The Seven Churches, Part VI: Thyatira.

To the angel of the church in Thyatira write:

These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first. Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds. Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan's so-called deep secrets (I will not impose any other burden on you): Only hold on to what you have until I come. To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— 'He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery' just as I have received authority from my Father. I will also give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
- the Book of Revelations

Things could potentially have gone more smoothly getting to the bus that would take me back to Ankara from İzmir. For twenty unblinking minutes I watched as the taxi that was transporting me to the station wove erratically through dense traffic, quite narrowly avoiding snuffing black-clad Greek widows, lithe Levantine youths and mustachioed Turkish men poised on the curb as they smoked their bitter Samsun cigarettes. Yes, they were on the curb. The taxi went onto the curb. I really don't know what my friends had said to the taxi-driver when they loaded me into the taxi, but I imagine that it was "DRIVE LIKE YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE AND YOUR KIDS ARE HOME. YOU KNOW, LIKE THAT CREEPY LADYBUG SONG." As my post-dinner sütlaç threatened to tumble forth from my gullet and onto the taxi's notably clean upholstery, I sought the intercession/succor of the baby Jesus.

Dear Infant Jesus in Your timothy-perfumed Manger, I began, I know that I don't deserve Your pity, but I would like to not have to avail myself of repatriation insurance. Well, I guess it would be my family availing themselves of it, as I would be by that time "that fragrant seventy pounds of charred bones in the Fed-Ex box". But anyway, I have a lot to live for, not the least of which is, um, becoming a priest. Um, no, I can't promise that. Uh, I'll - um - GO TO YOUR MOM'S HOUSE IN EPHESUS. Yeah, I already did that. Look, I just really want to live, OK? I used to be an altar-boy if that means anything. Amen.

As we rounded the next corner on two wheels I beheld the bus station and nearly began to weep with gratitude. And by "weep with gratitude" I mean "discretely check the contents of my underthings because I was certain that I had evacuated." I got out of the taxi by nearly teleporting out of the open window and threw a lump of lira ($3? $55? I didn't know) at the driver, who had already taken the pre-agreed-upon fare for the service. I'd once again forgotten that Turks don't usually accept tips for doing their jobs. (Refreshing.) Out of the corner of my eye I saw him rise up out of his seat to try to give it back to me, but I was gone too quickly, and I will never know if he was able to buy a pack of smokes or a new TV with the lira I'd thrown his way. I knew two things and two things only: one, the last bus to Ankara that night was going to leave with Swiss precision in about sixteen seconds from the otogar and two, despite having lived in Turkey for five months at that point, I didn't know how to operate a telephone. Spending the night in the nearly-abandoned otogar sounded about as appealing as being administered a slow-sheet enema full of tapioca and, jowls a'flap, I ran as I'd never run before.

There it was. The İzmir to Ankara Express. It was pulling away, right on time, into the gathering Aegean darkness, heedless to the brutal lowing sounds that issued forth from my desperate lungs. I stood there watching it gather speed as it attempted to clear the garage while cursing in a language I'd made up on the spot. It sounded like the noises I imagine Cape buffalo make while giving breach-birth to triplets while high on peyote and it echoed cruelly and caromed off the high-arched ceiling of the otogar. It was then that the next several hours came to me in a vision, and brittle disappointment and mute horror settled into my bones.

No, nice old lady, I am not a homeless vagrant from the bleak Anatolian hinterlands. Please don't knit me something. Please no. Please. Oh, alright. Booties, then.

Pray, sir, are there to be found some men's restroom facilities that don't cause me to swoon from a nearly corporeal odor? And is there a suitable magazine you're ready to throw away that I may savage for something to cleanse my nether-regions? No? Good. Awesome.

Yes, withered old fellow, I would like to purchase those old lentil "meat"balls, and please cover them with that unidentifiable red sauce that will taste of sadness.

It was just as I had begun to actually taste the sadness-sauce in the back of my mouth that I noted that the brake-lights of the bus were glowing like nuclear cherries and the bus moved not. Swiftly gauging the distance between me and the bus, I determined that if I ran like my hips were going to break I might make it. As I tore across the parking lot at speeds generally reserved for particle acceleration the bus stopped completely, the door opened on the side of the bus and the driver - barely older than myself - stepped out into the light of the streetlamp, smiled broadly, and waved at me. Merak etme, he said. Don't worry. Then he mimed talking on the phone and made feminine chirping sounds. That could only mean one thing: my friends had called to tell him to wait for the fat American. As I attempted to take a breath that didn't feel like I was being run through with a bayonet, he offered me a smoke as he hefted my bags under the carriage. I declined as politely as I could and dragged my carcass aboard while he shotgunned it down in record time. As I made my way in the darkness to an empty seat I looked over my shoulder at the soft green glowing LED clock at the front of the bus. 10:03. I'd made the bus three minutes late - nearly unheard-of - and, while actually unlikely given the Turkish character, I felt as though I could sense the steely weight of judgment falling in twin parallel eye-beams upon my person. I found an empty seat as quickly as I could and attempted to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, which was nearly impossible given that I was still emitting high-pitched squeaks every time I exhaled and volutes of brine ebbed forth from every available pore.

Once I'd calmed myself from "rodeo bull" to "uncomfortable librarian" I took note of my chair companion. I'd not noticed him before because Turkish bus seats are incredibly roomy, so he was relatively far away from me. He was also one of the slightest men I'd ever seen. I mentally noted that I'd used larger things than him to pick detritus out of my teeth. He smiled at me - a wan, brief smile, but one nonetheless - and I smiled back and got back to the task at hand: ensuring that I was alert enough to not get dumped on the side of the road in the middle of the night again. After a few moments, he leaned slightly toward me and introduced himself. I told him my name, and that it was nice to meet him, and I immediately apologized for my crass butchery of the Turkish language. He smiled again - this one broader - and asked if I was a German. Nope, I replied. American. He then switched to urbane, nicely enunciated, British English. It's a long story and it involves a woman, he said of his English skills. I nodded sagely.

Turns out my new friend was from Akhisar and was going home after a visit with family in İzmir. I admitted baldly that I knew nothing about Akhisar (literally "white fortress") and he shook his head. Not much to know, he said. It's a nice place to raise a family, but it's not as exciting as the Pearl of the Aegean we'd just left. And there was that old stuff in the city center. You know, Bible stuff.

Bible stuff.

I casually got out my trusty (and increasingly nasty) guidebook. Akhisar. Formerly Thyatira. One of the Seven Churches. Aww yissssss.

I'd been on enough bus trips in Turkey to know that we'd not be tarrying in Akhisar; more likely, my new friend would barely have both feet on the sidewalk before the bus lurched away toward the enveloping dark of the awaiting Anatolian steppe. I casually mentioned my interest in 'collecting' the Seven Churches and he looked unsettled; I sensed his unspoken question and immediately stated that I wasn't some Christian fundie hoping to unlock the secrets to the End Times by visiting the Churches. Instead, I said, I was motivated by a desire to see places where it was rumored that evil dwelt. He didn't seem as comforted by that as I'd hoped, and I changed tack to ask about the ruins.

Oh, he said, they're nothing special. They're right in the middle of downtown. His eyes twinkled a little. Would you like me to ask the driver to drop me off there instead of the otogar? It's actually closer to my house. I think I could get you two minutes.

I was taken aback by this offer not because of the inherent generosity of it; I'd become completely accustomed to that in Turkey. No, here was someone who was deliberately messing with Turkish coach bus schedules, and, having fresh experience in that milieu, I knew that the consequences are dire. However, the thought of passing Thyatira in the dark of night, perhaps never to return, steeled my resolve.

The plan was simple and yet risky: he'd call out to the driver to drop him off in the city center in front of the ruins and would invite the driver to have a cigarette when he got off to help him with the luggage. If the driver lit up, I'd clamber off, claim that I needed to stretch, and walk casually up to the ruins and return without any other explanation. I can't keep him long, and he's bound to smoke that cigarette like he's about to get shot, he said, but I'll try.

Twenty minutes later I found myself trying to not look too interested in the personal conversation that was happening outside the bus window. All at once there was the reaching into the shirt pocket and the proffering of the cork-tipped white cylinder, and with a flick of a Zippo I was out the bus door and scuttling toward the ruins. My friend was right: they weren't Ephesus-spectacular, but they'd been lovingly protected. It appeared that Akhisar was proud of its past. I breathed in the heady smell of old things and ran back to the bus just as the driver stubbed out. He smiled at me and said something I didn't catch. I'd like to think he knew what the plan was all along and that he found it amusing; more likely he was grateful for the unplanned five minutes of standing and the hit of nicotine.

I thanked my friend several times and waved at him through the window of the bus as it pulled out in the direction of Ankara. I turned back and had begun to settle in when I noted the abrupt arrival of a new seatmate. In her strange, homemade fishnets, black pumps and miniskirt she looked so starkly out of place that I nearly shrieked. I got no other information from her other than that she was sick of sitting near the restroom in the back, was DEFINITELY Russian, was definitely going to Trabzon, and was definitely an artisan whose muse was humping. All day with the humping. I made mental note to not touch anything of hers and to take a cleansing Purell bath later.

Awesome. A Jezebel. I guess I deserved that.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, part V: Pergamum.

And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write;
These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges;
I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.
But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication.
So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate.
Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches;
To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

- The Book of Revelations

7 PM: Behramkale (Assos), Northwest Aegean Turkey

Ahmet and I had settled down into a meal - one that I knew I'd remember for the rest of my life - when his cellphone rang. He looked sheepishly at me and I tried my hardest to pretend like his ringtone - something hideous, like a snippet of some wretched ska song - wasn't ruining the atmosphere of our setting. Five feet away from me, the wine-dark Aegean lapped at what I determined to be a crumbled Byzantine fortification of the tiny port. Holding court on my plate were dozens of tiny octopi, braised in what I have to assume are the smoky-salted tears of angels. The sun was setting over the gilded crest of the Greek island of Lesbos, dim and misty in the distance across an azure slip of sea. Somewhere, a goat bleated and a gull cried.

And then the ringing. Oh, the ringing.

After the third time it rang - each of the previous calls being dispatched via a deft maneuver wherein Ahmet squeezed it through his shorts pocket - I was ready to make some suggestions.

"Ahmet", I said quietly, " for the love of the infant Jesus just answer it. If you do not choose this course of action, I will be forced to assume that I have permission to launch the device into the sea, wherein it will be swiftly set upon by various pelagic bivalves who shall encrust it utterly."

He got up and answered it while I slowly continued to savor my betentacled treat. When he returned several minutes later, he looked rather ashy. At first, I attributed it to the fact that both of us looked like we'd gotten smallpox before being blowtorched. As he ate, he kept looking at me over his plate as though I were ready to release poisonous spores from my eyebrows. I was preparing to apologize for being short with him about the hell-phone when he put down his fork and sighed heavily.

"My uncle died today", he said.

As I silently awarded myself the Dogpiss Asshole Friend of the Year Award, I asked how he was holding up. He said that he wasn't close to this particular uncle, but that his presence would be required - and required anon - in the southern Turkish city of Adana for the funeral. "I have to be one the damn pallbearers", he said moodily as he pushed the remainder of his dinner around on the hand-thrown ceramic plate.

It was at that moment that I, with dawning horror, realized that the trip we'd planned - only a third of which we had left - would have to end. I'd spent quite a bit of time in Turkey, but I didn't think that being left to my own devices without a native speaker of Turkish was wise considering that I had, apparently, a singular inability to distinguish that which was Awesome from that which was Incredibly Stupid. Ahmet must have sensed my hesitation, and he put down his fork and looked at me. "You ARE going to go on with the trip, right?", he said, fixing me in my seat with his very serious eyes. "You understand Turkish. You know how to get food. You know how to get places with public transportation. And you've done nothing but talk about Satan's altar for days now. I'll kick your ass if you don't go."

It was true. I'd spent five months in the country and I knew what to get in restaurants, how to find what I needed in cities, and - perhaps most important - I had the razor-honed ability to home in on a ruin site like I was a carrier pigeon on crystal meth. And I had been talking about Satan's altar - rumored to have been inside the Red Basilica (Kırmızı Avlu) in Pergamum - far too much to have come that far without seeing it and its hoovey goodness.

We left Behramkale reluctantly. The ruins of Assos are easily some of the most evocative in all of Anatolia and indeed the entire of the Greek-speaking ancient world, and the village of Behramkale was debilitatingly charming. Ahmet clearly didn't want to spend an entire day and night in transit to Adana (stopping in, of course, Ankara) and I was loath to part from his witty company. It was therefore all the more fitting that we had to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck from the harbor to the upper town, and that keeping us company in said pickup truck was a goat. A goat that had continence issues. Goat raisins everywhere. ALL THE TIME GOAT RAISINS. As we sat on the side of the dusty road picking livestock shit out of our clothes and awaiting our separate buses - his going southeast, mine going straight south - a donkey walked out into the road and stood there defiantly. It was as if he was thinking Yes. Yes, I am an ass. An ass in Assos. I get it. Morons.

I parted with Ahmet, wishing him a safe and goat shit-free trip, and after three dolmuş connections I found myself in one of Turkey's legendary climate-controlled sleeper buses. Before I got on the bus in question I'd handed my luggage to the bus driver and had asked - perhaps more pointedly than I'd intended - if this particular vehicle would be dropping me off at Bergama, the Turkish city that clung to the side of the ancient Pergamene acropolis. He assured me that the bus was indeed going to be stopping at Bergama and I clambered aboard the bus to my seat.

The next thing I remember was that I was being shaken awake by a man whose fen-like breath swam with the heady presence of onions, cigarettes and coffee. Haydi, haydi, Bergama'dayiz he said, and each expulsion of breath crashed over my face in a way that made me briefly imagine that I was being slapped with a diaper that had recently been filled by a tot who'd been eating slightly spoiled Indian food. It was dark out beyond the bus and the unflattering interior bus lights had been turned. We were not moving, and everyone - I MEAN EVERYONE - was looking at me with a mixture of pity and impatience. I rallied and flung myself down off the side of the bus to find my suitcase waiting for me already. Quick as a flash the driver and the porter teleported back onto the bus and it sped away into the awaiting darkness of an Anatolian night.

Wait. Why was it so dark?

I was too sleep-addled to piece it all together quickly, but when it finally came to me I felt icy dread creep into my man-area, and it withered accordingly. No, I wasn't in a well-lit but appropriately well-worn provincial otogar, perfumed as it would be by cologne, smoke, the smell of roasting meat and the vaguely reassuring scent of diesel exhaust. In fact, I was standing on the side of a Turkish highway in the middle of the night with a suitcase, a Discman and a rapidly-growing desire to live.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness just as some small animal skittered across the desolate stretch of highway - mother of God, was that some sort of ghastly lizard or something? - and, just as I was about to leap out of my skin, I saw the outline and lights of what appeared to be a skeezy roadhouse. I didn't know they even had those here, the lucid part of my brain interjected in detached ethnographic interest. It was then that I saw what appeared to be four fire-red lightning bugs moving in lazy circles above the ground of the parking lot. Moments later four shadows detached from the more concrete darkness and I noted with dim fear that the fireflies were the cherries of four cigarettes, each one of them clutched in the hand of a burly twentysomething Turkish man. The men began to stride purposefully toward me and it was then that I began to pray.

Dear baby Jesus in Your hay-scented manger, I began, I know that you probably aren't terribly amused by my profound interest in the Seven Churches, but get me out of this and I'll make sure to...um...VISIT YOUR MOM'S HOUSE. Oh, I did that already in Ephesus. Uh, I'll...GAZE ADORINGLY AT MOSAICS OF YOUR COUNTENANCE. Ah. Did that already at the Hagia Sofia in İstanbul. Look. I don't have much. I'm sure you're a reasonable divine infant. Can you help a former altar boy out of a bind? Or are you going to be LIKE THAT?

They were drawing closer and I began to understand just how fecked I was - foreign, fat, and forsaken - and how nobody on the earth knew where I was at that moment. So this is how I am going to perish, I thought, alone on the side of a Turkish highway in the middle of the night, snuffed by creepy Turkish hooligans before my time. It made for a lovely tourism advertisement. It was at that moment that one of the men detached from the group and walked up to me. He took an impossibly long drag off of his smoke, exhaled and said

So, are you going to Bergama?

IN ENGLISH

to me.

I recovered from the shock of being addressed in my mother tongue in the middle of Anatolia more slowly than I'd like to admit. Upon closer inspection, the burly twentysomething Turkish hoods of my imagination were in fact four reasonably-dressed college kids who were heading home on that same bus for their vacation. Home to Bergama. Despite these revelations - and the resulting disappearance of the metallic taste in my mouth - I had fixated on why this particular gentleman had addressed me in English. I was surprised because I'd spent a lot of time in Turkey and, almost without fail, people presumed I was Turkish. It's not my "look", although there are certainly Turks who look like me. I don't flatter myself to presume that it was my ability to blend with the native population, but because I was in pretty good franchise of how things functioned I did get by unnoticed for the most part. My analysis was interrupted by the young man, who sported a kicky goatee like mine (at the time) and had begun speaking again.

We just called a taxi. Would you like to share it with us? I found the strength to say that yes, indeed, I'd like to not die on the side of this highway, and he laughed heartily. It turns out that we were quite near Bergama - as my eyes adjusted, the lights from the city glowed welcomingly in the distance - and, reassured that I wasn't about to take the Big Dirt Nap, I asked why I was left to perish. Oh, he said, if there are fewer than ten people getting off at a certain city, they drop you off on the outskirts to save on gas and time. Well, at least the cheap buses do. I vowed to become fluent in Turkish so that I could write a scathing letter to the chairperson of the We're Crappy and Strand You for Giggles Bus Company just as the taxi arrived. We piled in and, in the gentle glow of the globe light I introduced myself to my four companions and thanked them for not taking my sweet sweet life. They laughed again and asked if I had a place to stay in town. I was so preoccupied with not being slaughtered that I hadn't given it much thought, and it was clear that it was quite late. One of the gents, Mustafa, then told me that his grandfather owned a hotel in town that I could stay at called, strangely enough, The Gobi Pension. He worked there too and would make sure to take care of me. I nearly wept with gratitude.

And about the English? They had seen the book I'd been reading before I passed out and, apparently, I had been speaking in my sleep. They were in the seats behind me, they assured me, and were in no way stalking me.

The Gobi Pension was perfection. Mustafa and his charming grandfather checked me in and told me about the complimentary Turkish breakfast that could be had the following morning and trundled me off to bed tutting softly about how weary I looked. My room overlooked a busy road and, on the other side of said road, a street fair was quite earnestly in full swing. I opened the window and listened to the fair and the lingering sigh of the city as night overtook it before passing out in my clothes on the bed.

I awoke early and, eager to not miss the lovely breakfast, I made my way downstairs. Patio tables set out on the sidewalk positively groaned with Turkish breakfast fixins: abundant tea, tomatoes, cucumbers, bread (loaf AND simit), olives, salça, feta cheese and hard-boiled eggs in İznik- style egg-cups. I tore into it like a badger until I noticed a young blonde man sitting alone in the corner poking dejectedly at his egg. I brought my plate over to his table and asked if I could sit because HEY I WANTED TO TRY NEW THINGS OK. He looked at me quizzically and I began to wonder if I should ask in French or German (neither of which I actually knew) when he bade me sit. His name was Serge, he was in fact quite fluent in English and he was a Belgian tourist visiting Turkey for the first time. He had no earthly idea what was going on, like, EVER. (Did they mean to set out olives and tomatoes for breakfast? he asked. Yes. Yes they did, I counseled whilst cramming said delights into my awaiting maw). I asked him what he planned to do that day, informing him that rabid hell-cats wouldn't be able to keep me from the Pergamene acropolis and the Red Basilica. As we talked over the eggs and olives and learned more about each other, I revealed that I was taking Anatolian/Greek/Roman archaeology courses at my school, and he beamed. Who better, he asked, to go to Pergamum with? Serge was a big believer in serendipity.

Serge and I became fast friends. He was bright and witty and quite a conversationalist, traits which I prize dearly. Instead of taking pictures, he wrote and sketched in a journal about his experiences, which I found fascinating. We set out after I gorged myself, and as we walked to the site, we noticed that a young man of about thirteen was tailing us. As my experience only the night before had proven to me, Turkey was a place where wonderful and unexpectedly delightful things would happen just at the moment when you presumed that you were about to be murdered, and I wasn't concerned. Serge, however, was still guarded, and he became quite uneasy. Um, so what's with this kid? Pickpocket? Glue-huffer? he asked. Let's ask him, I said, and Serge looked mildly horrified. C'mon, it's a kid, and we're strapping lads. We can take him. Serge tittered nervously.

I turned around and walked toward the boy, who looked quite startled by this development. Can I help you? I asked. It took a moment, but the boy beamed and answered. Can you speak English with me? I am learning it in school. Sure, I said, but in exchange you have to help us. When we're done today with seeing Pergamum we'll both need to find the otogar to leave town. Can you help with that? The child nearly squealed with delight and agreement. I winked at Serge, who looked on in wonder. It was clear that he was beginning to understand the magic of serendipity as it played out in Turkey. As we walked to the site, we held an extensive conversation with our new friend. His name was Mehmet (Call me Mike, he begged), and he liked American music and British television and had a dog that he named after an obscure Ottoman pasha. He had a cat, too, but her name was a little different. He'd named her Madonna. That is awesome, I said, and meant it.

After temporarily parting company with Mehmet at the foot of the hill leading to the sites, Serge and I spent the better part of a day in the extensive ruins of Pergamum's acropolis - I in nearly unglued archaeological bliss, Serge writing and sketching dutifully in his notebook and looking pensive - before we descended to one of the secondary sites nearby. It was the site of the Red Basilica, which in antiquity contained an altar that was crowned by a sinister-looking hollow bronze statue. A priest would get devastatingly high from inhaling the smoke from a burning medicinal herb and would climb inside the statue and gibber until he passed out/shat himself, all the while making oracle-like pronouncements. It was this place that St. John pronounced was where Satan dwelled and I stood there, transfixed, in the roofless ruin and tried to imagine how beastly sweaty those priests must have been after being released from the bronze statue. Mmm. Satany and musky.

After taking in as much of Satan's altar as I could stand, we made our way back to town. True to his word, Mehmet was waiting for us at the edge of town to show us to the otogar. After he brought us there and helped us buy our tickets - Serge going to Çanakkale, I to Ankara - we bought him an ice cream and a Coke and passed a lovely hour watching the street fair's pagentry.

Serge's bus came first, but before he got on he scribbled his email address on a postcard and asked me to keep in touch. Many months later, I got an email from him; he was teaching English and French in Nanjing, China. Apparently, while he and I were climbing around the ruins, I'd talked extensively about my love for the Chinese culture and the Chinese language, and he'd recorded that in his notebook. Reviewing it later while poised to choose a country to teach in, he'd chosen China in large part because of how rabidly I'd talked about it. He was so damn happy, he said, and he had me to thank for it. Serendipity indeed.

Mehmet stayed with me until the bus came. Absently I reached down to the ground for a rock or a stick as a little souvenir of the wonderful day I'd spent with two new friends, and when my hand came back up I noted that I'd come upon a rock.

A white rock.

As I boarded I put the rock in my pocket where it would be safe. The muezzin was crying out from a nearby mosque, a sound that was dulled and finally muted by the interior of the coach. As we pulled away, Mehmet waved happily at me through the window with - did I imagine it? - a little bit of mist in his eyes. The hum of the air conditioner whispered softly, and I half-imagined that it spoke with St. John's words as I closed my eyes for a much-anticipated nap.

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

For the first time in my life I had to rely on myself to navigate around another country and its culture alone, and in doing so I had learned to trust in the often surprising innate good in strangers. I'd gotten over my fear of taking risks because I somehow knew that Turkey and her countrymen would ultimately not disappoint me. I arrived in Ankara puff-chested and cheeky-proud and, for the first time in my life, I felt like an adult. A man.

My white rock doesn't have a name written on it - I checked - but of this I have no doubt: I had overcome.

Until next Friday, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, part IV: Smyrna.

And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things saith the first and the last, who was dead, and lived again: I know thy tribulation, and thy poverty (but thou art rich), and the blasphemy of them that say they are Jews, and they art not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Fear not the things which thou art about to suffer: behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.
- The Book of Revelations

When first I began to tell people that I'd made fairly concrete plans to spend several months living in another country - another, might I add, Middle Eastern country - I was confronted with a sadly anticipated mixture of wonder, incredulity and, most enchanting of all, thinly-veiled racism.

Me: So, I think I'm going to be studying abroad in Turkey next year.
Older Female Quasi-Relation: Oh my.
Me: What?
OFQ-R: Isn't it, you know, [whispering] completely filthy there? You know?
Me: What?
OFQ-R: And those Moss-lem men will just stone a woman to death in the street for being alive.
Me: What?
OFQ-R: Well, you might as well just slit your own throat. In your own bed. Then rob yourself.

After a while, in sheer exasperation I began to actively lie to people who had heard about my plans to study abroad (likely in conversation with my mother).

Distant Relative Feigning Interest: So, your mom told so-and-so who told what's-her-face who told blahbitty-blahbitty who told me that you're taking off next year for parts unknown.
Me: Yes, I am going to the Congo.
DRFI: Isn't it incredibly dangerous there?
Me: Well, if I escape being hacked to death by a paramilitary death squad for a pack of smokes, I'll likely become a host to a parasite so rare as to not have a classification yet. Worms will burrow unbidden from my skin and my eyes will leak out of my skull. Small pieces of my body's extremities will rain down on the forest floor after becoming dessicated and necrotic. In the end, I'll die alone, sweaty and parasite-ridden, while shitting my pants and moaning like a crack-addled whore in heat. But I think that would be the same anywhere.
DRFI: I'm just going to go freshen my drink.

One soul-crushingly rainy afternoon, my mother and sister and I went out to my grandfather's house in the malarial fens of Orono, Maine, ostensibly for a lovely visit. In the course of the conversation, my mother mentioned that I had gotten accepted to study in Turkey for that following Spring semester. Casually, as if it weren't significant, my grandfather said "Oh yeah, I was there once." And the he moved on to talking about, oh, grout or something. Maybe about chowder. Or his broken electric griddle.

I couldn't help but stare nakedly at him. This was a man who, from the time I moved to Maine, hadn't - to the best of my knowledge - left Penobscot County, and from frequent declarations to that effect had less than no interest in doing so. But he wasn't always like that, my subconscious stated baldly while forcing my mouth closed. Remember: your aunts and uncles were all born in different states. And this wrinkly seventy-five pound man used to be in the Navy. Oh yes.

I interrupted his train of thought to ask him about his time in Turkey after he finished his riveting story about, oh, I dunno, finding the last tube of Gleem toothpaste on clearance at the Shop N' Save.

"Oh, it's a godforsaken place", he said, and shuddered a little. "Hated it."

I was a little crestfallen, but I asked where he'd been in the country. İzmir, he said, and it was a hellhole. I knew I'd be based out of Ankara, but still, I needed to know why the country I was poised to be spending a hell of a lot of time in soon was so repulsive. I pushed further, and he sighed. It was at this time that I closed my eyes slightly to take in his story whilst imagining this sixty-something man in the prime of his youth and wearing what I have to imagine would be a kicky little sailor's outfit, complete with an adorable little cap. It was amusing on many levels and was denaturing the sting from his previous "hellhole" comment.

"So, once we docked in the smelly little harbor, we went on shore leave. I went to a little cafe on the water and got a coffee or something and then I smelled this sweet smell coming from the tables beside me. One of the men asked me if I wanted some of this hubble-bubble thing, and I was like 'sure.' When I woke up three days later we were headed back out to sea. And I couldn't stop shitting my pants."

I was relieved, to be honest. My grandfather had seen about ten minutes of Turkey before he accepted the fragrant hose of what I assume was a nargile filled to the brim with the finest hashish outside of the Afghan lands FROM A PERFECT STRANGER. I could easily and without the subtle ache of regret write off his entire statement with a notation of "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT UM WOW". Expunged. Forgotten.

As we prepared to depart, he took me aside to ask me for a favor. "Could you bring me back some of their funny money?", he asked quietly. "And maybe a postcard?" I assured him that I would perform both tasks and would send his postcard from İzmir herself. It was then that I caught a tiny, fleeting twinkle in his eyes. You filthy old man, I thought with a smile. You loved that hash, didn't you?

***

Many months later, I awoke in the humid darkness of a sleeper coach bus. Something heavy, wet and hot was pressed against my shoulder and I presumed it was my Turkish friend/brother, who had fallen asleep moments after leaving Ankara and had slumped three-quarters of the way into my seat. I had no idea where we might be - we could have been halfway to Belgrade - but somehow I didn't want to wake him despite the fact that I knew my arm would hang dead at my side for the better part of an hour after we disembarked. Shortly afterward the helpful announcer-person came over the bus' intercom and stated that we'd soon be arriving in İzmir. My friend roused instantly and nearly pressed himself through the window in the hope of getting a glimpse of his most favored of cities. After several minutes of mute anticipation we rounded a corner on the side of a large hill and there it was, glittering softly, arcing gracefully around its promenaded, palm-tree-lined harbor.

İzmir, birthplace of Homer.
İzmir, the Pearl of the Aegean.
İzmir, nicknamed "the phoenix" because of the number of times it had been burned to the ground and had arisen, glimmering, from the ashes.
İzmir, formerly Smyrna, and one of St. John's Seven Churches.

I gasped nearly inaudibly.

İzmir isn't usually talked about much in travel literature. When it is mentioned, it's usually spoken of as a convenient, centrally-located place to stay while one attempts to ruin-hop on the Turkish Aegean coast. Admittedly, it is exactly that. However, places like Kuşadası are far more likely to provide the types of services the bleach-bloated Northern European hordes require as they disembark from their cruise ships/rented caiques for Ephesus. You know, services like postcard stores that sell only cards depicting Greco-Roman statuary and their prominently erect phallii. Or restaurants specializing in the preparation of various schnitzels. Or shops that proffer poorly made (and technically illegal) fezzes. And, while emphasizing the convenience of İzmir's location, most books describe the city as one might describe a highway-side Super 8 Motel on the outskirts of Detroit. Mostly clean. Pretty safe. Glue-huffing kids will likely not swipe your wallet. What they almost invariably fail to mention is how absolutely refreshing and charming the city is and how, upon departing from it, one begins to immediately wonder when you might return to it.

I fell for İzmir that night in the otogar, waiting to turn around to Ödemiş. I dared not mention this then, as I felt that revealing undying love without having even gotten off the bus would make me seem, oh, unhinged. Much like the feeling I got in most of Turkey - the feeling that I somehow really, really belonged there - I felt as though the city had already claimed me as its hairy, chunky lover. Or something perhaps less creepy/disgusting, like "From what I saw from the breath-fogged bus windows I felt like I'd lived there before, in a former life or some junk. You know, improbable nostalgia." Wait. That's just as creepy. Forget I said it at all.

Before we set out for Ödemiş from Ankara my friend had indicated a strong interest in having me bring my passport on the trip. While I wouldn't have ordinarily done so (at that time I apparently had a desire to live on the edge), there was an unnatural gleam in my friend's eye that begged both obedience to his will and trapjawed silence about it. I went with it because, hey, a week with a real Turkish family in a very small town in İzmir province is worth that much and more. The day we we set out to go to İzmir he asked me to take my passport with me so that I could, and I quote, "do some special shopping" for him. I was unsure about what kind of shopping would necessitate/be aided by an American passport, and I didn't ask, but the possibilities I formed in my head excited me. Again, this is because Twenty-Year-Old Domonic Apparently Had A Death-Wish. It was after the blissful morning of sightseeing in the old(er) city and vapur (ferry) riding that it became clear to me that my friend wanted me to

TRY TO GO SHOPPING IN THE BX/NEX LOCATED ON THE HARBORFRONT

for Nike shoes.

For those unfamiliar with US military bases both in the US and abroad, there is usually an exchange - fancy word for "a store" - located there for the convenience of the servicepeople. For Army folk, it's called a PX; Navy, it's called NEX, and for Air Force, it's called BX. For those unfamiliar with living abroad, Nike shoes are UNFATHOMABLY EXPENSIVE outside the US due to import markups and the perceived social status associated with them. Owning a pair of them in Turkey meant not only that you could buy and sell all of your friends but that you could sell their mothers, too. Sell them INTO WHITE SLAVERY. I may be exaggerating here, but only slightly. My friend's presumption was, of course, that American shoes being sold to Americans in a little slice of America would have an American price tag, and paying $90 for shoes was better than paying the $320 most stores in the country were posting. And by "better than" I mean "wouldn't suck the root as much as."

Two asides:

- Nike in Turkey is pronounced "NAYK", rhyming with "bike." Turkey is only one small sea away from Greece, a country where Nike, goddess of victory, was worshipped as an avatar of Athena Polias/Promachos. Just sayin'.

- Nike products do nothing for me, like, AT ALL.

So there I stood in front of a nondescript doorway leading into what looked from the outside to be an old airplane hangar, passport in my brine-covered hand, waiting to live, waiting to die, waiting with strangely specific instructions on color, width and style. In a last-ditch effort to spare my own life I tried to convince my friend that being an American citizen and an American serviceman were two very different things; the Special Eye-Gleam, however, compelled me forward.

I entered and immediately I was faced with some sort of turnstyle. Behind it was a woman - a woman in cornrows! - and I noted quickly that about three inches of shatter-proof glass separated us. She looked me up and down the way one looks at a woman in a spaghetti-strap top, sweatpants and flip-flops as she tries to flag down a bus in January in the Midwest: there's a mixture of confusion, horror, and revulsion. I immediately felt the need to evacuate onto myself but I figured that this would complicate things even more. She pressed the So Now You Can Hear Me Through This Glass Button and spoke.

Be-Cornrowed Military Woman: Can I help you?
Me: Um, yeah. My Turkish friends all think that I can shop here. I probably can't. I am wasting your time and now you are going to execute me, right?
BCMW: Lemme guess: Levi's jeans.
Me: Nope.
BCMW: Nike shoes.
Me: Bingo.
BCMW: You can't shop here.
Me: Can I have a note to that extent? Because damn.

As I left, I got a glimpse of the goods, and there was indeed a wall of shoes. After I told my crestfallen friend that they existed, and existed in a dazzling array of colors and styles, he lifted his watery eyes to me.

It must be like a church in there, he said.

Later that night, with zephyrs carried off the Aegean blowing the scent of the sea through the city streets, I asked him what he meant by comparing the BEX to a house of worship. He'd not meant any irreverence, he said, but had wanted to compare it to a place where a particular group of people could go to be safe and together. Of course, I'd imagined the Altar to Indonesian-Made Petroleum-Formed Foot Encasements, and, while it wasn't the synagogue to Satan St. John referenced, it seemed close. And Lord, was that altar FANCY.

Until next Friday, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, Part III: Laodicea.

And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: 'The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation. I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

- The Book of Revelations

5:30 AM: New Laodicea.

ALLUHU EKBAR ALLAH EKBER! ALLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHU...

I sat bolt-upright in the darkness, my husk clanging dangerously inside my body and threatening to leap forth from my maw. The singing seemed to be coming from everywhere, including INSIDE MY OWN BODY. My skull was vibrating like a Himalayan singing-bowl and my vision swam.

Hey: did the "shower" - that creepy bolt in the all in the bathroom that emitted a strange mist all over everything EVERYTHING - just spontaneously turn on? Was that ceiling plaster crumbling down upon my body? And, perhaps most critical, what the hell was I doing here?

Flashback: Ankara, two and a half months previous

My first experience with the call to prayer (ezan in Turkish) came not a moment too soon. I'd arrived in Turkey with the promise that the school I was attending would send a gentleman to collect me from Esenboğa Havalimanı (Ankara Airport), but as I cleared Turkish customs - a cursory wave of the hand after digging out my US passport - there was nobody waiting for me. I stood there for a moment and tried my hardest to contain the panic that was welling up within me. Had I known that the school I was heading toward was a full forty minutes away and would have cost be about four times the amount of lira holding court in my sad little wallet, I would have probably spackled my briefs with my partially digested in-flight meal. And and AND, I didn't have the phone number of the woman who was heading this exchange program and even if I did, a cursory look at the alien phones - phones that seemed to only accept flimsy little cards of undetermined extraction- confirmed that I had been, indeed, thrown right the feck under the bus.

Near the terminal there was a small room that looked like a bus-station terminal. The blue haze of a hundred cigarettes partially obscured the features of the gentlemen holding nicotine-y court in there, and a thought - an alien, perhaps-I-have-a-guardian-angel thought - entered my consciousness. He's in there, it whispered. Um, there are like FORTY MEN IN THERE, I countered. He'll be the one in the nice clothes, it said, because you're going to be going to the Harvard of Turkey and he representin'.

Sure enough, upon entering the room (and getting a contact buzz), I noted that only one of the men was wearing slacks and a suit-coat. I walked up to him and said "Bilkent?" in a voice that I hoped didn't come out as it had in my head - shrill and desperate. He leapt up and smiled and grabbed my bags out of my hand. The rational part of me then began to interject. Dude, what if he's a taxi driver?, it asked. You don't know how much this will cost. Also, he could drive you from here to Syria and you'd have NO GODDAMN CLUE. The angel-voice interceded and urged me to look in the back seat of the vehicle parked at the curb. The sad little hand-lettered placard bearing my name was there, sure as shit. I took careful note to mentally french-kiss my guardian angel later and I clambered in.

Seeing as I knew about three words of Turkish at that time, I sat back and watched the Anatolian pageantry - as much as I could, as the driver seemed to feel that speed limits were merely the suggestions of mildly retarded politicians - and became more and more apprehensive. As we hurtled closer to the edge of the city I noted a significant amount of the "scantily-clad children playing with feral dogs and trash fires" phenomenon, followed soon by the "I'm not so sure that your house isn't made entirely of corrugated tin" sector. As the car paused at a stoplight, I looked in all directions and saw only what I would come to know later as gecekondu - a Turkish squattertown - and I thought: Huh. There was a sentient part of me that knew that this was likely only part of the city - I'd seen pictures of the school I was supposed to be attending, and many of the Ankara downtown. However, the part of me that had just been on a plane for seven hundred hours, in a Swiss airport for another three hundred, and then almost got its shit abandoned at the airport asked a polite, delicate series of questions: What are you doing? Did you think you were funny, packing two suitcases to come live in some other place for a semester? Also, did you happen to SEE THAT STUFF IN THE SQUATTERTOWN? BECAUSE SHIT.

A half hour later, we passed through a gate to get into the school, and I was unceremoniously left in front of a large building that I was assured was "Yurt Yetmiş Sekiz", whatever the hell that meant. Upon entry to the building, I was swept past the security checkpoint in the foyer and into a small, dark office where the Dorm Master Dude-Man held court. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, casting a glow that made the DMDM look like he'd been slapped by a flipper from the Porpoise of Incessant Jaundice. His narrow eyes were so blue as to be almost white, and his mustache twitched a little. He spoke no English, so an interpreter was sought. I imagine that the conversation went like this:

DMDM: [lights cigarette, exhales slowly] I'm not really sure why it is that you have come here.
Interpreter: Welcome to Dorm 78!
Me: Thank you for your hospitality. I will assuredly not intentionally set this building on fire.
DMDM: You don't look like an American.
Interpreter: I hope your travels were good.
Me: I haven't pooped in three days.
DMDM: Your room isn't ready because you requested a non-smoking room. [pauses to inspect cigarette, then gently - tenderly - takes an improbably long drag] I don't know why you subscribe to such lunacy.
Interpreter: We're almost ready to welcome you to our community!
Me: I am becoming uncomfortable now.
DMDM: I believe that some unfortunate student has been informed that he has a roommate by now. I hope you're happy.
Interpreter: Let's go meet your new friend and roommate!
Me: Awesome.

The interpreter takes me downstairs and to the threshold of a room that is being frantically cleaned by several young men in various states of undress. There's a bucket, hot water, a vacuum and sponges aplenty. As the high reek of lemony disinfectant reached my awaiting nostrils, I shuddered slightly; one of these men is my new roommate, and moments ago he'd been taken by force from the pleasure of a double-as-a-single and was handed a bucket and a sponge because some American dude was moving in. I wanted nothing more than to just stop living at that point, because really.

I was introduced to my roommate, who shook my hand and immediately left. Apparently, he'd been trying to get to the bus station so that he could visit his family in Gaziantep (a city in Southeastern Turkey) for Spring Break. Like I could have felt any worse; now he'd have to settle for the Antep Red-Eye bus because Spoiled American Dude needed a bed. After he left, I located the bathroom, which consisted of several holes in the floor in stalls. As I tried to figure out the logistics of how to use the hole-in-the-ground crappers, I opened the curtains and looked out at my view of Turkey: a parking lot and a partially abandoned building site. Bits of garbage tattered around in the midwinter wind, rattling morosely.

I sat down on the bed and opened my checkbook. I have enough money to go home, I thought, and nobody would begrudge me that. What was I thinking? Also: can you die from not pooping for this long?

At that, my lowest point, I heard something coming through the open window that sounded like singing. It's not a radio, I thought. And it's... it's coming from more than one place. It took me a minute to register that I was hearing my first call to prayer, and I swooned. No, not from exhaustion, dehydration, or from the pain of what surely was going to be a memorable dump as it moved down the Colon Highway, but I swooned from the sheer beauty of the sound, and - as loath as I am to admit it - from the exoticness of it. I was really here, and this was going to be my home for nearly six months, and every sunset was going to be like this, with men singing. I began to unpack, smiling.

Back to New Laodicea, 5:35 AM

The muezzin finished just as I was becoming convinced that I would be killed by sound and, about twenty minutes later, my heart-rate had finally come down from "methadone-addicted hummingbird getting laid for the first time" to "you'll likely survive." I was in a hotel room - very small, but very neatly appointed - and there could be no question as to where: Denizli, a largish Turkish city nearish to the Aegean. I say "nearish" because Denizli means "with/of the sea" but it is kinda nowhere near the aforementioned body of water, which is vaguely amusing. Amusing and sad.

I'd insisted that I and my traveling companion go to Denizli for two reasons: one, because it serves as a convenient base for exploring not one but TWO insanely awesome ruin sites (Aphrodisias and Pamukkale/Hieropolis) and two, because THAT'S WHAT I SAID NOW GET ON THE DOLMUŞ (minibus). I'd done my research and discovered that a precious hotel/hostel served the greater Denizli area and that the owner, Aslan, was a man of legendary hospitality and warmth and that his wife, Lord protect her, made mucver that would cause you to briefly die with sheer animal pleasure.

Our bus arrived in Denizli at dusk and wearily pulled into the otogar in the city center. I'd noted several things about the city as we made our way through it.

1) Cocks. Denizli is the cock capital of Turkey, and statues of them are EVERYWHERE. Everywhere with the cocks. On the sides of buses. On the civic seal. On the sides of buildings. Cocks cocks cocks. Yes, of course I mean roosters. Guh.

2) There seemed to be a persistent mist hanging about.

3) The one taxi driver lurking near the otogar had a cloudy eye and a pegleg.

The "persistent mist" turned out to be "an intense amounts of dust that, once the sun goes down, rains upon the city as though it were Pompeii. Also, it smells like burning." And I was wrong about the cabbie: it wasn't a pegleg, just a leg that was cruelly misshapen and painfully thin, perhaps ravaged by *urp* polio. I made a mental note to bump up the tip if we survived the ride to the Fantastic Unicorn Palace of Hostely Goodness. We clambered into the cab and gave him the address. He looked at it, looked at me - one milky eye fixed on my sweaty forehead, the other good one in my own dung-brown eyes - and said something in Turkish. He handed the address back to me and sat there. Sat there and didn't move.

OK, what the hell. I knew that some taxi drivers get commission if they bring the foreigners to a particular hotel, but this didn't seem to be about that. As he rolled down the window, lit up and went to Flavor Country, I had a hurried and - might I stress, awesome - conversation with my traveling companion that went something like this:

Me: So what do we do now?
Traveling Companion: Maybe we should draw a picture and write the Turkish word for hotel on it? Wait: do you know what the word is? Also: how are we still alive?
Me: He's a taxi driver, not a retarded six-year-old.
TC: What's your brilliant idea, feckstick?
Me: Let's get out of the cab.
TC: He is going to shank us.
Me. Bring it, bitch. I've always wanted to get tetanus.

We opened our doors, and within moments the startled driver got out and gestured that we get back in. Good times. So we did, and he started the car, sighed heavily, and pulled out into the dusty city, setting a course for the magical home of Mr. Lion.

We arrive in an ordinary city block and pull to the curb. The apartment complex we'd come upon had only one light on inside, and Mr. Cloudy-Eye gestured toward it. Then he pointed to a sad little building across the street that looked like it was once a hotel.

ONCE A HOTEL.

The cabbie, of course, had known all along. I swore under my breath and vowed to take my copy of Let's Go! Turkey! and heave it into the wine-dark sea.

The best part was that there was no "Option B." Denizli is an industrial city that is known throughout the country for good universities, rooster statues and THAT'S ABOUT IT. There were no other hotels listed for the city. Great. Sleeping in my clothes in the bus station. Again.

The cabbie had, by this time, gotten out, heaved our suitcases to the curb and lurched over to the front of the apartment, where he pressed the only lit doorbell on the switchboard. A man came to the window - it was about five stories up - and he opened the screen and yelled down to us on the street. The cabbie and the dude yelled back and forth for a minute, and then the cabbie stood in front of me and said, in perfect English, "May I please have my fare?"

Stunned, I gave it to him - with the handsome tip I'd promised him in my mind - as the man from five stories up came to the ground floor door.

"Hello, I'm Aslan", he said, and eagerly took my hand into one of his giant meaty paws. He looked the part of a lion - shaggy hair, broad nose, and a swagger - and I briefly thought about how people grow into their names. "How can I help you lads tonight?", he asked.

I explained that we were a) foreign and b) retarded and c) poor planners and that we were now in a postion of not knowing where we'd lodge ourselves that evening. Could you, kindly large man who looks vaguely like a big-cat, tell me where we might rest our weary and, might I add again, retarded, foreign carcasses?

He sighed. His hostel/hotel wasn't closed per se; it was now only open on a seasonal basis. And, um, this wasn't the season. He paused and then strode purposefully to the doorbell. This time a woman opened up the window, and Aslan began to conduct a (loud) conversation with the person whom I assumed was his wife.

She came down over the stairs WITH SHEETS AND BLEACH AND TOILET PAPER.

No no no, I began, but Aslan was already stopping me from speaking by standing in front of me in a vaguely felid pose which I interpreted as "shut up." He made tea in the waiting room of the ho(s)tel while his wife CLEANED A ROOM FOR US; we sat looking at the tawny liquid feeling like prolapsed walrus anuses as he talked about how much we were going to enjoy Denizli and the surrounding areas. When his wife was finished, we thanked her very much and she welcomed us graciously to Denizli. *I* would have rubbed my ass on the pillowcases, but hey.

Again, this can't be stressed enough: it was almost 10 PM by this point. And we were strangers. Foreign strangers who knocked on their door and said "Hey, are you a hotel?"

Aslan shook our hands, bade us good night, and retired to his apartment across the street. We sat on our beds, stunned at the hospitality and graciousness. As the dust settled quietly onto the Cock Capital of Turkey, we gratefully slipped into beds whose sheets smelled of sun and citrus and thanked our lucky stars that we weren't having to provide excruciatingly slow manual pleasure to old men in order to secure park benches for the evening.

When the muezzin woke us six hours later, we couldn't be angry. OK, so we resolved to take note of whether or not future accomodations shared a Byzantine wall with a mosque, but other than that, only gratitude.

As we packed and prepared for our trip to Pamukkale/Hieropolis and Aphrodisias, I remembered that the cock-bound, dusty Denizli sits upon the ruins of Laodicea, one of the Seven Churches. The settling dust whispered as it landed indelicately on the roads, on cars, on sad lawns. Over the din of morning traffic, mosque action and simit-sellers hawking their delicious wares, I heard the dust speaking.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

I took that to heart and I thanked Aslan in two ways. One, I hugged him, which elicited an eye-roll from my traveling partner, as apparently he was too patrician to have ever had to wash his pits and undercarriage with a paper towel in a public bathroom after fitfully sleeping on top of his luggage, fully clothed in seventy-five degree heat in a bus station. Two, I paid him twice as much as he asked for - secretly, as I left the rest of the money for his wife to find in the room. Hell, he'd even DRIVEN US TO THE BUS STATION FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. He'd heard our voices, he'd opened his door - and, well, tea isn't food, but it's really close.

We boarded the bus, glad not to be dead. I closed my eyes and drifted off, dreams of the four remaining Churches - Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira and Philadelphia - fluttering in and out of my consciousness like bleached marble songbirds.

Well, until we were abandoned on the side of the road forty kilometers from Aphrodisias. But that is a different story for a different time.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

The Seven Churches, part II: Ephesus.

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, he that walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks: I know thy works, and thy toil and patience, and that thou canst not bear evil men, and didst try them that call themselves apostles, and they are not, and didst find them false; and thou hast patience and didst bear for my name's sake, and hast not grown weary. But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love. Remember therefore whence thou art fallen, and repent and do the first works; or else I come to thee, and will move thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent.

- The Book of Revelations

Why does she have so many tits? I mean, come on; get a load of THAT.

- An unnamed Turkish friend

That morning I hadn't even bothered waking up at dawn to hysterically fling the curtains open or sob gently in front of the television as slick-haired mustachioed gentlemen gestured pointedly at happy sun faces or sad clouds that skittered across Doppler maps of Anatolia. I presumed that Satan would, indeed, win, and that I would come all the way across the planet without pressing my cheek against the heat-cracked pillars of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus. (This was something that I presumed would be forbidden, but the thought of it left me breathless and panting like a spaniel in heat.) I reclined in the darkness, allowing the Hooved One's victory to seep into my bones, embrittling them before my time and causing them to ache delicately.

From the kitchen I could smell the salça simmering seductively in a vat of beautiful, incredibly fresh butter, and could hear my friend's mother stirring something and humming. When she opened the door to the back porch, a shaft of gilded light snaked through the hallway and under the door.

A shaft of sunlight. The. Bright. Sky-disc. Was. Up.

Play it cool, I thought. You can do that, right?

I entered the kitchen slowly, my body loose, and beheld the four happy Turks who had begun to settle down to breakfast. Sit down, a menthol-cool voice whispered into my ear, and eat the delicious food before they start staring at you.

"So", the patriarch began while tapping his soft-boiled egg open, "I take it that today you two will go to Efes, yeah?" My eyes moistened and my vision swam; I presumed that "Efes", along with being the number one beer name in Turkey, was also the Turkified name for Ephesus (EFF-iss-iss), and the answer was hells yes. I couldn't drive a stick-shift, which is apparently all one can get in Turkey, but if I had to provide excruciatingly slow manual pleasure to a half-blind goat-merchant for a ride there while the sun shined WHILE THE SUN STILL SHINED, I was poised to make it happen.

***

Twenty minutes later the car slowed a little, and my friend/chauffeur began to scan the sides of the highway for something. "We can't be near", I said, trying not to allow sheer animal desperation to enter into my voice, "because the sign back there said that Selçuk is twenty-nine more kilometers away." "Ah", he said, guiding the car into some person's yard, "but the ayran is here."

Now don't get me wrong: I do love some good ayran. Ayran is very simple to make: take plain yogurt and add some lightly salted icewater to it, and then shake it up into a frappe. OK, so it sounds absolutely horrid when it is described, but take it from me: when it's hot and dusty out, and you're lucky enought to get your mitts on some ice-cold ayran, drinking it makes you feel as though you've been french-kissed by an archangel. You know, one of the really saucy ones with the three sets of wings. Or is that a seraphim? I digress.

He got out of the car and walked up to the door and knocked. Mind you, from the outside of this place one would assume that this was just some old house, but from previous experiences I knew that this was likely one of THOSE PLACES that everyone knew about and which would provide me with LOCAL COLOUR and ETHNOGRAPHIC PLEASURE.

A woman clad in şalvar came to the door and stared at my friend. At this point, had this been most places in the US, the woman would have fogged his ass with military-grade assailant-spray; because it was Turkey, she smiled brightly and began to shuffle out to a small shed near the door to fetch a tiny tea-table and Turkish stools. The Turk sat and began happily humming, merrily awaiting his treat; I was mildly aghast. Because I had not been offered any explanation as to why this woman, why this house and why oh God why these tiny stools that I was threatening to render into kindling, I was quite uneasy. It would have been like me going to some random person's house on my way to work and knocking on their door to be like "GIVE ME SOME COKE. AND A POLLY-O STRING CHEESE IF YOU HAVE ONE. ALSO SOME COOKIES. NO, NOT THAT SNACKWELLS SHIT."

True to his word, the woman disappeared into her house and came back out with a carafe of very thick ayran, which she poured into two glasses. As I drank, my friend explained that this woman was known throughout the entire province of İzmir as making the most sublime ayran in the whole of Western Anatolia. It was true; I may never again taste something so strangely refreshing. "And who would have thought", he mused, "that someone without electricty could make something like this."

The shadow of a passing cloud darkened the yard for a moment and my hysteria returned, now coupled with a healthy fear that I would poop my pants later as karmic retribution for having enjoyed this creamy, salty and only partially refrigerated treat so much. I clutched my friend's arm and croaked in a voice that sounded terrible and distant - like a faraway air-raid siren - that we needed to be on our way, lest something quite un-magical happen in this land of enchanted goat's-milk treatiness. As we left and as my friend paid her, the old woman asked us where we were heading. "Efes", my friend said. Her eyes glinted and, for a but a tiny moment, I thought I saw gathering tears. "That place is like an old friend", she said in a misty, far-away voice. "You know, a friend with whom you don't speak anymore." She paused and wiped off a glass with a rag. "When I was a girl, I wanted to be trained in the classics and archaeology. They were my first true loves. And then..."

In the trailing of her last word, I could feel the last forty years of Turkey's turbulent history, and I knew even without her telling me so that she was illiterate. The land of the galloping mare's head had come a very, very long way, but someone - something - had left her behind, alone with some goats, their milk and the salt that could be mined directly from the soil in her barren yard.

My heart/husk rattled within the tin barrel that was my chest with trepidation. I, too, had abandoned my first love, and worse still, I had abandoned THE SAME LOVE THAT THE OLD AYRAN WOMAN HAD. And and AND, I was soon to be hurtling at speeds generally reserved for particle acceleration on a Turkish highway toward one of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse. You know, toward a place that God Himself told an angel He'd eff up by moving their candlestick out of its place lest those who'd left their first loves repented. Or something. Definitely with the candlesticks, though.

Oh, of course I still loved the classical world - why else would I be dragging several of my Turkish friends on death marches all across Anatolia if I didn't? - but my secret, first true love was the daring, brilliant and hubris-doomed city of Athens. Athens, which, while tantalizingly near, was still a sea away from where I sat and a world away from my newly-favored ethnographies about contested landscapes, genocide and the reconciliation of sacred/historical/archaeological space in large cities. OK, so it's pretty close to that last one, but you get the drift.

At last, we reached Ephesus and beheld the parking lot, which was an ocean of blinding whiteness - white gravel, white tour buses, pasty white Northern Europeans/North Americans bulging unattractively out of inappropriately cut white garments, aclutch their pallid white children. White bullhorns blatted in the sun-shattered heat and white dust swam lazily in volutes, kicked into the air by white strappy sandals. White-filtered cigarettes were devoured and ground into the white earth, which whispered briefly in protest.

I simultaneously wanted to die and to live.

Walking through Ephesus is an experience that is not really describable. The throngs of bleached tourists were, at first, quite unnerving, but as anyone who knows a damn thing about the ancient world, and indeed, of Ephesus, it is and was a city that can appreciate nothing less. The Star of Asia. The jewel in the diadem of the Ionian city states. Ephesus: second only to Rome in size, stature and grandeur. It would have been filthy, smoky and gloriously and wretchedly stinky as well, and there, in the burning Aegean sun, I made my peace with the reality of one of the most fascinating and engaging ruin sites in the whole of the world.

Ephesus would likely have evolved into a modern Turkish city had it not been for deforestation, which led to erosion, which silted up the city's famed harbor and turned it into a malarial fen. And then, oh wait, there were earthquakes too, because THEY don't suck at all. Finally, the inhabitants of the city left the burned-out remains of their own Wonder of the World - the Artemesion - and their once-splendorous pearl of the Aegean and fled toward Smyrna and to the interior of Anatolia. Abandoned, silted over and forgotten, Ephesus would await excavation in the twentieth century.

After spending as much time as I thought would be possible in the site itself, I darted into the souvenir tents that lined the path to the parking lot. After searching for twenty minutes, I found a small reproduction of the Artemis of Ephesus, replete with several penduluous sphereoids hanging from her upper torso. There were many of these statues to choose from, but I chose the one with the very large hat. After commenting on the polymammaric nature of the statue, my friend asked me why I'd chosen that one.

Together we walked toward the car and the promises of a renewed, long-lost love affair, of five more apocalyptic churches, and of the endless delights that Turkey herself provided for me every day. I realized upon reaching the car that I'd not answered his question, and I turned toward the city's ruins as I spoke.

"Because it looks like a candlestick", I said.

***

Me and the Ephesian amphitheatre

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic