Talking Location With George Dearsley: TURKEY

25th April 2021

#TalkingLocationWith… George Dearsley, author of Twelve Camels For Your Wife

What do you want when you go on holiday? Beautiful beaches, breathtaking archeological sites, fulsome hospitality from quirky locals, tasty cuisine, guaranteed good weather, sporty thrills? Turkey has it all and more.

I knew nothing of the country when I drove a battered Ford van across the border with Greece in 1972 on a trip with a university pal which took us to Japan.

Within a day a group of Turkish youths befriended us, brought us tea and sandwiches, showed us the sites of Istanbul and started a love affair that has lasted 49 years.

There have been some scary moments, like being arrested as a spy in 1974 during the short war with Greece over Cyprus, and waking up to an earthquake in 1999 that shook our building like a washing machine on full spin and killed 17,000 people elsewhere.

But if I had a pound for every kindness done to me by Turks over the years I would be hobnobbing with Jeff Bezos.

For example, I once went to pay my bill in a cafe only to be told by the manager that a waiter I had been chatting to had paid it and gone home after finishing his shift.

Back in the 1970s the Turkish government had a lax attitude to the heritage that five glorious civilisations had bequeathed it. You would turn a corner and see a piece of a Roman column being used to prop up a door jamb in a village home or be taken by a knowledgeable local into a wood where there lay a spectacular abandoned Byzantine mausoleum. I recall visiting the jaw-dropping underground city of Derinkuyu Nevşehir province, Anatolia, where 20,000 people once lived, gaining entry via an anonymous metal door lying flat on the ground.

Patara

Nowadays tourism is a major income so sites are well kept.

My favourite is probably Ephesus, about a 40 minute drive from the traditional village where I now live. Most people wax lyrical over the library. But the highlight, for me, is the public latrines. What better way to promote social integration than to have people emptying their bowels in open rows, with all bodily fluids and solids properly flushed away. Incredible to think that public sanitation only came to London with the Victorians but the Romans had it almost two millennia ago.

Alacati

Other “must see” places include Nemrut, a two-thousand-metre-high mountain, twenty-five miles North of Kahta, near Adıyaman.

In 62 BC King Antiochus I of Commagene built at the summit his own astonishing mausoleum flanked by huge statues eight to nine metres high of himself and various gods.

Then there’s Goreme, the surreal area of so-called “fairy chimneys” made from tufa rock, which people hollowed out and turned into homes and fresco-filled churches.

You can now spend a night in a hotel built into one of those caves and float over the place in a hot air balloon.

Gorema

Don’t miss Pamukkale, where mineral-rich thermal waters flow down white travertine terraces on a hillside. Or try Dalyan, where you can visit stunning rock tombs built into the hillside, wallow in mud baths or get up close and personal to the wonderful loggerhead turtles. The list goes on.

Pamukkale

I often smile when I read the negative comments below a British newspaper story on Turkey, usually about migration, written by people who have never been. Partly to offset this and also to thank the Turks for their generosity, I wrote a book Twelve Camels For Your Wife, an offer made to me in the 1980s by an Istanbul nightclub owner. I kept the wife.

Whether you are a holidaymaker or looking to live abroad I try to explain the culture and peculiar customs, like my neighbour bringing me a plate of sheep’s intestine filled with rice mixed with herbs, being invited into someone’s home to watch a circumcision or being given a gun to fire at a wedding.

Crazy things happen here almost on a daily basis. OK, animal rights protocols rightly mean you no longer bump into men in the street leading around a seven foot bear. But you might see a 1930s Oldsmobile drive past in Istanbul or be invited into your local football team’s stadium before kick-off to meet your favourite player or go to a deserted waterfall to find a photographer willing to take your picture in a series of Ottoman costumes. All things that have happened to me.

George Dearsley

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