Before all roads led to Rome, as the saying goes, they led to Ephesus. And so it was appropriate that it was Ephesus that would be the final destination of my voyage, before the long stretch of daylight winging my way home.

The flight to Ephesus was from the high and dry vastness of Caesarea, at the foot of western Turkey’s tallest volcano – an abrupt and staggeringly huge peak named Erciyes. Waking up to morning in that sprawling industrial city was like waking up within a partially completed watercolor painting: Dawn was all long strips of glowing purple, blue and orange, rinsed of detail, floating below the sharp white triangle of the volcano.

It was a bracing setting, all wide dimensions and keen wind, sharpening my hunger for the flight’s momentum.

After shoving through a smoky shoebox of a Turkish flyspeck airport, we managed to figure out the weird, provincial methods of boarding and somehow got on the plane in a timely way. When we stepped off of it, we were in a different world: No cold, borderless high desert – rather a bustling place where the air tumbled in an invigorating blend of warm and cool, and all the close-in colors shone like new fruit. That is the place of the Aegean shore. We had reached Izmir, “Smyrna” to the ancients on account of its aromatic myrrh trees, the city near where Ephesus dreams.

The ride to Ephesus along the highway road was a chance to sip the cocktail of the seaside air and let my eyes meander over the intricate pastel work of the landscape. All the shades of hills and field, coupled snugly together, were rendered in vivid shades of ochre, taupe, jade and bone.

We glided through the sharp, rough shoulders of the hills, some vitality in them seeming to suggest they could rear up at any moment. And this was how Ephesus’ environs should look, as for over a thousand years – a span of time longer than the life of England – Ephesus was the pounding heart of Mediterranean commerce.

The Neolithic legacy of Goddess worship had been born from a timeless tradition of fire-lit cave rites into the day of the historical world with the founding of the gleaming Temple of Artemis here. The temple had drawn the interest and investment of the famed King Croesus – as in “rich as…” – who earned that honorific by founding banking in Ephesus. Banking had drawn the best sculptors of Greece, the great faiths of Asia and the all-important money of Rome.

Ephesus’ gleaming gravity had, at its apex, drawn over a quarter of a million free people, over a million slaves, to it. It sprawled, shining, within a circle of hills crowned by a 10 mile long wall built by Alexander the Great, and into that busy circumference flowed the height of culture and capital – and, come the time of Christ, some of the true luminaries of the gospel: Paul preached here, most famously in Acts 19. Saint John the Evangelist, author of the gospel, lived most of his life here. And the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus herself, spent her final days in a modest house just outside the sparkling, messy metropolis.

Now a town called Selcuk lounges on Ephesus’ outskirts – a warmly mellow beach village just out of the sight of the beach, with the surfer vibe of a Santa Cruz and the field-fresh food of a Napa or Cambria.

Our hotel was less than 500 yards from the low hill where the author who had written the history of the end of the world in ‘Revelations’, John, lay buried, and was as laid back as any Big Sur retreat. After spending an evening on its cushion-strewn roof terrace, surrounded by hookahs and plates of amazingly fresh food, we headed for Ephesus.

Our first visited site, though, had been the Artemision – the site of the Temple of Artemis – just down the road. There is no overstating how awesome this site was for the people of the ancient world, and how total its devastation in the opening chapters of Christian Rome was.

In the famed Seven Must-Sees of the World, better known as “Seven Wonders of the World,” the dusty travel writer Antipater wrote,

“I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on anything so grand.” ”

It was the marvel of the ancient world – the Louvre and Great Wall fused elegantly into one form, where the greatest artists of the greatest age of art the world had ever seen worked with unlimited wealth and scale. The Temple itself swept over a football field in length over enormous gardened grounds, reared up nearly two hundred feet from its three-tiered platform, and kept safe the lore of a faith that was as old as mankind – Goddess worship. And in its time, tourists and pilgrims would flock there in daily tens of thousands.

The Temple was, however, not nearly so fortunate as it was glorious, and finally met its end after a chain of damaging catastrophes when Christian mobs consisting of boozed Goths and a violently intolerant Bishop annihilated the place utterly. Its bashed stones were crammed into a variety of other buildings, its art defaced and its pieces scattered, leaving only the description, “Destroying the delusive image of the demon Artemis, Demeas has erected this symbol of Truth, the God that drives away idols, and the Cross of priests, deathless and victorious sign of Christ.”

What one can today visit is the Temple’s vast foundation, stuffed and ringed with those chunks of marble that remain. A single reconstruction of a column, stacked to the historical height but still missing its ornate capitol, crowns it like a diadem.

Ephesus is far more intact, as no one in particular had a grudge against it. Its demise came when its harbor silted up, leading to a catastrophic drop in commerce and a vicious malaria epidemic due to the swarms from swamp where Ephesus’ lifeblood used to flow. Covered by dirt, it wasn’t unearthed until late in the 19th century – and they have still to unearth more than 30% of this gargantuan city.

Visiting Ephesus proved a two day venture – one day for the mind to wrap around it, another to savor it. There is truly too much to see and experience on a single day, if one tries to absorb the rich diet of history along with the deluge it offers the senses: The soaring 2,500-year-old theaters for crowds of 25,000…

…the library fronting drizzled with miniature leaves of pure marble…

…the looming edifice where a forty-foot tall Imperial statue stood…

…the detail bursting from everything

…the sheer, endless size of it.

This was the lower Manhattan of the ancient world, and it remains largely intact, preserving a sense of grandeur, sleaze, ambition and wonder that is thrives identical in our own time. Its urban landscape is scattered with dusty reflections of our own concerns, passions and issues: Fast food places, mega malls, culture wars, market regulation battles, class struggle, suspicion and embracing between faiths, and, above all, the presence of wealth – wealth driving, memorializing, evolving the world.

In a profound sense, walking as one among tens of thousands within the high and elaborate skeleton of this most-great city, I felt I was nearly in another time.

And in a profound sense, I felt I was already home.

Like millions of others did one hundred and twenty eight generations before, I picked up some souvenirs and was on my way.

Monasteries come in all shapes and sizes, including those that resemble a savory treat for a gigantic anteater.

The Goreme Open Air Museum, as its called, is one of several monasteries built in the cones of volcanic dust and eerie guts of this dusty land. It is the largest, the oldest and, with new circuits to its subterranean channels being discovered all the time, one of the strangest.

It is also one of the more crowded. Guides reciting wikipedia entries in over a dozen languages lead swollen cadres of up to three dozen through the tiny tunnels and steep spires. Expect to wait a good fifteen minutes outside each shoebox-sized chapel to get a glimpse at defaced Middle Ages masterpieces – the usual New Testament fare.

Then it was off to Uchisar, a place distinctly pre-Old Testament.

You’ve heard my description of the place before: Inexplicable; primeval; alien. On this day, I learned two other things about the Uchisar Castle.

It’s a breeze to climb compared to the Citadel of Amasya, and it provides an even greater view than one can imagine.

The span is astonishing. And yet more beguiling is the flurry of details that swarm in the landscape. As clouds transformed the light with their low passage, I found my attention diving into valley upon countless valley where cave dwellings and fairy chimneys flocked.

I spent as much time as I could atop the Castle. It had a mellow, ageless vibe that made it easy to ignore the baby wasps inexplicably hovering in vast numbers. Then it was time to amble down the termite hill and get back to town.

In town, we arranged a stunningly good dinner and a somewhat reliable trip to Caesarea – “Kayseri” – from where we’d be taking off for the Aegean coast the next day. Both worked out splendidly.

With the trip curling rapidly to a close, it was with a touch of melancholy that I left Goreme. For a tourist town, it was neither crowded nor overly commercial, and for a town in central Turkey – a “Koran-belt” flyover region much like in the US – it was advanced and prosperous. Overall, it’s all one might want in a small town – a place where people ride horses down the street on the way to their air-conditioned, plasma screen equipped fairy chimney houses.

With such a place as Goreme, the question is not whether I’ll go back, but how long I can bear staying away.

Nature harbors enclaves of weirdness: Bryce’s soaring spires come to mind. But nowhere else in the world has mankind’s endeavors taken that weirdness and made it incalculably crazier, but in Cappadocia.

In the heart of Cappadocia is the region around Goreme, and when I woke in Goreme, I found geological laws had stayed asleep – I was in a terrain that seemed like it had to be artificial, like I was in a movie set on God’s own backlot.

Presiding over it all – watching us as we embarked on our thrillingly multi-culti tour; brooding over our descent into the subterranean cities of blind, fish-skinned ancients; staring over the plains as we cut through their edgeless dust from valley to lunatic valley of fairy chimneys and cave dwellings – was the real deity of this land: A citadel, depraved and gruesome, that had stood sentinel since before history; a place that was old before the pre-Biblical Empire of the Hittites was young: Uchisar Castle.

Uchisar’s hundreds of honeycombed chambers had been scratched through its colossal height in a time before tools. Who did it, there is no record: No pottery suggesting they had families who stored and served food, as we understand them; no burial mounds indicating they sheltered their dead; no looms, no tablets, nothing to link them with humanity – nothing to even prove they existed, but for the deranged tunnels of Uchisar.

We would climb that the next day. For the first day in Cappadocia, we descended. First, we dropped into the tight tunnels of Derinkuyu Underground City.

The guide describes it as “humid” down there, but the guide’s English was lacking. It is clammy down there, like the air has a fever that just broke. Even with the lights that are strung through its thousands of chambers – a space enough for the 10,000 inhabitants that would hide there whenever an invading force raged up from the Arabian desert – darkness stains everything. It congests it.

This is because Derinkuyu’s cold, strangely moist chambers are constricted. Some of the passages we went through were less than four feet high, less than three feet wide, and ran for up to 100 meters. If you bend over double and walk for thirty seconds, you’ll get an idea of what it feels like to be touring down there. If you do it for three months, with your eyes closed, you get an idea of what it was like to live down there.

From the chilly incarceration of Derinkuyu, we enjoyed an hour of roaming the opposite kind of environ – the capacious Ilhara Valley.

Cut by a bright blue, meandering brook, the Ilhara holds a mellow little garden of growth. Leaves literally sighed across my path as I walked it. The trail wended softly through tight groves and neat emerald meadows. And all around, tiny chapels were hidden in the high cave houses – more subterranean chambers where the covert Christians painted symbols of faith on the darkness.

Lunch was the kind of over-indulgent, wasp-ridden affair that’s become characteristic of central Turkey. If you’re able to eat your ferociously rich four courses without being nearly stung in two directions at once, you’re probably not actually in Turkey. This is less of a problem inside, but do note that I racked up three confirmed kills of yellowjackets while on the bus to Goreme.

After cramming about five pounds into my midsection, it was time for the steepest hike this side of Amasya – a four-limbed scramble up the slope of Selime Monastery: A tremendous hive of chapels, dormitories and dining halls that was a center of religious learning for the region and the cradle of monastery life for Christianity.

Set in a lofty cone of packed volanic ash, the Monastery was a web of mysterious, faintly decorated rooms lacing around quiet, dark chapels. It had a lasting peace to it that was a palpable shroud. I loved wandering its pious chambers, high above the valleys of Cappadocia – it was the closest to floating that climbing has ever felt.

After such a soothing experience, it was time to give the nerves a proper beating. It was time for Turkish night at the Yasa.

The Yasa is a cavernous nightclub – literally, as it is built into the volcanic rock of a plateau near Goreme – that plays host to the region’s best-attended revelry. In its six subterranean alcoves, lit by torches and disco balls, perfumed mobs of Russians, Turks, Czechs and Persians descend on long tables to play drains to endless bottles of raki and platters of “mezes” – steppeland appetizers. As they do, and as the music pounds on with enough bass to melt your fillings, troupes of nomadic dancers come out to regale the crowd with artful flailing.

This is Turkish Night, Saturday night, and with Mad Khadir – the professional dancing, ex-commando hotel clerk – by my side, I guzzled as much of it as I could.

The air was about 60% smoke, 30% adrenaline, 10% smell. The food kept coming in wild, cheap, tasty proportions. The dancers leapt from one act to the next like ornately costumed flash cards – doing high kicks in ribboned vests, stomping in scarlet dresses, leaping around an open flame.

Around the time I was on my third 1.5 liter water bottle, trying to rinse the Red Vines taste of raki out of my gorge, the waiters were throwing burning knives at a distant board with their faces. Yes, their faces. The night had maxed out its deliberately crazy credit.

It was time to go somewhere normal, like my subconscious. I slept like an anvil.

Getting to places in Turkey is easy. Getting there the way you planned is the hard part.

This became evident during my trek from Amasya down to Cappadocia – “Land of Beautiful Horses,” according to the Persians, and they would know. Cappadocia is also one of the more alien landscapes found on this planet or most any other planet we know, and so I knew I had to visit it. How I was to get there, I hadn’t yet figured out.

But inshallah - Arabic for “God wills it” or “God will provide” is not just a conversational filler around here – it’s a way of life. It didn’t take much to get the Amasya hotel staff as excited and determined to find some way of getting me to Cappadocia as I was, and so soon the clerk had called his friend, the tax driver, the tax driver had bargained with his friend, the bus travel agent, and before I knew it – literally, since none of these men spoke English – I had a ticket for a Mercedes luxury class bus to Cappadocia, leaving in one hour, in hand.

After about ninety minutes spent in this fly-specked bus station, drinking more fearsomely strong tea, I was on my way to the south: A land notoriously fiery in temperament and weird in lore, where Christian communities had crept through clammy volcanic caves hidden underground for months in darkness, and some of the most colossal cavalry battles of the ancient world had struck like storms.

Relaxing on the bus, I spent about eight hours watching the rugged loom of Amasya’s river valleys smooth into the light brown scorch of Central Turkey’s desert environs. The roads dropped and the mercury soared, as it seemed like the creases were being ironed out of the land.

And it was while going from stop to stop, tiny Turkish town to tiny Turkish town, that I thought this day would be a fitting occasion to write about some of the subtle, common touches of life here.

Food

Turkish cuisine is very healthy in many regards, but it tries not to be.

My average Turkish breakfast consists of juicy cucumber slices, great big tomatoes sweet enough to be cherries and plain yogurt. Bread is also available, including some terrific, buttery pastries made of that translucently thin crust – filo – that are like quiche without the egg, known as borek. Jams, honey and hazelnut spread are available to liven things up, as are very pale, rich cheeses like feta or goat cheese. Notably, meat and egg dishes generally aren’t.

And of course, present is our eyeball-popping little dose of Turkish tea – as it is for lunch, dinner, casual conversation, long drives and most forms of bargaining as well.

This is in stark contrast with breakfasts in, say, France, where the selection of meat is vast.

Similarly, most lunches and dinners begin with a vegetarian selection, and the Turks are not the type to try and slip some hidden flesh bits into their salads without telling you. I’m looking at you, Germany.

But do not mistake this as an aversion to cooking up our animal friends. Turks will eat any form of meat, so long as it is chicken or lamb, and will consume it in mass, drizzling quantities. These are never bland dishes either, usually tasting of mild peppers, fierce chilis, modest onions and lots of flame. It’s rare to find a main course that doesn’t at least taste well done.

And all of these meals are enjoyed at a steady, unhurried pace – without the somewhat anxiety-inducing European habit of withholding the check for up to an hour after the meal’s completion. It makes for a sumptuous dining experience that tastes both refined and barbaric.

Hotels

As the Lebanese raconteur said to me over his stout beer bottle, Thai girlfriend glittering in the height of Paris expat couture under one of his brawny arms, “the Turk hotel service is like nothing, man. It don’t even rate.” And he would know – when not running ATVs through the Cappadocian desert night, he supplies the five-star hotels of Qatar.

No, Turkish hotels are usually sadly lacking in amenities. Sure, as I mentioned before, “wireless internet free guest,” but you’d hear the same in a three-walled bus station or a smoky kebab shop. The hotels are usually malfunctioning in some way, they rarely foist extra towels on you, and very often haven’t got much in the ways of shiny surfaces.

That having been said, they have a lot going for them compared to some of the European hotels I’ve stayed in:

One, they are unfailingly tidy – not a single speck of dust for an ant to entertain itself with. Two, they have good water pressure and hot water. And three, they have Turkish people running them.

The latter is a huge plus; this can’t be overstated. If you’re staying on the fourth floor and there’s no elevator, don’t worry – someone will insist on hauling your overstuffed luggage up for you, then refuse to be tipped without a fight. If you need transportation to a museum and don’t have a taxi lined up, don’t fret – the hotel manager’s friend can be called up to take you there for free. Everything may not be provided for up front, but it’s just a patient request and a friendly smile away.

Just don’t expect your room to be any bigger than a postage stamp.

Friendliness

I know I have gone on quite a bit about how cordial, generous and genuine the Turks are. Well, they really have earned it.

Cab drivers will charge you less than the meter. Hotel staff gets their entire family involved to help. I haven’t been so impressed by the tour guides, but then again, I have yet to be on a street, looking confused, without someone stopping to offer some advice, insight or assistance.

For an example, we turn to that fateful and dusty bus ride to Cappadocia.

I had managed to get a ticket, even during the biggest travel day of the Muslim year – the end of the post-Ramadan celebration. I was going to be arriving in Kayseri at around 7pm – far earlier than the midnight arrival that I thought I would be stuck with. But there my fortunes began to fail: I had no idea how I would get from Kayseri – a city with a larger population than Alaska in the middle of Turkey’s dust bowl – to the remote nook of Goreme around 60 kilometers distant, where my hotel was waiting.

Enter Ramazan – not the holy month, but a helpful young man across the aisle from me.

The poetic coincidence of this encounter was not to be limited to my meeting someone named Ramazan on the last day of Ramadan celebration. No, for Ramazan is an imam – an Islamic priest; literally translated, a “guide.” And guide he did.

After hearing I needed to get to Goreme, Ramazan set about the bus as my personal travel agent. He talked with the bus operator to secure us seats, and talked with other passengers to help us move our accommodations when needed, all the while chatting with me about Ottoman history, religion and cities throughout Turkey.

By the time I reached Goreme, I was a true believer – if not in the Prophet, certainly in the generous sense of charity in the Turkish people.

In Closing

Goreme House was our destination down in Cappadocia. As we worked out the check-in process with a sloe-eyed, chain-smoking clerk by the name of “Mad Khadir,” I watched cats amble in the Roman-style courtyard. The place was a pale oasis of light lodged in darkness – the kind of stone-thick darkness that locks in the desert every night.

The next day, I knew, that darkness would shed fast. In its place would be lidless skies of ceramic blue, clouds chasing fast through them, above a landscape of thousands of towering basalt cones, weirdly tilting chimneys and defiles tucked tight around secret gardens. Cappadocia, a prehistoric fairy tale, was waiting behind that impenetrable curtain.

I’ve come to learn a few other things as well:

Bottled water is plentiful and astonishingly cheap here. Traffic signage has yet to intrude. Everyone has a cellphone, but not everyone has a painted house.

Tipping is rare. Good help is common. Buses are everywhere.

Gas is expensive. Food, affordable. Hospitality, priceless.

The most common greeting of a guest to modern Turkey is not merhaba, “hello.” It is “guest free internet wireless.” In cave-dwelling hotels, smoky bus stations and wasp-ridden cafes, I have been well and truly soaked in a rich brew of free broadband.

This is among the many ways that Turkey is distinctly awesome. They have become all the more evident during my errant journeys down from the shining emerald of the Black Sea coast, into the stony seam of the Valley of the Kings, humbling in its ancient structures and natural awe.

Coasting into town on an early bus, I had a lunch involving sinfully good eggplant infested with nuggets of gummy lamb. It wasn’t so bad, as the main course was the view – a perspective of the town of Amasya and its dominating mountain castle that stretched the horizons and the mind alike.

I made for the Pontic tombs after lunch finally gave up bothering me, stomping through a haze of wasps and construction dust to reach the scenic riverfront of Amasya. The promenade there is as precious and crisp as a tea set, with statues of famous historical and literary figures central to the town – Strabo, Mehmet II, and Ferhat and Sirin.

Those Pontic rulers who drew me here – the Greeks who died in a last defiant stand against Rome’s domination – go unnamed, but not unnoticed. Their mark is the cthonic terror that rears over the valley: The forty-one towers, eight layers of wall and hundreds of feet of sheer basalt slopes that make up the Citadel.

Stomping around the tombs, I saw the remains of the Citadel everywhere. Vestigial clots of worked stone, tilting turrets and inexplicable gates rear up amidst a dusty waste of a mountainside. And most remarkable of all the ruins were the tombs themselves – crafted caverns that look like Kong-sized sarcophagi, built to house the remains of the ferocious sovereigns of Pontus.

The next day was more of the Amasyan same: Tacky food, wall-to-wall charm, crazed wasps, cyclopean structures and long, dusty walks. As ever, liberal quantities of Turkish hospitality abounded – directions were given, fares waived, and the daily event of an enthused Turk delivering a loud and teary-eyed declaration of affection for America.

This time, I made it up to the Citadel itself. It proved a vertiginous maze of soaring stone and deadly drops; amazement lives vivid in the air up there. I was as astounded by the perspective from the mountain as I was by the notion that not only had people built the Citadel on that sharp peak, but someone had managed to storm and demolish it.

At the height of the Citadel, I meditated on all that surrounded me – the fantastic environs, the arduous and wild road behind, and the hard, shining horizon ahead. This was a good moment, all the more savory for the promise of greater moments to come.

First came the challenge of getting down. The guidebook describes it as a “fifteen minute walk to the Citadel,” and it is, if you’re measuring from the public toilets 95% of the way up from the town. I ambled down the trail, mind teeming with visions of my book’s heroes stalking up its dry pine groves, and hit the river in no time. There I rewarded myself with some Turka Cola – suspiciously like RC Cola – and a cab ride to the hotel.

At the hotel, I learned that the buses out of town were all booked the next day – a necessary nine hour trip to the south had just hit a wall. Then I endured a dinner of flat yogurt, warm grease and some of the less charming parts of a lamb. Wasps circled and the tea was poor, but I went to sleep eager for waking. The strangeness and stresses of the next day promised this much:

It would certainly be an adventure.

Greetings from “the Scotland of Turkey,” the Black Sea coast! In the rainy, cloudy spirit of this place, I have come down with a cold. Fortunately, this is Turkey, and so my mood can only get so deflated.

I spent the last two days crawling through the emerald crush of this area, looking for traces of Amazon civilization in its steel-gray soil and rivers. I discovered fuming, misty hills; brooding mountains; puffy, soft pita; breathtaking charity; surreal squalor; unparalleled seafood feasting and cows, cows, cows upon cows.

The trip, at this point, has assumed the character of a very tame picaresque – a succession of misadventures with exotic characters and strange luck. In one chapter, I deliver my laptop’s broken power cord into the hands of a taciturn man in a hidden electrical shop, and he charges me the cost of parts for fixing it. In the next, an elated girl in a head scarf practically bounces as she sells me a jacket in the midst of her gray and crumbling town. Then I trace the source of a mythical river – the Thermodon – using the compass of sheer luck.

Then cheap, steaming, shellac-strong tea at a roadside stop with an Amazon statue.

Then on down the river again.

The day concluded in Samsun, and there I will leave us, due to the lateness of the hour.

Departing Istanbul today, I figured things would only get better.

Now mind you, that is some pretty long odds. I’d already been given tearful parting gifts by a waiter I’d met once, found a pal in my hotel staff barman and never yet been disappointed by a meal. The law of averages was sure to kick in soon, whether I was in the Land of Wonder or not.

After spending a day in Samsun, I assure you: It gets better and better.

Before I regale you with photos of what I saw in Istanbul, I’ll share an anecdote from my ongoing discoveries about Turkish hospitality – each a eureka moment:

I had managed to partial amputate the power cord of my laptop, then short out the adapter box. Given that it came with my laptop, and was from the US, I thought I was out of luck. I ended up in a small electronics store, faced with a taciturn Turk.

“Merhaba,” I say. “Cord broke.”

He then proceeds to grab the power cord from me. He pops off the rubber feet. He urges me to sit. Then he unscrews the whole adapter section of the cord and begins to tinker.

I wait, mystified that service was not only instant, but productive. The fellow works with a soldering iron on the adapter itself, cuts a new cord, wires it. All the while, he exchanges somnolent “Salaams” with various quiet visitors who enter, sit, mellow.

Finally, he’s done. We test it. Sure enough, it fits the laptop and runs perfectly.

How much, I ask.

“5 Lira.” He tells me. About three dollars and change.

This kind of thing is not uncommon here. It’s practically the rule.

Now for Istanbul:

On the first day, I saw the mosque of Sultan Akhmet – the Blue Mosque. Akhmet struck me as kind of like Reagan – he presided over a time of relative growth and strength for the Ottoman Empire, and pioneered new frontiers of debt in the process of making Ottomans proud of their country again.

Anyway, his mosque has more minarets than just about any mosque, so there.

There are more rug salesmen inside the mosque courtyard than worshippers in the mosque – and this is Ramadan, mind you. Inside is quiet lovely and dim, with lighting that webs every capacious and frilly angle with its dangling wires. It is a very peaceful place.

Outside the Blue Mosque is the Hippodrome, NASCAR track for its epoch – the place where tens of thousands of plebs gathered to get bombed, watch vehicles whirl around and around the track, and secretly hope for a crash.

Unlike Talladega, the Hippodrome’s chariot races revolved a gigantic bronze plated column (that had its awesome bronze plates melted down into weapons by invading Crusaders), a beheaded serpent column from 490 BC, and this mighty obelisk, a third of its original size, from 1500 BC.

The next day took me to Topkapi Palace, where generations of Turk decorators veered between saturating themselves in their steppeland frippery and emulating the design styles of Europe.

It was vast, drafty, and extremely ornate. The rambling green space is made for both cultivating flowers and playing Cirit – a form of polo where you hit the other riders, not a ball, with a stick. In this is, it is distinctly Turkish.

Quite distinct is the Hagia Sophia – our next stop – which is distinctly Byzantine. This means it’s looming, like some primeval dinosaur created by a Judgment Day deity, sleeping in red brick before the showdown. Its guts are dark and rumbling, enough to swallow the largest western church.

Once a basilica church, then a massacre site, then a mosque, and now a museum, the Sofia is one fierce, forty-story fossil.

A milder delight is the Archaeological Museum near the palace – the mot just of my trip. It has a great array of artifacts from the origins of the world up to the soaring economies of Pax Romana, and then down into the tribal clumsiness of Dark Ages Byzantine art.

Above is a statue of Oceanus, one of the patrons of Ephesus, with Zeus reclining behind him. They are but a few of the hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of beautiful old stone there – so many that they spill over into snack stands, cat gardens and bathrooms.

More to come as I head east!

Be sure to write your e-mail address in the field on the left hand column, then click ‘Subscribe’ for updates.

From Turkey, the future of the United States looks brighter. As fascinating as the gull-ridden minarets and aromatic bustle of Istanbul is, I find my eye stuck in the green flash of recent developments in the West. I see glorious, bright visions, dear reader – hopeful visions. Accordingly, I’ll give you some good news on points of light within the latest chapter of red sunset in America’s political history:

Barack Obama won a debate 57 million viewers watched.

46% of people who watched Friday night’s presidential debate say Democrat Barack Obama did a better job than Republican John McCain; 34% said McCain did better.

Obama scored even better — 52%-35% — when debate-watchers were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country’s problems.

Palin, as I suspected from all logic and research, has shown herself to be disastrously inept when it comes to discussing national and international policy off-script. This underscores what a desperation pitch and born-again pandering McCain’s choice of her was – which, for me, is a vastly more significant warning against McCain.

And, just in time to staunch the global market’s bleeding and tarry Black Monday, Washington announced it has a bailout plan in the works.

In sum, we seem to be veering away from cataclysm.

Here, on the hem of civilization’s center, all is looking rather rosy. Now, I’ll give you my perspective on Turkey.

The first and most prominent thing about Turkey is how friendly the Turks are – aggressively, genuinely friendly to an extent I have never seen demonstrated in humanity before; not on such a general scale.

They are blunt – one will not mince words if you are walking too slowly or have the wrong impression of something. And they are energetic – a fellow walked a whole eight blocks out of his way to show me to an electronics store when he overheard me saying I needed an adapter plug. But overall, they are amazingly friendly.

I have been invited in to meet the families of merchants and to drink apple chai with them no less than three times. I have never had an impolite remark or dismissive word sent my way from a Turk, even a security guard. I received a decorative fingerbowl, a cup of apple chai and a piece of buttery baklava from my waiter one meal – all free – as he beamingly explained, “I love your country.”

And indeed, that too is apparent: The people of Turkey range between grudgingly or excitedly pro-American. This not only shows their amity, but also that same casual, confident quality to their friendship – they are all pretty chill about the greatest military power in the world playing with heavy munitions in their backyard; calm, considering our presence in Iraq is like another nation occupying Mexico and running raids along the Rio Grande.

Less general observations abound in this vivid, mellow city – a city truly like a hash fantasy or poetry-stuffed dream:

Cats are profuse, well-fed and unafraid in the streets. None are mistreated; all are friendly. I think this shows something about the nature of the natives’ character.

Not many Turks observe Ramadan. When the call to prayer blasts, unseating your fillings, everybody goes about their business. I have yet to see a Turk on their knees outside a mosque, but I have seen many Turkish guides winking as they discuss good wines inside a mosque.

Turks are very much “Turks” – not Europeans, or Easterners, or Muslims. They speak with fire about their Sultans, their horsemanship, their food. They identify with their heritage and are rather excited about it. It is their favorite topic, behind how great America is.

It is no more safe to cross an Istanbul street than it is to cross any Italian street, which is to say, not at all safe. It is far safer to ask a person in Istanbul for help than it is an Italian.

Power ballads and late-80s rap are alive and well, rocking the Bosporus. If you like music to gallop on a horse to, or to wear a giant clock to, you will dig the Istanbul music scene.

Ruins are everywhere. The only similarly populous feature I can think of would be the manicured greenspace in Irvine, California, and even that falls dramatically short of how ubiquitous Roman ruins are here. In a smoky hallway leading to a public bathroom, I saw some eight marble slabs depicting ferocious Byzantine guards, leaning on the walls between alabaster nymphs and a colossal, pitted statue of Hadrian who appeared to be adjusting the cheeseboard cieling with his upraised hand. This was not unusual – at least, not to Istanbul.

That’s another distinct quality to Istanbul: Strangeness is common to its spirit – weird and unafraid and happy to see you.

And the word is, it only gets stranger as one heads east.

And east I go.

See you there, dear reader, hopefully with pictures.

Turkey’s government is once again being crushed between Iraq and the hard place of pressure from the west. The attacks on Turkey by the relentless PKK – Kurdish rebels in Turkey with contentious but nevertheless real ties with the ruling Kurdish party in Iraq – have its citizens rightly demanding those responsible be pursued into Iraq and neutralized. The US – which has always regarded Kurdish Iraq as a model of stability in a crucible of strife – has rightly demanded Turkey not make the situation more chaotic by invading. Both sides have good, urgent arguments, but only one can prevail. Which is the right course?

It may surprise some to hear that neither case will be a disaster if handled well, and that both have their merits. If anything, Turkish intervention would have some positives to it that have been lacking from the Iraq War:

First, it would be a Muslim nation involved in fighting terrorism in Iraq. This is something that is long overdue – the view of the world being that Iraq is a western, Christian crusade to institute a vassal state in Islam’s backyard. If Turkey comes in on the side of battling terror, it looks less like a White House delusion.

Secondly, Turkey has significant amounts of troops to devote to this task and, without Saddam to worry about, might actually stand to wipe out the PKK. Whatever the case, al-Qaeda’s use of Kurdistan’s bandit kingdom as a refuge from the surge will be further abbreviated and the thorn of the PKK could be plucked from the common side of Turkey, the Iraqi parliament and the US. Considering how shoe-string troop counts are in Iraq, why not welcome in the second-largest NATO army?

The answer to that brings us to the negatives of a Turkish intervention – the first being that the roads Turkey’s 50,000+ troops will be tromping down will be no longer available to our own effort. It would be a logistical constriction for our military and would add to the confusion Iraq already suffers. This would be especially true if the Turkish military holds to its word, as it has said:

Cicek said Turkey’s sole target, if its troops entered northern Iraq, would be the PKK militants, about 3,000 of whom are believed to be hiding there.

Combating any and all terrorist elements in the tangled web of mercenary northern Iraq is much more realistic and achievable than trying to sift out Kurdish Maoist Nationalists from All-Use Religious Fanatic Al-Qaeda Fighters. These groups hardly share the same bed, but outlaws are outlaws, arms traders are arms traders, and ducking one group while hunting the other will not be easy. It will also mean we and the Turks will have to be careful not to trip over one another, rather than aim to work together.

Turkish intervention is one heavy, edged pendulum, and could certainly swing either way – good or ill. It’s up to the US to encourage cooperation with our NATO ally if they feel that they’re forced to step in, rather to ignore or hinder it for the sake of the Iraqi government. For, regardless of the potential ill of the intervention, this much is certain: Security for that sector can’t be left in the hands of Baghdad. When Turkey last seriously considered stepping over that brittle border, the US defused the situation by having the Iraqi goverment sign a commitment to break the back of the PKK. Absolutely nothing came of it.

And yet the response from Washington last week was merely more of the same:

“PKK violence not only threatens Turkey, but also undermines the security and welfare of Iraq,” U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement issued Monday evening. “Turkey and Iraq have vowed to collaborate in the fight against terrorism … We call on Iraqi authorities to take effective measures against the PKK.”

It seems a situation where again we are getting the back of the Iraqis and again they cannot measure up to what’s demanded of them. Considering car bombings still shiver Baghdad with regularity and al-Qaeda is not yet entirely contained – not to mention the larger threat of sectarian insurgents – how can we expect the Iraqi security forces to deal with the PKK, one of the largest terrorist factions in the world? Put simply, we can’t – not at this point.

Asking Turkey to wait extends this situation at the expense of Turkish lives, which the PKK are not loath to take en masse. Allowing Turkey to intervene means risking a much greater destabilization. But with the region already being destablized as the PKK opens its attacks against Iran and Iran lashes back. Waiting while the Iraqis get their act together under the miserable leadership of the Dawah party may not be an option for long.

And Washington may soon find itself in a sandwich of its own – having to decide whether it wants a NATO partner with an Army larger than any other hunting terrorists in Iraq, or Iran.