Twelth Post From Türkiye: Bolu and Gordion

Merhaba. My name is Jack and I will be your guest blogger today. My lovely wife apparently got tired of me hounding her to finish blog posts, b/c she told me to take care of blogging about these adventures myself. It could also have to do with the fact that she didn't participate in either of these trips. Anyway, I digress. In following Merry's blogging method, I am listening to baglama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba%C4%9Flama) virtuoso and Turkish folk musician Al Ekbar Cicek as I write.

A month or so ago I went camping with some guys from work. My friend Mert (whose name means "strong" and "manly" in Turkish) has a friend who works for the local municipality up near Bolu, who hooked us up with a cabin in the Koroglu Mountains. These mountains are the watershed between the Anatolian Plateau (a high desert like the inter-mountain west in the U.S.) and the Black Sea. Due to this weird climatic mix, the forest in the region is a mix of deciduous and evergreen trees, with lots of moss and all kinds of fungus.Like much of the landscape in Turkey, it reminded me of home. 

(Left to Right) Cody (a friend from work, from Alaska/Montana), Mert, Mert's friend, and Mert's nephew.

I didn't expect to be eating hot dogs (the whole pork thing, and whatnot) but I wasn't sure what the fare would be for a camping trip. Well, if I had given it five minutes thought I would have remembered that hospitality is sacred to Turks, and that good food=good times. Before we headed out of Ankara Mert stopped and bought enough food to feed ten men for ten days: steak, sausage, eggs, chicken, bread, cheese, olives, multiple kinds of fruit, and cookies, in addition to traditional winter-time soup, and stuffed eggplant that his mom had made. The man was relentless in feeding us. He made me eat steak that night until I thought I was going to puke, then again the next day. Oh yeah, he also had to acquire much raki (anise-flavored liquor, beer, tea, cigarettes...). Luckily we had already talked a lot about how I don't drink alcohol. He just had to focus all his alco-hospitality on Cody. 

  

Our Cozy Cabin

An ingeneous, very Turkish, stove, that burns hazelnut husks. the husks go into a hopper that funnels them down into the stove.

Forest near Bolu

Here's Mert displaying his 9mm marksmanship skills. We became friends because we ended up talking about guns, hunting, etc. at work one day. He also brought his 12-gauge. We didn't have any clay pigeons, so we took turns throwing junk (we found an old CD, a clay roof tile, and old teapot) into the air for each other to shoot. All were impressed that I hit the CD when only the edge was facing me. Like all good Turks, Mert did his conscript service in the Turkish military. When we went for a hike the first night he said it reminded him of his days doing 40-km night hikes in the southeast, though I wonder if he smoked as many cigarettes then. Whether he's speaking English or Turkish, he begins every sentence with the phrase "kardesim," ("my friend").   

An action shot of me shooting at, and missing, a bottle. I told them beforehand that I can't hit nothin' with no handgun.

Mossy and Foresty

The next week, when I got the day off for Veteran's Day, I wanted to take our newly-arrived car on a road trip to nearby Gordion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordium). Merry wasn't feeling very well, so I loomed up the car with Diet Dr. Pepper, throwed Truman in the back, and hit the road. Gordion was the capital of ancient Phrygia (a kingdom of Indo-European-speaking people who were allies with the Trojans) during the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. 

 

A Phrygian Vase with a Centaur

The kings of Phrygia were famous for building tumuli, or wooden tombs covered with man-made earth mounds. The one pictured below belonged to King Midas of golden-touch/ass's ears fame.

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Trum in the tunnel archaeologists cut into the center of Midas' tomb.

It may not look like much, but that's the oldest extant wooden structure in Anatolia and, perhaps, the world (forget the metal supports holding it together).

You see! Look at that wood!

Near to the tomb is the old acropolis of Gordion. It sits on a man-made hill that sticks up much higher than the surrounding plain. 

Main gate of Gordion. Too bad the scaffolding was in the way.

See all those mounds behind Trum? They are un-excavated tumuli.

The Acropolis

Besides a small group of tourists, Trum and I were the only people there. We picked up all kinds of amazing potsherds (Trum found one that was clearly the lip from a big gray pot. It could have been 2,500 years old). But, being good culturally/historically-conscious folk, we put 'em right back down, so that some grad student/archaeologist can find them in the future.