stone mosaic outside of deserted Christian church in Kayakoy
woke up to rain and all of our clothes still wet from doing laundry in the sink.
kind of sucked because we had to pack them wet. gross.
sultan's breakfast at Ideal Pension
morning muesli at Ideal Pension
after breakfast we donned our raincoats (although the rain had temporarily stopped in Fethiye) and took the dolmus to Kayakoy...got there to a heavy torrential downpour.
we immediately took shelter under a wine bar (although it was too early for wine--even for us) and enjoyed some çay with 2 others who had gotten off the bus to see the abandoned village.
locals enjoying çay
main (inhabited) street at the base of Kayakoy, souvenirs covered from the rain
when the rain wasn't really stopping we decided to just go for it--it was our only time here--on the upside, there were NO tourists, except the other couple that we had had tea with.
i could have spent days here. i think we both could have.
absolutely phenomenal. we didn't get through even a quarter of it by the time we had to catch the dolmus back to pick up our stuff and make our bus to Göreme.
plus, because Louis de Bernieres used Kayakoy as his fictional city of Eskibaçe in this book (which I read just before our trip), I could picture all the characters and the vivid village life--I guess he's a pretty good writer, in retrospect.
a little bit of history and the ghost town of Kayakoy: traditionally the Turks and the Greeks lived together harmoniously...Muslims & Christians shared regions and villages.
following the Greek war of independence, there was a huge population exchange where all the Greeks living in Turkey were mandated to move to Greece and vice versa.
there were around 25,000 Greeks living in the town until 1923, which was then called by its Greek name: Karmylassos.
the ghost town consists of over 1000 buildings...mainly homes, with some churches/chapels and a couple of schools.
of course, this exchange must have been quite a culture shock...i later read that the 25,000 Greeks that got moved ended up in a small, poor suburb of Athens that, to this day, remains one of the poorer areas around the city.
the Turks who were transferred here were very unaccustomed to the climate and conditions that they soon relocated to other areas of the country.
there are many other areas where Greeks were expatriated...though not sure if any were as large as this one.
i would love to come back here someday--to Turkey--stay around the Lycian Way, either right here in Kayakoy, so i could walk around the abandoned city every day, or else in Faralya at George House--every day we could do a good hike of the Lycian Way.
there are a few good walks around Kayakoy too--you could walk through most of the village about 8 kms to Oludeniz (that's how extensive the ruins are)--all the way back to Fethiye too.
i had a dream last night so vivid but i didn't tell bob all of it: he proposed to me but with this ugly gold ring with blue stones (i hated it in the dream and wondered why he had gotten me gold when he knows i hate it--but i didn't say anything to him in the dream). not sure if this part of the dream was brought on by my day dreams previous to our trip of him proposing in a hot air balloon, or because of our friends' recent engagement news that we got via email in Fethiye...or because yesterday i found a curiously flattened box in his backpack--it was bizarre but without a lid--and more curious because i asked about it and he claimed he had no idea what it was, yet i think he saved the box somewhere....
anyhoo, the dream went on that my parents were so excited they came to pick us up from the airport and when they asked us about the hot air balloon ride i got so upset because we had forgotten to go to Göreme/Cappadocia.
anyway, maybe Turkey would make a good honeymoon if it was a place of proposal--i'd come back here.
sooo...after getting completely soaked for 2 hours we hopped the dolmus back to Fethiye to catch our overnight bus to Göreme. it was still light out for a few hours when we got on, so we got to enjoy some awesome scenerey on the bus ride...some very interesting small towns.
bob wants to know where all the water went in Bodrum.
we also brought up an old talk (dream?) again about the possibility of opening a camp--maybe in Manitoulin?
we are the only tourists on this bus--it's pretty cool.
random billboard says: Git güle güle, Konas doya doya
(i think it's a cell phone company?)
random lunch and overnight bus snacks:
pogaca (bread stuffed with cheese & parsley)
we chose this cheese because the picture told us that it goes with simit
fresh apricots (finally!) from Fethiye
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