Hi again all,

My last update from Turkey. Tomorrow Robin and I are off to Italy.

Since last I wrote, I traveled for a week and a few days in the Asian side of Turkey, caught up with an old friend and met up with some current ones, returned to Istanbul, and greeted Robin(!). As always, a lot to say, but here's a shortened version.

Cutting more facets in the jewel of this experience

I wanted to go to Ankara, at least to visit the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations (highly recommended, by the way--truly amazing artifacts from Neolithic through modern times). But a friend from high school reminded me that I really should also try to reconnect with another friend from childhood who came to Turkey in the '80s as a missionary for an evangelical group and has been doing that work here ever since. Frankly I'd a) conveniently forgotten he was here and b) been just as content that our paths hadn't crossed that much since he went off the evangelical deep end in college. The last time I'd talked with him, in the late '70s as I recall, he was extremely serious about saving people and pretty rigid about his belief that Jesus is the only way. But I looked him up, found that he teaches computer engineering at a university in Ankara, and sent him an email. I ended up spending two nights with him and his family.

I had long good conversations with Will and his wife Barb, an interesting counterpoint to my long conversations with Muslims. They no longer call themselves missionaries--that's heard as kind of a Crusader word here--but rather are simply "workers" in the service of Christ as they understand him, seeking to make more people believers (that is, Christians) by their example and whatever conversations and witness that leads to. For example, Barb volunteers at an institution for handicapped children. After she'd been doing that for several years, a co-worker asked her why she does it. If I were living in your country, he said, I don't think I'd spend so much of my time volunteering to work with such severely handicapped kids. This was her entry into giving her witness.

Their perspective is that Islam isn't a very reflective religion, that people try to store up as many good things in their favor as they can for Judgment Day. If you as a Muslim don't get caught doing the bad things you do (again, this is the perspective/interpretation of my missionary friends), there's no real reason to stop or to apologize. You just try to overbalance it with works that will outweigh them once your good and bad deeds are tallied. That's not the perspective I got from Alper and others, but it clearly is theirs. They also had some very critical things to say about the place of women in Turkish society (breaking their backs to gather food for the animals in rural areas, for example). And they also spoke about how nationalistic a culture Turkey has--I've noted this, too--and how Turk equals Muslim in people's assumptions. They said people who do convert to Christianity (that is, "who become believers") have to change their national identity card, which lists Muslim as the default for all Turks, and that can lead to job discrimination and ostracism from the family. They cited stories of people they've worked with.

Their church (kind of a storefront) has also been vandalized and one night someone threw a Molotov cocktail through a window. I asked if the neighboring imams or community leaders expressed any solidarity with them. They said no.

So, a reality check or counterbalance to the stress of love and tolerance that I've seen, heard, and experienced here. It's a complicated society. I assume all of them are.

A side note on this terminology of "becoming a believer": This kind of thing has always irked me. If you equate believer and Christian, then of course anyone who's not a Christian is ... what? A non-believer, I guess. But a non-believer in what sense? It's not that they don't believe in anything, even that they don't believe some of the same key things others of us do about God and the meaning of life and the responsibility we have for each other. That kind of language about who is a believer and who's not dismisses others too easily and too completely, I think. And remember the high respect for Jesus (as a prophet and even as the Messiah) that Muslims hold, as taught in the Qur'an. They don't believe some of the same things about Jesus that many Christians do, of course, but does that make them "unbelievers"? Depends on your benchmark.

As a counterpoint, my friends Matthew and Kip, whom I met up with in Cappadocia, told me about a tour they took of an underground city. Such things are like ant farms for humans, long underground passages and little caves carved out that Christians dug and used centuries ago, places they could go and hide in for up to a month at a time when hostile groups of people came through. (As I recall, this was in Selçuk times--11th to 13th centuries.) Anyway, Matthew and Kip's friendly Turkish tourguide kept talking matter-of-factly about "this is where the infidels would go." I've always thought that kind of word (infidel) was derogatory and always used in anger, but apparently not here. If I remember my Latin roots well, infidel probably just means unbeliever. So here we go again, completing the circle.

After my visit with Will and his family (and finding that he still has his boyish smile and the kind of enthusiasm and lightness of humor that he had before he got all-so-serious about things in college), he and Barb took me to the otogar (bus station), prayed with me and wished me well (both parts were reciprocal), and sent me on my way. As I mentioned before, I'd had some initial reluctance about contacting him, but there's something about seeing 50 in the rearview mirror that makes old friendships all the more valuable, even--perhaps especially--in light of significant differences.

Fairy chimneys, Rumi's tomb, and Mary's place

From Ankara I traveled by bus to Cappadocia. A year and a half ago Robin and I had been there, to Göreme in particular, and had really enjoyed the area. Also the Kelebek Hotel and Pension, where I stayed again this time. (Another place I highly recommend.) Matthew and Kip liked it too. Cappadocia is known for lots of reasons, probably especially for its "fairy chimneys"--phallic geological formations which surely found their way onto album covers in the '60s and '70s. (I repeat: Matthew and Kip liked them, too.) Basically the region is an eroded volcanic plain, with a harder basalt layer on top of a softer layer of tuff or tufa, which is a sandy stone. Wind and water over the centuries have made it a beautiful Badlands-kind of place with yellow, greenish, and rosy colors accenting the basic tawny color of the soil. Cappadocia also is known for the dwellings and churches that have been carved out of the softer rock. There's an Open Air Museum just outside Göreme, chock-full of the old churches. Some of the ceiling paintings are still recognizable, though the eyes of seemingly all of the figures have been scraped out of the paintings over the centuries. Matthew and I also found a series of tunnels carved in one of the valleys. Word is that they used to connect some of the underground cities mentioned above. Cappadocia is also mentioned in the New Testament, but the churches date from a millennium later.

From there we drove to Konya, where Rumi's tomb is. Very impressive and a place of pilgrimage for many Muslims, especially Turks. Again, I think Rumi's openness and loving mysticism still have great influence among many (though not all) Muslims here. One of his most quoted poems of welcome says,

Come, come, whoever you are.
Unbeliever, fire worshiper, come.
Our way is not one of desperation.
Even if you break your vows a hundred times,
Come. Come again.

Kind of reminds me of the present UCC slogan, "No matter who you are of where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here."

In Rumi's tomb, as in mosques and other sacred spaces, people take off their shoes and women are asked to cover their hair. Tombs of important leaders in Islam are places of pilgrimage where people go to pray. In one section of the tomb, two professional- and modern-looking Turkish women with heads uncovered stood praying before a box holding hair from Muhammad's beard. Clearly they were very devout and had also chosen not to wear scarves (they are provided for women who don't have one). But no one insisted that they adhere to the dress code.

After Konya we spent three nights in Selçuk, near Ephesus. On the way over, we stopped at Aphrodisias, site of an extensive and impressive Greco-Roman city with extensive and quite beautiful ruins. The scale on which these cities were planned is amazing! The stadium held something like 30,000 people (you can still see it and explore it), the agora through which you'd walk to go to the theater was a colonnaded space at least a hundred yards long with a reflecting pool in it. A few of the structures, like the main gate leading to the temple of Aphrodite, have been reconstructed enough so you can see what it really looked like.

Ephesus is similar and much better known, though I'm not sure it has much on Aphrodisias. Except the rebuilt facade of the library, which you can find pictures of quite easily, and the "slope houses," which is an excavation and restoration in progress that shows how the really wealthy lived. You walk through it (after paying an extra charge) on elevated plexiglas platforms. The boys and I stood for quite some time watching people doing restoration work on a mosaic floor below. A guard noted our interest and invited us down onto the floor to talk with the restorers. The he took us to another section of the slope houses--they're built into the slope of a hill--and showed us a brilliantly colored mosaic that you can't see from the walkways above. What a treat! Matthew remarked that each day just gets better and better.

And then we went to Mary's place.What a disappointment.

Ephesus is where John is said to have retired to at the end of his long life to write the fourth gospel. That's also the gospel in which Jesus, while being crucified, turns to the beloved disciple (understood to be John) and tells him to take Mary as his own mother. So Mary is understood to have lived out her final years in or around Ephesus. About 50 years ago a German nun had a very detailed dream that supposedly showed the house that Mary died in. People followed her descriptions and found such a house on a mountaintop near Ephesus. It's become a pilgrimage site, of course. But frankly it's a bit shabby, at least to eyes that don't have a devout Catholic's connection to Mary. Or a devout Muslim's connection to her. Or whatever. There's a quiet little chapel in the old stone house. And nearby a metal grate where people have crammed paper napkins on which they've written prayers. And next to that a tree where people have stuck their gum. Really.

I don't know the significance of this, but there are scores of dabs of chewing gum dotting the bark of this tree. And that's about it, except for the gift shop. It takes a long while to drive up to Mary's house, they charge you as much as to visit any historical site in Turkey (plus a parking fee), and that's all that's there. Somehow we were all disappointed. To be fair, I'd also heard that there'd recently been a forest fire that had burned right up to the verge of Mary's house and stopped, and you could see the charred marks to prove it - they were cutting down burned trees on the day we visited - so there may be a spiritual power to the place that we simply didn't key into, but that's the unadorned report of my impressions.

Mary's house was also one of the stops that the pope made on his tour, which is on-going right now.

Ghost town Sultanahmet

With the pope in town, security is huge--tighter even that when Bush visited. Benedict (somehow I still think of him as Ratzinger) sparked quite a controversy a couple of months ago by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's polemic against Islam and Muhammad without saying whether he agreed with it or not. He hasn't exactly apologized, though he's done some fence-mending. Thankfully, thus far anyway, his visit is going well, from what I hear. But the Turkish government is taking every precaution to make sure that there are no ugly incidents. Extra thousands of police have been brought in from other parts of the country. I've heard there are 15,000, 20,000, 35,000, and 50,000 police protecting the pope. (Another recurring theme of my time in Turkey--you hear variations on a theme from different people when you ask them all the same question. Where exactly is the truth? I don't know.)

Last night the main route through town was closed off so the pope's motorcade could pass through. All week a beautiful park beneath the Topkapi Place and near Haghia Sophia has been closed for security reasons. I'd hoped to take Robin to a special place in there for tea. Today half of Sultanahmet is cordoned off so the pope can visit Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. Many shops have had to close. And the cab drivers have simply stopped working because streets keep getting closed off because the pope's entourage will be coming by sometime soon. I'd hoped to see Haghia Sophia one more time before leaving, but no. And we can't get a cab to take us to the airport tomorrow because that's also the day that the pope is flying out. Fortunately, my landlady has arranged for a van to pick us up at 6 a.m., 4 hours before our scheduled departure.

As mentioned in a previous email, I've kind of said my goodbyes to Istanbul. This week is a bit anticlimactic on that score. And the pope's visit keeps throwing a wrench into things. But whaddya gonna do?

Hopefully I'll be more reflective at another time. But tonight I've got packing on my mind, and making sure we set the alarm and don't sleep through it.

Be well, dear ones. I'll write again from Venice. We get there in a couple of days.