A Year in the World (43 page)

Termessos, a place of myth, casts a mysterious spell. Pegasus, the winged horse, flew Bellerophon over this spot, lifting him high enough to be unreachable by the swords and arrows of the belligerent tribe living on the mountain. Bellerophon, legend goes, defeated them by hurling down rocks. How they carried enough rocks goes unrecorded. I guess if you can have a winged horse, you can have enough rocks, too.

After our first real hike, we’re all exuberant at lunch. We’re seated under trees in the garden of a roadside restaurant, and a stream running by adds to the coolness. We feast on mezes—fava purée, eggplant, a dip that looks like melted bricks, tiny okra with tomatoes (I love this), grilled sea bass and puffed bread, then slices of watermelon and yellow figs. No matter how many plates arrive, we clear them immediately.

We sail out of the harbor in late afternoon, the water changing from pewter to obsidian. The coast, backed by craggy mountains, resembles a Chinese painting on scrolls. I almost expect a calligraphic poem to appear in the sky:

Above shadow-dark waters

Of this ancient port, where Alexander

Launched war, the hills reign

In mist, always peaceful.

The two young Turkish boys who crew for our captain, Mustapha, drop anchor in a small cove. We swim in the dark water around the boat. Late, late, Ali serves a roasted lamb in the warm night air. We attack the plate of various goat and cow’s milk cheeses. The food is a great good surprise. I should start a list of mezes. One I like is yogurt with watercress—the peppery, sharp tastes accent each other. Instead, I write words I learned today:

ashlar
—large stones square cut

heroon
—shrine to a mortal hero or a demigod

ostothek
—urn for bones

kline
—funeral bier

The Di Rosas and we lie on the bow watching the full moon appear to rock in the sky as the boat sways. More stars than I’ve seen in years rock along with the moon. We’re cradled, we’re lulled. Way in the distance we see fireworks celebrating the anniversary of Atatürk’s defeat of someone. I hope it was not the Armenians. What was it like to put out the last lights of the Ottomans and to catapult the country into the twentieth century?

Ah, Atatürk, I have a longing to know you. I imagine my mother at eighteen, invited to the embassy in Istanbul. She’s wearing burgundy silk, and her dark hair fans over the side of her translucent face. She is twirling a long loop of pearls, thinking of escape, thinking of a sail with the English boy on the Bosporus tomorrow, when
he
walks in. The music sinks briefly, then quickens. His white silk handkerchief arranged like a flower in his lapel pocket catches her attention. Then his jaw like the back edge of an ax. Then his moody Turkish black eyes pin her. She pauses midlaugh. His eyes, the color of charcoal. He motions to an aide, then suddenly stands at her side. She smiles. Those all-American teeth. He kisses her hand. She meets his gaze with her eyes as blue as these sapphire seas. He’s accustomed to deference that he does not want and she does not provide.

Peaceful evening, much laughter. If they knew I am dreaming of Atatürk . . .

Cheryl, Karl, and Ian have abandoned their cabins and sleep on deck.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 31: PHASELIS

Edoardo, just eleven last month, is the most charming child. He never whines or complains. His good nature will carry him throughout his life. He loves to try new foods. He listens like an adult to long historical background information about ruins. He has the quality that will make his time on earth enjoyable— curiosity. He seems interested to know everyone on the trip. I am surprised when he curls next to me to read what I am writing in my log. “I want to see what you see,” he tells me. He also is keeping a log. He’s reading a novel and working in a puzzle book and learning sailing knots from Mustapha.

Midmorning, after swims, we take the dinghy to shore. From the crescent beach we walk into the pine woods of Phaselis, a seventh century
B.C.
town with a processional street ending on another beach at the other side of this small peninsula. This was a trading outpost for wood and purple dye from murex shells. Like Manhattan, Phaselis originally was sold for nothing. The colonizer Lakios offered a shepherd some dried fish in exchange for his land; a “Phaselis offer” still means a cheap one. The oldest coins are Persian, dating to 466
B.C.
They’re stamped with a boat prow on one side and the stern on the reverse. Coming and going. Along the broad way in, still recognizable as a street with sidewalks, I run my finger over Greek inscriptions engraved with calligraphic flourishes on stone columns, the β (beta) and Ω (omega) with extra curves and the Α (alpha) with a little arrow in the crossbar. The many potsherds are sea-washed smooth. I pick up handfuls, marveling that after all this time they’re still underfoot. Decorative indentations, painted designs, ridges, what a thrill. I leave them in a magic hexagon pattern on a stone.

The baths are more intimate than at Perge and less grand, but the underfloor in the
caldarium
still has round terra-cotta pillars that held up the warmed floor and the arches for the flow of water into the
tepidarium
, then the
frigidarium
. Fulvio and I are fascinated that the terra-cotta stacks rest on twenty-five-centimeters-square
cotto
tiles with wavy designs that could have been made in Italy today. Terra-cotta is eternal, like the stones. We are walking everywhere on mosaics. Kick away a few inches of dirt, and underfoot are white tesserae in the running heart-shaped leaf design that we’ve seen in the other ruins. Behind this excavated street lie the agora (the piazza) and the remainder of this town, still unexcavated.

We sail along a wild and wilder coast, after passing a clump of hotels. Fulvio says, “We’re lucky to see this. It will be ruined in ten years.” Every day Edoardo holds out a fishing line, trawling through the water, but nothing bites. Ed suns. Aurora looks out at the water. Cheryl listens to music with her earphones. The others read. I’m happy propped on the orange cushions with my log.

Lycia. This is the Lycian coast, formerly a league of twenty-three cities stretching from outside present-day Antalya west to Dalaman. Sorting out the history makes me pity Turkish schoolchildren who must be examined on the waves of sieges that beset this area. Along this coast lived early Anatolians. They were up and running in time to fight the Egyptians with the Hittites, and to take the side of Troy in the Trojan war. All the mighty ancient-world warlords had their way with Lycia. By the time Alexander appeared here, most towns considered him their deliverer from a long struggle with the Persians and the Carians. At this pivot the Lycian language morphed into Greek. Some Lycian letters survive on tombs; a few inscriptions are even bilingual Greek and Lycian. Ptolemy, king of Egypt, had his fling here, and later Syria took over. The convoluted history, packed into paragraphs in texts, actually was spread over many centuries, but it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by the preponderance of war. Too bad no one recorded more about sculpture, architecture, love, celebration, food, sex, birth, poetry. When Lycia later became a Roman province in
A.D.
46, the area prospered and Christianity developed alongside the pagan religions. Given as a prize to Rhodes by the Romans, the Lycian coast finally appealed to Rome and won its freedom. At that late date the Lycian League was formed along democratic principles, and the long-suffering twenty-three cities joined together. The cities fell in the eighth century to Arab warriors. Writing this in my log gives me a solid context in which to plug Enver’s lectures.

About
four we anchor in a cove and take the dinghy to a pebble beach at Çirali, where Enver’s in-laws have a house. Through orange and pomegranate orchards, we walk to their octagonal house, set on a larger porch of the same shape. Inside, I have the impression of being in a tent; perhaps their inspiration was nomadic. Six beams radiate from the center. Each side of the octagon has a double door opening to the surrounding grove. I would like to fall asleep to the scent of orange blossoms. The inside walls are irregular white stones lying flat like a jigsaw. His father-in-law, a famous sponge-diver, also did archaeological diving at Gallipoli. There’s a photograph of him in the depths among World War I torpedos at rest with the fish. The in-laws are off on their boat, but we eat their olives and drink their tea and beer.

A neighbor, a reed-slender Turk who looks quite amused, comes around with his tractor pulling an open trailer spread with a Turkish rug and a long cushion. We climb in, sitting back to back, and he takes off down a dirt road, going full out. Who knew a tractor could fly? The air smells of pine and figs. We pass rude, ramshackle houses where children on the porch wave enthusiastically, laughing at crazy foreigners bouncing in the trailer. The houses look as though they were thrown together over a weekend and could as easily be dismantled tomorrow.

At dusk we again embark on a vertical climb. This time other people are walking, too. Hiking at the low-biorhythm time of day doubles the trouble. I lag behind and fall into step with a very pregnant Turkish woman and her husband. We pass a clump of scraggly bushes with limbs and twigs tied with tissue paper, tickets, and receipts. At this ancient place you make a wish on the way to the home of the Chimaera, the mythical fire-breathing monster. Women formerly tied their hair to the branches if they wished for health or a child. The pregnant woman ties nothing and does not pause at the magic bush.

Finally we arrive at a rock slope where eight or so fires blaze out of small openings. My group already is seated around the largest, listening to Enver tell the legend of the Chimaera who terrorized Lycia. Bellerophon, astride Pegasus, slayed the monster Chimaera by shooting arrows of lead that melted in her fiery throat, suffocating her. Around here, however, they say the monster was driven underground forever, and her breath flares out in eternal, inextinguishable fires on the mountain. The rational explanation for the flames is that gases leaking from the magma of the earth spontaneously ignite. If you put out one fire with dirt, gases escape from other crevices and combust. The oldest seafarers knew these natural lighthouses and looked for them as they sailed by far below. Who can explain this phenomenon? Surely gas leaks elsewhere, but nothing like the Chimaera fires exist, except on this rough slope. The legend of the raging female goat/lion/serpent driven underground may be as good an explanation as any. Some myths seem to answer the question
why
: Why does winter come? Why did the war begin? And why does the mountainside stay on fire?

The mythical beast is an old friend of ours. A fabulous bronze statue of the Chimaera made during Etruscan times was found by men digging trenches outside Arezzo’s Porta San Laurentino in 1553 and now can be visited at the Archaeological Museum in Florence. Arezzo has two reproductions at one entrance to the city. They’re positioned inside fountains, which cools the idea of fire-breathing. The legend is complex, and no one fully understands the monster, whose father was a giant and mother a half-serpent. Those two had some powerful recessive genes working. The other children were Orthrus, a dog with several heads; Hydra, a water snake with nine heads; and Cerberus, the hound of hell. The Chimaera was
not
from a nice family.

Twilight lasts long; the fires look even more mythic. This home of the Chimaera in Lycia, this hot spot, draws young couples who gather around the flames. Is there an erotic element to the myth? Or maybe it’s just the young who can make the climb.

We descend to the dark beach, and the first group of five jumps into the dinghy. I wait—for the pleasure of sitting on the still-warm beach pebbles with my feet in the silky water. I find a white rock, smoothed by the waters, like a miniature moon. Or maybe it’s like a round of pita dough left to rest for half an hour, or the egg of some secret sea creature. I will steady my desk papers at Bramasole with its nice heft.

As we near the boat, Ali’s flavorsome shish kebabs send out their scent to lure us. Mustapha and Ali have suspended a grill over the side of the boat. We motor down a few coves to a quieter spot, passing Leek Island with, Enver tells us, ancient ship anchors and amphorae scattered on the bottom. Everyone has a swim in the dark before we sit down to red cabbage shredded with yogurt, roasted peppers with garlic, a variety of grilled meats, and fried potatoes.

The
thematic current that draws our little ship of fools together proves to be an interest in buildings. Ian, formerly a racetrack owner, has restored forty-four historic buildings in New Orleans. Fulvio, of course, is the master builder of Tuscany, well known for his impeccable use of materials and his sensibility for the vernacular architecture. Karl is a builder in San Francisco who has worked on small houses as well as mega-estates in Atherton. Bernice and Armand have restored not only a Baltimore firehouse but also a farm in Virginia. Ed and I have our own restoration passions that have involved us for fifteen years. After dinner we trade stories of various projects. There’s a lingo, a bond, a mutual sympathy.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1: PORTO GENOESE

Those men of Genoa covered the globe. What a strange landscape. We’ve gone from rugged and sheer multicolored stone mountains plunging into the sea, grottoes and clear water, goat trails, scrubby trees, and maquis to what looks like the Okefenokee Swamp. Instead of alligators and water moccasins, we find scattered ruins tangled in vines. At the start of the path, we pass two grand stone tombs. On one I find a carved boat and a poem that ends:

After the light carried by the dawn had left,
Captain Eudemos

There buried the ship with a life as short as a day,
like a broken wave.

The dense oily incense of bay trees saturates the humid air. We pass a Turk chewing on myrtle leaves. Seeing our curiosity, he strips a branch and offers us some. It tastes astringent and bitter—no thanks. Meandering in the jungle, we cross several streams. Ed and I have the impractical shoes; everyone else bought the kind of sandal you can wear in water, rejected by us as too ugly when we shopped for our gear. We’re
bella figura
trained but are taking to this kind of travel with a passion. Ed has a two-day beard. This morning I slipped on a T-shirt I’d worn twice.