ANTALYA, Turkey — The Turkish bath wasn’t our idea.
We couldn’t see ourselves lying stark naked on a marble slab as big as a king-size bed while muscular Turks wielding bristly luffas scrubbed us raw, sudsed us clean, oiled us down and gave us a bone- bruising massage.
But to Mine (pronounced MEE- nuh) Karahan, our guide to all things Turkish for the past week and a half, a visit to a 700-year-old bathhouse was a cultural experience we shouldn’t pass up.
So were the stop at a village market to buy the one-size-fits-all baggy pants Turkish women in the countryside wear, the lessons in how to tie our scarves the way Muslim women do, and the dinner party where we all did our best imitation of a belly dance.
None of this was especially pretty. But it was fun.
We two had never taken an organized tour. Who wants to be trapped inside a tour bus for hours at a time, we’d sniff, isolated from the locals, herded from museum to market, mosque to church and on to another town, another market?
And Turkey was always near the top of our list of countries to see someday, but there were just enough news reports of trouble with neighboring Iraq and the country’s minority Kurdish population to make us hesitate, if only a bit.
But a friend who’d done this same tour the year before, and loves to travel as much as we do, said he thought we’d like seeing Turkey by tour bus. And the western half of the country is considered quite safe for travelers.
The group on the Rick Steves tour our friend took was kept to 28 people, he said, his fellow tourists compatible, the buses comfortable and the lodgings simple but clean. There’d be a bit of walking, and you and your luggage were on your own, but that’s nothing new for travelers used to going independently.
Our previous foreign trip, independently to Japan, had been a bear to arrange, and we were ready to kick back on the next one. So we put our preconceived notions about group tours aside and signed up.
As it turns out, on the Turkey tour we did all the things we’d have done on our own and then some.
There were markets, museums, ruins, mosques, churches and fast food. (Don’t knock the dilli kasarli, the roasted tongue sandwich served up by a Turkish fast-food chain, until you’ve tried it.)
But there was also that Turkish scrub-down. And the visit with a village imam, the spiritual leader of a dwindling Muslim congregation, in his centuries-old mosque; the luncheon stew slow-cooked by a philosophical widow whose oven is a 3-foot-deep hole dug in the dirt floor just outside her house. And the stories told by our Turkish guide, Mine, of the Apostle Paul in the same arena he was kicked out of for preaching Christianity to the Romans.
And, lest anyone think we were segregated from the “real Turks,” Mine pushed us off the bus more than once, pointed us in the direction of a market, and said, “Go mingle with the people, go talk to them. They’ll be nice to you, even if you don’t speak the language.”
She was right.
“Merci” works
The locals strained to hear any words they recognized from our fractured attempts at Turkish. The phrase for “Thank you” (tesekkur ederim) was supposed to sound something like “Tea, sugar, a dream,” but every time we tried it, people would look puzzled and then, when it dawned on them what we were trying to say, howl with laughter.
So we adopted a modest French “Merci,” which Mine assured us everyone understood.
The guidebooks had warned that Turkish baths aren’t for everyone. The attendants can be especially rough on women tourists, one said.
But figuring there’s safety in numbers and Mine wouldn’t let us get into too much trouble, nine of us (five men, four women) made our way a little nervously down the cobblestoned hillside from our hotel to the bathhouse.
Rose, the sturdy attendant in the women’s side of our bathhouse, had shed her Muslim head scarf and high-necked cardigan sweater in favor of a black lace bra and panties. She grabbed our hands to lead us through the process, which wasn’t gentle but wasn’t unbearable either. When one of us remarked in English to the others on her firm biceps, she grinned, flexed her arm and said, proudly, “Keek-boxing, eh?”
Mine has a degree in political science from a Turkish university. As we rolled along from Istanbul through Turkey’s rural Cappadocia region and down along the Mediterranean seaside, she read aloud from daily newspapers she picked up each morning. If you napped along the way, you missed her tongue-in-cheek commentary.
“A new lion is born at the zoo and needs a name,” she translated for us one day from a local paper. “IBM wants to do business in Turkey. Oh. A man has been communicating with aliens since he was a little boy. And what does the pope say? He says it’s a sin to believe in aliens. But they were created by God too, weren’t they?”
Our fellow bus riders took Mine’s editorializing in stride. Most of us were middle-aged, although two recent college graduates were aboard with parents. We covered 1,750 miles on our 13-day tour, with 10 major stops, and even though we were on that bus together during waking hours for the better part of two weeks, there were no trip-spoiling personality clashes.
We asked how Turkey gets along with Iran.
“They want us to go along with sharia rule and wear veils,” she shrugged. “But they’re a source of oil for us, so we get along well.”
In the village of Guzelyurt, we woke early to a concert of Middle Eastern sounds: roosters crowing, doves cooing, dogs barking, donkeys braying, and the minor-key call to prayer from the minaret at the mosque that once was the center, physically and spiritually, of the village.
In the mosque, we met the young imam in charge, who was introduced to us only as Ramazan. He meets regularly with Americans traveling in Steves-sponsored tours to answer questions about Islam and Turkey’s religious culture.
The mosque dates from the fourth century and is being shored up by the government, which considers it a tourist attraction, despite the fact that Guzelyurt is a little off the tourist track.
Ninety-nine percent of Turkey’s population is Muslim. The government is secular, but clergy are appointed by the government and paid from taxes. This is Ramazan’s first post. He studied six years at a Muslim theological school and has been in Guzelyurt for three years.
He doesn’t preach about politics at Friday services, he said, because provoking controversy is not part of his mission. “He’s also a social worker,” Mine explained. “That’s a big part of his job, so his purpose is to unite people, not divide them.”
His biggest challenge?
“He wishes he had a larger congregation,” Mine said. The village used to have more people, and the mosque was the center of activity. But most of the younger people have moved on to the city for better jobs.
But most of the people we met were eager for us to understand Turkey and appreciate its place as a gateway to the Middle East.
In rural Anatolia we lunched with Fahriye Ozbek, who gathered us into her large sitting room and dished up a shepherd’s salad and a country stew made with white beans.
Her stewpot had been placed in a hole about a foot in diameter and 3 feet deep, dug into the hard- packed dirt outside her kitchen. She used dried grapevines and other brambles for fuel.
The family has a little vineyard outside the town, she told us with Mine translating, and the women ride the donkey tethered out back to tend it. The grapes are cooked down into what she described as “grape molasses.” Last winter was so cold, she said, she feared there wouldn’t be enough grapes for molasses this year.
One of us asked if she had words of wisdom for Americans.
“Just for you,” she said. “Be glad you have an education. And always be respectful of the people who are older than you. Don’t leave your mothers and fathers when they get old. Always take care of them.”
The memories of Fahriye’s rural wisdom and Mine’s loosely structured guidance have stayed with us. We probably experienced as much of Turkey’s rich culture as we could have on our own, we’ve decided.
And we did it from the cocoon of a tour bus.
