Chapter 14
Your Wife Doesn’t Love You
Istanbul, Turkey
October 19
The moment we stepped off the boat in Kusadasi, Turkey, I knew it would be a bad scene. The other passengers were aggressively jostling for position at passport control. Touts were steering credulous tourists toward fleabag hotels, and some guy in civvies was selling everyone visas for twenty bucks—U.S. currency only—even though the guidebook said they should cost half that much.
As usual, we were last in line at passport control, and when we finally reached the front of the queue, we found ourselves face-to-face with a very stern-looking mustachioed Turkish soldier who spoke only a smattering of English. I handed him our small stack of passports. He stamped the five American documents in a perfunctory fashion, but when he got to Betty’s Guatemalan passport, a quizzical look crossed his face.
“Was dees?” he asked, holding up the red passport like a smelly fish.
“Our friend is a citizen of Guatemala, but she’s also a permanent resident of the United States,” I said pointing to Betty’s green card inside the passport.” I honestly don’t think this guy had ever seen a Guatemalan passport before and the green card didn’t mean anything to him.
“She no come in,” he said firmly.
“The boat has already gone back to Samos,” I replied as calmly as possible, “there’s really no where else for her to go.”
“She no come in.”
Unfamiliar with local custom, I asked an assertive young tout who was enthusiastically trying to adopt us whether this was the sort of problem that could be solved with a crisp $50 dollar bill.
“I am afraid not, my friend,” he said, and warned me not to try it.
“Then would you please ask the officer if I could speak to his boss?”
The tout and the soldier exchanged a few words in Turkish, and I was escorted to another counter, where I met a young female officer who spoke nearly fluent English. I explained our problem—and she seemed sympathetic—but she said there was nothing she could do until the head office in the Turkish capital, Ankara, reopened in the morning. Meanwhile, Betty would have to return to Greece. I didn’t even want to think about what might happen if there were no more boats back to Samos that evening, but a night in the local hoosegow didn’t seem like an attractive prospect.
“I have an idea,” I said to the officer, “Beatriz can’t go anywhere without that passport, right? So why don’t you hold on to it. We’ll stay at a hotel here in town, and you can call Ankara in the morning. That way, we won’t have to split up our party or all go back to Greece.”
Incredibly, she agreed, and Betty was permitted to enter Turkey—at least until ten o’clock the next morning. I quickly hustled everyone out of passport control before the officer could change her mind. On the way out, Betty asked, “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Have you ever seen that movie, Midnight Express?” I said, referring to the famous seventies film about an American thrown into a Turkish prison.
“That’s not funny,” said Betty, hitting me on the arm and laughing in spite of herself.
“Seriously,” I said, “either the head office in Ankara will tell these guys to let you in, or we’ll buy you an air ticket to Zurich, and meet you there at the end of the week. Either way, you’ll be fine.”
Betty looked hugely relieved. In fact, we were all so happy to get out of passport control, that we weren’t really paying that much attention when our dogged tout set us up with a suspicious-looking driver in a decrepit Chevy station wagon. The driver took us to the Hotel Kismet, as we requested, but Devi had some trouble deciphering the tab. As he drove off, I asked Devi how much she paid.
“Two million Turkish lire,” she replied.
“Two million lire? How much is that in American money?”
“I’m not sure. Let me see. There are 97,000 Turkish lire to the dollar.”
“Really? 97,000?”
“So two million divided by 97,000 is … just over twenty dollars.”
“That’s a bit stiff for a four-minute ride,” I said.
“Yea, you’re right. I’ll ask the hotel doorman what it should cost.”
The doorman confirmed that we paid approximately five times the going rate. What’s more, the Kismet didn’t have any vacancies, so we had to take a second taxi ride to another nearby hotel. The driver only charged us 400,000 lire, and the hotel was a mere eight million lire per night.17
The next morning, I dug out my only sport jacket and tie from the bottom of my suitcase and dusted off an article about our trip that I wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle. I wasn’t sure just how much pull The San Francisco Chronicle would have with Turkish passport control, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
At the portside immigration office, I waited at the counter for the officer I met the previous evening to finish a phone call. As she walked toward me, she said, “I called Ankara, and sent them a fax, but I haven’t received a response.”
Oh no, I thought. Now we’ll either be stuck in Kusadasi for days or Betty will be kicked out of Turkey.
“So I suppose that’s their problem,” she continued, and she stamped Betty’s passport with a kerchunk and handed it back to me.
“Çok tesekkür ederim,” I replied, butchering the Turkish phrase for “Thank you very much.”
She laughed and said, “You are welcome, and give my regards to your friend from Guatemala.”
Devi blamed herself for getting fleeced by the larcenous Kusadasi taxi driver. I told her not to worry about it—it was only a matter of fifteen bucks—but she was determined not to be duped again, so she drove a very hard bargain with the poor guy who drove us north to the ruined city of Ephesus.
In the first century, Ephesus, or Efes as the Turks call it, was the crossroads of Asia Minor—a cosmopolitan outpost of the Roman Empire with a diverse population of Ionian Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Egyptians. St. Paul preached his new religion here and later wrote his epistle to the Ephesians. Some religious authorities—notably the Catholic Church—believe that the Virgin Mary spent her last days in a small house in the hills above the city. Ephesus is also considered one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the world, and with even a bit of imagination, a stroll down its Sacred Way is like a trip through the mists of time to the glory days of the Roman Empire.
Of course, after two weeks in Greece and Turkey, Kara and Willie felt roughly the same way about classical ruins as they did about medieval cathedrals at the end of our Italian tour. Still, Ephesus held marvels that piqued even their imagination. They loved the Great Theater, a huge 2,000-year-old 25,000-seat arena that’s still used for concerts today. Our guide, a retired professor of antiquities named Ayhan Guçet, told us about the theater’s renowned acoustics, and we decided to try them out for ourselves. Kara and Willie clambered up to the seventieth row of the amphitheater, and sure enough, they could hear us whisper on the stage several hundred feet below.
But Kara and Willie’s favorite spot in Ephesus was undoubtedly the first-century public latrine. This ancient father of men’s rooms everywhere could accommodate fifty customers at a time, and most of the marble toilet seats (shaped remarkably like the modern variety) were still in place. The adults, on the other hand, were more amused by the secret underground tunnel that linked Ephesus’s renowned Celsus Library with the city’s public brothel. It gave “lust for knowledge” a whole new meaning.
As dusk fell, we found ourselves at the eastern end of the Arcadian Way, a broad marble boulevard that once ran from the Great Theater to Ephesus’s bustling port. Professor Guçet told us that Antony and Cleopatra trod these very stones when they stopped off in Ephesus during their journey from Alexandria to Rome. It was easy to imagine the pomp and splendor that would have marked their procession into the city.
As usual, Kara wanted to know what could have possibly happened to reduce such a great metropolis to ruins. “Was it an earthquake, like in Olympia?” she asked.
“Not this time,” I told her. “In Ephesus, the city was ruined by neglect.”
“What do you mean, Daddy?”
“Over the centuries, the channel that connected Ephesus to the sea slowly filled with silt, and no one bothered to dredge it out. Eventually, the harbor was choked with dirt. Ships couldn’t get their cargo into port, and Ephesus lost most of its trade.”
“Yea, but that didn’t wreck the buildings,” said Kara.
“True. Something else happened here sixteen hundred years ago.”
“What was that?”
“As the Roman Empire weakened, it could no longer defend outposts like Ephesus. Eventually, a band of German warriors called the Goths marched south from the Black Sea. They sacked the city and destroyed its magnificent temple—one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. After that, the citizens of Ephesus gradually drifted away, and the city was buried under shifting sands.”
“Who dug it up?” asked Willie.
“People called archeologists. They excavate old cities and look for clues that tell them how people lived in ancient times.”
“Do they look for treasure?”
“Some do, but mostly they search for knowledge.”
Willie looked a bit disappointed at that, but I’d still have to say that this ancient town on the Turkish coast was the best place we found to introduce children to the wonders of the classical world.
On the way out of Ephesus, Devi and Betty followed the kids into a souvenir stand, and I popped into one of the many Turkish rug shops strategically situated near the entrance to exploit gullible tourists. I suppose everyone has his or her particular souvenir weakness. With Devi, it’s hand-painted crockery and anyplace she goes she usually picks up some sort of pot, crock, or serving dish. With me, it’s oriental rugs. All you have to do is show me a hand-woven tribal motif, and the money practically leaps from my pocket. The middle-aged woman who owned the rug shop was obviously a hardened veteran of her trade, and she knew a patsy when she saw one. By the time Devi came to retrieve me, she’d pretty much sold me on an over-priced 3 x 5 Afghan rug.
“What do you think of this one?” I asked Devi.
“It’s fine,” she said, “but I think we have three very similar ones sitting in a storage space at home. Plus, you don’t want to carry that rug all the way to Istanbul, do you?”
“No, I guess not,” I replied. Then I turned to the proprietor and said, “Sorry, I’m not going to buy the rug after all.”
The proprietor, deprived of her prey at the last possible moment, flew into a rage. “What’s wrong with this rug? Why don’t you want it?”
“Look,” I said, “my wife says we don’t need it, so that’s that.”
But that wasn’t that. The woman kept screaming at me. And when Devi and I retreated from her shop, she chased us out into the street where Betty and the children were waiting.
“Your wife doesn’t love you,” she yelled at me.
“What!?” I said, noting the kids were taking this all in.
“Your wife doesn’t love you. She only wants your money. She doesn’t want you to spend money on a rug so she can have it all for herself.”
“What’s she talking about, Daddy?” asked Willie.
“She’s just a crazy lady, honey. She’s mad because I didn’t buy her rug.”
“She doesn’t love you!” the woman kept screaming. “She doesn’t love you, and she has another lover!”
Kara and Willie looked somewhat taken aback by that accusation.
“She doesn’t,” I said to them.
“I know,” Kara said.
I thought it might be futile to explain to this harpy that Devi had actually been with me twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for the last four months, making it, at the very least, problematic for her to have another lover. So instead I just said, “You know, lady, you really need to work on your sales technique.”
That only incensed her further, and we could still hear her shouting as we trotted toward the car.
After that unpleasant exchange, we drove north to the city of Izmir. Once a cosmopolitan trading post, Izmir was burned to the ground by the Greek army when it retreated before the Turkish hero Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923. As a result, Izmir is a modern, somewhat sterile, city with wide streets, office towers, and little in the way of historical interest. Still, it was the best place to catch the express bus to Istanbul, and better yet, Devi had a 50 percent–off coupon for the Izmir Hilton, so we could all sleep in style.
As we dragged our ragged little entourage into the Hilton’s opulent marble lobby, an expression of pure delight played across Kara’s face. During our travels through Greece and Turkey, our accommodations have been pretty basic, and apparently Kara has been yearning for some good old American hotel chain luxury. Her elation was so touching that we abandoned our usual practice of dining in a cheap neighborhood restaurant and let her do her favorite thing in the world—order room service.
The next morning we got up before dawn and caught the bus to Istanbul. You might think a nine-hour bus trip up the Turkish coast would be a pretty grueling ordeal, but the bus had reclining seats, plenty of leg room, air-conditioning, and a hostess who served coffee and snacks at regular intervals. By my reckoning, the kids knocked back enough cookies, crackers and sodas to pay for their tickets. If it weren’t for the television set at the front of the bus blaring Turkish soap operas, the trip would have been nearly perfect.
Fortunately, we didn’t take the highway all the way into Istanbul. Near the end of the day, the bus squeezed onto a small ferry that chugged across the Sea of Marmara and into the Bosporus—the narrow strait separating Europe from Asia. This brief waterborne leg allowed us to “sail to Byzantium,” and a few miles out we were treated to the dreamlike vision of Istanbul’s domes and minarets rising weightless from the mist. This same approach has stirred the hearts of travelers for more than a thousand years, and it took my breath away.
It also elicited a strong sense of déjà vu, and I realized that a stylized version of this same vista graced the cover of a book I owned when I was a boy of nine or ten. Entitled Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, it was a child’s tour of the world with simple descriptions and grainy black-and-white photos of all the most wonderful places on earth. When I was a boy reading in bed in Erie, Pennsylvania, I never dreamed I would get to see all these places myself. They all seemed so remote and romantic. Thirty years later, with my own children in tow, the reality exceeded the dream.
Once off the ferry, the bus made several stops in Istanbul, and when the hostess asked us where in particular we were getting off, we realized we didn’t have the slightest idea. Fortunately, there was a friendly young Turkish-American woman on the bus. We showed her the name and address of our hotel, and she organized our transfer into a couple of taxis that took us across the Atatürk Bridge into the ancient district of Sultanahmet.
The taxis pulled up in front of the most remarkable hotel of our trip thus far. The Ayasofya Pansiyonlari consisted of seven or eight nineteenth-century row houses squeezed into a narrow cobblestone alley between the Topkapi Palace and Aya Sophia—Emperor Justinian’s magnificent sixth-century church. In short, we were wedged between the two seats of power—Ottoman and Byzantine—that made Istanbul the most powerful and influential city in the Western world for more than a thousand years.
Once we settled into our old-fashioned rooms—done up with period brass, glass lamps, and Turkish carpets—we decided to wander into the night. Aya Sophia was dramatically lit by floodlights that accentuated its graceful form and picked out the seagulls wheeling gracefully amongst its domes and minarets. Across from Aya Sophia was a huge lighted fountain framed by the massive Blue Mosque. After a while, Betty and the kids went back to the hotel, and Devi and I strolled alone down dark, narrow streets to the spot where the Golden Horn enters the Bosporus. There, fisherman grilled their catch in the shadow of the Galata Bridge, and passengers scurried to and fro amongst Istanbul’s ubiquitous ferries.
Devi and I climbed onto the Galata Bridge to get a better view of the old district. We turned in time to see a crescent moon rise above the sixteenth-century Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent. For one perfect instant, we stood under the stars at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, Islam and Christendom—a place of great deeds, deep intrigues, and grand illusions. If there is a more fascinating, more romantic spot on earth, we’ve yet to find it.
Resting in the shadow of Aya Sophia had its advantages, but sleeping late wasn’t one of them. Each morning, at the crack of dawn, the muezzin’s call-to-prayer exploded from a loudspeaker right outside our window like the voice of Allah himself. This holy wake-up call meant that we always got an early start on the day—and each day we spent in Istanbul, we were rewarded with a rich mélange of sights, sounds, and smells.
Though it’s not terribly original, my favorite place in Istanbul was Aya Sophia, itself. Once inside its courtyard, I was amazed to find the 1,500-year-old church ringed with a bewildering accretion of buttresses, kiosks, tombs, and outbuildings that stuck to its sides like barnacles. Once we got past these layers, we found ourselves standing inside a grand narthex decorated from floor to ceiling with polychrome marble slabs. At this point, we definitely had a feel for ancient Byzantium, but it wasn’t until we passed through a second narthex and into the nave itself that we understood the vast splendor of the place. There, in a space the size of a modern sports arena, we were encompassed by an improbable admixture of stained glass, somber-faced Byzantine mosaics and thirty-foot golden shields inscribed with assertive Islamic calligraphy.
Hundreds of feet above us were two half domes and, ultimately, the huge central dome of the church. When it was first constructed in 537, Aya Sophia’s dome was considered a nearly impossible engineering feat and in fact, it’s collapsed four times over the centuries. But it was rebuilt each time, and today it remains an awe-inspiring metaphor for heaven. The sixth-century author Procopius wrote that this dome seemed to be “founded not on solid masonry but suspended from heaven by a golden chain,” and the Emperor Justinian, himself, upon entering his church for the first time, fell to his knees and cried, “Oh, Solomon, I have outdone you!”
Anyway, if there’s such a thing as a spectacularly funky old church, Aya Sophia is it. Between its Ottoman chandeliers, dour Byzantine icons and its countless architectural curiosities layered on bit-by-bit over the centuries, there’s a surprise around every corner. By comparison, St. Peter’s in Rome feels like Christian corporate headquarters.
But Aya Sophia was by no means the only fascinating site within walking distance of our hotel. The Blue Mosque, Sultan Ahmet’s failed attempt to rival Justinian, is still a remarkable accomplishment. The Topkapi Palace, with its manicured courtyards, elaborate harem, and fabulous porcelain collections is, by itself, worth a trip to Istanbul. And of course, you can only imagine our children’s rampant delight when we ventured into Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar—the fifteenth-century mother of all shopping malls with more than four thousand jewelry, rug, and chatchke shops.
This isn’t to say that Istanbul is perfect. The food, while generally cheap, is also generally awful, and every tourist attraction in the city is plagued by aggressive touts who pester you incessantly with little toys and other assorted crap. I also noted, with some irony, that this is conceivably the worst place on earth to buy a Turkish rug or any other fakable item of value. Plus, it’s impossible to wander the streets of this city without that damned song, “Istanbul (not) Constantinople,” rattling around in your head all day.
Those quibbles aside, no city we visited thus far has been so thoroughly engrossing. It was a joy to stand on the banks of the Golden Horn and tell the children how the last Byzantine Emperor ran a massive chain across the Golden Horn in a futile attempt to stave off the gunboats of Mehmet the Conqueror. And the Topkapi Palace was the perfect setting to recount how the Ottomans conquered the world from Mesopotamia to the ramparts of Vienna. We had great expectations for Istanbul, but the city exceeded them all. Even Betty agreed it was worth her trouble getting here.
17 About eighty-five bucks