Pamukkale to Konya, Turkey, Sunday 13th April

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We said farewell to Pamukkale where we had met so many kind and helpful people and headed off to Konya, changing buses at Denizli. Konya is a city which is a religious site for Muslims. Many pilgrims go there and we had been told that dress needed to be appropriate for women visiting mosques and some sites. When we stopped to change buses, I went off for some picnic items and came across a clothing shop where I bought a very cheap long skirt for 5 lira ($A4.25).

The bus trip took six hours, with the scenery changing from blossoming orchards, to crops with poplar windbreaks, to rugged mountains with newly planted pine trees on them. A little creek meandered along beside the road and lots of groups of people were out picnicking or relaxing beside it.

On the bus we had a steward similar to the ones on airlines. Every two hours he brought around drinks and then some kind of liquid freshener for us all to wash our hands. Now and then he sprayed the bus with attar of roses. When a child got on, he provided biscuits and sweets and sat near the child and entertained him for a while. He found an English speaker amongst the Turkish passengers so that we would know how long the break stops would be, and finally, he showed us where to go to meet a connecting bus. Fantastic service and the ultimate professional with pride in his job.

The bus depot was 14 km out of the town centre so we took a mini-bus with the key word, Mevlana, on it. We didn’t know where we should get off, so when I saw a sign for the place we were wanting to go, I said “Bus stop Mevlana, please” in Turkish. A crowd of young men on the bus responded at once and an English speaker among them said that they were getting off at the same stop and that we were not there yet. It turned out that they were all second year student teachers coming home from a wedding in another town. At the bus stop they assisted us with our bags and helped us to find the hotel we had the address for.

On the way, they said that we should be careful because not everyone is a good and trustworthy student, and that some people might help to carry our bags, or take a photo for us with our camera and then run off with them. It was a sensible warning and one that our hotel owner reiterated. The boys had invited us to have a cup of tea at the home of one of them who lived nearby. He lived in the family home which was a 500 year old Ottoman building. Way back, his ancestor had been the Vizier for the Sultan Selim, the father of Suleyman the Law Maker and the one who had expanded the Ottoman Empire to a great extent. The house had been built for that Vizier.

It had a walled garden around it so we entered by a high gate and sat with the boys in an outdoor carpeted area while the tea was being prepared. They looked at the photos of Inverleigh and our family. When they saw our canoe on the Leigh River they said that it was the Titanic. They were interested to hear about Australia and working conditions for teachers, as well as to explain special things about Konya and their work expectations in Turkey.

We went upstairs in the house for the drink. The room had a raised platform at one end for the most important people to sit on and we were ushered to that spot. The ceiling had decorative woodwork and the walls had two religious messages in beautiful calligraphy on them. By now there were about 16 people in the room apart from us, but the host’s large samovar (large teapot and urn set) provided enough tea and hot water for us all to have two cups. When we left, they presented us with a card signed by them all, a book and a CD of Sufi music.

About eight of the boys escorted us back to our hotel, which was just as well since we would have had trouble finding it. They called Keith ‘Uncle’. It was clear that events that seem long ago to us have an enormous impact of the feelings and attitudes of these boys today. In particular, relations between Greece and Turkey and the failure to be accepted into the European Union, despite applying way back in the 1950s, rankle. For one boy, the destruction of Smirna (Ismir) after WW1, and the differing Greek and Turkish versions of events, impact on his family of Turkish nationalists with an Armenian grandmother. The boys held Ataturk in very high esteem, and spoke of what he had done for Turkey with awe. All, bar one, took their religion seriously and were proud to talk about it and to explain some of their practices to us. They were a kind and friendly bunch with a good sense of humour and incredible kindness to strangers.

After all those adventures we decided to have a quiet night in, catching up on emails etc.