of them, a little promise of an unlikely friendship, and then the kind of slightly awkward goodbye that comes from the unspoken fact that we will not see each other again, nor keep in touch, nor even make empty gestures about keeping in touch. The Professor's wife held my hand warmly, and fretted about it being cold. (The Turks have a deep-seated fear of catching cold - drafts and chills of all forms are carefully avoided - to the point that people will not open windows more than a crack on a suffocatingly hot bus). I told her I was fine, and she told me to go straight in and warm up. Such a lovely caring nature is typical of the Turks; I will miss being treated so well when I get back to England- where affection appears to be shown through insults. Right?

Last weekend I went to Sinop with a colleague, her daughter, her mother, her aunt, and a bunch of pensioners on a packed and rowdy bus. It was, as I expected, both interesting and trying. (At several points I was made to dance in the aisle of the moving bus, and at one point a microphone was proffered with the instruction to sing "a foreign song.") These Black Sea Turks are so enthusiastic and fun-loving it's amazing - they get up to all kinds of embarrassing and crazy antics, and without alcohol! I don't really relish group tours but I didn't want to miss the chance to see more of the Black Sea. Sinop is one of the longest continually inhabited cities on the coast, about half-way between Istanbul and Trabzon. And there were a lot of strange sights to behold. We toured the famous Sinop prison, which was not that interesting to me and rather scary. But what made it worthwhile was the surrounding fortifications, walls built by the Seljuk Turks incorporating Greek ruins. You could literally see classical pillars sliced up like carrots and laid into the walls. No one seemed that interested in this part, but I was haunted by the sense of so much history built on top of and cannibalizing itself through the ages. You get that feeling a lot in Turkey.

In Trabzon, in fact, I am eerily conscious of the weight of its history, which remains for the most part invisible. This is an ancient settlement, and yet almost everything, apart from a handful of mosques and a caravansary, looks to have been built in the past fifty years. Trabzon is truthfully not very attractive. Fighting for ground between the mountains and the Black Sea, the architecture is almost all of the 1960's-style block variety. But I am haunted by the idea that it was a different place 100 years ago, different not only in the appearance of its buildings, but with different people and a different culture. Until the aftermath of WWI and the formation of the Turkish Republic, this whole region was a Pontic Greek stronghold - descendants of Byzantine Greeks who never left- and now, due to deeply contested historic events, read "relocations" and "population exchanges", almost all of them are gone. The thing that makes the history of this region so haunting is that no one talks about it. The people around here don't seem to want to reflect on the past. Many old buildings were destroyed to make way for six and seven-story apartment blocks, which seem out-of-place in a city of about 200,000. The main area of town has some half-dead Ottoman wooden houses whose days appear to be numbered, and, out of sight, hidden, there remain some crumbling ruins of Byzantine churches, Greek villas, and Orthodox monasteries, which almost none of the locals know or care about, which aren't mentioned in any tour guides, and which I, annoyingly, haven't been that successful in finding. I've read that one of the monasteries in the hills above the city is currently in use as a barn, but if you ask the farmer nicely, he might remove the hay and let you see the frescoes.

In any case, I have that predictable feeling that I haven't made the best use of my time here, that there's more to see that I've missed. So I'll be spending Saturday visiting mosques that used to be churches that may have been temples before that, and gulping down the last glasses for who knows how long, of fragrant black tea grown not fifty miles away.