News From the Interzone: Fethiye, Turkey, January 2001

Fethiye: We took an overnight bus to the south through the mountains. The mountains in Turkey are extensive and vast, creating natural corridors and barriers that have dictated power and history for millennia and even today dictate the routes of highway systems and railways. Towards daybreak as we passed through the Ak Dag and Baba Dag ranges of the Toros mountains, there was a splendid snowfall, swathing the land in brilliant sheets of white and draping the landscape with its tendrils--extremely beautiful (although somewhat hair-raising). I slept little on the ten hour bus ride and was quite exhausted when we arrived in the morning. In any case we went and met our friend Denise who brought us to see the home she is building up in the hills overlooking one of the valleys outside of Fethiye. She has been living in the area for many years and has a travel agency there.

Denise has a view of Rhodos from the windows of her new home--quite amazing. Jo and I ran her dogs around for a bit--nice to be out in the country again.. also she keeps horses there (hostile ones--appropriate for the region).

Fethiye is in the heart of what was known in the ancient world as Lycia, one of the most amazing and fascinating regions of Anatolia.

Lycia was (and is) a rugged land surrounded by tall mountains and largely isolated from the rest of Anatolia, but blessed with fertile farmland, rich forests, fine natural harbors, and one of the most beautiful coasts I have seen. The Lycians are now considered to have been an indigenous pre-Indo-European race. They had their own language and customs. The region was colonized in the archaic period by various Greek city states but always retained its own character and remained largely independent despite the nominal sovereignty of numerous powers. This fierce sense of independence can perhaps most clearly be seen in the history of Xanthos, one of the primary ancient cities of the region and a fine site (I visited it four years ago). The Xanthians on two separate occasions, rather than allow their families and possessions to fall into the hands of the enemies, burned everything in the city and then put the entire population to the sword, including their own women and children. The Xanthos river valley at the heart of Lycia is fertile, very beautiful, and full of ancient sites.

Although my friends only had two days off from work, we spent most of the first day sleeping. We were actually staying on the outskirts of a very strange village called Hisaronu. This little town is the destination of lots of English package tours--it is like little England or something--all the prices are listed in pounds, the restaurants offer Roast Beef and Sheperd's Pie rather than Turkish food, and the local touts address you with an English accent. There is a place called Hamish McTurk's and another called the Rover's Return as well as a place with simulated golden arches called McDowells--all a little unsettling--but in winter all this is shut down and silent--in the summer the place is crawling with blue collar English and their children. I actually met a women several years ago who didn't know whether she was in the north, south, east or west of Turkey, only that there was a beach nearby.

Anyways there is a weird little ex-pat community of Englishmen in the town and in the evening we went to the pub where they all hung out. We had meat pies and played cards while awaiting the beginning of trivia night. Well as it turned out, although most of the questions were English specific, between Jo and I we trounced all the other teams and got the prize of a bottle of champagne which was really quite unnecessary as we had already drunk about 8 bottles of wine between 5 of us. By this time we were quite jolly--and somehow began to experiment with a little trick that Jo picked up somewhere--it seems that if you burn cork, a nice layer of soot forms on the surface of it that makes an excellent sort of camouflage paint. It didn't take long before we were wearing war-paint stripes on our faces, and fezzes, and several of our entourage ended up dancing on the bar, and even (horribile dictu) a little karaoke... anyways after much raging we went back to our very cold little apartment and tried to get some sleep before a busy day visiting sites.