3,000 km Dash Across Turkey

Two years after leaving Turkey we finally managed to carve out enough time to get the whole family across the globe and back to Turkey. It was the only home our kids ever really knew so it was a big deal. While visiting an old home and taking in all the little things of your old life is deeply meaningful, it doesn’t make for a very interesting read.  A walk down memory lane with kids mostly involved the mundane things of daily life like walking around the old neighbourhood, picking out favorite snacks from a familiar corner store, visiting lots of playgrounds, and taking in a million other little sights, sounds, and smells that made up this place that was once our home.

But for kids, mostly snacks.

Thankfully, at least for the sake of this blog, we also took a bit of time to make a detour from visiting people to visit Mardin: one of Turkeys most unique provinces. The province of Mardin is home to four major people groups with their own distinct cultural traditions that have each played a part in shaping the character of the region. Arabs, Kurds, Syriacs, and Turks have all lived here at the north end of the Syrian plain, building mosques, churches, schools, mansions, monasteries, and villages out of the honey-coloured stone.

While I had been to Mardin twice before and seen many of the sights (once in summer 2017 when I hadn’t figured out my camera and then later in a week of cold snow in 2022), my family hadn’t so I got to play at being a tour guide for the week.

Our first stop in our tour of Mardin was the city of Midyat, a large center in the east of Mardin Province and the center of the Syriac peoples within Turkey. The Syriacs are a Christian minority descendant from the Assyrian peoples and known for speaking Aramaic (the language of the 1st century Jews as well as Jesus and the disciples) as well as their silversmiths and the beautiful architecture of their ancient churches.

As we made our slow way through the narrow winding streets of ancient Midyat, I was shocked to find crowds of tourists, hawkers selling flashy trinkets, a couple of horses for tourists to pose with, and tacky LED hearts for selfie takers. Parking had always been a nightmare in the historic heart of the town, but now the spaces were choked with various luxury cars rather than beat up Fiats and Tofas, the staple car of villagers all over Turkey.

Sometime in the past few years Midyat had become incredibly touristic.

We checked into our hotel, a beautiful stone building of fresh pale stones which told us it was a new construction unlike the deeper tones of the weather worn stones of the historic buildings. I asked the bellhop what had happened and where all these visitors had come from. He explained that tourists from other parts of Turkey had begun flocking to Midyat in the last few years after seeing the beautiful old city in their favorite TV shows. It is actually incredible how much influence Turkish soap operas have on the tourism market in Turkey. While Turkish tourists are the majority its not uncommon to run into Arabs, Greeks, and even South Americans visiting sites they saw on Turkish shows!

Over the next few days as we wandered the city more and spoke to people, I was struck by the way in which this influx of tourists had affected the city. As we spent a few days in the city, we I couldn’t help but notice the attitude of the locals. Most were less than friendly, and some were outright rude with us and our Turkish friend who was travelling with us. Even people that I had met and had tea with on previous visits were somewhat standoffish. It really seemed like many locals were burnt out by the sudden oversaturation of tourists which, while it brings money in, also upsets their normal way of life and the character of the city.

And yet the effects and changes of tourism in Midyat seems to be more complex than simply “bad”. While some of the town (especially where our hotel was) had certainly lost its authenticity, this wasn’t the case everywhere. Outside of that most touristic square where we had first arrived, much of Midyat had remained relatively unchanged. Sheep were still brought to and from their pens in the heart of the city every morning and night, locals still slept on the rooftops, and the elderly still spent their time gathering on stoops and prepping food all day long.

Midyat is a living thing and so is prone to change. Buildings have always been ruined and new ones built and, thanks in part to the money brought in by tourism, much of the new construction is true to the character of the city with real stone walls, stacked terraces, and vaulted rooms. Many of the new buildings are being built where abandoned ruins had been a few years ago. Change is nothing new, but sudden and overwhelming change often brings difficulty and resentment with it.

We ventured outside of Midyat city a few times to visit some of the villages of Tur Abdin with their ancient churches and monasteries. In August the fields were short cropped and yellow after the harvest and dust hung heavy in the air making the horizon a pale gray rather than blue. We were struck by how much friendlier these villagers were to us, quick to chat and invite us in for refreshments. Apart from a couple of the most well-known sites, most of these places are well outside the scope of what most tourists would venture to see and locals certainly haven’t had to wrestle with changes to their way of life brought about by flocks of tourists.

In the far south of Mardin we visited the city of Nusaybin, a Turkish city that creates a little anomaly in the Turkish-Syrian border by jutting south into Syria’s northern territory. We were here to visit a sight I hadn’t yet been to. The church of Mor Yakub is all that is now left of the school of Nisibis, one of the oldest educational institutions in Christendom and one that was deeply and dramatically tied to the theological development of the Christian Faith and the geopolitics of the time.

The school of Nisibis (the name of the city in the 4th century AD) was founded in 350 AD by Mor Yakup and taught Theology, Science, and Philosophy. It was a major center of the Church of the East (a union of churches ranging from the Middle East to Central Asia and south into India), which has spent the majority of its existence as a minority religion within various different empires. Mor Yakup, the founder of the school and his student, Mor Ephrem, are still venerated all over the world and their relics can be found from Canada to Armenia. In fact, the relic of the Ark of Mor Yakup is still on display in Armenia at the Etchmiadzin Treasury Museum that I had visited in 2023.

It would be impossible to sum up the significance of this site in this blog so it was rather striking that the building, surrounded by ruins, could be seemingly so insignificant. But this is ultimately the character of such sites for the Church of the East where they lacked the official power and wealth that Christians in Europe and the Holy Land had access to.

All of this deep history was in the back of my mind as we walked around the site, but at 47 degrees Celsius (that’s probably a million degrees in Fahrenheit) it was hard to think of much more than how to find some shade. August, as it turns out, was not the best time of year for us to visit after two years of readjusting to Canadian temperatures.

In chatting with the warden of the church (inside in the shade) we found out that I had met his uncle in 2022 and sat on his terrace drinking tea and eating nuts from his trees in Hah (Anıtlı). As there were no more Syriacs living in Nusaybin, he had moved down to keep the church in order and keep alive their people’s connection to their ancient sites.

On our way from Mardin to Antalya where the friends and familiar sights of our neighbourhood awaited us, we stopped in to see some of the highlight sites along the way though we had to pass by hundreds of other sites that we didn’t have time for.

There’s nothing more exciting than an underground city for the kids so we made a detour to this place…

We spent one night in the city of Gaziantep and even though we knew we wouldn’t have time to do this incredible city justice, we set out to walk the streets for a couple hours before calling it a night.

From our hotel in the old city, we walked a short distance through tightly packed Ottoman-style houses of timber and plaster with each floor cantilevered out further than the one below. We were headed towards the old market district which was on the far side of Gaziantep Castle from our hotel when I spotted the shop of a coppersmith, the inside glowing a deep orange from the thousands of engraved copper pieces reflecting the light. The workbench outside told us this wasn’t just a salesman but a craftsman which means we were less likely to have someone trying to sell us machine pressed pieces as if they were genuine hand made ones.

The wares inside were a collection of all types, plenty of simple daily use items as well as numerous magnificently detailed pieces, more often than not collecting dust. Plates, teapots, cups, water pitchers, vases of all sizes, massive trays, tiny decorative boxes, more variety than you could imagine, were stacked from floor to ceiling making it difficult to even walk in the tightly packed space.

As we browsed, we asked the shop keeper, Hasan Üzümcü, the price of various items. He often cringed and hesitated, sometimes telling us the price but more often simply telling us not to ask about that one. On some of the pieces he had, instead of a price tag, the number of days (or weeks or months) he had spent making it. He seemed relieved when the subject changed from prices to the difference between mass produced machine pressed wares vs wares that were hammered or etched by hand, and quickly led us outside to his work bench to show how, using a tiny chisel the size of a pen tip, he cut patterns into the copper or, with a hammer tapped the copper into a dimpled surface like a golf ball. When we eventually went back inside and prices came up again he again became uncomfortable. The fact that our eyes were naturally drawn to the most unique and ornate pieces was not helping matters.

I tried to relieve Hasan Usta by telling him that I understood why such time consuming and meticulously crafted pieces would be expensive. I told him about the traditional quilters, cobblers, and boat builders I had met that all faced the same problem of trying to compete with mass produced imports in an economy that is already struggling. It wasn’t easy to convince him that I actually wanted to spend money out of love for the art and a desire to see these trades continue (also, it makes more sense for me to buy a copper vase than a handmade boat). Without sales these crafts will slowly be lost from the regular culture and only remain to be paraded out occasionally at museum or cultural fairs.

He seemed a bit more at ease but, as soon as price came up again he interrupted and said “enough about this, lets go outside and drink tea.”

Outside in the shadow of Gaziantep we sat around a massive, beautifully etched copper tray and were brought cups of a light spiced tea I’d never heard of before. We talked about his work and the difficulties that these traditional crafts have faced in the past decades. How years ago there were far more craftsmen than there are now and how no young people are taking up the trade. This last bit was said with a grin aimed at his own son, whose help in the business was to run his father’s social media while he studies at university.

As we sat conversation ranged from the richness of Turkey’s cultural mosaic, politics, to the 2023 earthquake that destroyed large sections of the castle we were sitting next to. While the epicenter of the earthquake was in Gaziantep province it wasn’t nearly as disastrous as it was in neighbouring Hatay and Kahramanmaraş. Even still 4000 lost their lives in Gaziantep.

Long after our tea was done and most of the neighbourhood had gone dark as shops closed and the last of the daylight dwindled we finally went back inside to pick out a piece. Now Hasan felt even more guilty and tried to assure us that he didn’t serve us tea just to convince us to buy something.

In the end we agreed that we would each “hak vermek” one another, which is to say we would both “do right” and with honesty give each other what they are due. I want to honour him and show his craft the value and respect I know it deserves but first he had to be honest with me and tell me a genuine price and not undersell himself. With this important business out of the way we began the task of sales once again and finally picked out a Turkish double-teapot set made by him. Even then this was made difficult as he did everything in his power to stop us from buying anything at all.

He was possibly the worst salesman I had ever met and one of the most enjoyable people I have had the pleasure of meeting. I was reminded that this is what I love about travel and travel photography. It’s the ability to spend hours delving into the lives and thoughts of the people you meet and capture these characters and the culture they represent at the same time. Not culture in the grand sense of politics, architecture, and the great movements of history but rather elements of all those things wrapped up in the daily lives of real people.

The only issue was that I haven’t done this in a long time and, engrossed in conversation I forgot to take more than just a couple of pictures.

Part two coming soon!