Aegean Pearls: My Life in Izmir

Since arriving in Turkey, I've known I wanted to hike. It's been hard to do: temperatures have been in the mid-30s most days since I arrived at the beginning of August (it is now mid-September). But I really want to see this country and experience it, and hiking is the best way to do both. My third week in country I found the article " The Most Beautiful Hiking Routes in Izmir ," and I've taken it as a personal challenge. Over the Victory Day (August 30) weekend, I chose the trip to the Ionian city of Teos. To get to this ancient city, I hopped on a bus at a stop around the corner from my house. It was a three hour bus ride with two transfers. It was totally worth it. I was in such a hurry to see an ancient city -- I prefer the term, "lost city," because I am an Indiana Jones fan, but the fact is that the site is open to all-comers -- that I got off the bus one stop too soon.  I quickly found a path into the site via the "back way." As I follow...

I attended my first Turkish folk concert this week, a performance by the T epecik Filarmoni Orkestrasi , a group of musicians who play Romany music, among other styles. It was an experience unlike anything I have ever heard, and my mind is honestly still relishing it. Here's a look at some video my friend shot of the concert, held at the Sanathane Theater in Basmane, a historic area with winding, cobble-stone streets close to the center of town. Romany music is, of course, tied to the Balkan gypsy culture, and it is very eastern in orientation and sound. The 10-piece band, led by a percussionist on the doubek drum included 3 violinists, a tambourine, a base drum, a zither, clarinet, trumpet, and a keyboardist playing bass notes.  But to their Romany songs, TFO added some Turkish folk and even some riffs on western standards. They have a really cool arrangement of Mozart's symphony #25 that they meld with Romany style to create a musical experience unlike any other. There was a...

A few weeks ago I went through my monthly book binge. The school secretary, a Turk named Ipek, had asked me if I was teaching any Turkish writers in my literature classes. I have spent the years since my first visit to Turkey reading Turkish writers, most notably Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk. But I remain ignorant of the breadth of Turkish literature.  Ipek set me aright. She wrote down ten authors I needed to check out. I immediately went home, hoping to find them translated into English. It took some work--so did finding English titles in a Turkish bookstore. Finally someone mentioned a store with English books on Konak Pier, and I went the next Sunday to check it out. The English titles they had were mostly classics--Frankenstein, Kafka, stuff like that. I found two books by Turkish writers: a history of the Ottomans and Orhan Kemal's My Father's House . Kemal had been one of the writers on Ipek's list. The book begins as a novel--another man telling his story to the writ...

Today i hiked out to Homer's Caves (I'll have a different post on that adventure. But as i walked out I'd the town of Eğridere, İ saw these signs and thought to pass them on to my readers.  Hoşgeldiniz (hawsh-gel-dee-neez) is the way to say, "Welcome." And since Turkish feels like it's arranged backwards to my native language, the sign translates to "welcome to Eğridere  (That smile over the g is unique to Turkish. The g is silent, but it turns the vowel before it into a long vowel EE-rih-der-eh instead of EH-rih-der-eh.) On the other side of the sign, for those leaving town, are the words, "Güle güle." İ love saying this, but i have yet to have a Turk take me seriously when i use it. İt means "bye bye," and anyone who uses it above the age of seven sounds immature.

When Americans and western Europeans think of Turkish food, the first word that comes to mind is Döner, that fast-food delicacy of shaved pieces of roasted lamb or chicken, stuffed into a pita with salad and hot sauce. As they say in Deutschland, " Döner ist schöner ," and the truth is that there are few snacks more beautiful or more delicious. But since I've been in Turkey, I have yet to eat Döner as I know it from England and Germany. İnstead, I have found dürüm, which looks like a chicken burrito 🌯 and tastes delicious. Like the burrito, the dürüm is wrapped in a tortilla. İ have seen tortillas for sale in the bread aisle, too. The meat for the dürüm is cut from the same, rotating spit of roasting meat that goes into a Döner.  Unlike the burrito, the meat is really yummy. As you can see from the photo, it was served with red sauce that wasn't "peppery hot" as one would find in a Mexican restaurant, but was savory hot. There were small peppers...

The first week of school we went over procedures with the kids. One procedure that caught my attention was the Earthquake Drill. We have to be ready for earthquakes here. The ground often shakes. Here's what we do: a siren sounds for 30 seconds. When it sounds, we duck under our desks and protect our heads. When the siren stops, I lead the class out the front door to the edge of campus and follow a wall to a parking lot, where we wait for ... aftershocks, clearance for return, I haven't figured this out yet. I have experienced one earthquake already, the week before school started. It wasn't much. The building shook for about 15 seconds, and my swivel chair kept moving around under me. But I wasn't knocked around or anything. I saw the tweet below this week. For me, it combines fascination and fear. I'm fascinated by the history and art that has shook this landscape for thousands of years. People moving in and out, empires rising and falling, and art that is anc...

Between the Kordon, the harbor side park that separates Izmir from the harbor, and the neighborhood of Alsancak, lies this amazing starue. Horsemen race along the shore, an artistic mix of balance and exuberance. Arms raised, they gesture toward Izmir's city center, about a kilometer away. Some hold instruments in their hands--they may be riding crops, when I look at them, they look like pens or paint brushes. The sculpture is called Tree of the Republic , and its sculptor, Ferit Özşen, captured a key moment in the founding of the Turkish Republic--and that moment happened exactly 100 years ago. Ten days ago, I wrote about the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Alıören , the moment when Greece was forced back from the gates of Ankara into headlong retreat towards the Aegean Coast. The Greco-Turk War (1919-1922) had begun with the Greek occupation of Smyrna, a city that, at the time, had twice as many Greek residents as Athens.  The ten days that followed tha...

I've traveled to enough places by now to find one important aspect most places have in common: at one time, they had a Golden Age. I have been to many sites in many places, and in each place I heard, "we were the center of things," or something to that extent. Last summer, driving through North Dakota, west of Fargo, one of the remotest places I've ever been, I found that I was near the geographic center of North America. A map on a roadside marker showed how trade goods had criss-crossed the contenent in aboriginal times, with "The Peace Garden State" right in the middle. I have been in the Republic of Georgia, viewing an amazing castle complex, and I have heard of that country's "Golden Age" of building and proselytizing orthodox Christianity . Everywhere was the center of somewhere. I have read enough, too, to have learned one other important thing. Most places have had at least one epic story written about them, too. Georgia was the place w...

Friday we had our school open house. Monday will be my first day teaching at MEF International School, İzmir. I thought I'd describe the work of these last 4 weeks for those I've taught or taught with, just to show some of the wrinkles of international teaching. This is my first experience teaching outside of the United States, and it has been revelatory. When I went into planning for teaching English in grades 8 through 12, I had to adjust to a completely new set of standards. For many years standards for international schools were based on those set by Cambridge University in England, where the college entrance exams are known as "A-Levels." Four of my five classes (all but 11th grade) use the Cambridge standards, either through a program called IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education--grades 9-10), the A-Levels (grade 12) or the middle school"Checkpoint" exam that my 8th-grade students will take. More about 11th grade later...