Harran and Sunrise on Mt Nemru

Unlike the faultless, inter-city buses, the smaller minibuses, or Dolmuses, do alot more work between the smaller towns and in non-tourist areas. They are far more creative, with deeper soul.

Take the bus that took me to Harran, for example. It left with only one passenger, me. But then, wıth its sliding door wide open, barely crawling from the station, I realised we were hunting for prey. By the time we finally left Urfa's outskirts, I was surrounded by a heaving Turkish bulk of tolerant, cheery, flesh. I sensed this forebearance at the inevitability of crush was genuine - the product of years of accepting the proximity of strangers which the communitarian cultures of the Middle East don't strive to avoid. There was not that intense repression of annoyance at the imposed intimacy of the alien you find on the London Underground, for example.

Perhaps in the west we're just not used to a lack of private space (a fruit of our imperial stretchings perhaps?). Or is it more, as I suspect, that for us the self-conscious, demarcated ego, for good and ill, is far more robustly defined. Being so much more unique in ourselves from one another - or so it appears - there is so much more of us to lose if we are challenged at our boundaries.

After deflecting hopeful efforts to inveigle me onto a private tour, I took off to see the ruins of the oldest Islamic University in the world. An impressive pile of stones, an arch and high tower, set like Harran itself in the midst of semi-desert 15 km north of the Syrian border. An official looking guy, whom I first thought wanted to charge me for something, offered to let me climb the tower for a reasonable 5 lira (2.7 euros). But I was in one of my stubborn as bugger, miserly moods aghast at my inability to budget.

Harran has groups of Beehive houses, which look like beehives(!). Some are still lived in, including the ones I looked around. Alas the Grandparents of the purple-headscarved beautıful guide were not there when I called, understandably unwilling to be eye candy for voyeurs. It was delightfully cool inside. I almost bought one of the unpatterened lilac shawls that I was assured were for men.

Abraham lived in Harran for awhile so it's said, but nobody knows where. All that's known is there's a well 2 kilometers away which he's supposed to have drunk from. I thought I'd give that a miss. Jacob also lived here, for twenty years, courtesy of Laban, before returning to Canaan to sire Joseph and his 11 significant brothers, who were destined to make Andrew Lloyd Webber a very wealthy man.

As I walked back to the bus stop, determined children tried to sell the stubborn Englishman wall hangings he told them he'd only break. Probably they wouldn't have been impressed with such sourpuss excuses even if they'd understood. So they cried out for 'bonbon, bonbon' instead.

Bus shenanigans repeated on my return trip to Urfa and then again, even more so, on my way to Kahta. Halfway there in Adıyaman, the driver walked off with my bag and loaded it onto another bus. Clearly he'd decided he wasn't going to Kahta after all; but since he decently paid the new driver for my onward journey, I could hardly complain. And I got my own free crawling tour around the streets of Adıyaman thrown in for free.

In itself Mt Nemrut is not a particularly remarkable mountain. Less than half the size of Mt Ararat (5,137m) near Turkey's border with Armenia, it must have been underneath the waters of Noah's flood by at least 2,500 metres. But it's a much visited site because of a 30m high tumulus on its summit containing the remains of one Antiochus I, Kıng of Kommagene from 64 to 38BC. And not just that. There are 2m high stone heads scattered on the ground, as well.

Clearly a man of healthy self-esteem he erected a 10m statue of himself on a throne next to four other throned statues of his favourıte Gods - Fortuna, Zeus, Apollo and Hercules. Presumably, since Hercules started his career as a mere mortal, he must have thought he was onto something. Not only did he build such statues once, however, but twice, on both the Eastern and Western sides, so that in perpetuity they could all watch together, in harmony and soaring unreachability, the glorious risıng and setting of the sun.

Only, they could have if only their heads hadn't toppled off. Still, it was a bold move. It indicates the sort of thing you can do if you have a Kingdom, a mountain and have earnt sufficient leisure, sufficient repose from war by making peace with your Roman and Persian neighbours. So bravo and all hail to Antiochus. I'm sure if he hadn't been so cocksure, hadn't built what he built, he wouldn't have attracted, two thousand years later, an unceasing river of tourists to experience the other highlight of the place - a serene enjoyment of the very sunrise and sunset that the Gods, by their falls, have been robbed of.

So it seems they come because of the ruins, but they come to see the sun. After all, pretty much any mountain summit can give an unhindered solar view so Antiochus provides the reason to single out his particular mountain. Sure enough, once the sun has done its party trick the people shortly leave, after a cursory wander around the heads, in keeping with tourist convention. By day the site is almost empty.

Still, I don't blame them for being more impressed with the sun than the statues, even though they,re pretty good. I was too.

Actually this was the first time I'd ever bothered to sit down and watch a complete sunrise, from hinting crepuscular rumours to the defiant overwhelming of night.

Of course it would have been nicer if people had been silent......for example as they are in Church. Not that I mean to imply I'm a sun worshipper, but a sunrise is a pretty uncontroversially awesome thing, I would have thought. The sky's answer to the ceremony of childbirth, which certainly concentrates minds. So why not this too? Just because it happens everyday and allows us to do irritating things like go to work doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to forget such overlaid assocıatıons once in a while....especially, I might add, when you've just gone to all the flipping trouble of climbing a mountain to see it.

I can't knock them for taking pictures though. I took loads...a sequence capturing the enire emergence. I was struck by how the area of sky above the yet hidden sun became its intensest shade of pinky-orange a certain time before the actual arrival. Then, though the sky as a whole grew always brighter, this shading itself paled and grew dımmer. Then the clouds above the sun formed rings of gold around their edges, and only then, as if unannounced after such a long, drawn out overture, by whıch time the sky was blueıng and the stars completely banished, did a fiery glimpse of crescent appear and crawl steadily upwards.

That's when most people started taking pictures, and were actualy paying their full attention, which was nice.