Overdue: Bozcaada 10K

We’re had houseguests this past week, and more are coming, so I haven’t found time to write about the weekend we spent on Bozcaada until right now!  I hope you’ll find this worth the wait.

Bozcaada is a small island off the Aegean coast of Turkey–one of only three that Turkey got to take back from Greece in the aftermath of WWI and at the start of the Republic.  It has a really long and fascinating history, which I will largely gloss over now.

The island has been inhabited since prehistory, and it appears in Ancient Greek mythology before it shows up in the actual historical record.  Accounts vary, but one prominent myth theme is of a prince named Tenes who was the victim of his stepmother’s anger and jealousy.  She had tried to seduce him; when he refused, she cast him into the sea.  He survived, though, and washed onto the shore of the island.  The islanders received him as a king, and renamed the island Tenedos after him.  (In Greece, the official name of the island is still  Tenedos).  Years later, Tenes’ father discovered his wife’s betrayal, and set  sail on a journey to find his son and seek forgiveness.  When he arrived at Tenedos, he tied his boat to a mooring, but Tenes took an axe and cut the rope that bound the ship to shore.  Today there is (apparently) a Greek saying, “the hatchet of Tenes,” which indicates a resentment that can never be eased.

Non-mythological Greeks also lived on the island.  They were vintners and traders, and there are local coins dating from the Archaic period that show bunches of grapes and wine vessels.  Some of them have Tenes’ axe on the obverse.

This coin is not Archaic–it dates from BC 188-170 (the Hellenistic Period) according to the website I took the image from (asiaminorcoins.com). But even at this later date, you can still see the axe with a bunch of grapes underneath it displayed as symbols of the island.

Greek people continued to live on Bozcaada during the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and stayed there under the Roman and later Byzantine empires.  The Ottomans conquered the island around the same time they took Istanbul, and Turks and Greeks lived together relatively peacefully after that.  Today, there is still a very strong Greek influence on the island; the village there is divided into a Greek quarter (actually a half) and a Turkish quarter (half).

All that historical background aside, Juan and I went to Bozcaada with one of my work friends, Büke, for a very contemporary reason: to participate in a 10K race.

It started Thursday evening at midnight, when Juan and I caught our overnight bus from Istanbul to Geyikli.  We arrived at seven the next morning, and bought our tickets for the ferry from Geyikli to Bozcaada.  It was a little cool and cloudy, but we made the best of our day, starting with a walk through the island’s quaint village:

Picturesque decay.

I think these giant baskets are sun shades, waiting to be stuck on poles like umbrellas at the beach.  But I’m not at all sure.

Near the Bozcaada ferry dock.

After exploring the village a little, we rented bicycles and pedaled off through the countryside.  (Can you say “countryside” when a place is very small?)  Bozcaada is still a wine producer, and the vineyards are truly breathtaking.  There are also several sandy beaches for swimming and relaxing.  We visited this one:

A contemplative man. He went swimming shortly afterwards. I thought it was too cold, and took a nap on the beach instead.

In the evening, we cycled back to our hotel and returned the bikes, then turned around to find dinner.  We ended up at a place called Lisa’s Cafe, which is owned by an Australian woman who’s been married to a Turkish guy for the last 25 years.  Her Turkish was great, but she also seemed happy to have occasion to speak to someone in English.  We sat outside enjoying breeze off the water and sharing a cheese plate for quite a while before we decided we should probably order dinner at some point, too!

In (completely unnecessary) preparation for the next day’s run, we both ordered spaghetti–I had a plate with Romesco, and Juan had one plate with Bolognese, and another with chicken and mushrooms.  Lisa really cracked herself up asking repeatedly about our food, as in, “How are your three spaghettis?”  ”Are you enjoying all three spaghettis?”  ”Can I get you anything else besides your three spaghettis?”  Etc.

As we finished our three spaghettis, Büke arrived on the island, and met us at Lisa’s.  Turns out Lisa could, in fact, get us something besides our three spaghettis.  We all shared a piece of homemade lemon cheesecake.  So there!

Saturday was race day!  Because the island is so small, there were no real concerns about closing streets to traffic.  That means the start time could be later in the day.  In the morning there was time for Juan and me to explore the island’s fortress.

At the entrance.

The fortress is incredibly well preserved (and doubtless restored).  There is disagreement about who first built it, but it was used, destroyed, and rebuilt multiple times by the Greeks, Venetians, Genoese, and Ottomans.  The plaque visible above the entrance commemorates a restoration made in the 1815 under the reign of Sultan Mahmud II.

A view of the harbor from the fortress. That was the last ferry into the island before the race, and if there were any runners on the boat, they were definitely cutting it close!

Bozcaada is covered in poppies, the petals of which are used to make jam, sherbet, soaps, etc.  This one was growing inside the fortress.

We left the fortress in time to change for the race and soak up the excitement at the start line.  New Balance was sponsoring the event, and they did a great job.  I was feeling nervous as the race approached, because I knew it was hilly, and my legs didn’t feel very perky after the previous day’s bike-ride.  But hanging out under the New Balance tents and picking up our race swag really helped me relax.

I took this photo much earlier in the day. Just before the race, the plaza was completely packed with people. Juan and I hung out in the shade and did some serious people-watching. There were a bunch of really fit-looking older people there, as well as some younger athletes with running gear that we haven’t seen before and couldn’t interpret. Mostly, though, there were amateurs like us.

We couldn’t find Büke at the start line, but it’s okay–she knew other runners there, so she wasn’t alone.  I was going to include a race photo here of us at the beginning of the course, but I was stealing the picture from the official photographers’ website without paying for it, and my conscience got the better of me.  They should put a watermark on their photos or something!  Anyway, here, just imagine a lot of people on a sunny road, looking determined.  Juan and I stayed together for the first minute or so, but we’d agreed in advance that he would run at his pace, not slow down for me.  He beat me by almost ten minutes!

I’d been running on hills in Istanbul to prepare, but I wasn’t being serious about training at all.  The course was tough for me!

This is how I felt running up the hill to the 5K turnaround point. Okay, it’s also ornamentation from a Greek cemetery inside the fortress we’d visited earlier that morning.

But all three of us prevailed:

I look kind of goofy here, but I was happy!

Fun fact: I finished 34th of the women (486 total), and Juan finished 34th of the men (594 total).

After the race and a shower, we decided to rent bikes and go back to the beach.  The cycling and swimming made it a triathlon day (in spirit, not in distances)!  I swam, too, this time.  Wow, the Aegean is cold!

In the evening, we went out for a nice meal with some of Büke’s friends from her running group.  Around 10:00, Juan and I started yawning, so we didn’t make it out to the bar afterwards.  Büke, however, is a real trooper.

From the terrace of our hotel.

The next morning, we went to brunch at a famous inn called Rengigül. Büke had recommended it to us for Friday morning, but Juan and I couldn’t find it on our own and had to wait for her guidance.  In our defense, it doesn’t have a sign outside.  Rengigül is run by an extremely feisty 70-year-old woman who had walked the 10K the day before.  Her place is completely magical.

Now Juan is making a goofy face, but you can see all around him how beautiful the setting was.

Breakfast was an absolute feast!

This isn’t even all of it!

Bozcaada, like everywhere else, has culinary specialties, one of which is jams.  They are particularly well-known for tomato jam and poppy petal jam.  But there are many, many others.

The jam selection at Rengigül is pretty spectacular. Pictured: poppy petal, green fig, sour cherry, tangerine, orange peel, strawberry, mulberry, quince, squash, spicy green pepper, tomato, some green herb that I couldn’t identify, some aromatic flower that I couldn’t identify, and who knows what all else. Not pictured: sugar high and resultant food coma.

Buke and me enjoying an extra cup of coffee before leaving Rengigül. Turns out we were a little too relaxed…

When it was time to leave, we had to rush to catch our ferry home.  And we missed it.  Once again, Büke saved the day and rearranged our entire travel schedule with new bus tickets connecting in different cities than we’d originally planned to pass through.  But we still made it back to Istanbul in time for a good night’s sleep.

Goodbye Bozcaada! I hope to see you again someday!

In Between Time

I’ve been struggling to come up with good topics for a post.  The time since our Likia Trail weekend has been kind-of in between.  I don’t mean in between good and bad—things are pretty good!  I mean in between exciting events, the trip to Lycia and an upcoming trip to Bozcaada (details in the next post—Bozcaada was spectacular!).  Regular life in between these things seems a little too boring to talk about, you know?  But I press on!

We’ve had a couple of lazy, relaxed weekends.  Last Friday, Juan surprised me with a fantastic dinner out.  We went to a restaurant called Vogue that has a rooftop terrace with a gorgeous view.  The food was continental, rather than Turkish, but I still managed to have deniz borulcesi, the plant I’d tried unsuccessfully to prepare at home earlier this month.  Turns out, when entrusted to the proper hands, it tastes delicious!  We both had fish dishes, and shared a chestnut cake for dessert.  Awesome.

Saturday I went for a long run while Juan was at his sailing lesson.  In the afternoon, we took a trip to a neighborhood that we haven’t seen much of before, Etiler.  In truth, the visit was precipitated by the need to visit a phone repair shop, but at least we took advantage of it to walk around a bit.

We still had technology-related errands to run on Sunday, so we went to a place near the Bosphorus where there are a bunch of shops selling cameras and telephones.  These shops are in an underground passage that’s dark and crowded.  I doubt these are authorized resellers of branded products.  No one had the cable we needed, but they did all have firearms for sale.  I hadn’t realized how easily accessible guns are.  I don’t know what kinds of regulations there are regarding the purchase of firearms, but it didn’t look like you’d have to do very much to just pick something up.  Creepy.

Since we were in the neighborhood, and since Juan hasn’t had a chance yet to see it properly, we stopped at Süleymaniye Camii.  At first I was a little worried, since we hadn’t planned for the visit, and I wasn’t carrying a head scarf.  But Süleymaniye sees many tourists, so they were ready for us.  I borrowed a head-covering and a long skirt (my knee-length skirt was too short!), and Juan also borrowed a long skirt (he was wearing shorts).  I think Süleymaniye is the most elegant of the big mosques in Istanbul, and we had a really pleasant time.  We even took a little nap on the grass outside—the gardens there are beautifully maintained.

On Wednesday of that week there was a holiday: May Day.  It was chaotic!  Every year there are workers’ demonstrations in Taksim Square, and they are usually peaceful and go off without a hitch.  This year, though, the police wouldn’t issue a permit for a gathering in the square.  Why not?  Depends on who you ask.  Officially, the reasoning was that the construction in Taksim Square made it unsafe for such a large crowd.  However, some of the worker’s unions and parties claimed that this was just an excuse, and they vowed to celebrate the day in Taksim anyway.

So, early in the morning, masses of people started marching to Taksim from different points in the city.  Police details in riot gear were lining the streets.  Obviously, tension was high.  We woke up to loud chanting as people surged through our neighborhood.  By 10am, things had gotten out of hand.  Again, it’s unclear whether the police or the demonstrators made the first move, but the effect was that demonstrators were breaking windows, spraying graffiti, and throwing rocks.  Police dispersed the crowds with water cannons and tear gas.

When things quieted down, Juan and I tried to leave our apartment, but there was still tear gas in the air outside our building.  (That was the first time I’ve smelled tear gas—not something I’m eager to do again).  We made the best of being trapped inside, and accomplished a lot of spring-cleaning that day!

The following weekend was relaxed again.  Juan’s Saturday sailing lesson was cancelled, so we got to enjoy a slow morning together.  We went for a run and then a long walk down to Ortaköy, a neighborhood on the Bosphorus.

Totally cheating. This photo is from another day all together, and it’s not actually in Ortakoy. But the view from Ortakoy looks so much like this that if I hadn’t written this caption, you never would have known the difference.

We poked around the shops, drank tea on a gorgeous terrace, had a beer at a university hang-out, and then walked back up to our neighborhood.  On the way we found a small, completely overgrown cemetery.  The gate looks like the entrance to a park, but inside the walls there’s a jungle of weeds and a colony of stray cats, all of whom seemed shocked to see humans in their midst.  It’s strange to come across such an untouched little lost world in the middle of a very busy urban neighborhood!

We found a lovely restaurant for dinner.  Just as we sat down we realized that the place was a showcase for a particular vintner in Bozcaada, the island we were travelling to on the following weekend!  So we got to enjoy a preview of island wines, and get in the mood for our trip.

And that, in a nutshell, is what we’ve been up to of late.  Too boring?  Tune in next time for a review (with many photos!) of our trip to Bozcaada, and a recap of the race we ran there.  Spoiler alert: it was AMAZING!

Look Out! Photos Ahoy!

There was a national holiday last week, so Juan and I made it into a four-day weekend.  And there’s a lot of photographic evidence!

We spent Saturday through Tuesday hiking a tiny part of the Likia Yolu (or Lycian Way), which is located on a southwestern Turkish peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean.  We’d learned of the 510 km long hiking trail from one of Juan’s colleagues.  The trail was first way-marked by an English woman, Kate Clow, in 1999, and volunteers have been maintaining it ever since.

We flew from Istanbul at 6:30 Saturday morning.  (Funny aside: in order to get to the suburban airport in time, we had to leave the house at 3:00am.  We made it to the airport without a hitch, but we still almost missed our flight because we fell asleep on the floor at the gate!).  We travelled on by bus and mini-bus to our first village stop: Faralya.  After checking into our pension (George House–I’d highly recommend) and dropping our bags, we started hiking down to Kelebekler Vadisi, or Butterfly Valley.  The valley is in a deep canyon carved by a river that flows from the mountains in a series of waterfalls to the sea.  The path down from the village is steep, but worth it.

This over-exposed photo shows just how steep the cliff really was! There were three places with ropes to help you climb up or down.

On the hike down we saw all kinds of of wildflowers growing in between the craggy rocks, including bushes of tiny yellow orchids!  I have never seen orchids growing in the wild before.  At the bottom of the cliff is the valley, and there’s a path through its tall grass that leads on to a pebble beach.  The valley is, in fact, home to many butterflies, none of which I recognized.

We relaxed on the beach for a couple of hours, chatting and napping intermittently, and then walked on the valley path again further back, past the place we’d come down the mountain, to see the waterfall at the head of the valley.  And then we climbed back up to the top, and waited for the sun to set.

A view toward Butterfly Valley from George House.

The next morning (Sunday) we headed on to our next village stop: Kabak.  (Kabak, by the way, means squash or pumpkin.  I have no idea why the village has this name!)  There are two different trails you can take to hike there. The official Likia Yolu trail is only a few kilometers long, but it goes straight up over a mountain.  The other, non-Likia Yolu trail is longer, but it hugs the coastline and gives sea views the whole way.  Well, since we’d already agreed we were in no hurry, we chose the scenic route. And here are scenes!

Lots of scenes!

Here we’re looking down at the water from atop a tall cliff.

I see some of these images are a bit repetitive. Humor me, please. I chose from an even greater pool of pics.

Sculptural Trees

We saw several stone cottage farms like this on the path. Some had a cow and some chickens. All of them had honey bees and goats. There are still goat-herding families in the region, who move up and down the mountain during the year to keep their flocks fed.

More loveliness.

Finally we arrived at the beach at Kabak!

We spent two nights at the same pension/campground.  And here it is:

Not bad! We stayed in one of these little bungalows.

These flowers were on the property–they look strangely like toilet brushes.

The next day (Monday) we decided to do a day-hike and then return to the same spot, rather than push on to the next village.  We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to get back to the airport in time for our Tuesday flight.  Our destination for the day was Cennet Plaj, or Paradise Beach.  I was concerned that after the incredible beauty of the preceding day’s hike, this trail wouldn’t live up.  But I was wrong!

Poppies on the trail.

More of same, but not bored yet!

And who are these fine-looking people?

Intrepid guide

Cennet Plaj

This beach was just as lovely as the others.  The water was cold but clear, and there was hardly anyone else there.  Perfect!

Eventually it was time to hike back to Kabak, which we did.  When we arrived, we had a beer,

Efes: the ubiquitous beer

watched the moon rise,

The moon always looks bigger in person than in photographs, you know?

and the sun set.

It would be great if those two people in the corner were me and Juan. Alas, we could not be both photographers and photographees.

The next morning, we got up and did a reverse taxi, minibus, full-sized bus, airport, bus, metro trip back to our apartment in Istanbul.  And that, in a nutshell, was our trip to the Lycian Way!  It was spectacular, and I wish we could have spent more time exploring further.  But I doubt we’ll be back soon, because other Turkish destinations await!

Friends, you have made it all the way through this indulgently long post.  Thank you as always for reading, and commenting, and caring.

Springtime Stuff

It’s springtime in Istanbul.  The weather is mild, the evening sunlight is golden on the Bosphorus (which I’m looking at right now as I type from the Starbucks with the best view in the world), and plants are green and blossoming.

That means, it’s tulip season!  There’s a tulip festival going on all month. Apparently, the best place to view the flowers is in Emirgan Park.  We haven’t been yet (and I don’t think we’ll make it over there in time), but there are plenty of bulbs planted all throughout the rest of the city.  Even the medians of the streets are filled.

This is not a tulip. I don’t know what it is. In addition to these fuchsia/lavender trees everywhere, there is also an abundance of wisteria. Istanbul is purple!

There are some other things in season now, too.  Like…purslane!

I’m sorry, like what now? Purslane?

Yes, purslane is in season, and this begins the culinary portion of today’s post.  We ate this delicious small leaf in a meze with yogurt and garlic at Ece Aksoy a few weeks ago.  At the time, I had no idea what it was.  But then I saw a big bunch of it at the vegetable-seller’s.  So I bought it!  In order to find out what I’d purchased, I first asked the vegetable man what it is called in Turkish: semizötü.  Then I looked that up in google translate.  And voila!  Purslane.

Please note that when you see this at the store or vendor, you will only see the beautiful glossy leaves from the top, and you may start dreaming of rinsing it quickly in a colander and making a salad right away.  It is only when you get home that you will discover it also comes in its own bag of heavy, clay-ey dirt.  It’s there in the photo.

Purslane is delicious in salad and on sandwiches.  I’ve heard you can cook it, too, but I haven’t tried.

A few days later I was at the vegetable vendor again.  This guys likes me.  I’m always asking about the weird and wonderful produce I see, and I rarely understand a what he tells me.  He usually lets me taste things.  I ate an unripe almond the other day (verdict: tastes unripe, like eating grass).

So I was there, and there was this weird stuff that looked like some kind of algae or seaweed.  It seemed like the kind of thing that might be in a salad at a Japanese restaurant.  With sesame seeds or something.  He let me taste it, and, yes, it was salty, like something that grows in the ocean.  So I bought it and brought it home, and started the same research process.

This stuff is called deniz börülcesi.  It has three English translations: Samphire (sounds fancy!), Sea Asparagus (okay, I like asparagus), and Glasswort (uhhh, wait a second… That probably should have been a clue right there).  But!  Undaunted, I press on, looking for recipes.  It seems there’s not too many things to do with deniz börülcesi.  You need to blanch it quickly, then let it cool and make a salad with lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil.  Doesn’t sound hard!

Oh, except, you also have to remove the edible part from the woody stems.  You see “sea asparagus” doesn’t actually grow in the sea, underwater.  It grows in bracken marshes in a sort of low-growing, scrubby bush.  It turns out separating the food part from the non-food part takes a long time.  It also reduces your initial bunch of green stuff to about half its size.

I was definitely already annoyed when I finally finished that process, and then transferred the stuff to the boiling water for blanching.  Within moments, the whole apartment smelled like a mucky swamp.  Apparently, samphire is strong stuff!

Looks kind of like green worms, doesn’t it?

Verdict?  Tasted like salt and lemon.  Even after all of my separating of green stuff from woody stuff, there were still sticks inside the green worms.  We couldn’t finish even the paltry amount I’d made.  A culinary flop.  (I would be willing to try this in a restaurant, though, before declaring deniz börülcesi a bad food.  Maybe someone who knows what they’re doing can make it delicious.  I’m just not that someone.)

I’m going to let a last food photo segue us to another topic: last weekend.

This looks way better than green worms!

The weather was beautiful on Saturday, so we went with a few friends to Bebek, a quaint neighborhood on the waterfront.  First stop?  Ice cream!  Turkish friend Ali introduced me to ice cream sandwiches made with kağıt helva as the bread.  Kağıt means “paper,” and helva doesn’t really have a good translation into English (auto-correct is trying to respell it as “halva” or “halvah,” so I guess that’s what it means in English).  Helva is basically sweet, soft candy-ish stuff.  It’s usually made of sesame, but it can be made of wheat or any number of other things. In this case, it is not actually made of paper, but the crispy wafers are sort-of paper-like.  Kağıt helva consists of two pretty flavorless wafers spread with sweet cream in between them (really, just like a wafer cookie, but with a greater wafer to cream ratio).  So the ice cream sandwich above has two kağıt helva with ice cream in between them.  It’s a sandwich made of sandwiches.  My flavors were chestnut and caramel.

After the ice cream, we went on to see some contemporary art at a pretty interesting art space.  The building that houses the collection is the headquarters of a large company, Borusan Holding.  During the week, it’s an office.  On the weekend, it’s a museum, and the collection is arranged within the work spaces.  The building itself was initially built in the first decade of the 1900s by an Ottoman government official.  It was his country estate.  The first World War and the founding of the Republic ended his career, and the place eventually fell into disrepair. Borusan purchased it in the late 1990s and had its exterior restored, and its interior completely redesigned.  And now it’s gorgeous.

Not my photo. It’s from here.

The coolest art was a temporary exhibition called “Anima” by a Korean artist named Choe U-Ram.  The sculptures were all mechanical.  They didn’t photograph well.  This is my best attempt:

The sculpture had a motion sensor, so it was dormant when you entered the dark room, but the flowers started lighting up and blossoming when you came close. It was super cool.

Juan and I were with other people, but our group photo didn’t turn out so great, and I haven’t asked for permission to post their pictures.  So you get a picture of just me and Juan instead.  This makes our moms happy.

Bosphorus views do not get old. This is from the rooftop terrace of Borusan Holding.

Forest Run, Good Fun

Well friends, it’s been more than a week since I last posted.  And there wasn’t even any real content in that post.  It’s not that I haven’t been doing fun stuff, it’s just that I haven’t been doing a lot of photogenic stuff, and I haven’t been making extra time to write about the stuff, photogenic or not!  Frankly, I think I only have boring things to say right now.

But for some reason you’re still reading!  Here’s something fun.  Last Saturday I ran a 6K race.  A bunch of my work colleagues are runners, and they invited me to join them on a fun run organized by a local running club called Adim Adim (it means Step by Step).  The club is an all-volunteer effort, and it’s free to participate in their runs.  The course is in Belgrade Forest, a big park on the outskirts of Istanbul.  It’s really lovely there!  Of course I didn’t bring a camera to prove its loveliness, so here’s a picture I stole from the internet.

Shamelessly copied from znamus.ru, a Russian blog which appears to have shamelessly copied all of its images from elsewhere as well.

There were 188 people there, and the environment was definitely more friendly than competitive.  I came in 78th of all, and 8th out of the 68 women.  Eighth.  That makes me feel like an Olympian!!  It’s not actually that I ran that fast, it’s just that very few of the women there were really racing.  Still, it’s an ego boost!

And it’s an ego boost coming at just the right time, because Juan and I just signed up for a 10K race in May.  It’s being held on a tiny Aegean island called Bozcaada, and I really can’t wait.  I’ve heard the course is really hilly, and I’m not even going to consider trying to run a fast time.  I am going to go wine-tasting at the race’s conclusion!  Priorities.

Slightly Off-Topic

This mini-post isn’t really about Turkey.  It’s about showing off the Easter eggs Juan and I decorated on Saturday.  They don’t sell Easter egg dye in Istanbul (well, I’m sure you can find it somewhere, but I’m not fanatical enough to go traipsing all over town).  We made do with markers, which actually worked quite well.  Behold!

That isn’t a mess in the background. It’s artistic bokeh.

A turtle with its head inside its shell.

A self-satisfied owl.

And now for my masterpiece, an Iznik egg!

There’s a little bit of Turkey relevancy in here after all.  Did you know that tulips first originated in Turkey?  They’re a national symbol.

One evening’s artistic output.

More about life in Istanbul next time.  Meanwhile, thanks as always for reading (or just looking at pictures in this case).

Pera Exploration

Juan didn’t have to work last Saturday.  We got to spend the day together!  There are still many museums in Istanbul that we haven’t visited, so we took advantage of the opportunity to knock another one off the list and explore the Pera neighborhood a little more.

Pera is lovely.  We go there for restaurants and bars pretty frequently. The neighborhood used to be the center of the French community in Istanbul, before the founding of the Republic.  It’s filled with grand Beaux Arts buildings (now a little shabbier) and narrow winding streets (now a little dirtier).  And there’s an art museum there called the Pera Museum.

Pera Muzesi–the building, like many others in the area, has a modern addition on the top that’s incongruous with the rest.

We started at the top of the museum and worked our way down.  There were two traveling exhibitions.  The first was a very large collection of photographs by Nickolas Muray.  I had never heard of him, which it turns out is silly since many of his images are quite well known.  He did both fine art and commercial photography from the 1920s through 1950s.  A Hungarian immigrant originally named Mandl Miklos, his professional career started in Brooklyn in 1913.  We saw some really exquisite prints of costumed dancers from the 1920s, as well as a lot of color commercial work from the 1940s and 1950s.  Muray had a 10-year love affair with Frida Kahlo, and there was a large section of the show devoted to his portraits of her.  I’d had no idea!

The second traveling exhibition was a survey of contemporary works from the National Museum of Jordan.  Juan and I both felt sort of meh about it, but it was still worth seeing simply because I have really no knowledge of contemporary Middle Eastern artists.  (I don’t have any knowledge of historical Middle Eastern artists, either, for that matter.)

The permanent exhibitions on the bottom two floors included a small survey of ceramics from Kutahya, a show on portraiture and landscape as historical documentation of Western diplomacy to the Ottoman Empire, a collection of weights and scales spanning from the Hittite period through the 1950s, and a section about one of Turkey’s most famous intellectuals and artists, Osman Hamdi Bey.  All of these were fascinating, but I’ll spare you too much detail.

But I won’t spare you every detail! This is Osman Hamdi Bey’s most famous painting, The Turtle Trainer, 1906. Something that interested me in the wall text was the assertion that while Hamdi Bey was clearly working in an Orientalist style, his paintings did not include the sexual innuendo and/or violence present in Orientalist paintings by European artists. So this is romanticism without exotic “othering.” I copied this image from wikipedia, by the way.

After the museum, Juan and I found a beautiful restaurant for dinner. The restauranteur was there, too.  The place was a fresh “farm-to-table” type spot.  We ordered a vegetable meze platter and the chicken liver pate.  There was so much, we didn’t need to order main courses after it all.  Everything was just fantastic.

See how beautiful the meze platter was? That’s the pate with toasts and tomato marmalade at left. Then, clockwise from the upper left corner are stuffed grape leaves, honey squash with feta dressing and walnuts, eggplant wrapped around mysterious delicious filling, two kinds of ground lentil paste (I think the pink one had beet and the green one had herbs), bulgur salad wrapped in collard leaves and topped with pomegranate seeds, and cooked leeks and apple on top of a giant pink radish slice.  There was also a cucumber and yogurt salad that we finished before I thought to take a photo.  Oh, and there were some black olives on the plate, too.

After the stupendous meal, we headed out for an after dinner drink. Earlier in the week we’d had friends over for dinner, who’d told us about a new bar.  It doesn’t have a name or a sign out front, and it’s very small.  You have to be “in the know” to find it.  The owner fancies himself a bit of an alchemist or mad scientist–he asks you what tastes you like and how you’re feeling, and then he mixes a custom drink especially for you.  He’s an American named Alex.  You can see where this is going, right?

Juan and I weren’t looking for this place at all, but we stumbled on a tiny, cool-looking bar, went inside, looked around and said, “I think we’re at Alex’s.”

Alex hard at work. It’s hard to see in the photo, but on the illuminated shelves behind him are jars of hand-labeled, home-made infused liquor.  There were tons of flavors, including lemon, clove, cinnamon, mint, saffron, walnut, fennel, sage, ginger, etc., etc., etc.

Okay, so a lot of it is show.  But it’s a good show, and we liked it.  I had something with lime, honey, and spiced rum called “Voodoo Baby,” and Juan had something with orange peel, cinnamon, and bourbon called “Quinn’s Last Words.”  I think mine was the tastier of the drinks, but both were great.  They were also strong, which is really rare in Istanbul.

So, last Saturday was a success!

This weekend is also going nicely so far.  I’m going to color eggs in a little while because tomorrow is Easter.  In that spirit, here’s a little friend that showed up near my office recently.

Bad lighting! But you get the idea.

Oh!  And I added a couple of photos to the skiing post.  I just got them off of Juan’s phone.  Take a look!  And, as always, thanks for reading.