Konya, Rumi and the departure from Troy

I've now been travelling for 45 days. So not very long then. One and a half months definitely sounds longer. I've been in my currrent country of passage, Turkey, nine days. So far I've been to Istanbul, Gallipoli, Troy, Pergmon, Ephesus (Selcuk), Pammakale (and Hierapolis), Eigirdir and now Konya. I'll probably stay in Turkey another week or two - though nothing's certain. Here, in Konya, the deathplace of the famous Rumi, I pause to meditate on the life, poetry and dancing of a man whose productions seem as popular in California as in Iran. This afternoon I suspend sightseeing and my tendency to wander from cafe to cafe, taking far too many photos, and rest in this very pleasant Hotel Ulusan before, tomorrow, visiting the museum devoted to this Islamic transnational hero. The Turks call him Mevlana- meaning 'our guide', whilst many in the west might like to think of him as our kind of Muslim, i.e not much of a Muslim at all.

As it happens, the Orthodox Muslim community accepts, if it doesn't embrace, the man. Though to some his inclusive, potentially heretical ideas must seem a bit lax. For example:

'Come, whoever you may be ,
Even if you may be
An infidel, a pagan, or a fireworshipper, come.
Ours is not a brotherhood of despair.'

I have read next to nothing of his work but I especially like these lines (courtesy of Wikipedia):

'Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,
How it sings of separation.'

and....

'How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?
Do not cast thy glance upon my golden face, for I have iron legs.'

Tomorrow in the evening after the museum I'm to see the 'Whirling Dervishes', whom I was reassured to learn from a Gentleman in Ephesus, are actually the real deal here, not the fake troupe you find in Istanbul. That's nice to know. I'm looking forward to the aesthetic spectacle of course- one that apparently decodes as the attempt to transfer God's loving energies from the divine to the human level- but I also go out of curiosity about a group that had such a big impact on one of my most influential teenage idols - George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, the Greek Armenian philosopher who taught that we're all asleep and enslaved by our mechanical associations and reactions.

Looking back now on my pre-Konya days, I left off at Troy. From here I took the tour bus to Selcuk but got off at the ancient city of Pergamon. Here I said goodbye to the delightful Emily, an American student bound for Damascus who, besides being funny and vivid and interesting to talk to, was a shining refutation of the stereotypical dumb-assed, culturally myopic, bumble-gum-brained American one is supposed to encounter, but which in fact I never have. I may catch up with her in Syria, that is if I go there. This will depend on whether I get whisked away by the God of Work (what name shall we give him?) to work in some desert or other, such as Kuwait (for example- Saudi having died a death by terror in my mind, so it seems, thanks largely to the stark warnings of a librarian I virtually met and who works at the place that wants to employ me), or else somewhere more attractive and less lucrative. It may also depend on the question of visas and how difficult it is to get them (nobody seems to know), and on whether and for how long I get sidetracked in Eastern Turkey and Georgia.

In Pergamon (now called Bergama) I stayed with the silently bookish Ersin at the Odyssey Guest House. In each of the quaint rooms a copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey' is left out in thematic echo of the establishment's name. I picked up Ian McEwan's 'Saturday' as a part of his well stocked book exchange program, and gave up my 'Cafe Europe' about life in post-soviet Eastern Europe, which I'd finished. Inside the cover of each of his books he has stamped a message saying that this book started its voyage in his guesthouse and inviting the reader to stay. A wonderful touch I thought. I'd have liked to have had more of an however pigeony-english chat with him, but alas he was very distant. In the morning I got the first of my two unsolicited motorbike lifts, up the very long road to the Acropolis.

As usual, as in Greece and the Balkans, the ruins date back to pre-Alexandrian times and as usual the better preserved ones, and therefore the more interesting to look at and the better to clamber over, were the younger Roman ones. After a point there's not much you can say about Classical ruins if one isn't to become too stilted. What I can say is that the sheer height of the mountain on which ancient Pergamon sits sit sold it very well, and that whilst Pergamon was perhaps fractionally less impressive than Hierapolis, which I was to see later at Pammakale, both just couldn't compete with Ephesus, which is by far the best set of ruins I've seen anywhere, barring perhaps the Palatine Hill area in Rome and the Parthenon itself.

The best that is, if you can persuade your mind to factor out the torrents of tourists and the avalanche of tour buses that surround and infiltrate Ephesus. If you can't, you'll probably prefer Pergamon or Hierapolis, even though they have no Library of Celsus, just because the modern masses are thin on the ground. Like I, you might find yourself at St.Philips Tomb at Hierapolis, with not a soul in sight, expept for those of a mountain goat and friendly archeologists working away, offering water to an Englishman who had climbed to a site most tourists don't bother to (sorry Philip, you needed to write a non-heretical Gospel to get the attention John does).

In Pergamon I met Kiya, a Kiwi English teacher teaching in Dubai. She gave me useful teaching work finding tips and listened to my uncertainties. She said people in the Gulf are 'not nice' but that you can have a good life out there with the ex pats and etc...and of course the money. As usual she had little to say to recommend the region other than the money - and this was Dubai she was speaking about, not Saudi. She said I looked a bit uptight, or somethinbg like that, that perhaps I needed to just travel awhile and take it easy. Maybe she's right. Though I think if I was a bit rigid it was probably because we were talking about work, which always gets my back up. Or maybe I always look tense. If so it is pure illusion. Nowadays, for most of the time, I feel oceans of calm inhabiting me, since I left my settled life behind.

The bus from Pergamon to Selcuk (Ephesus) was excellent as usual. Turkish buses always have ample leg room, by which I mean ample enough even when the person in front of you reclines and when you're 6 foot 4, like me. Water and coffee is served and the airconditioning is both always there and powerful. Sometimes you can even turn off the sound that plays on the buses that show videos.

It seems this entry must draw to a close, so I'll write more on Ephesus, Pammukale, Eigirdir and Konya tomorrow. Such are the trials of time I can't stop the present moving on, even though I haven't swept up all of my past. This offends my linear instincts of chronological logic but perhaps doesn't trouble my reader.

Now I must wander. Well, not must, but you know what I mean.