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| Turkey’s Crimson Flag on our Sailing Gulet |
Our schedule in Turkey goes like this: three nights in the Aegean harbor town of Bodrum, one week on a sailing cruise in the Turkish Aegean leaving from and returning to Bodrum, four more nights in Bodrum, then nine nights in Istanbul.
Hardcore travelers know that Turkey has been on practically every “top 10 must-see” destination list for the past few years. As I write this, just yesterday it appeared on yet another top destination list for 2015. Yet, many of our family and friends have asked, “Why Turkey?”
We have a litany of reasons, likely the same reasons that put this crossroads country on so many of those must-see lists. Top among them are the food, the history, and the culture, all pretty different than our own, which is what makes it so intriguing a destination.
You might imagine that we weren’t without reservations in the weeks leading up to our departure from Italy to Turkey. The horrific acts of brutality by the ISIS (or IL, as they seem also to be known), had lead to military action and a flurry of activity at Turkey’s long border with Syria: refugees surging into Turkey, and Turkish Kurds rushing into Syria anxious to fight the IS. Just days before we were to leave, Germany issued a travel warning, and it was reading about the German travel warning that we learned the USA had issued a travel warning the week before.
Still, the travel warnings were against travel to Eastern Turkey near the Syrian border: we would be hundreds of miles to the west. More of the warnings cited security threats in the Turkish cities of Ankara, Izmir, and (unsurprisingly) Istanbul. The warnings advised against congregating in groups, which seems a curious and hardly effectual warning considering we would be spending nine nights and ten days in a city of sixteen million. Congregating in a group of some kind—at the airport, restaurants, hotel, museums, mosques, and so on—seems inevitable. We take the warning to mean we shouldn’t hang out with mobs, which is hardly something we need to be advised against.
The bottom line is that common sense prevails. We don’t wear the stars and stripes on our sleeves (so to speak), and we don’t run around advertising that we’re Americans. That really has nothing to do with being in a Muslim country our own government warns us to be careful in: we behave similarly in London, Paris, Rome, and any other European city we visit. It just seems polite: we are their guests, after all.
The reasons to stay away aside, what remains are all the reasons that we want to visit Turkey, which you’ll see in our upcoming blogs.
Earlier, I called Turkey a “crossroads country”, and I mean this in quite a few ways. Geographically, Turkey straddles both Europe and Asia; for that matter, the city of Istanbul straddles both continents. When we step off the plane in Turkey (at the airport on the eastern side of Istanbul) we will in reality be setting foot for the first time in Asia.
Historically, Turkey lies at the intersection of the ancient and the modern, with Roman ruins, biblical cities like Ephesus, and if not the birthplace of Christianity (which would have to be Jerusalem) then at least the tinderbox where the fire Saint Paul lit began to spread. Before it was called Istanbul, it was Constantinople (named after Constantine the Great, who we blogged about here) when it was the eastern capital of Christianity on par with Rome, and even before that it was called Byzantium.
Culturally, and perhaps most importantly, Turkey is a modern, secular, Muslim country of 77 million people, 99.8% of whom claim to be Muslim (though, like Europe’s Christians, fewer and fewer actually practice their faith). A few years ago I read the book “Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths” by Bruce Feiler. In it, Feiler contends that Abraham, as the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is the key to peace between these three faiths, which together form the predominant religious tradition on our planet. While I agree, I think the fundamental point is commonality: if Turkey can thrive as a secular Muslim country, straddling east and west, ancient and modern, then there is hope for peace.
One of the principle things I looked forward to in Turkey was hearing the call to prayer. It’s an artifact of the way we blog that, as I write this, I’ve already heard the call to prayer many times. Each time, it’s caused me to stop what I was doing, listen, and be contemplative. Never have I felt more like I was a guest in a foreign country than listening to the call to prayer, though it has since occurred to me that as foreign as the call to prayer might be to us Christians, so too must the ringing of church bells be to Muslims. Yet, they serve the same purpose: to remind the faithful that it’s time to pray.
When you think of things this way, you realize that we have much more in common than not.
