Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 10

Up early today, we rent the boat of a local fisherman.  We’ve spent most of the last week within a hundred yards of the sea, but this is the first time we have ventured out on it.  In fact, if our difficulties have shown anything, it is the unlikelihood of coastal travel except by sea.  In summer, this is extraordinarily difficult country -- arid, steep, and broken underfoot.  In contrast, the sea could not be more welcoming.  There is scarcely a wave upon it, and the temperature close to the coast is like a bath.  There is no doubt that we could have rowed the same distance that we walked with less effort.  Rowed, hell, we could have swum the whole way with less effort.  This insight is crucial to understanding the history of Lycia, which for thousands of years has been about controlling the seaports and thus the valleys that run down to the seaports.  To conquer the port was to conquer the valley, because valley-dwellers had no practical way to move their goods into any other valley.  Coastal travel was all by sea. Touring by boat brings us in some ways closer to the history of Lycia than hiking.   

We’re taking the boat out to a “sunken city.”  Aperlae was not the only Roman town to drop into the Mediterranean during the earthquake of 40 A.D.  Offshore from Uçağiz is an island where another old town suffered the same fate.  We putter along the steep-sided coast of the island for a kilometer or more, passing the remains of a prosperous Roman town – wharves, steps, and houses cascading down to the water’s edge.  All of these structure have dropped below the waves, where they still can be seen extending under the water to the old wharf line perhaps five or ten meters offshore.

                        The area is aggressively protected.  No swimming is allowed, no snorkeling, no diving, even mooring is discouraged.  Here, for the first time in days I feel like I am in western Europe, reading the rules in all their length and multilingual seriousness.  I miss the casual comfort with the detritus of history that we felt at Chimaera and Aperlae. 

                        To give ourselves a short last hike, we ask to be dropped at Simena.  This is the largest town in Turkey that is not connected to the Turkish road system.  It has a well-preserved Genovese fortress on its hilltop. The walls are topped with shelters the size of tombstones, giving the top of the fort the appearance of a child’s carved pumpkin mouth. Inside the fortress are structures left by earlier settlers, including a pocket-sized amphitheater, with seats for perhaps 200 people cut straight from the stone.

                        Everywhere we have gone, the best-preserved remnants of Greek life are the theaters.  But here, looking at this tiny clone of the theaters we’ve seen all across Lycia, it occurs to me that for the Greeks the need to build these things must have been almost primal.  Why else carve one from stone for such a tiny community?  Theater must have had the same power for the Greeks that television has today – so powerful that even the poorest citizens and communities demand access.

                        We head out the back of the fortress, past a suburban sprawl of Lycian tombs and down the trail that links Simena to mainland Turkey. Once down the hill, we need only cross a cow posture (“Must be rich,” I now find myself thinking when I see someone’s cow), and we are back at the old Moslem cemetery.  As we march on, I can’t help noticing the trash along the road.  There’s trash everywhere in Turkey.  Part of the problem is that plastic floats, so it tends to wash up on the shores of even the most remote and charming inlet.  But another part of the problem is the Turks themselves.  They litter casually.  I’ve seen something like this in Korea too, where massive numbers of people hike into the mountains to enjoy the nature beauty and leave behind a new mountain of trash.  Maybe it’s part of the development process – perhaps there’s a point in a nation’s prosperity where it’s an irresistible thrill to be rich enough to throw away a potentially useful container. 

                        This is our last hike. We are on the bus to Antalya by early afternoon.  We check into the Doğan Hotel, but what we really want is an old-fashioned Turkish bath.  The hotel sends us to a 600-year old hamam just up the road. For two hours, we are scraped, pulled, massaged, and lathered within an inch of our lives.  A fair amount of skin comes off in the process, and a good thing, too, because the only way to remove some of this dirt is to take the skin with it.  At last, we drag ourselves back up the stairs. After the inside of the hamam, what had been the swelter of the town seems as cool and gentle as an air-conditioned office.  We sip apple tea and trade stories with the hamam staff. 

We are content.  We are clean.  We are finished.

Comments

[DensityDuck]

"Maybe it’s part of the development process – perhaps there’s a point in a nation’s prosperity where it’s an irresistible thrill to be rich enough to throw away a potentially useful container."

Seems to me that it's the other way around--it's not so much that it's a thrill to throw away a potentially-useful item, but that you're rich enough to care about where the food wrapper goes once you've finished with the food.

[nh]

Both notions are false. There are simply bugger-all rubbish bins.