Trabzon'a gittek: AŞTİ-Sümela

Trabzon'a gittik: AŞTİ-Sümela (We went to Trabzon [pt. 1]: Ankara bus station to Sumela Monastery)

The 19th of May here in Turkey is officially Youth and Sports Day, a holiday which fortuitously combined with my work schedule to provide the four-day weekend necessary for visiting Trabzon by bus. It was my second trip to the Black Sea here, but if you check out a map, you'll see that it's quite a bit farther east than Amasra, where I went back in September. This time around I also had the special pleasure of being joined by he with whom I share more genes and inside jokes than anyone else on the planet, my brother Mike, whose travelling style is so laid back it makes cooked spaghetti seem unyielding.

But who am I to critique travelling styles? I left for the bus station an hour early on Friday evening, only to discover once I got there that I had left my ticket on the table at home after I took it out to check and make sure I had it in my bag.... There wasn't enough time to go back home and pick it up so I asked the man at the desk if I could replace it. The poor fellow was being harried by so many people looking for tickets to places that were sold out it seemed like the water crisis must have come early to Ankara this year, but he still found time to tell me it wasn't a problem to board the bus without a ticket, since my name would be on their list. Inşallah. There was just barely not enough time to make it home and back for the ticket so I sat nervously in the waiting area for forty-five minutes. Thankfully, the benches for that are on a large, open-air platform elevated in the terminal, almost like a second floor with no walls. It made it feel like I was still there and waiting, but removed from the bustle and chaos enough to take off some of the stress. At any rate, I got on the bus fine and pretended the people outside were waving to me as we pulled off (guess who can't wait to get back to Maine and have people wave at him!). As I rummaged for my iPod, I realized that in the process of packing I had pushed my ticket down to the bottom where I couldn't see it, and it was there after all. The lesson, as always, is that I'm an idiot.

The 12-hour bus ride was normal and fairly restful, but I forgot the neck pillow that I got on the not-Cyprus trip, so I ended up with another case of RiceKrispy neck. For the last hour or so of the trip it was light enough to see the coast with its mostly industrial or retail activity- not quite as spectacular as the Mediterranean, but serene and mystical nonetheless. Once I was in the town center, the bread store next to the bus stop had, miracle of miracles, brown bread, which went nicely with the Chokokrem (Nutellas' cheap cousin) I toted half-way across Anatolia. The tea garden in the city square was the perfect spot to eat and watch people at 9:30 in the morning. About a block from the northeast corner of the square was Otel Can, where Mike and I had a nice, clean double room with breakfast for the weekend. After I slept for a couple hours, I ventured down to the sea-front park, complete with at least three competing tea gardens and some walking paths.

Coming in range of Turkey's northern neighbors once again (Trabzon is the first port of entry for most Russians coming to Turkey), there are again restaurants and clothing stores advertising themselves with the Cyrillic alphabet, some of which I could still understand. If you go far enoguh to the northwest or northeast here you'll run into that, but in between, besides Cappadochia (which has signs in every language from Korean to Spanish), there isn't much other than Turkish and English.

Once Mike arrived in the late afternoon (having taken a scenic detour into the mountains thanks to a dolmuş crazily headed AWAY from the city center), we ventured west across the city for eats. Most of the city is set up away from the shore, a relic of its establishment centering around the most easily defensible local geography. The narrow, stone, pedestrian-friendly streets interspersed small markets and restaurants for at least a kilometer stretching out towards the suburbs. Once the buildings became mostly one or two-story residences or convenience stores I admitted the best places to eat were already past and we doubled back towards the center.

The next day at ten, our hotel owner reserved us a spot on a mini-bus heading to Sumela Monastery, the biggest historical draw in the Trabzon region. It takes about an hour to get there, via the town of Maçka. At Maçka, you start ascending into the mountains alongside the Altıntepe River, which cuts through the fir forrests very quickly and mystically. Most aspects of the Sumela site had an unmissable air of mysticism surrounding them. Approaching the cliffs into which the monastery was carved, there is enough natural beauty to justify a big trip itself. The vastness of the forrest all of a sudden seemed seal the area off in tandem with the dark, imposing clouds to create a feeling of seclusion even amongst thousands of visitors. You have to hand it the Greek Orthodox, they sure know how to pick real estate for a religious site.

At one point, the frescoes on and in the chapel of the monastery probably rivalled the natural beauty of the site. Unfortunately, those on the outside had been mostly scraped away or carved with graffiti; Mike and I were appalled- when we wrote "Jeter swallows", it was in really small letters. In addition to the vandalism, most of the faces had been erased, I believe by those during the Ottoman or Republican periods who weren't big fans of iconism, unfortunately. Inside, even my untrained eye could tell that this was where some of the best medieval depictions of Christ and some saints might be found. I'm not being modest when I call myself untrained- even after 8 months of going to places like this, sometimes accompanied by a woman with a master's in art history, the most insightful thing I could come up with to say to Mike was "you can see the regional influences in the art here on the size of his nose". It was a honker.

There are trails going up higher on the mountain and a stone staircase leading down to the main parking lot at the site, so to kill time before we met the bus at 2, Mike and I did a bit of hiking. This is the perfect time of year to be exploring places of nature and beauty in Turkey since the rainy season is coming to an end and the weather is getting very hot again. Flowers were thrusting and insects were active everywhere, despite the mostly overcast sky. The rain started coming down off and on as we tested out the staircase, but luckily that is covered gorgeously by yet more trees in most places. Finally, after we waited at one of the out-lying chapels estimating the odds of being able to jump from it into the river without hitting the bank 500 feet below for about half an hour, it was time to head back to the bus.

"Bucky, are you sure they said two o'clock?" Mike asked, when no one from our tour group was in sight.

"Well, you saw the guy hold up two fingers to us, what do you think it meant? Wait, then he said the word for hour. Maybe he meant two hours. That was at eleven..."

"Dang, if only I could remember the modular arithmetic Gates taught us for math team."

And so, from about 1:55 to 2:10 on Sunday afternoon we stood at the scenic overlook where we'd been dropped off, pretty much alone, doing our best to stay positive that the bus and everyone we came with was on its way up to get us. It wasn't. The view was gorgeous, but the roiling clouds increasingly came to symbolize my stomach as I calculated how long it would take to walk 46 kilometers back to Trabzon.

Coming soon:
-How Bucky and Mike made it back to the city, photos of the monastery, narrative and photos of Uzungöl, and the best köfte and pide I've had in Turkey. Maybe I'll change the name of this blog to "When It Rains It Pours"; I really ought to be more consistent with the output next year.