Mushrooms

It has been miserable rainy here for most of the week.  The temperature dropped 20 F from Monday to Tuesday and with the short days and long nights it has been hard to be motivated to do anything.  None the less, I was excited about the ARIT trip I had signed up for on Saturday, to tour the Belgrade Forest looking for the water system that fed Ottoman Istanbul and for mushrooms.  Perhaps it was my determination, perhaps our guide, Gencer has a special connection with Allah, or perhaps the storm had just blown itself out, but Saturday morning I woke up to beautiful blue skies and glorious sun.  It could not have been a nicer day for a hike in the woods.  

We met at ARIT at 8:30 and since so many folks had canceled (chickened out) the 11 of us were in a service bus.  Our first stop was Bahcekoy for borek (pastry and cheese) it was very tasty and a good start to a long walk.  

One of the few parts left over from the aquaduct that brought water from the Belgrade forest to Istanbul.  This is Sultan Mahmut Kemeri in Bahcekoy. It was lucky that they made the pillars far enough apart for cars to go through or this would have had to come down long ago.

 We got off the bus about 5 minutes farther north from the borekci in what looked like an alley way and started walking.  The forest has plain (plane?) trees, chestnuts, oaks, and black pine trees, which aren't native, but have been planted by the forestry service.  There was a lot of undergrowth as well, ferns, bushes, brambles and of course mushrooms.  It was a beautiful day for a walk.  The leaves littered the ground, which was for the most part maintained trail as wide as a lane of road and flat.  There were some times when it was steep or slippery, but in general it was very easy going.

Our first stop inside the forest was the Topuzlu Bent or dam.  It was the oldest of the dams we were going to see, built in 1750.  Coming out from the dam was a very small creek, almost all of the water was routed into pipes which were carried via aqueduct by gravity to Taksim with branches that brought water to the villages along the Bosporus including Arnavutkoy along the way.  I dont know much about the history of dams, nor when people started making them, but this is definately an old one and it is still in use and maintained today.  What is particulary interesting to me is the shape of it, which you can see in the picture below.  It is straight at the edges and then with an pointed arch in the middle supported by two think towers one third and two thirds the way across the river.  The Ottoman architects were good at making mosques at this time, so they knew about distributing weight with arches and pillars so this is what they did.  They had no cement or rebar or anything besides a simple mortor and gravity to hold the rocks in place and the water back. And it has been working for 350 years?!

Topuzlu Bent, Belgrade Forest, Taksim water supply 1750.

 We then had quite a walk on the way to the second oldest dam so our focus changed to mushrooms.  I hope the library has a mushroom book because the names of all these fungi went by too fast for me to remember and report them.  It was amazing after we started really looking and knowing what to look for, how many mushrooms there were, everywhere, and so many different types.  Gencer stopped and told us about some of them and helped us with basic mushroom morphology.  He told us which ones were safe to eat and which ones were poisonous. I was really looking forward to collecting some and cooking them, but he warned against that and in the end I didn't bring any home.

You can see that the gills on this mushroom dont make it all the way to the stem, but they don't split either.   

This mushroom is nearing the end of its roughly one week life.  You can tell because the cap skin is starting to shrink and invert the umbrella.  This will release the rest of the spores from the gills if any are left.  

This one is a horn of plenty or trumpet mushroom.  They are supposed to be particularly nice dried.  

Gencer explaining about the morphology of this mushroom.

This mushroom doesn't have gills, it stores its spores in a sponge.  Unfortunately in this picture along with many I took that day, I couldn't get the focus to be where I wanted it to be, so the middle of the stem is in focus, but the sponge on the cap is not.  

Two old mushrooms doing their best to procreate.  At one point Gencer said that if every spore that every mushroom produced ended up making a new mushroom the earth would be completely covered.  Fortuntately, less than 1% of them do, so we are safe, for the time being.  

As you can see, most of the mushrooms we saw were coming up from the decaying leaves.  Mushrooms are part of the recycling system for the forest.  They produce none of their own food, lacking chlorophyll and therefore being unable to photosynthesize.  Some decompose leaves breaking down the sugars the trees had already made to support themselves.

These are the most deadly of the mushrooms we saw on our walk, if I remember correctly they were called death cap.  They are pretty.

This is a young mushroom and there are two ways to tell, first the cap isn't open all the way, so the spores haven't been released.  Secondly, you can still see the shell like structure the mushroom came from.  I missed the beginning of the explanation, but I think the proto-mushroom forms in a covering, which then it breaks through to join the world.  

This is a totally different type of mushroom, called a coral mushroom.  I had never seen anything like it above sea level.

The actual fungus network under a log.

Fungi are actually huge underground structures, the mushrooms we usually see are just the fruiting bodies produced by the mushrooms when it is time to release spore to reproduce.  We turned over a log and exposed this gossamer webbing of the actual fungus itself.  It is quite something to think about how extensively this network can extend under ground.  When several different types of mushrooms are in the same area of the forest, does that mean their networks are intermingled?  What do they do when they run into each other?  

The end of a puffball.  Gencer tapped it with his finger to show the spores poofing into the air.  I couldn't get the camera to focus appropriately.  Apparently when it is ready to burst an animal brushing by or even a heavy rain can pop it.  

Here's a whole colony of fungi.

This looks like a family portrait.  This type of mushroom is related to the red topped on that the smurfs live in.  They weren't nearly big enough for someone three apples high to live in.  

This is a mushroom being eaten by other fungi.  It kind of looks like a moldy decapitated head.  

 Gencer used this as a reason why we shouldn't collect even the edible mushrooms.  While the mushroom itself might be ok, the mushroom eating the ok mushroom may or may not.  Since even small amounts of the second fungus (smaller than we would be able to see) could make us sick.

Checkout crazy Harold's crazy hair.

Valide Bendi, 1797.  This was the second dam both chronologically and on our visit.  

 After a couple of hours of mushroom hunting and several bends and choices of path and even some times where we seemed to go off the trail all together.  At first I thought I might be able to follow the route again, but soon, I realized I would be utterly lost.  The second dam, Valide Bendi, holds more water than the first dam (which is on a diferent river).  It isn't as tall, but it is wider.  You can also see that the arch system has been refined.  The pillars are not as big and the arch extends the whole width of the river.

Notice the pipes, most of which are blocked.  This was how the water flow was measured and regulated.

 In this case, there was no river coming out, all of the water was forced into pipes which join the aqueduct.  I guess the water pressure produced by the mass of water is what give the force needed to come out of the fountain at the other end.  It makes the public fountains that are everywhere through out the city make more sense.  Some water must also go to the cisterns, which I guess were accessed by wells rather than at pressure though the fountains.  Serbians were brought to this region to maintain the water works, which is how the forest got named the Belgrade Forest.

The front of the Valide Benti, all the water goes to pipes.  Clearly I am not wet.

My shadow on the river, next to the monument that that thanks the sultan and the valide for their magnanimity in making the dam and supplying water to the people for free.  

A dead mushroom with great gills.

The third dam, Sultan Mahmut Bendi.  1839

 The third dam was the most like the modern hydroelectric dams I have seen.  It is one giant curve with no towers.  It was at this dam that someone explained that bent is old Turkish, from Persian.  In English it leads to bound, and then to bondage, which I thought was interesting.

This is the cage mushroom, its spore are on the inside and when it is new it smells awful and attracts flies into the cage.  They get the spores on their legs and wings and distribute them.  The only other mushroom that needs animal help, are truffles.  

These are in the jelly family of fungi.  The have the consistency of Haribo jelly peaches.  They are called Judas ear mushrooms.

This dog was following us for more than an hour.  He kept up with the last person in our group, and it felt like he was escorting us, making sure no one got lost.  Also in this picture, you can see the ridge that divides the water that goes into the Ottoman water system we had seen (on the left) and the Roman water system which takes water to Sultanahmet instead of Taksim

This fungus and all 'bracket' fungi are sarco-something fungi meaning they live on dead wood.

More bracket mushrooms

It is hard to tell in this picture but this mushroom was an excellent dark red/purple color and very hard.

I couldn't get a picture of this one that I was satisfied with.  To me it looked like an aerial view of a densely populated city.  

This is the remains of a stump of a tree much much bigger than anything else in the forest.  Gencer thinks it is a remnant from when the Ottomans decided to empty out the forest of some rebels so they burned the forest down to chase them out.  There would have been much bigger trees before the fire.  

This region was oddly lacking in undergrowth.  Gencer said it is because this is where the original settlement was 300-200 years ago.  The folks were forced to leave and the material used to make their buildings has been largely recycled and reused.  These trees are much younger than the empty space, and I thought that the undergrowth would be faster growing and return before the trees, so I have my doubts about his assertion. 

This branch of mistle toe was just lying on the ground.  It is a parasite and had come from the high branches of a nearby tree, probably during yesterday's storm.  It was a coup, both to find it and to be able to identify it.  I decided not to bring it home as I didn't want to deal with the lines of people all clamoring to kiss me if I should hang it up in my apartment.  

The consensus among the walkers was that this is deadly nightshade, but our expert wouldn't confirm or deny.  Again, focus issues. 

This is the ruin of the church for the Serbian village that isn't there any more.  Only the front wall is intact, perhaps because no one wanted to scavenge from the holiest wall of the church.  It does surprise me that it isn't symmetric.  

The last mushrooms of the trip, these tiny ones were growing on a living tree along with moss.

Lunch - well earned and quietly devoured. 

We got to lunch at about 2:30, later than expected, and after about 5 hours of walking.  It was a cute rustic establishment and the food was very tasty (although I would have eaten almost anything at that point.)  The yogurt is made there with part cows milk and part buffalo milk, it stood up in blocks on the table and was very good.  I was kind of surprised we ate outside, but it wasn't too bad.  As Kathy remarked, it will probably be our last outside meal of the year.  After lunch, back in the bus and back home.  My feet were sore and I am stiff today, but it was a great trip.  It was nice to put a little natural history in the regional history tour.