Might the resulting ancient cuneiform texts have eventually carried versions of the same flood story forward? Might the Jewish people have become conversant with this storyline of devastation and retribution when they were in Babylonia during the Jewish Exile, beginning in 579 BCE? Could not it have morphed, starting in 537 BCE, when they were freed to return to Judah by Cyrus the Great, as Hebrew texts turned into the Jewish Torah, and then into the Christian Bible’s Old Testament, and eventually, as the story of Prophet Nûh, into Islam’s Qur’an?
Frankly, I’d never taken the time to ponder this storyline, and I wondered where exploring it would lead me. At the least, it would be thought provoking. William Ryan responded to news of Ballard’s discoveries with a message: “It’s going to rewrite the history of ancient civilizations because it shows unequivocally that the Black Sea Flood took place and that the ancient shores of the Black Sea were occupied by humans.”
5000 to 3500 BCE: The origins of ancient Mesopotamia, Greek for “land between two rivers,” the Tigris and Euphrates. Known as “the Cradle of Civilization” and “the Fertile Crescent,” home to Sumerians and Babylonians, among others, it emerged as an active civilization from 3100 to circa 1000 BCE, followed by Assyrian and Persian dominance.
* * *
Getting up from my table at the Istanbul restaurant, I settled the tab and returned to the hotel to pick up my luggage. I was ready to go to the airport to meet my wife and travel on, very much looking forward to the days ahead with Janice in Cappadocia before I embarked on a month of solo roving. Years earlier, on a trip to Timbuktu in West Africa, I’d left her out of the trip entirely and later regretted it. Perhaps she’d found me a better person when I returned from that journey, but damage of a sort was done by my selfishness. We wanted to do this jaunt differently.
Cappadocia is dotted with dwellings carved out from huge rock formations by locals thousands of years ago, quite literally caves. Now those homes are either deserted and damaged, or refurbished and rented. Given my willingness to stay in any old place, I had found one that seemed modest but had been de-cluttered by district entrepreneurs, and I showed Janice for her approval.
As is her inclination, she did some independent research and in no time found a different cave that offered more comfortable, one might say luxe, surroundings. It was tastefully spacious and appointed with exotic curios. Its restaurant’s cuisine was of a high order. We took long walks, found hiking trails, discovered new wines, and were introduced to the resident connoisseurs’ slow cooking of fresh ingredients. We were taught to convey our one pecuniary food aversion in Turkish: “Hayir soğan lütfen.” No onions, please.
The letter I carried, the one written by Taha, came up over dinner one night. I promised her that if the chance to head to Iraq actually arose, I would find someone trustworthy who could read it for me before I ventured in, just to ease her mind.
For several wonderful nights, a nascent crescent moon accented our evenings. And when Janice left for home, I moved to a different cave.
7 The hypothesis was put forward in the New York Times and in an article in the scientific journal Marine Biology: “An Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shell,” by William Ryan and Walter Pitman, in 1997. In the Quaternary Science Reviews in 2009, marine geologist Liviu Giosan proposed that the Black Sea had risen more modestly.
8 A fire heavily damaged the historic Haydarpaşa Station in 2010. While restoration was undertaken, the building’s role as a busy transportation center was suspended in June of 2013 due to construction and refurbishment of the commuter rail system and the related rapid rail service between Istanbul and Ankara. Sirkeci station also closed to be adapted for the new commuter line known as Marmaray.
THREE
WHIRLING DERVISH
“Whoever you may be, come. Even though you may be an infidel, a pagan, or a fire-worshipper, come. Our brotherhood is not one of despair.”
—Mevlâna Jelaleddin Rumî, Islamic poet, Sufi mystic
I awoke to an eerie sound coming from outside my cave, a labored wheeze followed by a commanding silence. It was like hearing God breathe.
I pulled on my shorts, stuck my feet into sandals, slipped a T-shirt over my sunburn, and left in search of the haunting sound. Across the dirt road was a hillside of abandoned caves—the color of apricot in the early morning. I climbed rocks that crumbled beneath me as I pushed hard up the hill. A trail emerged between boulders, leading to a rock-strewn staircase. I slipped through a stone arch, and the trail continued along flat rocks until I reached a plateau two hundred feet above the road.
Peering over the cliff edge, I looked out on a sky of hot air balloons. One blasted its furnace, then another. The gods breathed. Ten balloons jostled for position; those lower down provided their baskets of passengers with a view of a village, while those higher up rewarded with a vista of the horizon a hundred miles away.
Opposite me was a hilltop I’d been on the night before. When I’d moved into the Çavuşin cave, I’d met Halim, the lanky owner of the refurbished lava rock abode’s six rooms. “My grandfather’s father was here,” he said; Halim runs the Village Cave Hotel with his wife, Serife, who had settled me in with a glass of local red wine and a bowl of Anatolian soup. Suitably primed, I had been invited by Halim to come check on his olive trees. He was intent on inspecting each and every tree, not just a sample. He assured me (and perhaps himself as well) that the recent lack of rain had not harmed his crop.
In another direction I could see a trail leading to the end of the village. Eight hundred people call Çavuşin home, though daily tour buses will artificially swell that number during the summer. The locals welcome visitors as a stimulant for their stuttering economy. But it was still too early for the buses to begin arriving, and the townsfolk were asleep. I descended a trail to the village and spent an hour strolling empty streets. Wandering among yards filled with scraps of uncompleted carpentry work and piles of split and spoiling squash, I saw a young boy perched atop a brick wall.
“Gunaydin effendim,” he said as an offhanded good morning.
“Merhaba,” I replied, happy to be able to communicate at all.
Cappadocia is Turkey’s land of “fairy chimneys,” hollowed caves and hallowed sites.
A tractor and cart passed me and stopped beside a field. Two young men filled the cart with squash, the vegetable’s pale yellow color at one with the land. The driver yelled “Merhaba!”
I strolled up a short hill, where the trail entered a valley in which abandoned hill homes perched on the irregular mountainside, and found myself alone in a large garden of healthy-looking squash. While I was admiring the vegetation, my reverie was broken by a crackling call from the speakers of the local mosque. It was ezan, the call to prayer. The scratchy recorded message broadcast the call around the amphitheater of vacant caves pockmarking the rock face. In the fourth century CE, this valley alone had hummed with the activities of a thousand people. Now the muezzin’s strained voice echoed among empty buildings, abandoned for more modern homes.
A widening in the town’s main street made the current road broad enough to once have been a small square for inhabitants to gather. Now a dozen chairs sat there, nearly empty, and a gray-bearded man in the one occupied seat waved to greet me.
“Salam,” he said, “Bonjour, salute,” bantering to break down this visitor’s defenses, if not my nationality.
“Hi,” I replied. Thinking this might be too brief a reply or mean something different in his language, I added, “Hello.”
He willingly shared his place in the shade, pointing to one of the empty chairs beside him beneath two trees that wound around one another in the way strings make a rope. One, a pine, seemed half dead at its base, yet its needles were a healthy green; the other had leaves that looked like limp lettuce. Removing his fez, the man continued in Turkish, adding English words for clarity at first, but after “visitor” he forgot and reverted to French. “Chef,” he said, pointing to a restaurant and mimicking
eating; “carte” when gesturing toward a water cooler that looked like it would be more at home in a modern office than bolted to this village sidewalk. He motioned to me to take advantage of this and fill my water bottle. I obeyed.
Whenever he spoke, he gestured with both hands before the left one landed on the nook of his cane. The other clutched his bracelet of prayer beads.
A moped went by, driven by a young male with a pretty girl on the seat behind him. She smiled at the old man, and he grinned in return. She waved. He waved. He nodded approvingly about the girl’s allure, giving a thumb-up before letting his right hand again tend his prayer beads.
“Fraulein,” he said, adding to this German overture a phrase in Turkish that I took to confirm he found her attractive. “Fraulein,” he repeated. He pointed to himself to signify he knew he was mingling languages. “Bonjour,” he said by way of extension.
“Fraulein,” I parroted back, and paused before adding, “Bonjour.”
As we chatted with few common words, three men emerged from around a corner and walked out into our street, more trailing behind. Soon there were twenty of them approaching us.
“Walk after prayers,” my companion observed, stroking his beard. Thousands of such strokes over time had flattened the beard and shaped its downward wave into a metronome that kept time as his head swayed while talking.
As the men approached us, I considered that I might be occupying someone’s seat—but whose? As each one arrived, I rose from my seat to let its presumed owner take his rightful place. Each time, my gray-bearded friend motioned me to sit back down. Eventually another elderly fellow stood beside me. The other men had taken their seats and all the chairs were occupied. This time, Graybeard stood up, propped on his cane, and offered his seat to the last arrival. He walked away without another word, as though he’d had sufficient time with me. I did not see him again.
Enjoying a mid-morning coffee with Halim on the patch of grass outside his collection of caves, I asked him about the practice of prayer. He said that the drumming that wakes the day was Davul, and the morning and evening prayers were short because “the world goes on.” The night’s last prayer was the longest. About the divine scheduling for this, Halim said, “None of us knows the time, just the caller.”
Halim gave me a map and drew lines over it to show the way to the Göreme Open Air Museum, a World Heritage Site. From there I could work my way up a long road, to the Rose Valley path, which led into the hills and eventually curved back to Çavuşin. If all went well, I’d return before dark. “Once you leave that hub of tourism activity,” Halim promised, “you’ll not see another soul until near the end of your hike.”
My water bottle was again empty by the time I’d kicked dust on a sparsely peopled path and reached the museum. This fourth-century campus has seen years of adaptive reuse, refurbishment, and, after neglect, restoration. A repository of frescoes and icons within the monasteries, its stone-cut layout was fascinating for the acreage it covered, its hint of hidden tunnels, and the above-ground erosion of carved architecture. In the gift shop I was delighted to come across an edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It seemed just the right kind of reading to be doing here. I didn’t know then just how useful this Stephen Mitchell translation would become to me.
Outside the museum, on seeing the lineup waiting for transportation back to town and the crowd taking the narrow sidewalk in the same direction, I headed up the hill, looking for the quiet I’d hoped to find. Halim’s hand-drawn map showed the path, which he said “was not actively used.” I checked my directions with a man at the roadside.
“Yes, you are here,” he said. “Yes, I have heard of that—what you call ‘offshoot’? Map might be okay. Might not be. Take the first turn you think it is.”
Emboldened, I was fifteen minutes along before I determined I was in the wrong place. I retraced my steps to the paved roadway and walked down another dusty road to a left fork, wondering if the right hand one was instead the offshoot I wanted. After ten minutes I was again sure I’d misread directions when two young women wearing skirts, tank tops, and runners emerged from a gully. Definitely not locals. They climbed up the dirt embankment to where I stood, looking perplexed.
“Are you lost?” one of them asked.
“Because we think we are,” the other added. “If you’re lost, then we’re in the wrong place together.”
They had walked the same ambling route as I was attempting. One of them explained, “We saw two paths and have been many minutes on this wrong one from here, but it deads-in-the-end.” She added as an afterthought, “I am Lana.”
“Rick,” I said. We shook hands and I turned to the other woman.
Out came her reluctant hand, with a nervous hesitation as she searched for words. “I’m Suncica. Croatian.” Having successfully completed her introduction in an unfamiliar language, she gave a brilliant smile.
We decided to walk back to the fork in the dirt road and go along the other path. The trail dipped in places, sometimes steeply, as it rounded the cliff. Half an hour in, the path had found its level beside a running stream, but we still hadn’t come across anyone else.
“We are from university,” Lana said at last. “We arrived yesterday. Tired this morning. Need this walk for energy.”
“Long walk, we wish,” added Suncica. Her face, out of the sunlight, gleamed, her skin akin to bronze. “At home, we are both much sports. Sitting on planes not good for people who are much sports.”
“Well,” I replied, “if we find our way out of here, it will only be after a long walk. You have your wish coming true.”
When we were an hour in, having come onto a path with many footprints, something ahead of us on the trail moved, and then quickly disappeared. I had been bringing up the rear of our little troupe but now moved to the front. Soon a man appeared on the trail, but when he saw we were coming his way he moved on. Odd.
At the next bend a canteen had been set up, and there the strangely behaving man waited with a friend. They’d constructed an awning near the rock wall and stacked cushions under it on low-rise seats. It turned out they were merchants; their wares included canned cold drinks, grilled chicken, packets of crisps, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.
We rested there for a while, and given the attractiveness of the young women, I could not help but feel the two shopkeepers resented my presence. Suncica sprawled out as though ready for a nap. Lana initially maintained her decorum, her posture straight and legs neatly folded. Then she too fell asleep, losing her decorum.
Later we took a few side hikes, detours off the trail, talking of our families and journeys. When I mentioned Mount Ararat, Lana asked, “Will you look for Noah’s Ark? That is where it is, is not?”
“In the minds of some,” I replied, adding a doubtful “yes.”
“If it is not true,” she asked, “how come everyone knows about it?”
That evening the town was quiet. My table was the only one set on the grass outside my cave. Halim came by to ensure I’d enjoyed his wife’s specialty, kiremite tavuk, chicken marinated in tomatoes, peppers, and garlic, cooked in a clay pot in a stone oven. It became clear that I was eating a serving from their family dinner. I omitted mention of my aversion to onions, of which there were plenty present. Pleased with my glowing review, he asked, “Have you spent time with whirling dervish? It is important part of our heritage. You will not see it eastward. It is about love for humankind.”
“It’s a little late,” I said lamely. “I leave tomorrow.”
“Tonight. I can arrange. I will drive you to the place.” Agitated, he looked at his watch. “There are seven parts to the ceremony. You may miss the first, the respect for Mohammed. We should hurry.”
Soon I found myself in a dark theater, shuffling toward the third and last row of seats around a circular stage. The chamber was hushed. I sensed without being told that using a flash camera would be poor form. On stage, several men in full black cloaks stood still, their robes draped over wha
t showed as white skirts flowing to their feet. Each wore a conical headdress symbolizing his “ego’s tombstone.”
I’d missed the first part of the service, as Halim had anticipated. The kettledrum beating commenced the Kudum, the second part. A flute evoked calmness and contemplation. This was followed by greetings among the men on stage, setting a distinctive role for each as they exchanged acknowledgements. These are said to portray one’s secret soul meeting the actual soul. The room went into silence.
A solitary figure, the spiritual leader, was in the midst of the men. Then came the demonstration we were all waiting for—the dervishes dancing in a rapid flow of attire and attitude. First they flung off their black capes to expose white under-robes. The act is said to “cast off falsehoods” and to be a “revelation of truth.” In synchrony, the dervishes clasped their arms to their torso in tribute to the “oneness of God.” In turn, each kissed the hand of the spiritual leader to seek entrance to the sema (or sama), the service and the “mystic cycle to perfection.”
Then the whirling began, setting off with the dancers’ right arms unfurling heavenward, a gesture to channel blessings down through the heart to their left hand, pointed toward the earth. As the spinning intensified, the audience’s mood became upbeat, yet still respectful, with commensurate foot shuffling in the bleachers. The music clinched the audience’s attention, slowed, and abruptly rose once again. The dervishes whirled with mind and heart and feet. At intervals they rested, though they didn’t make eye contact with any onlookers. All the while, the men’s skirts billowed, the ends tailored with rims that circled the dancers’ feet. They heeled, turned, toed, and repeated the footwork, dancing around the floor’s circumference. Near the end of the frenzy, the master joined in, his moves measured at a different pace.
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