October 9

(in which our heroes do not spend their life savings on a flying carpet)

Woke up feeling about 3 million times better.

Walkabout in the village. It's quiet: only the occasional car. It's pretty rustic - all of Turkey that we've seen has a good dose of falling-down houses. Mustafapasa is a town that has lost a lot of its young folks to other places where more is happening... that's kinda sad.

But there are nice things happening here - we ran across a house that was preparing for a wedding. The tradition is to invite people into your house, and we were there, so we got a little house tour and pictures with the family. Alp is good, but there is no way that he arranged this one.

I am sure that if a Turkish tour group had shown up at our wedding, I would have been far less hospitable. Probably not impolite, but much more baffled and less inclined to play host.

There was grape syrup making, chili sauce making, pumpkin harvests, donkeys - all very picturesque to the point of seeming staged, but no. Like the opening scene of a musical before the song. Of course, New York City looks like that to me too.

The village has a strong Greek accent; the whole region dos. This is one of the areas of Turkey that had a big Greek population before the Revolution, which included a Greek invasion of western Turkey, and a lot of associated bad blood. The peace agreement involved the exchange of hundreds of thousands of people both ways, with property expropriation (basically, you evict some people from their homes, then replace them with other people who have just been evicted).

There was talking about having Turks come back who didn't speak Turkish. To my mind that makes them Greek, but it's about who your parents are, not where you were born (and I realize my naive geographical classification does ignore most of history).

Some families returned decades later, but for the most part, the culture was uprooted. So there are Orthodox Christian churches, which are not much used, and other stuff like houses carved out of the hillsides, which the new owners didn't know how to maintain.

The nearby open-air museum contains a cluster of monasteries which were carved out of natural caves. They sprang up during an Iconoclastic period of Christianity; the orders who came here were the ones who wanted their churches decorated with icons. So you walk into these caves, and they open up into shrines and small churches with beautiful frescoes.

The story - iconophiles out in the middle of this remote area carving out church after church as fast as they can to paint iconic frescoes on them - I find that fascinating. The actual art I find too, well, iconic, and am not really moved.

Lunch was at the house of Fahriye Abla ("Abla" meaning "Sister", as a respectful title), and her mother and grandson. We spent a while after sitting around talking with her (translated by Alp). We asked lots of questions about their life, they had questions about ours - and the theme, repeated, was really "it's different, and it's hard, but we're not complaining, it is what it is." There was also some culture clash in between old and young Turkey. The grandmother is worried about her grandson and granddaughter, who are not married - educated and working in the city, age 30 and still unmarried!! She was married at 14, and has been to Istanbul once. We probably have more in common with her grandchildren than she does? She gave a good selling speech to Marleigh about her grandson, though - an audio engineer now living in Spain. Pictures were exchanged and promised to be sent.

After that was the Carpet Cooperative (I have neglected to get the actual name), which included demonstrations, silkworms, and a really good sales job. Interesting spin - the carpet making co-op is government supported, because it provides income to villagers so they don't all move to the cities. The salesman, ariel, had to walk a delicate path between "look at how much work this is" without "we are harsh taskmasters" and "these are affordable" and "even though they are expensive, they're reasonable." I make it sound nonsensical, but I do appreciate the amount of work that it takes to make a textile handcraft - and they do give the weavers a fair cut, and even so, they're expensive for the good ones, but more affordable because labor is cheaper here, and they have reasonable shifts... Anyway, many of our party was convinced, including Derrick (though we were not nearly as convinced as the previous tour, I hear). I fell in love with one purple silk carpet designed by the award-winning designers that they are rightfully proud of for winning Best Carpet of the Year three years running (and we saw two of them AND WALKED ON THEM!!!)... but it was $13,000, and while I do not think it was overvalued, it was not in our budget.

Then, the Turkish Bath. I have never felt so clean in my life, and also relaxed (though the next morning was sore). We were a little at a loss for what to do (answer: shower/pouring water, then sauna, then salt scrub, then massage, then more showering and laying about as desired. But also answer: laze about bathily and do as you like, because it's not supposed to be about the checklist.), as Alp didn't show up until later, but Marleigh (who was earlier) gave us hints. I was worried that the heat would Get me, but there was enough lukewarm water to keep from melting.

Finally, more dinner at the Greek House - we finally got around to explaining the Assassins' Guild - and music (saz) and dragging-Americans-into-dancing, which nearly everyone was a good sport about.