Myra, Turkey

By Jenni Gate

A destination spot for travelers in the ancient world, Myra was part of the Lycian empire along the Turquoise Coast. It had a long history as part of the ancient Greek and Roman empires with a port important to trade throughout the Mediterranean. Myra is rumored to have been the birth place of St. Nicholas in the 4th century AD (the Byzantine era). In Biblical times, St. Paul is said to have changed ships in the harbor. Great travelers throughout time have marveled at the cliffs housing the necropolis, and its amphitheater was one of the largest of the Lycian empire.

Cliffside necropolis at Myra, Turkey

Amphitheater at Myra, Turkey

Kemal Kayankaya—Frankfurt’s Wise-Cracking Turkish-German Detective

By Heidi Noroozy

In the 1960s, with economic recovery from the devastation of World War II well underway, West Germany found itself with a booming economy and a shortage of labor for its growing manufacturing, construction, and mining industries. A guest worker treaty with Turkey solved the problem, and soon young Turks were filling the labor gap. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, at least initially, with each guest worker returning to Turkey after two years. This policy had advantages for both nations: Germany gained a much-needed workforce without having to integrate a distinctly alien cultural and religious minority into its society. Turkey would be guaranteed a generation of highly skilled workers when its citizens returned home—a great boon to its own economy.

But things didn’t turn out that way. Many Turks chose to remain in Germany and raise families, even if they remained on the fringes of society. Because these workers were classified as “migrants” and not “immigrants,” and since their children born on German soil did not automatically receive German citizenship, the country became home to an entire generation (or two) of residents who were neither entirely German nor fully Turkish. It is not a situation conducive to intercultural harmony.

Against this historical background, German crime novelist Jakob Arjouni has created one of the most memorable characters in the mystery genre. Private Investigator Kemal Kayankaya is the son of Turkish migrant workers and was orphaned at a young age. Adopted by a German couple, he grew up in Frankfurt, speaks flawless German with a Hessian accent and not a word of Turkish. He’s an avid fan of the Gladbach soccer club, and he eats pickled herring with his breakfast coffee, yet none of these German attributes save him from relentless prejudice and stereotyping. Faced with his dark skin and Turkish features, people constantly mistake him for the garbage collector, street vendor, and even undocumented immigrant. Never mind that, unlike most of his Turkish-German compatriots, he’s in possession of a rare treasure: a German passport.

In a series of five hardboiled detective novels published over the course of nearly 30 years (from 1985 to 2012), Arjouni holds up a mirror to German society. Like the best heroes of the genre, Kayankaya is a relentless champion of the downtrodden and dispossessed. He’s fearless and dogged, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking lone wolf with his own set of moral standards. However, Kayankaya’s ethnicity and the intercultural battles he faces add a whole new subtext to the classic PI tale.

His cases take him through the seediest parts of Frankfurt: dark alleys, brothels, and strip clubs with their pimps, prostitutes, gangsters, corrupt cops, and government officials on the take. The novels explore themes of social marginalization, racism, and unequal distribution of justice, sometimes set against the backdrop of larger historical events, such as the breakup of Yugoslavia. Other themes are xenophobia and police corruption (Happy Birthday, Türke!/Happy Birthday, Turk!), eco-terrorism and political culpability (Mehr Bier/More Beer), immigration fraud and the illegal sex trade (Ein Man, Ein Mord/One Man, One Murder, which won the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize), racketeering and the lingering effects of the brutal Balkan wars (Kismet), and religious intolerance (Bruder Kemal/Brother Kemal).

Kayankaya’s tough-guy image is tempered by his vulnerability. His Achilles heel is his ethnicity, and even his German citizenship doesn’t offer much security when corrupt officials rob him of his ID and toss him in a cell with a group of illegals slated for deportation. In violent confrontations with the bad guys, he often ends up in worse shape that his opponents, but when it comes to battling the daily humiliation of prejudice, no one is a match for his acerbic and often cynical wit. His great talent is to twist hurtful attitudes and toss them back at an adversary in a way that makes the other person look like a fool. Take this exchange in a scene from Ein Man, Ein Mord, where the detective tries to enlist the help of an immigration official to find the missing Thai woman he’s been hired to locate. The official won’t be deterred from her mistaken assumption that Citizen Kayankaya has come to renew his residency permit. She asks him his name. 

 

“Kemal Kayankaya.”

“Spelling?”

“Pretty good. But I do have some trouble with those foreign words.”

With the series spanning several decades, Arjouni allows his protagonist to age in real time. The first book, Happy Birthday, Türke (1985), opens on Kayankaya’s 26^th birthday, which he celebrates alone in his office until a client shows up and he shares a piece of cake with her. In 2012’s Bruder Kemal, Kayankaya is 53 and his life has become a great deal more stable. He’s in a steady relationship, has cut way back on his drinking, and even has his own website. Kayankaya’s transformation reflects changes in Germany’s attitude toward its Turkish community. When he took on his first case in the mid-1980s, a Turkish-born German citizen was almost unheard of. Today, according to one statistic, nearly two-thirds of German Turks hold German passports, thanks to immigration reforms in recent years. But just as they do in real life, prejudices die hard in Kayakaya’s fictional world, and the detective, who claims to have never seen the inside of a mosque, finds himself mistaken for an Islamic terrorist.

Jakob Arjouni’s cross-cultural detective series is destined to remain at 5 books. Sadly, the 48-year-old author died earlier this year after losing a battle with pancreatic cancer. Although I read the series in the original German, the first four books are available in English, and the translation of Bruder Kemal is slated for U.S. publication in September 2013. I am pleased to see these stories reach an international audience, for while Arjouni intended to hold up a mirror to his native Germany, the themes he explores are universal problems that plague societies around the world, and many of us may see our own faces reflected in Kemal Kayankaya’s Turkish eyes.

A Wandering Tale

By Edith McClintock

A few months back, I was in a five-week training course where we spent a day on Myers Brigg team-building exercises. For those of you who may not know, Myers Brigg is a psychological test that measures how people perceive the world and make decisions. My classmates and I had all taken the test online during our first week of training, but only the trainers knew the results (although a few of us, including me, did know our “types”).

For the last activity, the trainers asked four of us to leave the room. We waited in the hallway for about ten minutes while the rest of the group did something—we weren’t sure what. Then we were asked to come back in the room, sit in front of the group, and, together, plan a trip.

Backpacking, Florence, Italy, 1990s

So we did, contemplating oceans and mountains, deciding why not have both, riffing off each other, laughing, wandering down byways. Everything fun and flexible. Nothing too thought-out or well planned. We ended up sailing for Croatia, stopping at various sites along the Albanian coast, ending in the ancient city of Dubrovnik.

No one discussed booking tickets, passports, packing appropriately or reading travel guides.

The four of us, it turned out, all scored high on perceiving in the Myers Brigg judging/perceiving (J/P) typology. Before us, the trainers had asked a group of high judging classmates to also plan a trip, and the result was very different—obviously much more structured.

I’d like to note that judging does not connote judgmental, nor does it have implications for one’s level of organization. Judgers simply prefer a planned or orderly way of life. They like to have things settled and organized, to bring life under control as much as possible. Perceivers prefer a flexible and spontaneous way of life, to understand and adapt to the world rather than organize it. They like to stay open to new experiences and information.

So what does this mean for how I like to travel?

It means I don’t like to read guidebooks. I don’t like to have a plan or particularly know where I’m going. I like to wander, to explore the random and unknown. I like to get lost.

Priene, Turkey

You can imagine this doesn’t work well with strong judging types, which I learned on my first big trip—backpacking through Europe with my sister and two friends when I was nineteen. One friend showed up with a plan for the entire month of travel, a day-by-day, nearly hour-by-hour schedule—with listings of museums, restaurants, even our scheduled wake-up time each morning. Some of it was useful information, true, but the idea of a detailed breakfast schedule on vacation was incomprehensible to me—still is.

She was, I have no doubt, high on the Myers Brigg judging scale. Two of us were high perceivers. My sister is probably somewhere in between. We didn’t make it through the trip. There was yelling at the Naples train station. Three of us went to Germany with no plan. The other stayed in Italy.

That’s not to say I’m not perfectly happy if someone wants to sort out monotonous details for me—important sights to see, bus schedules, country crossings, visa details. That’s lovely, and I can do that too, if necessary. I can even enjoy it sometimes. What I can’t do, or hate to do, is travel with a schedule or stick to a plan when there’s a random brown sign on a map, maybe indicating a castle off the highway. Sure, it’s not what we had planned, we don’t know any details, possibly we don’t have enough gas or a spare tire, but why not take a look? I prefer to travel with someone who says, “Sure, why not?”

Bay near Dilek Peninsula National Park

We did this in Turkey when I was traveling with another friend. We’d rented a car to visit the ancient ruins of Priene, Miletus, and Didyma scattered along the Aegean coast. But we saw that brown sign and headed off the highway to follow a dirt road surrounded by cotton fields. After several turns, helpful pointing in the opposite direction from a farmer, followed by a long, rocky road through more fields, we found ourselves confronting an unimpressive ruin of a castle on a tiny hill.

There was a reason it wasn’t listed in our guidebook. We took a few pictures that will never be shown to the world, scurried back to the car at the first sign of a barking dog, and were soon back on the highway and en route to exploring the guidebook-approved sites, only two hours delayed.

Doğanbey, Turkey

We rushed through dusty, archeological sites under a baking sun, and by late afternoon, I thought we should try a new route back through a national park, maybe take a swim somewhere along the coast. We again followed winding roads, stopping first at a beautiful deserted bay, where the water was too shallow and warm, the bottom mucky, and we decided to find something better along the way. Unfortunately, there was no other way. The road ended.

We turned around, making several more attempts to find a road through the park, but instead we kept ending up near what looked like a ghost town nestled in the side of a small mountain. It was there we found a visitor center and learned there were no roads through the park from the south. Problem solved, we’d have to backtrack.

But in the meantime, why not explore the ghost town? We followed the narrow, cobbled roads, past crumbling stone houses snuggled next to restored, boutique cottages, catching glimpses of sparkling bay through gnarled olive trees and draping bougainvillea. Just cats and silence.

Doğanbey, Turkey

The town, we discovered, was renamed Doğanbey from Domatia after the 1923 population exchange when Turkey gained its independence and ethnic Greeks were pushed out of Turkey (as were Turks living on Greek islands). Doğanbey was left to crumble for many years—until the parks department acquired several buildings, and wealthy foreigners looking for seclusion bought others.

Today, it’s a perfect, sleepy village. And not in any guidebooks.

But that is essentially how I like to travel, whether it’s by car, foot, plane, or train.

Sometimes you get a dusty cotton field and boring ruins, sometimes a spectacular desert cave outside Petra with no toilet or running water, other times a visit to the Valley of the Kings with no tourists.

You never know. But that’s the fun. 

For more, you can visit my author website and/or personal blog, A Wandering Tale. Even better, order a copy of Monkey Love & Murder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Book Depository (free shipping nearly anywhere in the world).

Bottle Caps, Footmen, and A Touch of Jazz – The Story of a House

The entrance to the Smithsonian Castle
in Washington, D.C.

Culture shock, the good kind, hit hard when I moved from Texas to Washington, D.C. Everything is different here, from the trivial to the grand. Cab drivers chatting about politics and literature. The super quiet subways, where everyone is reading, reading, reading. The view across the Potomac River, especially at the Tidal Basin when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, the breeze blowing around little pink and white blooms like magic confetti.

Then there’s the architecture. The awe-inspiring national monuments, built in Greek Revival style, excerpts of speeches by Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington etched into the granite walls. The famous buildings that hold our three cherished branches of government, universal symbols of democracy and all things American. The museums – not just the exhibits, but also the enormous edifices that house them. The Old World urban layout, including the roundabouts with pretty fountains and gardens, designed by Pierre L’Enfant, the French architect who also planned Versailles. The Library of Congress, which stores a copy of every book published anywhere in the world. (Do they still do that, in this age of e-books and e-readers, I wonder?)

And, of course, the embassies, dozens of them along Massachusetts Avenue, NW, not far from where I lived in Dupont Circle. Peru, Denmark, Cape Verde, Bulgaria, Japan. It seemed to me back then, and often still does, that strolling by these buildings was akin to making a really quick visit abroad.

(Photo: M.V. Jantzen)

Tucked away on a quiet corner of Embassy Row stands a Beaux Arts mansion that has always intrigued me. Back then it was both the Embassy of Turkey as well as the Turkish ambassador’s residence, and no matter how often I passed it, its stunning exterior always gave me pause. In the early ’90s, I couldn’t take photos of it because very serious-looking men stood guard out front like vigilantes, holding big machine guns and menacingly approaching passersby, particularly those with cameras, who glanced their way for too long. I never knew exactly why they were there, but over the next decade, the country underwent a military coup, was slapped with more than 1,500 judgments by the European Union for human rights violations, enforced a NATO-led, no-fly zone at its border with Iraq, and closed its border with Azerbaijan to avoid a civil war there from spilling into its own borders. Who knows which of those issues led to the extra security.

Regardless, the armed guards are long gone, and the embassy itself is now housed in a separate chancery right on Mass Ave (as Washingtonians call it). But the ambassador still resides at the impressive old mansion, which is one of the city’s most important historic buildings and has its own colorful story to tell.

Believe it or not, this impressive mansion sits atop what was once a city dump. In 1909, Ohio millionaire and philanthropist, Edward H. Everett, purchased the property. Everett earned his fortune, among other things, for inventing the crimped Coca Cola bottle cap. He was a pioneer in glassmaking (think fruit jars and soda and beer bottles), owned oil companies in Texas and Ohio, and had been a large shareholder of Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis.

The view from the dining room
into the conservatory
(Photo: Library of Congress)

To build his dream house, Everett hired the famous Washington architect, George Oakley Totten, Jr., who by then had already designed quite a few Washington embassies and public buildings and had served as an advisor on the remodeling of the U.S. Capitol Building and as chief designer to the Office of the Supervising Architect for the Department of the Treasury. The birth of the Republic of Turkey was still decades away, but ironically, Totten had strong ties to the region. He'd designed the first U.S. chancery in Istanbul and the residence for Izzet Pasha, the grand vezir (counselor) and prime minister of the Ottoman Empire. Totten's work impressed his client so much, he was offered (but declined) the post of "private architect to the sultan."

Totten liked to experiment with different architectural styles around Embassy Row, and Everett’s house was no exception. The architect blended three architectural periods in his design for the mansion: 16th-century Italian, 18th-century Romanesque, and 19th-century Art Deco, borrowing additional decorative features from Ottoman styles. It took five years to build, and when it was complete in 1915, the Edward Everett House, as it is still known, had some of the most innovative features of the time, including a Webster air washer and a built-in humidifier. 

The palatial, three-storied home also featured – still features, in fact – an enormous foyer with a black-and-white marble floor, teakwood floors everywhere else, marble fireplaces, ornamental ceilings in every room, a swimming pool in the basement, a ballroom, a musicians’ gallery, an elevator, and a rooftop garden. According to the society pages from newspapers of the time, the Everetts threw many a lavish party in this home, including festive musical evenings featuring singers from New York’s Metropolitan Opera. At least one party included 3,000 guests, an orchestra that played till 3 a.m., a lavish dinner, and footmen who wore “mulberry livery, with white silk stockings and pumps with silver buckles everywhere.” (Gotta feel sorry for those poor footmen.) 

 

After Everett’s death, the government of Turkey leased the space in 1932 from Everett’s widow then bought the house – including all of its furnishings – outright in 1936. Total cost, $265,000, though even back then the house was valued at more than $400,000.

Munir Ertegun
(Photo: Library of Congress)

Turkey was a young country at the time, only a couple decades out from when the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I and Ataturk, who’d led the country’s national independence movement and founded the modern republic, still served as its first president.

A jazz enthusiast, Munir Ertegun, a career diplomat, became Turkey’s first ambassador and moved into the new Washington embassy and residence, where he lived and worked until his death in 1944. Ertegun’s sons, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, shared their father’s love of music and went on to found Atlantic Records and discover such legendary artists as Led Zeppelin, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Otis Redding, John Coltrane ... on and on, right up to Kid Rock. At one time, Ahmet served as chairman for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. How’s that for circling the globe?

Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun

Before their rise to music mogul status, Ahmet and Nesuhi urged their father to host jazz events at home in D.C., a tradition that the embassy continues into today. The Turkish embassy was one of the few places in the highly segregated D.C. of the 1930s and 1940s to host racially mixed musicians and audiences. According to the current ambassador, angry southern senators complained to the first Turkish ambassador about his custom of not only letting black musicians into his home but letting them come in through the front door. Ambassador Ertegun kindly responded to at least one of these white senators that he too was welcome to attend the concerts if he was interested, only he would have to enter through the back door. Among the notable guests who played in the Erteguns' home: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Lena Horne. 

Lawrence Brown and Johnny Hodges
perform at the embassy in the 1930s

Last year, the embassy won a “best embassy” distinction in a Washington Post survey, following a series of jazz concerts it held with Jazz at Lincoln Center in honor of the former diplomat’s late sons and to commemorate Black History Month.

In an interesting side note, when Ambassador Munir Ertegun passed away in 1944, Washington had no mosque at which to hold his funeral. As a result, the beautiful Islamic Center of Washington was born, the movement to build it led primarily by the Washington diplomatic community. The center, to this day, is controlled by a board of governors made up ambassadors. Heard of anything like that before?

But back to the house. Now that there are no hired guns – human or otherwise – guarding the historic old mansion, I might finally be able to pay it a visit, camera in tow.

The Grand Bazaar

I’ve never been much of a shopper and never lasted long in a mall. Within an hour my eyes would glaze over; after all, Macy’s, JCPenny, and Nordstrom offered the same merchandise, slightly varied by quality, style, and price. Shopping has never been my favorite activity.

Until I found myself in Kapali Çarsi – Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

Many guide books claim the Grand Bazaar to be the world's largest covered structure, with over 75 acres of indoor space. In comparison, the Pentagon in Washington DC boasts only 34 acres and the Giza Pyramid in Egypt occupies a meager 13. Kapali Çarsi, or Covered Market, is the world's oldest shopping mall, with over 25,000 merchants, 4,400 shops, 3000 firms, 2,200 rooms, 40 hans (inns), 22 gates, over a dozen restaurants, 4 fountains, 2 mosques, 1 police stations, and 1 old Hamam (bathhouse), all co-existing in 65 covered streets, each of which has a name and is reflected on a map. And while being an absolute shopper’s paradise, it is also a token of human creativity. Everything is bought and sold in the Grand Bazaar, starting from the unlimited variety of the Turkish carpets to glazed tiles and pottery, and from unique authentic jewelry to leather apparel of all styles, sizes, and colors.

Originally founded by Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, who took Constantinople in 1453 and made it the new capital city of the Turkish Empire, the bazaar grew during the reign of Suleyman the First and became a small city in itself. Since then, it has survived three earthquakes and close to a dozen fires, each time rising from the ashes like an Ottoman Phoenix. Kapali Çarsi consists of several bedestens (buildings) and multipl hans (inns where specific type of products are sold and often made right on premises.) The best and most expensive jewelry was and still is traded in the Old Bedesten, the first bazaar building raised, while the Sandal Bedesten, a lofty 16th century hall of twenty domes resting on twelve stone piers, held various auctions in the past. In 1880, the bazaar also included 16 designated drinking-water posts, 8 wells for the use of fire-pumps, 10 “houses of prayer," 12 “strongrooms” for “keeping objects of high value,” and even a school. To this day, members of the same trade set up their shops in the same area, which is still reflected in the street names: tassel makers, purse makers, belt makers, skullcap makers, and so on.

I fell in love with Kapali Çarsi the first time I visited Turkey. I admired its churning sea of humanity, with merchandise as diverse as life itself, and its traders as warm and welcoming as only Middle Easterners can be. They would bargain with you to death, but they would let you leave their shop with a smile as long you would smile back – even if you didn’t buy a thing. And they would treat you as royalty if you purchased a nugget. They would order you coffee and tea on the house while you browsed through their merchandise, they would tell you their family stories and listen to yours while you made your choices and they would custom-make your item while you waited sipping your tea. It was unforgettable and somehow inspiring, and as much as I resisted the tourist’s urge to go on a shopping spree, I had to – for the sake of memories.

I’ve known women who wanted to be taken to famous restaurants and designer boutiques on their birthdays and anniversaries. When I was about to cross into yet another decade, I decided I wanted to go shopping in the Grand Bazaar on my birthday. That, of course, meant we had to travel to Turkey again, but it was worth the trip.

It still remains my birthday wish, year after year. Alas, it doesn't get granted every time I get older.