journal

Day 9 – September 9 2024 – Eskişehir – Ankara

Pazartesi, Monday: and the parties continued into the night last night.

Waking this morning, sick. Stomach sick.

still, tempted to try breakfast, through the other side of where we’d eaten the night before, a low door, corridor, ladies in the kitchen, our house host leading the way … and returning when we were ready with a mobile eftpos machine from La Vie Konak.

Discussing first thing: a pharmacy, eczane … which, after some confusion we found. menemen for breakfast, same place as we couldn’t finish dinner last night… and had to apologise to the waitress … and then slow movements, in search of museums, but on Mondays everything we might have wanted to see or visit was shut. So we moved slowly from sunlit parkbench to sunlit parkbench … at intervals so as not to become immovable as the cramps and phasing out caused by the drugs we’d been given increased or whatever it was that they did. Whatever it was it was abominable.

the streets look so quiet, like any European town, desert during the day, but the muezzin’s call still rang out, and behind every streetfront and out from every window life was heard going on.

Biding our time before our train to Ankara … and then finally after many parkbenches 1pm or so arrived. We taxied smoothly to the railway station, discovering both that it was exactly where we had disembarked from the bus and that we might have had we known bought our tickets then and there, rather than go through one of those insidious third parties that now seem to rule online services, clipping the ticket on buying the ticket.

It had narrowly missed J but obviously hit someone else on the way.

I think bees
more readily than any other species
would take to cellphone technology.

A swift transit through a brown country, the harvests in, it seemed, and the land waiting for the next crop … but so much land! and how would it be planted and what would grow? and how long before now had the harvest taken place?

Ankara from the start was not what we expected, a cavernous modern railway station,

with foodstalls showing temptations we dare not sample,

we didn’t for all that feel so bad … which was odd. Too excited, too exciting.

Ankara a big city. With a big railway station. And heat. A brief interchange with an American man, pony-tail, round-like and jolly and his daughter, whom we’d seen enjoying private jokes all through the journey, from the station in Eskişehir to here: he – you speak English? What the hell are you doing here?

Me – What are you doing here?

He – I work here. I asked, he said, Foreign affairs (!).

Then at high speed through circuitous streets, climbing a unexpected hill to the castle, just below which is the 16th century caravanserai, the divan, where we are staying.

Introducing Divan Çukurhan,

in the historic quarter of the little that was left here before Atatürk’s adoption of Ankara in 1932 as the capital of an independent Türkiye.

and so we pass on to the interior of the divan. Photos mislead, making the restoration appear less sensitive to the preservation of the building, for example the glassed interior courtyard, when in fact it was to us altogether wonderful.

The gallery outside our room,