MAY 29
        A half hour from Fethiye is ancient Tlos, one of the most spectacular sites in Turkey. Located on a plateau high above the Xanthos river valley, Tlos has a Roman bath whose main room looks out through a curved wall of open arches on the valley below (the only Roman bath room I know of which clearly was built for the view), a theater with interesting relief sculptures on the stage building, and an acropolis whose sides are covered with sarcophagi and Lycian temple-tombs (the most famous of these is the so-called Tomb of Bellerophon, the mythical hero who rode the winged horse Pegasos and slew the fire-breathing monster Chimaira).
        Then we’ll drive through the spectacular scenery of the Lycian peninsula to Antalya. Along the way we’ll stop at Xanthos, the capital of ancient Lycia, at Kas (for lunch), and at Phaselis, a remarkable site in a pine forest at the water’s edge. This area was best known in Greek myth as the place where the famous hero Bellerophon achieved various triumphs (and one defeat).  After he had acquired the winged horse Pegasos, killed the monstrous Chimaira by lodging a piece of lead in its fire-breathing mouth, and defeated the armies of the Amazons and the Lycians, he came to Xanthos; while the men cowered inside the city, the Xanthian women came outside the city walls and then, when Bellerophon rode up on Pegasos, they lifted up their dresses and exposed themselves; both the horse and its rider were frightened out of their wits at this sight and beat a hasty retreat. Still today, in the mountains near Phaselis, a jet of natural gas burns continually (as it has since it was seen in antiquity by Pliny); legend associates this eternal flame with the final resting place of the fire-breathing Chimaira.
        In the evening we’ll arive at Antalya, where we’ll stay for two nights. We’ll have dinner at one of the finest restaurants in the area, next to out hotel.  Our hotel, the Keptur, is a resort hotel about 10 minutes' drive north of Antalya, situated in a pine forest in the foothills of the Toros Mountains. 

MAY 30
        The general name for this coastal area is Pamphylia (“all-tribes”), which may be connected with the tradition that southern Asia Minor was settled by a “mixed multitude” of Greeks after the collapse of the Mycenean civilization.  Antalya was originally called Attaleia for its founder, the Pergamene king Attalos II. It quickly became, and remains, the principal port of Turkey’s south coast, and it is now a metropolis with over 300,000 inhabitants. Both St. Paul and the emperor Hadrian visited the city, and the latter’s presence in 130 AD was commemorated by one of the ubiquitous Hadrian’s Arches which fill the Roman world.  Other than this Arch, a Roman mausoleum called Hidirlik Kulesi above the harbor, a few Byzantine churches which were converted to mosques, and sections of the old wall, hardly anything remains of Antalya’s ancient past. Nevertheless it is a delightful city with a restored Old Town (mostly 19th century Ottoman structures) and a magnificent view from the promenade high over the harbor, looking across a great bay to the mountains of Lycia to the west.
        After visiting the spectacular Antalya museum (best known for a remarkable display of sculpture from Perge, a unique Phrygian treasure found just a few years ago, and the bones of Santa Claus) we’ll have lunch and then drive east to the site of Aspendus on the Eurymedon river, where we’ll see two fantastic structures: the best-preserved ancient theater, from any period, anywhere in the world, and the best surviving example of a Roman aqueduct.
        Greek legends say that Aspendus was founded by the prophet Mopsos, and there may be a basis in historical reality for this story.  During the 6th century Aspendus, Side, and the other cities of the south coast were conquered by Croesus, King of Lydia, but his rule was replaced by the Persians in 546 BC.  The great defeat of Persia at Salamis in 480 did not affect the cities of Pamphylia until the Athenian admiral Kimon's victory over a Persian army and fleet at the Eurymedon in 468.  The cities were free for a while, but reverted to Persian domination after the treaty between Greece and Persia of 386.  After Alexander’s conquest Pamphylia was fought over by the various Hellenistic monarchies, some of it was allotted to Pergamum after the battle of Magnesia in 190, and around 100 BC Pamphylia became a Roman province (although the province was called Cilicia). In 43 AD Pamphylia and Lycia, to the west, were made into one combined province of Lycia-Pamphylia; under the emperor Diocletian (284-305) they were split into separate provinces. As in the rest of Asia Minor, Aspendus reached its height of prosperity during the first three centuries of the Roman empire.
        The Aspendus theater was built late in the 2nd century AD by the Curtius brothers, Crispinus and Auspicatus, whose dedicatory inscription, in Greek and Latin, is over the entrances. It is virtually the same now as when it was built; the only things missing are the stage, which was made of wood, and the statues which filled the niches on the rear wall.  There are forty rows of seats, and the capacity was nearly 20,000.  The pedimental figure at the top center of the back wall is Bacchus (Dionysos), but a local story says that it is a girl (it’s always hard to tell with Bacchus/Dionysos) named Bal Kiz (Honey Girl) and that is why the local village is called Belkis.
        Following the road past a small cafe we turn right up a path which winds to the acropolis; structures include an unidentified building and, on three sides of the Agora, a stoa with shops, a basilica (commercial building) with annex and a high facade which may be a fountain. Continuing on the path along the east side of the acropolis we suddenly come into view of the aqueduct which brought water from the mountains 20 miles away.
        On our way back to Antalya we’ll stop at Perge, about 10 miles east of Antalya, where the spectacular sculptures we saw in the Antalya Museum were found. The large theater of Perge is one of the best-preserved anywhere, but it is not nearly as impressive as it should be if you have just come from Aspendus. Near the theater is one of the best examples anywhere of a Roman stadium; it held 12,000 spectators. Between the two entrance gates (the inner is Hellenistic, the outer is much later) is a large Roman bath, probably the most interesting of all the baths we’ll see in Turkey. There is also a long colonnaded Main Street with a water-channel running down the middle; at the west end of the street is a fountain-house decorated with a statue of the river god Cestrus.

MAY 31
        This morning we’ll visit one of the most striking sites in Turkey, ancient Termessos, about 15 miles northwest of Antalya and high on a mountainside 3300 feet above the Pamphylian plain. Thanks both to its remoteness and to the quality of its defenses and defenders, Termessos successfully resisted a siege by Alexander the Great in 333. There is a Hellenistic theater in good shape (with a spectacular view onto the valley below), several interesting rock tombs, a series of great cisterns, and a weird necropolis with sarcophagi lying like tumbled dominoes on the hillside, but by far the most remarkable aspect of Termessos is its setting.
        After visiting Termessos, we’ll drive north through the unbelievable scenery of the Toros Mountains to Egirdir, an old Turkish town on the south shore of Lake Egirdir.  Despite its setting, there are few tourists here (in 1996 and 2000 we shared our hotel with the Turkish Olympic weightlifting team), and it's a rare and wonderful opportunity to see a real Turkish town.

JUNE 1
         From Egirdir we'll drive east past Lake Beysehir to Konya, Turkey’s fourth largest city (after Istanbul, Izmir, and Ankara) with over two million inhabitants.        
        Although it has a continuous history far back into Neolithic times, very little is left to see from before the Seljuk period (llth-l3th centuries) when Konya became the Seljuk capital. The Seljuks were an Asiatic horde, a branch of the T'u-Kin (a Chinese name that eventually became‘Turk”), who adopted Islam upon their arrival in Persia and eventually made their way to Anatolia, where they became the dominant power after defeating the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV at Manzikert in 1071. The Seljuk dynasty (which was called the Sultanate of Rum) reached its height under Sultan Alaeddin Keykubat (1219-1236) but began to fall apart after a defeat by the Mongols of Genghis Khan in 1242. For the next two centuries the dominant power in this area was the Karamanoglu tribe, and they in turn were displaced by the Osmanli (Ottoman) sultanate under Mehmet II (the Conqueror), who took Constantinople in 1453 and Konya in 1467. Konya is best known as the home of Celaleddin (1207-1273), whose honorific title was Mevlana Rumi, a mystic philosopher and poet who founded the Sufi sect of whirling dervishes. The incredibly lavish tomb of Mevlana is one of the major attractions of Konya, along with many beautiful Seljuk and Osmanli mosques and two Seljuk theological seminaries, the Karatay Medrese and the Ince Minare Medrese.
         Continuing east from Konya to Urgup in Cappadocia, we’ll pass several caravanserais (han), inn-complexes along the major Seljuk trade routes, which provided free food, lodging, and services to merchants and travellers. They were virtually self- contained cities; the most famous is the Sultan Hani (1229), about an hour’s drive east of Konya.

JUNE 2
         Our base in Cappadocia is Urgup, and from here the most famous places and sights of Cappadocia are only a few minutes’ drive. Since the strangeness of Cappadocia requires for description a literary style more florid than my talents allow. I quote the following from John Freely’s Companion Guide to Turkey:

“Most of this part of Cappadocia is covered with a deep layer of tufa, a soft stone of solidified mud, ash and lava which once poured down from the now extinct volcanoes on Hasan Dagi and Erciyes Dagi, the two great mountain peaks of Cappadocia. In the eons since then the rivers of the region have scoured canyons, gorges, valleys and gulleys through the soft and porous stone, and the elements have eroded it into fantastic crags. folds, turrets. pyramids, spires, needles, stalagmites, and cones, creating a vast outdoor display of stone sculptures in an incredible variety of shapes and colors. The cone is the most frequent form in Cappadocia’s lunar landscape: many of them stand more than a hundred feet tall, some in groups and others standing alone like eccentric obelisks or sand castles fashioned by a giant child. Many of them are topped by a fragment of the basalt strata which once lay above the tufa; these huge rocks protected the tufa directly beneath them while the surroundings were eroded away. These black basalt capitals, balanced precariously   on the fantastic phallic cones, are known by the locals as pen bacalari, or fairy chimneys. The predominant color in some areas is brick-red, rust, ochre, or umber, while in others it may be ashen or even salt-white; but the sensuous rock surfaces subtly change their hues with the shifting patterns of sunlight and shadow. here and there deepening into pools of midnight blue, deep violet, or even an ephemeral green, and then at twilight the whole countryside is pervaded with an evanescent pink and golden glow, fading into a palette of pale pastels as night falls on this enchanted landscape.  What nature has left undone in the way of phantasmagoric architecture has been completed by the restless ingenuity of man; for since time immemorial the Cappadocians have been cutting into the cones and walls of rock, excavating and carving rupestrine houses. storerooms, churches and monasteries, many of them elaborately sculptured and adorned with vivid and imaginative frescoes capturing the religious visions of medieval Byzantine Christianity. 

  Urgup and most other villages in this part of Cappadocia are either perched on spires of rock or hollowed out of precipices or gigantic cones, with the doors and windows of their dwellings giving the appearance of a huge honeycomb or dovecote. Even the free-standing houses have been built of volcanic rock, and many of them have handsome arcades with facades and portals decorated with carved and sculptured designs; while some Cappadocians burrow into the hillsides and live like modem cavemen, but far more comfortably. For the apparently arid soil is incredibly fertile, and the local residents live very well on the abundant produce of their vegetable gardens, orchards and vineyards. The wine of the region is deservedly famous, with a heady aroma like a whiff of brimstone.”

        Ten minutes from our hotel in Urgup is Uchisar, a village on the edge of the enormous erosion basin of the Goreme valley. A medieval fortress is carved into the great rock at the top of the hill (it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese 200 feet high), and from the top of the fortress you can see all of Cappadocia. A few miles northeast is Goreme, where the rock churches are displayed in an “open-air museum”; unfortunately, beginning in 1989 the local organization which runs the site insists that all tourists be accompanied by a guide and they charge exorbitant prices. The most spectacular “fairy chimneys” are at Zilve, and we’ll make frequent stops to look around and take pictures. The most interesting town (and the best shopping) in Cappadocia is Urgup, where we’ll have lunch and spend the afternoon.
        Unless one has a special interest in medieval Anatolian iconography, the decorations in the rock churches can be disappointing. The architecture, however, is striking, especially since the process of construction is opposite the usual; whereas a conventional church architect would begin with an empty space and proceed to fill part of it with columns, walls, etc., the Cappadocian architect starts with a solid mass and his task, in effect, is to create empty space. In any case, even if there were no churches or cave-dwellings at all in this area, the extraordinary “lunar landscape” is one of the strangest and most spectacular sights in the world.
        It’s not known when the Cappadocian monastic movement started, but it may be as early as the 4th century; the monasteries flourished, especially after the 9th century, until the Osmanli and Mongol incursions of the 13th century. Even after they had been abandoned for religious purposes, the rock churches and dwellings continued to be used as shops and homes, and some are still lived in today.
        Our next stop will be at the underground city of Kaymakli, one of several such sites in this area (one other is open to the public, the city of Derinkuyu to the south). Beginning around the 7th century, these enormous subterranean labyrinths were created to provide shelter for whole populations against attack by Arab raiders. Kaymakli and Derinkuyu each could hold 12-15,000 people in at least eight connected levels of living quarters, storerooms, kitchens, and chapels. Ventilation shafts provided air, water came from interior wells, and the entrances could be blocked off with great round stones (like millstones) in case of danger. The walk along the marked path takes about 30 minutes.

JUNE 3
         We’ll leave early for the drive north to Hattusas, ancient capital of the Hittite empire. At Hattusas there are really two sites, about 1 mile apart: Yazilikaya, the Hittite religious sanctuary, and Hattusas itself. We’ll begin at Yazilikaya, an open-air shrine known for its relief carvings of the Hittite pantheon.
        Only the foundations remain of the buildings in front of the sanctuary: a propylaion, a temple with annex, and a smaller gateway.  Entrance to the large gallery was from the temple, entrance to the small gallery was from the smaller gateway. The large gallery contained relief sculptures of the Hittite gods and goddesses, with gods on the west wall and goddesses on the east; the division is not precise, however, since three goddesses are included on the west and one god is portrayed on the east. The north wall (between contains the chief divinities, the weather god Teshub, his wife Hepatu, and their son Sharruma. At the end of the line of goddesses is a large relief of King Tudhaliya IV (note that gods wear cone-shaped caps, while kings wear skull- caps).
        As the small gallery seems to be a mortuary chamber the two animal-headed figures at its entrance are probably demons to scare away intruders. The east wall of the small gallery has a Sword-God and a wonderful relief of the god Sharruma holding King Tudhaliya in his left arm. The west wall holds a procession of 12 cone-head gods.
        It is thought that the temple and the reliefs of deities in the large gallery were built by Hattusili III (1275-1250) and that his son Tudhaliya IV (1250-1220) enlarged the temple and built the small gallery and the self-portrait.  In other words Tudhaliya had his own tomb constructed while he was still alive, perhaps as a kind of apotheosis. There seems to be an identification in which the god Teshub, his wife Hepatu. and their son Sharruma are parallel to King Hattusili III, his wife Puduhepa, and their son Tudhaliya IV.
        The name Hattusas is a Hittite form of Hattus, the name of the city under the Hattites. The Hattite city was destroyed by the Hittite king Anitta around 1800, but shortly after became the Hittite capital. The lower city was built on the site of the Hattite city, where there also had been an Assyrian trading colony: the upper city was built during the Empire period (1450-1180) and the whole city was destroyed with the downfall of the Empire in 1180.
        The sheer size of the site (as well as a lot of barbed wire fences) compel us to drive around it, alighting at certain select places.  As we drive down and around from Yazilikaya , we pass first the site of the Assyrian trading colony and then the great temple of the Storm-God.  Taking the right fork we continue on the road uphill to our first stop, the Lion Gate.  Each of the three gates in the southern fortification wall at the highest point of the city is named for the relief sculptures beside the gate; the others are the Sphinx Gate and the King’s Gate (misnamed).  The tunnel under the Sphinx Gate is 240 feet long and is thought to have been a sally port.  The other structures whose foundations we see as we drive through the upper city are four temples, the New Castle, and the Yellow Castle.  Returning to the lower city we come first to the South Citadel and then to Buyukkale, the Great Citadel.  One of the buildings on the Great Citadel seems to have been an archives storeroom, the oldest library in history; over 3000 inscribed clay tablets were found in it.  Our last stop is at the main temple; it was apparently dedicated to both the Storm God (Teshub) and the Sun Goddess of Arinna (Hepatu), and their twin statues may have stood in two rooms of the ritual annex to the temple. 
        The temple itself is a series of rooms around a courtyard, with the ritual annex of 12 rooms on the northeast, and it stood in turn in a courtyard formed by storerooms and offices on all four sides.  In two rooms  thousands of cuneiform tablets were found in 1907.  The main entrance seems to have been through a gate.  Opposite the paved road on the south side of the temple complex is another set of rooms and buildings around a courtyard, in which a mysterious blue-green stone (an altar?) stands.  This complex may have served the administrative structure of the temple, and the same may be true for the many rooms on a lower level west of the temple.
        Because of the sloping ground, the rooms surrounding the temple were on three floors on the north side, two floors elsewhere.  Only the lower part of the temple and these other structures were built of stone, the upper part being of sun-dried brick.  At many places you can see regular circular holes on the top of the stone blocks; these held bases for the wooden framework of the brick sections.
        We'll eat lunch near the site, then drive on to Ankara.

JUNE 4
        Ankara, Turkey’s capital since 1923, is a large (well over 3 million) but very pleasant city, built on a hilly landscape with many trees and parks.  As in Istanbul, the first impression is the teeming mass of people—the chief difference is that in Ankara all these people look like they have a good middle-class job.
        The major attraction of Ankara, perhaps of all Turkey, is the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, one of the world’s truly great museums.  Even if there were nothing inside, the building itself is worth a visit; it is the restored bazaar built in 1464-1471 by Mahmut Pasha, the Grand Vizier of Mehmet the Conqueror.  The museum is just below the ancient citadel of Ankara, and from the front terrace you have a superb view looking down on the city. 
        The museum, recently renovated, is arranged chronologically, going anti-clockwise from the entrance.  The first exhibits are Palaeolithic (before 7000 b.c.) and Neolithic (7000-5500), and include striking wall-paintings, fertility figurines, and a restored sanctuary from Catalhuyuk.  Next comes the Chalcolithic (bronze implements are beginning to appear) period (5500-3000) with tools and weapons, painted pottery, and many more goddess figures.  The second half of the west hall is devoted to the first half of the Bronze Age proper (3000-2000) and contains (in my opinion) the most amazing objects of all, the Hattite bronzes (especially the symmetrical stags with colossal branching antlers) and fertility idols in gold, silver, and electrum.  DO NOT MISS the relief sculpture of a helmeted warrior, perhaps the god Teshub, next to the door leading into the central hall; it is from the King’s Gate at Hattusas and is the finest example of Hittite relief sculpture.  The first half of the south (back) hall has finds from the Assyrian Trading Colony period (1950-1750); most are from Kultepe, the city near Kayseri.  Here you’ll see cuneiform tablets written in Old Assyrian, the earliest example of writing in Anatolia.  The rest of the south hall has pottery and hieroglyphic inscriptions from the Old Hittite Kingdom (1700-1450).  At this point you should turn and enter the central hall, where are kept the sculptures, mostly orthostatic reliefs, from the Hittite Empire (1450-1180) and the Neo-Hittite period (1180-700).  Returning to the perimeter halls, the east hall has antiquities from the Urartian period (900-600, from east Turkey around Lake Van), the Phrygian period (750-550, from central and west Anatolia), and a few from the Greek and Roman periods. 
        From the museum we’ll go for lunch in a restored mansion in the Old Town of Ankara, then drive around the most interesting monuments and neighborhoods of Ankara to the hilltop mausoleum of Ataturk; besides the big neoclassical temple which holds only his sarcophagus, there is also a small museum of Ataturk’s personal effects and various other displays (his cars, for example). 
        We’ll leave Ankara for the drive west to Istanbul.  The formerly long drive has been shortened by the completion of a  super-highway, and there is some gorgeous alpine scenery around Bolu.  We’ll arrive in Istanbul early evening.  Today is my 65th birthday.

JUNE 5
        Departure day.