A Journey, Part 3. The Crucible
February 26, 2012
On the afternoon of 12 February, having thawed for a few days at Nessebar, we crossed the border from Bulgaria into Turkey and headed for Istanbul. Entering the first Muslim country of our journey, we had no idea that we would spend the next four months waking almost every day to the muezzin’s call. Our route through Turkey would have us spending a few days each in Istanbul and Ankara before travelling down through Cappadocia to the Sea of Maramara and finally east to the border with Syria.
Istanbul is such a beautiful city and the sense of history is palpable. Capital of two of the most pervasive and powerful empires, first the Byzantium Empire as Constantinople and then the Ottoman Empire as Istanbul, she reigned supreme for over 1500 years. It was, quite literally, the centre of the world. With the city straddling the Bosphorous Strait – the metaphorical moat between Europe and Asia and the gateway to the Black Sea – it’s not hard to understand why. I could only imagine what this city must have been like in it’s heyday. While much of the splendour has been jaded and the beauty faded, the jewels of the city like Topkapı Palace, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque stand as proud reminders of her former glory.
In keeping with the spirit of Istanbul, Turkey itself has long served as a melting pot of cultures and people. Although the Turks and Kurds make up the bulk of the population, there are sizable minorities of Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, and dozens of smaller ethnic minorities. We’ve become used to some ethnic diversity in our modern nations, but what’s different about Turkey is that many of these groups of people have been there for centuries or even millenia. Quite literally at the intersection of Europe, Asia, Arabia, and Africa, almost anyone who went anywhere passed through Turkey en-route and invariably left traces behind.
Ask any traveller what it is that draws them to travel and the answer will almost certainly be the experience of diversity. Whether in landscape, nature, food, or people, one gets perspectives on the road that would be hard or impossible to synthesize any other way. As we immerse ourselves in the different, our views can’t but change and be enriched.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness – Mark Twain
For all our differences as people, we’re so alike and I think that the essence of what we have in common is centered on love and compassion. Wherever in the world we are, people long for happiness. They love their families, want a better life for their children and want the world to be a better place. These are the ties that bind us. I seethe when I hear derogatory remarks directed at broad groups of people, be they Zimbabwean or Mexican, Jewish or Muslim. Such prejudices are abundant in almost every sector of society in every country and they are one of the great cancers that affect humanity and steer us away from our true selves.
The word inhuman is defined as “cruel, brutal, or lacking qualities of sympathy, pity, warmth, compassion, or the like”. It’s a lovely definition because it’s a succinct reminder that we cannot call ourselves human unless we have compassion at our core and that this is our natural state. Our prejudices stem from the warrior psyche, that part of us that mistrusts and alienates others so as to ultimately render them non-human and us at the same time as inhuman (synonyms: unfeeling, unsympathetic, cold, callous, hard, savage, brutish). When practicing prejudice or maligning a group of people, let’s not forget its origins and that it’s ultimately nothing less than a form of savagery.
From Istanbul, we travelled south to Ankara where we again tried and failed to get visas for Syria and the Sudan. There was so much conflicting information that it soon became clear that we would only find out whether we would get into Syria when we arrived at the border, sans-visa. From Ankara, it was on to staying in a cave in Cappadocia – a Lilliput-lunar-like wonderland where hundreds of people still live in caves carved out of huge ant-hill shaped rocks.
Mersin, located on Sea of Maramara, is one of Turkey’s largest ports and is off the main tourist routes. On reaching it, we’d already acquired a taste for middle-eastern desserts and, stopping into a pastry shop for knafeh and coffee, we got chatting to Mehmet, the owner. Off the tourist track, we’d found the Turks to be incredibly hospitable and friendly; I will never forget an evening at a tiny rustic locals-only eatery in Dalyan, near Çeşme a few years earlier, when the sparse-toothed, vested proprietor stood by our table with his glass of raki for the entire meal and toasted Salut! at every opportunity. Mehmet was no exception and before we knew it we’d accepted his invitation to experience real Turkish food that evening.
When travelling, and especially in a country like Turkey where an invitation to tea is often just a prelude to a hard sell, the easiest thing to do is to keep the shields up. We’d heard horror stories from Turks in Istanbul about travellers being held hostage and forced to sign credit card slips at gun-point after having accepted invitations into clubs and bars. Sometimes though, one has to make a leap of faith, follow one’s intuition and place one’s trust in another because it’s only when we do that we’re able to really overcome the barriers that separate us. But trust and vulnerability are inseparable and there was no small amount of trepidation before we met up with Mehmet later that afternoon and climbed into his car to experience the city he loved from his point of view. It was a night to remember as we moved from the restaurant – where he refused to let us pay a single lira – to bars, sharing stories and perspectives in broken English. None of it would have happened without his goodwill and our reciprocal trust.
Mersin is only a short distance from the Syrian border and on this day, 15 years ago, we arrived at the border and with minimal fuss obtained our visas and crossed into Syria heading for Aleppo.