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Position: 40°59’44″N 39°44’47″E
Amasra
If Turkey’s southern Taurus mountains are a series of giant crested waves, then they’ve crashed and run out in the roiling hills and tumultuous folds here on the northern edge of the country. Near Istanbul the coastline tumbles and swirls, and makes for slow going on rough sideroads. Beaches come and go. Where there is sand, there are hotels and restaurants a-plenty. Enough to support a large population of summer holidaymakers. Smooth as the coastline is, there are few natural harbours. Mercifully, progress has brought marinas to every significant town. It’s not clear what services and hook-ups are available, but for the intrepid it appears the Black Sea is easier to navigate than ever.
Amasra sits windswept at the bottom of a long downhill run. This little tourist village packs a lot of stuff into a small spit and a couple of islands. The walk up to the lighthouse was bracing. Gulls hovered in place buffeted by 35 knot winds rushing up the cliffside. Through force of habit, I looked around for safe anchoring in case we returned in Aleta. Given the conditions, there was precious little outside the harbour, and I wondered if high winds or nothing at all was the norm here.
Amasya
The main eastwards highway sits well inland and traverses pretty alpine views. It is a modern road with sweeping curves and lines of trundling lorries. Amasya lies about halfway across the country up a blind valley, long the burying grounds of territorial rulers. A river courses through it, lined on either side with crumblingly picturesque timber framed buildings. And as we wrote last week, it is full of puppies! It was well worth the detour.
The road swings north again and the narrow swath between the water and the mountains widens and becomes more tenable. The highway strolls along the water’s edge and passes steadily through a strip of slowly diminishing towns.
Function Follows Form
Larger cities like Samsun, Ordu and Trabzon have ancient histories, but look like they were built in haste a few years ago. The further east you go, the more functional and ugly the architecture becomes. This is the realm of 10-storey reinforced concrete towers. Quick to construct, the walls are a single layer of terracotta blocks covered by a skimcoat of off-white stucco. Typically, each apartment has a balcony and a couple of large windows that let in light. They cling to the contours of the hillsides in vertical and horizontal rows knitted together by narrow crossroads. The communities metastasize in ways the Byzantines and Seljuks could never have dreamt of. No doubt the current fiscal situation has slowed development as dozens and dozens of skeletal frames await completion.
Kemal Atatürk Slept Here
In about half the larger cities we’ve visited there’s a mansion that belonged to Kemal Atatürk. Early on, the new Turkish Republic formed a special administration that was tasked with disposing of the properties left behind by exiled Greeks. One such, a summer pavilion high above Trabzon belonged to the Greek Konstantin Kabayanitis.
The administration, with the support of Trabzon’s city elders, gifted it to Mr. A. in 1923. He spent all of two nights there. During his second visit in 1937, not long before he passed away, he took a moment to write his will and lay out a strategy for crushing the Dersim Rebellion. Eventually, the building fell into the local municipality’s hands and they turned it into a museum. The time to visit a summer pavilion is not, I repeat, not in the dead of winter with six inches of snow on the ground. The cold, draughty place felt like even the ghosts had left for warmer climes.
Let It Snow
Getting away from the modernist blight isn’t difficult. Carol found us a big, comfortable room in the Fatsa Termal & Spa Hotel on the bend of a river a mere 10km off the road in the foothills to the south. We originally planned to stay for two nights so I could get some work done, but snow came in so we stayed for a couple more. A heavy blanket of cotton settled on the bare fruit trees and turned the river into a cataract. We took warm showers after a very pretty walk.
Badenov & Fatale
At some point during our exploration of the Black Sea coast we started wondering if people thought we were doing something nefarious. Granted, turning up in obscure corners of the country in our rental car whenever a major military event occurs does seem a little suspicious. The first time was in Hatay when, two days after we left, US Army helicopters landed ten miles away, just over the hills in Syria, and attempted to extract the leader of ISIS. The second coincidence involved our latest road trip and the outbreak of war in the Ukraine. People regarded us with a little more curiosity than they did three weeks ago.
Our cover as a couple of inept American tourists with an incomprehensible language barrier is now polished to near perfection. We have aliases, Boris and Natasha (after Pottsylvania’s infamous masters of espionage), adopted long ago during a trip to Mongolia. Occasionally we’re addressed in German. I’m tall. Carol is blond. It’s not a bad guess. I speak enough German to pull it off – for a few minutes. If only our clothes met the necessary sartorial standards. Lacking the crisp angles of a Hugo Boss loden jacket means this particular veneer is tissue thin.
Postscript: What’s the Mood in Turkey?
Tensions are high. Underlying inflation has already been running at 45%, and the war has only exacerbated things. Fuel prices in November were around 8.00 Turkish Lira (TL) per litre. A few days ago they peaked at 22.20TL/litre, before falling back. The greenback has strengthened continuously and now stands at about 14.75TL/USD. That’s softened the blow for us, but, of course, it is salaried workers who bear the brunt of soaring prices.
The bigger question is the fate of the summer tourist season. Russian and Ukrainian tourists and ex-pats come here in droves. Sadly, that seems unlikely this year, or anytime soon. Then there’s the fate of all those oligarchs’ yachts littering the southern coast. It has been suggested we commandeer one and convert it into a floating puppy dog rescue ship. Personally, I’m open to strapping a couple of torpedoes on Aleta and turning her into a modern day African Queen. Boris and Natasha’s ineptitude might be just the right covers for Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer if they had fought the Russian Navy.
