It was a momentous first half of the year in the United States, 1993. Waco, World Trade Center bombing, the “Storm of the Century”. And I missed it all. It’s a weird experience, not being in your home country during times of historical significance. I watched these events unfold via the narrow lens of the International Herald-Tribune and occasional postcards and letters from home. Mainly, I was on a beach, or in a bar, or scurrying around ancient buildings. Who could have predicted the Eastern Mediterranean would be an oasis of youthful fun and rose-colored glasses while the U.S. was in turmoil?

I spent 7 months in Turkey, and a couple weeks in Syria, in 1993. I had many fun times, and saw some exotic places. Rather than present a full travelogue, I thought I would share a few stories from the bubble.

Alanya east

Arrival

Thanks to Mount Pinatubo, most of the earth was experiencing some weirdass weather (Bill Gates, take note!).

Cyborg, impervious to weather

Istanbul was frigidly cold for our two-week orientation. Snow squalls would roll in off the Black Sea at regular intervals. Everything I experienced in those weeks was punctuated by cold. Our program director would have us scrambling around stone walls in a blizzard, while he blithely lectured us about Ottomans in nothing more than jeans and a leather jacket.

That’s all well and good until you need to dress up for a Greek Orthodox liturgy in a historic church. No bulky boots & layers of clothing allowed.

The HQ and leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church are in Istanbul. Apparently, if the Church’s lands and buildings are not in active use, they could be ceded to the Turkish government. In order not to lose its property despite an ever-shrinking Orthodox population, the Patriarch himself would perform services at a rotating list of churches. His presence would attract a greater crowd than a normal worship, hence keeping those individual churches under Greek Orthodox ownership.

I remember the the sweet, ethereal smell of incense and the 700-year-old stone floor seeping through my “dressy shoes”, slowly freezing me from the bottom-up. After we were thoroughly iced, we were privileged to have a meeting (in a heated room!) with the Patriarch. We listened to him speak to his Greek-Turkish flock and sipped on rose liqueur. We met a young priest from Texas who invited us to the Patriarchate (Church HQ), where he tried his level best to get us to hang out with him all day: “No more questions? OK, well let me tell you about this one time in divinity school…”. Guy was undoubtedly homesick and in need of American-style conversation.

Musical Interlude

Our program director set up an intimate performance for us in Istanbul with the Sephardic-Turkish music group Los Paşaros Sefaradis.

During the Spanish Inquisition, the Ottoman government allowed fleeing Jews to live & work (with many restrictions) in the Empire, mainly Istanbul where they could be monitored, taxed, and controlled. The families that remained there for generations developed a mix of Spanish, Turkish, and Jewish culture, ritual, and language.

The members of Los Paşaros all grew up speaking Judeo-Spanish at home, while learning Turkish in school.

For our interlude, here is major Turkish pop star Sezen Aksu performing the haunting and beautiful “La Romansa de Rika Kuriel” with Los Paşaros a few years ago.

Becoming a Bathist

Not far from our little hotel in Sultanahmet, there was a 500-year-old hamam, or Turkish bath. If you’re a man, you enter the changing room, where you leisurely disrobe and enjoy sodas and teas brought to you by attendants. Then, I think, you enter the bathing room where you wash and prepare for a steam and a massage.

Chicks? We entered a standard locker room, and from there into a large domed marble room. Around the columned edges were niches with faucets, soap, and buckets for bathing and rinsing.

In the center of the room, directly below an incredible perforated dome, was a gigantic heated marble platform. You could simply lie on the slab, soaking in the beautiful heat, or you could get a wash and a massage. Care for a facial? Lean back and rest your weary head in the naked, pendulous bosom of an attendant that has had many years to cultivate an aura of grandmotherly warmth combined with a sadistic desire to tear your skin off layer-by-layer with a loofah. After a day traipsing around our freezing environs, this was utter paradise, even the dermatological abuse while suffocating between a pair of Quintuple Ds.

Istanbul Miscellany

Blanchernae

If I had to choose a vacation in a big city, it 100% would have been Istanbul. Pre-Erdoğan, I mean. You could spend weeks or months here exploring all the nooks and crannies. The mosaics and frescos at Kariye; the ruined old Blanchernae Palace, whose walls have been incorporated into the surrounding neighborhood; a midwinter boat trip up the Bosporus, sipping Salep and watching the modern Ottoman palaces roll by; quince dessert at the World Famous Pudding Shop; pretending to be 007 in the Yerebatan Saray; eating illegal stuffed mussels from questionable street vendors; singing Kurdish folk songs and drinking glass after glass of Aslan Sütü in the kind of bar where you have to knock on the door; exploring the hidden corners of Ayasofya, such as the Empress Theodora‘s graffiti in the stone railing, and Enrico Dandolo‘s timeworn gravestone.

The Big Thaw

After an unmemorable stop in Ankara (every stop in Ankara is unmemorable), we finally set up home base in Alanya. The town enjoyed its glory days in the 13th century during the Seljuk Sultanate. In 1993 it was a modern mess of bars, tacky shops, and sunburned Germans.

Alanya west

 

Our little skoolhouse

 

Pissing the night away Alanya style

 

Ulaş beach

In other words, Alanya is not much of anything other than a place to party and engage in hijinks. We spent a lot of time between the heavy metal bar and the mafia-owned Pub 13, conveniently located within drunken stumbling distance, through a bat-filled gecekondu, of our housing.

What’s an Aleppo?

An Aleppo

Weirdest. Road. Trip. Ever.

It would have been a tense time for a bunch of Americans to visit a Ba’athist stronghold in 1993, but there we were, on our little bus, heading into the belly of the beast. The border area on the road between Antakya and Aleppo is a dry canyon of no-man’s land, where one imagines snipers of various allegiances staring down through their scopes. Picture the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy threatens to blow up the Ark with a shoulder-launched missile. But with a paved road.

Also an Aleppo

As soon as we arrived in Syria at Bab al Hawa, we were in an alien world. Our bus driver had a “cousin” that traveled with us everywhere. Interestingly, the bus driver and this “cousin” never spoke or even really acknowledged each other.

Stencils of Assad The First were spray painted on every available surface in this part of the country. One got the sense of a slightly tenuous hold on power here.

We arrived at the historic Baron Hotel. You see, it was Ramadan, and the hotel was owned by an Armenian (i.e. Christian) family. Our program director liked his tipple, and the bar was open for business. It was everything you’d expect from a run-down piece of history – old wood,

Baron Hotel

marble, crumbling ceiling plaster. I loved it. It was easy to sit at the bar and imagine Winston Churchill drunkenly pontificating at a corner table.

Outside the time-stopped oasis of the Baron, the streets of Aleppo were…crazy. I had never seen anything like the chaos of life in that city. Imagine yourself downstream from the main bazaar when the evening canon blasts, signifying sundown and the end of the fast for the day. Suddenly, thousands of rabidly hungry Muslims are making a beeline for the restaurants and snack stands in the market. It’s like every “chase scene in a crowd” in every action movie ever made. Do not stand between tens of thousands of Muslims and their iftars.

I’ve been Muslimized!

Damascectomy

Damascus

We eventually piled onto our little bus with the driver and his “cousin” and headed south to Damascus.

Inlaid game table

I don’t know how Damascus fared during the recent Troubles, but in 1993 is was a beautiful historic city with wide boulevards and secret crevices. As our driver’s “cousin” settled into a comfy chair with a newspaper and coffee in our hotel lobby, we set out to explore (and shop). Syria in general, and Damascus in particular, have a not insignificant non-Muslim population. We found ourselves talking to a shopkeep, who offered us tea and coffee. We soon found out our new pal was a Christian and therefore didn’t give a damn about Ramadan rules. He invited us up to his attic where we got to sit around and smoke cigarettes and drink our fill of tea. My friend wanted to buy a rather pricey inlaid game table, at which point the merchant gave her a bank account number in Cyprus to which to send the payment. Smart man.

And there we have some brief memories of half a year in the peace and love of the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

In Loving Memory: DSA, 1965-2012. I can still hear your voice.

A gang of miscreants

Deniz