Miss Adventures

Dear friends,

I must apologize for the long delay in writing. But, I have been up to big things. First of all, I have been concentrating on my writing and my other blog Italofile.com. I am using Italofile as a way to explore the Italy travel landscape beyond the pages of my books The Unofficial Guide to Central Italy and Michelin’s Green Guide Tuscany. Indeed, Italofile covers all of Italy. So, please have a look.

We are still in Turkey and loving it. While Ankara may not be the most scintillating of cities, we have enjoyed traveling around to many exciting sites in Turkey: Istanbul, Kaş, Safranbolu, and numerous daytrips in Anatolia. Next up is a trip to Ephesus and Selçuk, which I hope to report back on when we return.

I’ve left MissAdventures.com fallow for such a long time that it will be hard to get up and running again. Bear with me. But hopefully having taken a break from this site for a while will have provided more ideas to grow.

One thing that I’d like to do is to take this blog into a slightly new direction: less about me and more about travel ideas to Turkey, India, or wherever I may be next! In other words, less about the “Miss” (or, now, “Mrs.”) and more about the Adventures. I’ve had fun and good feedback on Italofile, so I’d like to extend the creativity and expand the postings on MissAdventures as well.

Thanks a lot for your understanding and patience.

Cheers, Melanie

My staple during this hot Turkish summer has been kisir, what some call Turkish Tabbouleh. It’s not really a salad, but it makes the perfect cold side for stuffed peppers or karniyarik (another Turkish dish I’m making a lot lately).

I learned this recipe from my maid, but you can also find a perfectly good version in Claudia Roden’s Arabesque. Her book shows kisir served in traditionally in lettuce leaves, but you can easily leave it in a bowl if you feel like skipping the presentation. (more…)

There are a ton of books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Turkey and the Middle East. While most of them are useful in learning about the region’s history and culture, few hold my interest for more than a couple pages. That’s not the case for the following three books, which I am reading or have skimmed heavily (and plan to read when I get around to it).

Birds Without Wings. This novel, by the author of Corelli’s Mandolin, is set in Turkey during the population exchange. It gives a good overview of Greek/Turkish relations and also has a moving personal story.

The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet. Part of the dance that is a visit to Turkey and the Middle East is the browsing (and possibly purchasing) of carpets. You sit, drink tea, and let carpet sellers unfurl dozens of colorful rugs in front of you. This book, which focuses more on Iran, the home of the Persian carpet, is a good primer on the history and production of carpets in general. I’ve yet to find a similar book that is specific to Turkey. Another book I like in this category is Tribal and Village Rugs: The Definitive Guide to Design, Pattern & Motif.

From the Holy Mountain. William Dalrymple has penned many excellent historical/travel books. This one’s subtitle is “A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium,” and the author travels through parts of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in search of the roots of Christianity. I am also keen to point out Mr. Dalrymple’s latest nonfiction work, The Last Mughal, which looks at the events that led up to the downfall of India’s last emperor, Bahadur Shah II. In case you didn’t know, the Mughals of India had roots in Turkey and the Middle East. So, in many ways, I feel like I’m following in Dalrymple’s footsteps…but perhaps in reverse.

As I come across more good reads about Turkey, I will add them to my Amazon store. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these suggestions.

Last weekend we went to Beypazarı, a small village an hour and a half by bus from Ankara. Located on the old “Istanbul to Baghdad route,” Beypazarı has been inhabitated by various tribes and peoples, including the Seljuks, who left behind a 12C mosque, and the Ottomans, whose “konak” houses dot the town’s hillside. Beypazarı is known for its silver, especially filigree work, and is responsible for 60% of Turkey’s carrot (havuç) production.

Beypazarı, whose name translates roughly as “gentleman’s market,” struck me as a typical Anatolian village. Off the hot, dusty (but tidy) cobbled streets, old men huddled, drank tea, and played backgammon. A majority of the native women covered their hair with broad, patterned silk scarves that fell to about waist-length. Meanwhile, during the festival, young men wearing finger cymbals danced two-by-two to music that was part Turkish flute (ney) and part techno drumbeat. Near the town’s Ottoman Müze, what appeared to be a high school woodwind quartet played the requisite “Rondo alla Turca” from Mozart’s Sonata No. 11.

While more cosmopolitan parts of Turkey, such as Istanbul, like to play up their historical and geographical connection to mainland Europe, Anatolia looks to its pan-Turkish heritage. And, Beypazarı being the Turkish heartland, it wasn’t a surprise to find a large mosaic map in one town square which highlighted the “Turkic” areas of the world: Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaristan (Bulgaria), Turkmenistan, Uighur Mongolia, etc. Groups of beautiful, dark-haired, light-eyed girls wore the traditional costumes from these regions.

But back to the food. Those famous carrots were a central theme at the Beypazarı Festival. Multiple vendors offered bottles of fresh carrot juice, while others sold carrot helva. Further along, there were stands overflowing with dried fruits (including incredibly sweet sun-dried tomatoes) and nuts, packages of grape leaf dolmas and walnut baklava, and ayran, a yogurt drink not unlike a lassi. We stopped at a döner kebap stand and later watched village women rolling out and cooking gözleme (a bit like a pancake) filled with a hard, white cheese (beyaz peynir) and parsley (maydonaz). Beypazarı’s classic dish, which we didn’t get a chance to taste, is a casserole of lamb, rice, eggplant and earthy, easily attainable ingredients. The village also makes good use of a copious amount of walnuts by preserving them in a “walnut sausage,” a confection that looks exactly like the meat product but is flavored with nuts and sweetened with grape jelly. In addition to ayran and carrot juice, Beypazarı residents wash down their meals with mineral waters from the Inözü Valley.

Only an hour and a half from Ankara, Beypazarı is probably a sleepy town for 364 days per year. But it still merits a visit for its lovely Ottoman houses, gorgeous silver, and honest food. And even though the village is not quite on the tourist route, it has a surprisingly sophisticated, English-language website, helpful for planning a daytrip.

No one ever writes anything particularly special about Ankara. Guidebooks don’t dedicate many pages to the capital. And, when I mentioned to people that I was moving to Turkey, their faces lit up:

They: “Istanbul?!”
Me: “No, Ankara.”
They:”Oh, too bad. Istanbul is great.”

My first impressions of Ankara had been quite favorable, up until this past Tuesday, when a bomb exploded in Ulus, killing six. I’m now a bit loathe to go to the old city (eskişehir), as you can imagine. Nevertheless, not even London, Madrid, New York, or Washington is immune to these types of things. For what it’s worth, three days on after a bombing, this city is unshaken. Turkey knows how to handle these situations, it seems.

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In case you missed it, the New York Times ran Seth Sherwood’s 36 Hours in Istanbul this weekend. I’m looking forward to following Sherwood’s suggestions and telling you all about them very soon. Before that, we’ll be doing some traveling in Anatolia. Stay tuned…

We arrived in Turkey at a very interesting time. The Battle for Turkey’s Soul is afoot, pitting the “sons and daughters” of Atatürk (as well as the Turkish military) versus the “headscarf republic,” or Islamists. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish secularists have marched in Istanbul and Ankara at the slightest hint that the prime minister and president of this country both could come from the AK Party. Yet there are some people here that believe that the silent majority favors a government that has strong ties to faith.

Turkey is fascinating because it is the only majority Muslim country that is devoutly secularist. Atatürk’s mission to fashion Turkey into a modern republic included banning religious dress within state institutions. Therefore, for instance, women who wear headscarves and wish to study at the university must remove their scarves in the classroom. A revelation (to me) during these few weeks of constitutional crisis is that Prime Minister Erdoğan sends his daughter to school in the U.S. so that she can study at university AND wear a headscarf. It’s the difference of freedom from religion (Turkey) and freedom of religion (U.S.).

I cannot even personally begin to understand nor analyze the situation in Turkey. And, I don’t know if I want to - at least not in this forum. One thing I have come to learn in the few weeks that I have lived here is that Turks take themselves very, very seriously. As Jan Morris writes in the forward of Mary Lee Settle’s excellent book Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place:

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