Aaanyway, in its wisdom, the city of Houston decided to build a light rail system. Unfortunately, in and around Texas state politics at that time was Tom Delay, who, along with a variety of other critters, arranged for federal funding to be cut from the METRORail project. Over a series of years, the city battled to fund the project on its own. Finally, it managed to build one light rail line, which runs from the downtown (where no-one lives) to the football stadium (where no-one lives.) It does stop near the Rice University campus, which was nice for the few thousand of us who lived there. But it was not particularly useful--and, it seems had almost been dealt the committee death of a thousand cuts to be that way. Outside of a few places, Americans don't really like public transit. Texans hate it with the fiery heat of a thousand suns--go to Houston some time and watch the SUVs navigate the completely flat, completely paved Houston roads.
(But, oh, Houston, I miss you so much: your restaurants, your relaxedness, your wonderful people, your salads with cheese, your apparent reluctance to sell food that was not delicious and deeply unhealthy. Have I mentioned the food? I miss you like I miss forty pounds of thigh fat--you were soft and warm and welcoming, like forty pounds of thigh fat. I have lost part of myself, having left. Both literally and figuratively.)
Stuck in the fumes of the old world, the Turks do believe in public transit. Non-car transport here is cheap, convenient, and incredibly comprehensive--from lines that the city runs to private companies running buses and dolmuses. (A dolmus is a sort of private cab/bus that runs along a fixed line; the most I've ever paid for one was about five lire, which took me the entire way across Istanbul.) Turkey has some of the most expensive gas in the world--something to consider, when I see my students in their BWMs, themselves the recipients of a 100% tax. (This is levied on all foreign luxury cars, as I understand it, not simply on douchebag chariots; still, it warms the cockles of my heart.)
So, as a result of this backwardness, last weekend I found myself proceeding from Ankara to Konya on a YHT train, one of the new high-speed lines that are being built throughout the country. At about 250 km/h, we did a trip that would have taken by some estimates about six hours in an hour and forty-five minutes. Like (seemingly?) all transport in Turkey, the train was spotless; I discovered only in my last few minutes that there was a bar car, but that would have been an absurdly pleasant way to spend the trip back. The ride was nearly silent--which I will confess as an ex-Chicagoan, and veteran of the L, sort of disappoints me--and ludicrously pleasant. With a teacher discount, which I qualify for, the whole thing cost forty lire. (American friends reading this: do the expat currency game, and divide that number by half, then add a little bit. I guess round trip it cost $24.)
That teacher discount--which I get at museums, the movies, and for all I know with simit-sellers--is another sign of Turkey's backwardness. To an extent that continues to surprise me, this country reveres its teachers. Mustafa Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey (about whom much more later), exhorted teachers to be what he believed them to be: an essential part of moving the country forward. One further piece of evidence for this was the place that I stayed, called an Ogretman Evi--literally a "teacher's house," a subsided hotel for teachers. (Yes! These exist in Turkey!) I paid twenty-five lire for a pleasant room with a bathroom, flat-screen TV, and complimentary Ogretman Evi slippers, which now have pride of place in my apartment back in Ankara.
Konya itself is a vibrantly mixed bag. I went through a long walk through the city, which was--I really, really hate to write this--pretty charmless, as a whole. (And I live in Ankara.) There were pleasant restaurants and again good public transit, but the city tended towards the fume-drenched and dirty, and had obviously been built up quickly and cheaply. It made me miss my little lojman in the hills outside Ankara.
Konya is known as one of the most devout cities in Turkey--which leads me to something of an amusing story. Late my first night, I was somewhat lost in the city, and wanted a beer to bring back to my hotel room--I know, the glamor. Turkey's primary beer is the inevitable Efes, an "alcohol delivery system" (to quote one of my colleagues) that tastes of diabetic cat piss. But that evening in Konya--and this, friends, is irony--I was looking through teetotal storefront after storefront for that familiar logo. When I did find a store selling it, the lights were on, but it was closed. I was dismayed; the four teenagers who followed me into the alcove where it was located were also displeased. Reader, I was as close as I have been in my life to asking teenagers where to find alcohol, but alas I did not.
(I finally found alcohol, as I should have known all along, across the street from the Teachers' House. Some things transcend cultures.)
On the other hand, Konya features a number of wonderful things. You've never heard of the Seljuks, who were a Turko-Persian dynasty flourishing around the year 1,3000BCE. They produced some of the loveliest buildings I've seen in Turkey--you have my permission to copy their teal-and-white color scheme, if you wish, for your next bathroom remodel. I was particularly struck by the Ince Minare, a former madrassa now beautifully convereted into a museum. (A madrassa is, of course, a school--the Turks have clearly been backwards for millennia.) Someone needs to key Target in to Seljuk architecture with a quickness--I see a Kardashian (any will do) relaxing in front of a Seljuk kitchen panel, smiling gamely.
My primary focus in Konya was going to see Catalhoyuk, a famous Neolithic site near the city. Believed for a while to be the oldest such site in the world, Catalhoyuk has been displaced by other locations--I think the oldest known habitation is actually somewhere else in Turkey, and will no doubt show up in a future blog entry. But Catalhoyuk is a very early instance of art in the Neolithic world. Here, you can read about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatal_Hüyük
That seated female figurine is one of the oldest pieces of human art, period--it dates to about 6,000 BC. Many signs from the site point towards matriarchy, or at least to women enjoying some sort of roughly-equivalent-maybe-surely status. I had always been rather skeptical about people looking for spaces of utopic feminism in the past--I'm fine with the idea, not so much with twisting the facts to go looking for such moments--but I will admit that there's something sort of agreeable of the notion of some little settlement, way the hell back in the past, where at least one aspect of how people were organized wasn't just ghastly. Benjamin's Angel of History might have allowed them the tiniest of fist-bumps.
The site itself, at least the parts of it open to tourists, are covered in two wood-frame structures, which protect the excavations. I had the place to myself that morning.
How to describe Catalhoyuk? I happened to be reading "Anna Karenina" on my way to the site and back. Early on, during an argument between Karenin and his wife, the narrator describes him as talking "with her in his habitual tone, which was a mockery of those who would talk that way seriously. And in that tone it was impossible to say what needed to be said to her." This is about how I feel about writing about Catalhoyuk. I realize that you read this for my goofy enthusiasms about walls, and not for anything serious. But this--this was thousands of years of human life, wall by wall, uncovered for us to stare at. I don't want to get all spiritual--this isn't the end of Anna Karenina--but this place has presence. I thought of the "Temple of the Winds" in Hardy's Tess, but this was different: it felt warm and engaging. These people buried their dead in their houses, suggesting reverence for families and for living together. A chart showed where they started using milk, where they started domesticating animals, and so on forward.
I'm projecting here, of course, that this was docile family life. As the reconstructed Catalhoyuk house showed, most of these people had the head of some sort of animal mounted on the wall; for all I know, the fumes from the fires made them think it talked to them, and they spent their lives telling the children to beware Uncle Ugh's spirit, come back to life in the right antler and angry about getting crushed in that mine collapse. Nevertheless--and this comes from teaching Great Books--I felt a kinship to people for whom things like walls and families seemed to matter. These things appeal to a deracinated Canadian, thousands of miles from any sort of previous home, typing on an iPad in a Starbucks in what is no doubt as characteristic of our time as worshipping the antlers on the wall was to them.
The Archaeology Museum in Konya was great in the way that so many local archaeological museums here seem to be great, with so much stuff--Roman and Byzantine, primarily--that they have to put some of it in lines in the courtyard. I will never be able to think of the Romans without imagining them as covered in their clutter, wives complaining about those seven herms making it hard to get into the breakfast nook.
I was sort of the wrong person to see Rumi's tomb, another major Konya attraction: I'm mostly unfamiliar with his poetry, unlike those who were literally crying at the site of his tomb. The location is lovely, and I have documented it extensively with pictures--I feel like i should write more about this when I actually understand what it was that I was seeing. Around it was the all-too-freequent mess of Turkish road construction, umpteen lanes of unpaved chaos.
I missed the dervishes, who perform Saturday nights, since I had to take the fast train back to Ankara--a bit under two hours later I was back, 'midst embassies and Simit Sarailer and a (frankly) higher class of Turkish rubble, clutter, and exuberance. But I'll be back to Konya, hopefully better able to say things about Rumi.
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