Into the Wild East

I have been doing a lot of traveling.  Almost every weekend I am away.  I feel like I want to take maximum advantage of my time here and if someone is going to show me around I should take them up on it.  Two weekends ago (longer now) I went with ARIT (whom I have written about before) to eastern Turkey.

We flew to Sivas and out of Elazig.  Which are almost directly south of the compass rose in the map above.  It was the farthest east I have been in Turkey.

The flight was out of Sabhina Gocken airport on the east side of Istanbul on the Asian side at 7am.  Since it can take an hour to get there (even so early on a Saturday morning) I arranged to share a cab with another traveler I had met on other ARIT trips who also lives near me.  We met at the bus stop and hailed a cab.  Forty five minutes and 60TL (each) later we arrived at the airport.  Check in was fine and we made it to the gate where the rest of our party was assembling.  I have been on a bunch of trips with this organiziation and one of the best parts is getting to know other folks who also travel with them.  In addition to Neil, who I shared the cab with, I also immediately recognized Sue and Sandy as well as Kim and Chris from our overnight to Eskisir, so I knew it was going to be a good trip. 

Our breakfast/tea stop was at the top of the citidel mound in Sivas where we could look down on the city.  Scott (our fearless leader) said that several civilizations worth of citidel analogs were probably on that spot since it was a natural defensive spot in the valley.  From there we could see into the medrese shown below.  Scott and Tony (the ARIT rep on the trip) had tried to get official permission to go into it, but never heard back.  It is being restored, but these contracts are given to the lowest bidder, not necessarily a company that knows anything about the period or how to restore it to what it was.  They just fix it up.  So there is a lawsuit to get a real restoration architect to do it, which means all work has stopped.  On the plus side, that means that it is unguarded and open, so we ended up just walking in. 

It was all about the portal, here an over and over agin during this trip. The turquise tile work has been replaced with paint, but I really like the puzzle piece arch right over the door.

 Since this was a school (madrese is a religious school, which back in the day was pretty much the only school there was) there was no reason for it to have minerets, so the fact that it did was a show offy thing.  Apparently on festival days, they would throw food down from them.

The small doors would lead to the students cells and the big arch way would lead to a classroom.  There were three classrooms, one on each side of the building.  Open to the central courtyard.

This 4 sided style of medrese was very common, but in warmer places.  It is unclear why this was built this way here, where even in early April it was pretty chilly.  Students would come from all over the country side for their education, and would stay for a while (several years) until they had learned what they needed to know to go back to their towns or if they showed particular promise to go on to study with someone else. 

What is known about these 'public' buildings comes from their foundation documents.  When a school or a mosque was established by a pasa or patron, there were always many support buildings given as well.  For instance the school may have farm land with tennants on it which would supply the food for the school, there might be a market place as well whose merchants supported the school when they paid rent for thier stalls.  All of this supporting infrastructure provided for the school, but the document gives historians information about the town, how many people were in what sorts of professions, where people lived, what religions they practiced, etc.

The tile work inside one of the classrooms.

Celing close up.

Street scene, note the lack of traffic, and the sign with a great new Turksih word: yayaya it means 'to the pedestrian.' the rest of it suggests that when turning right on red you should yeild to the pedestrian should there be one. 

Some boys at a public fountain.  It is frowned upon to charge people for water (other than bottled water) it is a sign of hospitality in a town for there to be public fountains. 

Our next stop in Sivas was the down town area where there were several more buildings of the same era (1270 is the year that pops into my head).  One of the curious things was that all of these large building projects were happening in the same year.

If you start at the bottom and work your way up, you can tell that the battern was changed.  The other side was identical, but this change is apparently very unusual and no one quite understands why it was done.  Did the artisan get sick? The architect change his mind?

The front wall is all that is left of this building, which I think was a mosque, but I am not sure.  This is the other side of the door with the changing design on the portal in the previous picture. 

I thought this was an ancient pac man maze, but it turns out it is Arabic for the four great supporters of Allah or something like that. 

A hittite lion outside the archeology museum in Sivas.  The hittites were here a long long time ago and I guess there were lions here too back then. 

On the road from Sivas to Digvri.  You can see how much snow there still was even in late April. 

This is a burial house with a sarcophogus in side.  There were many of them in Divrigi.

A fixer upper, Ottoman style.

The complex from the way up the hill.  The mosque on the left and the hospital on the right. 

The mosque (left) and hospital (right) complex at Divrigi

The entrance to the hospital.  It is these portals which make this an interesting building. 

The entrance to the mosque. 

The two headed eagle of someone.

The fountain inside of the hospital.  Water exits through the spiral, providing a trickling sound which is soothing to the patients, or makes them constantly need to pee.  The view is from the second floor, which was accessible only by a crazy stair case.

The citdel of Divrigi.

The view from the citidel.  Harry drammers as my father would say. 

The view of the mosque/hospital complex from the hill.

Proof I was there. 

After Divrigi we went along the Euphrates river to a little town historically called Egin (pronounced een) but more recently called Kemaliye.  Back in the day they were very cut off from the rest of the country, with no way to connect with the south west.  So the folks of Egin started digging at the mountain with pick axes.  They got about 1km into the rock during the 1800s.  Then there was war and they got distracted.  After the republic was established, they started again and went another km before they finally got the governments attention and they brought in dynamite and finished the tunnel in 2002.  It is still bare rock and even the road surface isn't paved. 

There were 8km of hole in the mountain that looked just like this.

There was no light in the tunnel except where they connected to the river valley. 

There were great views from the light holes, even though it was raining and dreary.  The holes in the mountain provided not only light, but also a place to let the rock out so they didn't have to cart it all the way back they way they came.

I was glad that our drivers were from the town of Kemaliye and had been on this road many times.  Tony had also warned us about which side of the van to sit on depending on if we wanted to look down the cliff or not. 

The Euphrates river.

A Kongal dog.  I was disapointed we didn't stop in the town of Kongal, as the dogs are quite famous for being enormous.  This was a mini version. 

The street with our hotel was nicely restored.

These iron door knockers are everywhere and famously come from Kemaliye.

The town was very nice.  Well organized, nicely restored and geared towards tourism (mostly Turks).  The people were  entrepreneurial, hard working and focused on bettering the town.  There was a tourism school/natural history museum, all the streets were paved and they built the tunnel with pick axes, you have to admire that combination of talents. 

The spring and run off powered the flour mill inside this building, but this picture just highlights the natural beauty of the place. 

Kim and Chris drinking a non-caffinated coffee substitute made from a roasted nut in the pistatio family.  I am not sure how much it tasted like coffee, or pistatios, but it was interesting. 

Where do you park?  I park on top of the WC!

Cat picture.

All of the area's children were assembled for the Children's day celebration.  We saw the parade, but didn't stick around long enough to see the dancing demonstrations.

This was just a small sample of the water rushing through town. 

There was so much water rushing through town it was amazing, and yet we couldnt' take our boat tour because the river was too low.  The reason is that there was so much water this winter, they haven't closed the dam yet, so all the water is just running.  Only when they close the dam, which there is still too much water to do, will the water be high enough for the boats.  Bummer, this is the second ARIT trip I have been on when the boat trip has been canceled. 

Heleny and Dick chosing an iron knocker.

Apparently there are male and female knockers.  They sound different so you know if you need to cover if a man is at the door or not if it is a woman.  On several doors we saw three knockers, two identical and one different.  I have to wonder if the individual was the male, if only that female knocker usually come in pairs. 

A poem with unclear meaning, but greatly celebrated. 

There was some debate amongst the Turkish speakers but if I remember correctly this translates to something like:

Even if I leave this village

This village will always be our village

I can see other things and wonder other places,

but this village will always be our village.

I can actually read some of the words. From the begining, this is what I get: "This village is ________________, this is our village ___________________.  _________________ from, _______________, from this is our village ________________________."  Ok, so I didn't get any of the verbs, but I was still feeling pretty good about it. 



A very precarious house with a great view.  (this was the best of a dozen pictures I tried to take from across the aisle in the moving bus as we were leaving Kemaliye.)

A spring of very different water, adding to the Euphartes river. 

The aforementioned dam which isn't daming yet.  Coincidentally, I think I took a picture of this dam in miniature at Miniaturk early in the school year.

If there is a 'Left Behind' series for Muslims, this could be the cover art.



some guy who looks pretty pised off.

We had literally 8 minutes to see this castle in Haput.  But there wasnt much there to see, so it was ok.

I would have liked to get a better picture of these clouds/blossoming cherry? trees on the hill side in the sun, but we were late for the airport already.

Kemaliye was great. It was very refreshing and rejuvinating.  I could have spent more time there.  In general this was a very nice trip.  Not as rush rush as some ARIT trips I have been on.  Perhaps there was less history for me to forget or not understand.  As always the folks were very nice and interesting and friendly.  It is nice to get off campus, into the world and be with folks that don't reinforce my school persona and grouchiness.