I spent quite a few days at the lovely ANZ Guesthouse in Selcuk. The place sits just up the hill from the Selcuk bus terminal, behind a small carpet shop (”Ali Baba’s”). It’s operated by three Turkish guys, one of whom spent something like eighteen years living in Australia (and speaks English with a proper Outback twang), hence the Australiophile motif (”ANZ” = “Australia/New Zealand”). The ANZ is a fantastic hostel. The rooms are cheap and clean. For dinner they offer BBQed meats prepared by a pro chef. And the staff were some of the nicest folks I’ve met.

Mehmet was one such guy. He spoke not much English (and when he did, he somehow spoke it with “a Turkish accent”, his words), but he looked after all of us with the most sincere generosity. On my first day there he took me out for soup and Coca-Cola (old-fashioned glass bottle), and talked about small-town life, and about his girlfriend in Vancouver. They kept in touch by Internet, and hope to marry soon. I couldn’t help but fear that this girlfriend was, if not a fictional creation, at least some cruel woman giving him the run-around. What does a Canadian girl want with a small-town Turk who barely speaks English? But he insists they hoped to be married, and Mehmet is a good man, so I give him the b. of the d.

In talking with a few Turkish men they seemed to have a very practical approach to marriage. “If we cannot be married,” Mehmet says, “I marry someone else, it’s OK.”

Selcuk has many attractions, such as the ruined Greek city of Ephesus:

The highlight for me was the mountain town of Srince (shrin-JAY), home to the Selcuk wine industry:

Srince is one of those Mediterranean postcard dream-lands, where grape vines cling to Spanish-tiled rooftops, pomegranates hang at eye level from bushy trees, wrinkled old men ride around town on bicycles, and the rain always seems to fall elsewhere. I went up there via dolmus (taxi-bus) with a newly engaged Canadian couple from Calgary. We found a wine vendor in a three-piece suit who let us sample each of the fifteen or so flavours of fruit wine local to the region: apple, peach, cherry (regular and x-tra strength), blackberry, black mulberry, blueberry, kiwi, apricot, pomegranate…. All were delicious, and my Canadian friends and I picked up several bottles, to be drunk that afternoon over games of backgammon.

The most amusing sight in Srince came as we were having lunch in an outdoor restaurant on Srince’s main street, and a series of open-roof tour jeeps full of passengers made their way past. It is something of a local tradition in Turkey’s small towns to douse tourists with water, and while we were spared this fate, the tourists in the jeeps were not. Each of the restaurants on this strip had evidently prepared hours in advance for the jeeps’ arrival, and brought out enormous jugs—more like oil drums, really—of water, and with expert timing, launched litres of water into the air at the exact moment when it would provide the most thorough drenching to the helpless tourists inside. The final jeep in particular received an almost unbelievable dose; easily enough to leave them sitting in six inches of water when all was said and done. Our laughter turned into a cringe, not only in memoriam of all those poor digital cameras, but for the fact that drums of water can’t be all that easy to come by in rural Turkey.

The wine got us good and drunk, and that night I had a memorable conversation with two Turkish guys around my age, university guys who were in town to do some skydiving (”better than sex!”) at the local drop zone. One of them was an accountant, the other an aspiring mining engineer. The Canadian guy and I talked Turkish politics with these two, or at least what we knew of the subject. It was most enlightening. The common wisdom is that Turkey is torn between the secular, Euro-flavoured government of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the conservative Islamic movement which hopes for a thoroughly Muslim Turkey ruled by Shari’a law. The latter faction is currently in power after having squeaked out a victory in the general election on Jul 22, and the accountant guy gave me a sample scenario of how this result has begun to play out.

He took and passed a difficult exam to become a chartered pro accountant, fully qualified to step into a lucrative job in Turkey’s civil service. But when he applied, he was passed over for another, less-qualified candidate who happened to be a supporter of the AKP. He insists this is because he is a secularist who wants to work “for Ataturk”, and this government will always choose “one of theirs”. So he has been rejected as a gov’t accountant and has had instead to take a job with Deloitte and Touche, or as he calls it, “some fucking French or English”. He explained how the new prez won his power not with his ideas, but by giving the people simple things: roads, infrastructure, budgetary prudence. “Just like Hitler,” he says.

I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong, of course. But Turkey strikes me as one of those countries where everything people say about it is exactly true. For example, everyone says “Turkey is part European, part Asian”, which is not only literally true (Istanbul straddles both continents) but a more or less exact description of Turkish culture. And when people say Gen. Ataturk “created” the modern Turkish state, they are not merely suggesting he passed a few simple reforms through the Parliament or appeared as a head of state for a few treaty-signings. No, he single-handedly stirred Turkish nationalism after the occupation of Anatolia during WWI, leading to the Turkish War of Independence. He then shoved Turkey into the 20th century, giving them a Euro-style secular government and even a new language, for chrissakes. The guy really did create the country called Turkey, and Turkey is truly everything people say it is.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 3:49 am and is filed under Turkey.