Turkey

You are currently browsing articles tagged Turkey.

Stuffed aboard Zeus on a blue cruise

Monday, July 2, 2012 in Bodrum, Turkey

Meze being brought to table as Sidar, middle, explains to us what everything is. Photos by David Lansing.

The only think I don’t like about Turkish food is that there is always too much of it. When Captain Yorgo invited us on a blue cruise aboard his Turkish gulet, the Zeus, I asked Sidar if maybe we shouldn’t stop at a market and get some snacks to take with us.

“I think he’s got snacks and drinks on board,” Sidar said.

What an understatement. While we were cruising the coast, a cook was down in the galley making lunch for us. I’m thinking maybe sandwiches and some fruit or something, but then Captain Yorgo and his crew start bringing dishes to the table and it’s one meze after the other: the typical Turkish summer salad, coban salatasi, made with chopped tomato, cucumber, onion and peppers, which I love; kisir, a type of bulgur salad; a carrot salad called havuc salatasi; smoked eggplant and yogurt; chickpeas with pine nuts; and then the kebabs of chicken and the kofte meatballs and some wonderful marinated octopus dish.

Brienneh, one of the guests on the blue cruise, tries to digest lunch. Photo by David Lansing.

It just kept coming and coming until there wasn’t any more room on the table for any more dishes and we had to start combining plates to make more room. See, the thing is that in Turkey, you would eat all this food slowly. You’d have some raki and a bite of bulgur salad and you’d chat with your friends for awhile and then maybe have a single stuffed grape leaf and another small sip of raki, and so it would go for three or four hours. You might even take a short nap in the middle of all this and then come back to the table. But Americans don’t do that. Not for nothing are we known around the world for our fast food. We fill our plate, down it all in 15 or 20 minutes, and move on to the next thing.

So when all this food was presented to us, we really didn’t quite know what to do. Some of us just looked at it. Some of us took pictures of it. Me, I took a single stuffed grape leaf, got a cold Efes, and sat back enjoying the sun, the water, and the company.

Tags: , ,

Cheese pie and stuffed figs at the Bodrum market

Saturday, June 30, 2012 in Bodrum, Turkey | 5 comments

Red carrots, covered with fresh dill, at the Bodrum farmers' market. Even Sidar said he had never seen carrots like this. Photos by David Lansing.

More about the farmers’ market in Bodrum yesterday: It was kind of like a moveable feast for me. I’d stop at one stall and buy a little bag of cherries, eating them while I walked around some more, and then maybe buy a few cashews, some plump dried apricots, a few olives, and even a peynirli börek (cheese pie).

About those dried apricots: I don’t know what they do to them, but Turkish dried apricots are the best in the world. I fell in love with them in Istanbul and now buy them wherever I see them (and you see them a lot).

Nuts, olives, and stuffed dried figs for sale at the Bodrum farmers' market. Photo by David Lansing.

One of the other wonderful things I found at the market were dried figs stuffed with sesame seeds and almonds. They were being sold by this little old lady named Elif. As I got near her stand, she practically grabbed me by the arm to drag me over to taste her figs. To be honest with you, I took one just to be polite. But Elif knows her figs. These were incredible. And so I ended up buying a dozen of them. I think the trick is going to be making sure I don’t scarf them all down at one time back in my hotel room. They’re that good.

Tags: , ,

Bodrum farmers’ market

Friday, June 29, 2012 in Bodrum, Turkey | 1 comment

The Bodrum farmers' market on Fridays. Photos by David Lansing.

My favorite thing to do, no matter where I am, is to go to the local farmers’ market. Everyone has one, right? And you see things there that you won’t see anywhere else. So this morning I asked Sidar if there was a farmers’ market somewhere around Bodrum and he said, Of course.

“There is the one in Güvencirlik on Monday, and the one in Ortakent on Wednesday, and yesterday there was one in Bitez.”

“So there are no farmers’ markets on Fridays?”

“Of course,” he said. “Right here. In Bodrum. Do you want to go?”

This is how it goes with Sidar. He loves to yank my chain.

An artichoke farmer at the Bodrum market explains the health benefits of enginars to me. Photo by David Lansing.

So this afternoon, after lunch, we went to the farmers’ market which is held in a big covered building , sort of like an indoor parking garage, in downtown Bodrum. It was fantastic. The first thing that caught my attention was the guy selling small artichokes. They came with a foot or more of their stems and were piled stylishly in a mound. Using Sidar as a translator, I asked the farmer how Turks normally prepare artichokes. He said that they are usually poached in olive oil, sometimes with fava beans, almonds, and tomatoes, but with these artichokes, he would recommend slowly simmering them in water along with their stems and then drinking the soup. Very good for the kidneys and liver, he said. And also for other ailments. Like indigestion or ladies’ curse.

Well, I don’t have to worry about that. But I thought it was an interesting way for the guy to market his purple-tinged artichokes (called enginars in Turkish)—as a holistic health cure. I could just imagine a sign in my local supermarket back home indicating that not only were artichokes on sale for a dollar a piece this week but if you made a broth from the stems, it might take care of your cramps. Just imagine.

Tags: , ,

Bodrum: Taking Zeus out to sea

Thursday, June 28, 2012 in Bodrum, Turkey

Turkish gulets in Bodrum harbor. Photos by David Lansing.

We did our own little blue cruise today aboard a beautiful gulet called Zeus. The yacht’s captain, Yorgo, is a friend of Sidar’s (Sidar has a lot of useful friends, right?). Actually Yorgo isn’t his real name. That would be Selahattin. But everyone calls him Captain Yorgo. Which is certainly a lot easier to say than Selahattin.

Captain Yorgo, left, and Sidar on Zeus. Sidar always has a smile on his face--except when I take his picture. Then he prefers to look like a pirate.

The Turkish gulets are beautiful boats. Originally built and used by fishermen and sponge divers in the Aegean, the classic gulet is a two-masted wooden sailing vessel with a rounded aft and low-to-the-water profile. The fishing gulets Cevat Sakir wrote about in his book Blue Voyage were all powered by the wind. But these days most gulets (including the Zeus) are diesel powered. In fact, many of them aren’t even properly rigged for sailing anymore.

As we slowly motored out of Bodrum harbor you could see dozens—maybe hundreds—of gulets. Almost all available for charter. Like us, some of them were heading out to cruise along the coast on a day cruise, everybody hoping to find a quiet little cove where they could throw down anchor and then spend the day sunning or swimming in the clear blue water. It made me think of what it must have been like back in the mid-20s and 30s when Sakir was cruising these same waters, under sail, with his friends, the Bodrum fishermen. Throwing lines out and passing the time by drinking a little raki, smoking harsh Turkish cigarettes, playing cards. It sounds so simple yet so exotic, doesn’t it?

Tags: , ,

Bodrum and the story of the Blue Voyage

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 in Bodrum, Turkey

The sign at the top of the hill in Bodrum, Turkey, dedicated to Cevat Sakir.

Besides Herodotus, the other famous figure in Bodrum is Cevat Sakir, the scion of a prominent Ottoman family. Interesting figure, Sakir. Born on Crete in 1890, Sakir studied history at Oxford before getting into a bit of trouble when he shot his father after he discovered the old man had been sleeping with his girlfriend. Well, these things happened back then (and even now, I suppose). Since the Turkish officials probably figured the old man had it coming, Sakir was sentenced to three years of house arrest.

But, as it turned out, that wasn’t the worst crime he committed in his youth. At least, not in the eyes of the Turkish government. After WWI, when Atatürk came to power and decided to cleanse Turkey by banishing Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds (among others), Sakir wrote an article for an Istanbul magazine with this wordy but provocative title: “How the prisoners who are sentenced to death are going in full possession of their consciences to the gallows.” He could have used a good copy editor, obviously, but the point he was making was that these condemned prisoners were nothing but scapegoats in Atatürk’s new Turkish republic.

Well, Atatürk wasn’t real keen on the story. So he had Sakir arrested and sentenced to three years of house arrest in Bodrum. Which, at the time, was considered sort of the Siberia of Turkey. It was, according to the memoir Sakir later wrote, a simple and poor place whose residents eked out a meager existence from the sea by fishing and sponge-diving. “The journey was long and arduous, with the shadows of bandits lurking in the hills; the last stretch of the route from Milas was passable only on foot and muleback.”

Cevat Sakir, who called himself "The Fisherman of Halicarnassus."

But guess what? Sakir kind of dug the place. He made friends with the fishermen and sponge divers and they started taking him out on the sea with him. He was having such a good time in Bodrum that when the military heard about it, they brought him back to Istanbul to finish his sentence. No matter. When he was finally released, he returned to Bodrum and became the grand old man of the town, planting trees (the palms lining the quay are his) and telling tales of his voyages along Turkey’s western coast with the fishermen in a book called Blue Voyage.

The book became so popular that many of the fishermen and sponge divers converted their fishing boats, called gulets, into charter boats so middle-class tourists could experience Sakir’s blue voyages. In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Sakir not only fathered the tourist industry in Bodrum, he pretty much fathered the entire tourist industry in Turkey, outside of Istanbul.

Not bad for a boy who started out his adult life by killing his father.

When we arrived in Bodrum, I noticed a sign at the top of the hill with Sakir’s photo and a quote, in Turkish, from him. I asked Sidar to translate and he said basically it said this: “If you come to the top of this hill you will see Bodrum. Don’t think that you will leave the same person as when you arrived. To all those who came before you, it happened the same: They lost their heart in Bodrum.”

Tags: , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »