— katealaurel

[Posted from İznik, Wednesday evening; written in Edirne, Tuesday evening. Photos forthcoming.]

We finished the semester out in Antep on Friday. After their exams, students stood around outside the building in clumps, taking photos of each other on their cell phones to tide their friendships over until February, grabbing luggage from where it had been stashed under stairwells and in odd corners before taking off for the bus station. My students are — as is typical for Turkey — generally very close to their families, and their impatience to go home had been almost palpable for the last two weeks of classes. Still, I was touched when some students wanted pictures of me before going, and told me they’d miss me.

It’s been a stressful semester, though for very different reasons than either of last year’s terms, and that’s something I should write about. However, that’s not for this blog post; this blog post is about getting as far away from Gaziantep as I could.

I’m in Edirne, the furthest Turkish city from Antep that I actually wanted to go to (Artvın, on the Georgian border, is probably farther — but also probably less interesting). On Sunday night, I took the 14-hour express bus from Gaziantep to Istanbul, arriving with enough time to have a bowl of mercimek for breakfast and hop on another 3-hour bus to Edirne, on the border with Greece.

This city is cold and beautiful and nothing at all like Gaziantep, which, for the moment, I’m exceedingly grateful for. The narrow streets around the city center feel old in a way that most of Gaziantep, a booming city full of new wealth and poorer new migrants, has covered up with growth; little Ottoman houses, wooden balconies still in good repair, lean out over streets with shops selling traditional fruit-shaped soap and ubiquitous fried-liver restaurants. (I bought some soap; liver still makes me ill.) Three restored bazaars house modern shops under their white domes, though luckily, it’s mostly not tourist stuff— instead, cheap clothes, pastries, and mountains of yarn fill the stalls. Alleys turn around cemeteries with cylindrical Ottoman gravestones leaning crooked. Old brick-and-stone coursework juts out of the corners of modern buildings.

And the architecture! Oh, the architecture. Mimar Sinan’s greatest mosque is here, the Selimiye Camii, with a dome a few centimeters broader than the Haghia Sophia’s; the Eski Camii’s walls soaring with painted calligraphy; the Üç Şerefeli Cami’s mismatched minarets. Edirne feels rich in beautiful buildings in the same way that İstanbul and Şanlıurfa are; that is, it shows plainly all the wealth and time that went into making the city what it is, all the layers of people who built and improved and restored. It’s only fitting, since Edirne was an Ottoman capital for a long while, and a major Byzantine and Roman city before that, but it’s still startling and satisfying after two months more or less staying in Antep.

People have been extraordinarily friendly. A woman on the bus from İstanbul walked me to the hotel area, pointing out all the best places to try liver (sadly, I didn’t have the nerve to take her up on her advice). A bead-seller and a plastic bag-seller outside Selimiye took it upon themselves to give me exhaustive directions to the museum around the corner. A corner-store guy, when asked about postcards, sighed heavily and mourned the days when we wrote to each other on holidays instead of sending a text. An older couple walked with me for a kilometer from the bakery to the mosque complex at dusk, making sure I didn’t get lost. The gate-guard at Beyazit let me visit the whole museum at leisure even though I arrived fifteen minutes past closing time, pointing out rooms I missed, complimenting my Turkish and calling me “hocam.”

I woke up this morning to snow, which has shown up on the second day of my winter break travels both years now. (Probably because I’ve gone north both years, but that’s neither here nor there.) All day, wandering around the crooked streets, admiring 19th-century administrative buildings with their flourishes and pastel colors, trying to keep my scarf on and cricking my neck to stare up at calligraphied domes, squinting to read epigraphy in the museum courtyard, everything’s been graced by little flurrying snowflakes hurrying down, making the cold worthwhile.

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Things seen:
• iced-over streams of water in the bronze fountains on the main pedestrian street
• little boys ducking under cars in a snowball fight
• dogs curled up nose-to-tail in the lee of a wall
• soap shaped like figs, grapes, strawberries, watermelons, bananas, peaches, plums, apples, pears, and every other fruit
• elegant little boxes of badem ezmesi (“almond paste,” presumably similar to marzipan) in pastry shops with neon signs
• a man washing his bare feet in the şadırvan despite the ice all around
• lovely white-ground lekythoi from excavations at Ainos
• a young man hunched against the cold and waiting (for no one, he said) in the courtyard of the Muradiye Camii
• in a reproduction Ottoman medical text, a miniature illustration of two surgeons and a hydrocephalic boy, all smiling beatifically during the operation
• the lights flickering on in the minarets, through the snow, across the river, and up the hill, from the window of a dolmuş headed home

“Are you Turkish?” count: Four! In two days! Maybe red hair and blue eyes don’t stick out as much in northern Thrace; maybe hunching into my scarf and hat helps disguise me. At the archaeology museum, I eavesdropped, amused, as two guards argued in whispers— “Look, she’s reading the sign!” “Yes, but—” “Shh! She understands!” — before finally approaching. “Excuse me, can we ask you something? Are you Turkish?”

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Edirne: highly recommended.

• Lodging: I’m staying in the Otel Aksaray on Maarif Cadd., which is serviceable, cheap, and friendly, though nothing special (and has neither breakfast nor internet). Unfortunately, Edirne doesn’t really get enough tourists for true pensions or hostels, as far as I can tell.

• Food: Park Köfteci Osman, a bit down the hill from Selimiye Camii on the south side of the park. Walls plastered with newspaper clippings and photographs; plain, simple, perfectly cooked, mouthwateringly delicious köfte. Final Pastanesi, on the main pedestrian street, has good sahlep and two upper floors, as well as tasty cookies (including a traditional local almond variety). Cafe Pena, next door to Otel Aksaray, is kind of hilariously “hip” and Western (red-painted walls, old wooden tables, reproduction 50s movie posters on the walls, playing Cake and “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane”), but has a wide variety of okay coffee drinks, plus good internet. Lots of good little börek places on the main streets; Kardeşler Yıldırım Börekçisi has friendly people and a tiny upstairs room good for people-watching, just down the street west of the Eski Camii. I couldn’t bring myself to try liver again (I know, I’m a wimp — hey, at least I’ll eat brain!).

• To Do: Edirne has five beautiful major mosques/mosque complexes. The Eski Camii, Üç Şeferli Cami, and Selimiye Camii are all clustered near the city center and open to visit— a good guidebook will tell you more useful information than me. Muradiye Camii, off to the east of Selimiye, appears to only be open at prayer time, and it was too cold for me to trek out to the top of the hill twice. The Beyazit Külliyesi is a mosque complex including a medical school, hospital, and insane asylum — highly recommended. My guidebook (Rough Guide) dissed the medical museum housed there, but I found it both fun and hilarious. Granted, I study ancient medical history (and am thus also interested in Ottoman medical history), but who doesn’t enjoy seeing the ubiquitous Turkish museum mannequins cauterizing patients or playing the kemence to soothe the insane mannequin in the next room? Besides, the architecture is unusual and lovely, and the reproduction manuscripts and well-signed explanations are definitely worth seeing. The combined “Arkeoloji ve Etnografi” (Archaeology and Ethnography) museum behind Selimiye was surprisingly good — the archaeological sections in particular were very well signed, even with (Turkish-only) translations for the inscriptions. Apparently there’s been an upswing in archaeological activity in the region recently; some of the finds (including small bronzes, some decent burial steles, and quite a few coins) are very nice for a regional museum, and made more so by being able to easily place the dig sites relative to Edirne. I couldn’t find the Turkish Art Museum mentioned in the guidebook, and the staff at the archaeology museum had no idea what I was talking about.