With the first semester half over, the schedule happily provides a week vacation and Sue and I had a short holiday in Lisbon.  As we’ve settled into Istanbul, we pledged to each other we would take advantage of the cheap airfares–$300, and sometimes less, will get you a round-trip ticket to Barcelona, London, Budapest, Jerusalem and points in between–and travel whenever possible.  In addition,  we both wanted a break from the intense Istanbul scene.

Lisbon with a metropolitan population of three million seemed quiet, relaxed and almost provincial in contrast to Istanbul’s twenty million.  We found an apartment in Alfama, the old city.  During the times of Moorish domination, Alfama constituted the whole of the city.  Alfama became inhabited by the fishermen and the poor, and though that is still true, now it’s charm lures adventurous tourists like ourselves to its maze of cobblestoned lanes, some so narrow (like the address of our apartment) that even tiny European cars are excluded.  The great 1755 Lisbon Earthquake damaged but did not destroy the Alfama, which has remained a picturesque labyrinth of narrow streets, small squares, and neighborhood restaurants.  As always, we walked and walked.

One day we walked from Alfama to Belem, the cultural center including the Discoveries Monument recognizing the great Portuguese explorers and sailors including important historical figures such as King Manuel I carrying an armillary sphere, poet Camões holding verses from The Lusiads, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Cabral, and several other notable Portuguese explorers, crusaders, monks, cartographers, and cosmographers, following Prince Henry the Navigator at the prow holding a small vessel. The only female is queen Felipa of Lancaster, mother of Henry the navigator, the brain of the discoveries.

Clustered near the waterfront are Maritime, Modern Art and Archeological Museums, all wonderful.  The architecture of the Archeological Museum, housed in the Jeronimos Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is stupendous.

Of course we always visit gardens: here in Lisbon, the National Botanical Garden.  While looking for the entrance to the Garden, we stumbled into the National Palace, opulent and grand.

The next day we decided to take a day trip to Sintra (the whole town is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage monument, and rightfully so). We were warned that the weather would be cooler there and as the day progressed fog and rain settled in. Due to the mountain’s proximity to the sea, the climate is characterized by low temperatures and elevated precipitation, with dense and diverse vegetation including exotics introduced during the 16th century.

Here, from the train station, we walked up a small mountain on the scale of Mt. Battie in Maine (I expected to find a bus down but, to the delight of Sue, we missed the bus stop and walked all the way down) to a spectacular ridge protected by the Castle of the Moors built during the 8th and 9th centuries.  Under a Christian king it became a monastary in 1100.

Along the same ridge we walked to the Pena National Palace, summer residence and get-away from the Lisbon National Palace; as Sue commented, the Portuguese royalty (King Ferdinand was a cousin to Prince Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, husband to Queen Victoria) commanded too much of the national assets.  It was amazing to stand in a room of the National Palace and consider the sum of human work-hours represented by the trappings.

Unlike the opulent palace in Lisbon, the Pena was seemingly more livable; but what a hodge-podge of styles from Islamic to medieval to Romantic.  Stripes and plaids seem elegant in comparison.  It was if the designers of Disneyland had taken acid and then time-traveled.

Anyone who travels should include Sintra on their itinerary.
And then home to Istanbul; strange to think of returning to Istanbul as coming home.  But it will seem like home when Dan, Kim, Jesse and TL all arrive on Thanksgiving Day from Amsterdam and we celebrate Dan's birthday!

There’s old and there’s ancient.  We are surrounded by both.
The Robert College campus is old; next year the school celebrates its 150th birthday.  Originally the Robert College School for girls was located across the Bosphorus but was relocated in 1909; that campus, here in Arnavütköy where we live, became the unified secondary school of today in the nineteen-seventies.

This scene remains recognizable on our campus today.












But beneath the city of Istanbul lie layers of much older developments.  A tunnel under the Bosphorus planned to relieve the incredible traffic across the two existing bridges was planned to be completed last year; but as the digging proceeded, artifacts were unearthed, archaeologists were called in and repeatedly the construction ground to a halt.  Now the anticipated completion date is hopefully next year.

On a recent holiday, Kurban Bayramı, commemorating the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his young first-born son as an act of submission and his son's acceptance to being sacrificed (God intervened to provide Abraham with a ram to sacrifice instead) celebrated now with the donation and slaughter of sheep and cattle with 3/4 of the meat being given to the needy, we traveled to south-west Turkey and toured several extensive Greek and Roman ruins.

Ephesus was once a prosperous port but now lies dozens of miles from the shore.  With remains dated to 6,000 BC on the site, it is known as an important city during the Classical Greek era and by the 1st century BC, under Roman control, it had grown to encompass a population of 250,000.  The largely intact facade of the Library of Celsus is imposing.  Though the present excavations cover 30 or 40 acres, it is estimated that this represents about 15% of the original cityscape.

After leaving Ephesus we headed for Herakleia; when our gravel road petered out in the gloaming, we backtracked but did not reach our destination until the next afternoon.  That’s a story for another time.
The drive through the rocky landscape was painted with a faded palette including the flat green of olive trees.

This area looks up the flanks of Mount Latmos which appears in Greek mythology as the site of the cave where Selene's consort Endymion lies forever young and beautiful in blissful sleep.

Today Latmos, formerly, Herakleia, is a remote and sleepy village with ancient ruins scattered willy-nilly over the hillsides.  The region has been continuously inhabited since the Bronze Age.  Now the 320 local Turks share the cobbled streets with trekkers, rock climbers and mostly German tourists.

We stayed in a charming pension with a lovely outside dining area overlooking Bafa Lake, ten miles long and three miles wide, once an inlet of the Aegean Sea and now a landlocked brackish lake.

Though the ruins of a temple of Athena can be found in Herakleia, between the 7th and 14th centuries the area was host to Christian monasteries and the solid rock tombs of that era are bizarre and imposing.

By the time we found the ruins at Priene we were ruined.

But that afternoon I was pleased to buy a gallon of homemade lemony olives from a farmer on the roadside and returned to Istanbul feeling rich in many ways, inspired by the old, ancient and tasty new.

Istanbul is a city of stairs. They lead up the steep hillsides connecting upper street to lower street; sometimes they are the street! They go to house doors, they lead into basements, into the Bosphorus, into ruined cities. They are made of marble, stone and cement–sometimes all three together! They are beautiful and daunting, treacherous and necessary, gradual and short, steep and long.  Perhaps all the metaphorical steps of our lives also have these qualities.

Learning to live in an unfamiliar culture in a different part of the world, in a beautiful city rather than the beautiful countryside of my home has taken a lot of steps. We are still taking them.

Every trip off campus into the city requires going down or up stairs depending upon whether I leave through the top gate or the bottom gate. Then there are the steps of getting the transport card, id card and money in my pockets, back pack on, speaking to the gate guards in my infant Turkish (they are very tolerant and friendly!) and then going out onto the street.

On the street there are the stairs up the park hillside on the way to Ortaköy or down the many into Arnavütköy in search of provisions to bring back up the stairs to our house partway up the hill of Robert College. Or up the few steps onto the bus to places further afield in this huge city.

There are the steps to climb up to the school building for Tom's work, to see the office about residence permits and other paperwork, to the fourth floor for Turkish classes, to the library. These are also steps we take to find our places here, to do some good work, to step toward understanding, toward making sense of where we are.

There are many steps on all our journeys, sometimes we skip up them two at a time and sometimes we plod. But the beauty of the journey is incredible  even when it isn't  always pretty, the calf muscles are all the time getting stronger!