Out of many, one

The undulating screen hanging from the ceiling seems to wave like a flag in the breeze as its tiny LCD panels flicker in and out, one image fading into another. Though completely different in physical form

A detail of 'Sakıp Sabancı'
(Photo: Sakıp Sabancı Museum)

and artistic style from Botticelli's paintings of the Medicis or Sargent's portrait of Rockefeller, this video art piece by Turkish artist Kutluğ Ataman is likewise a commissioned portrait of a wealthy patron -- in this case Sakıp Sabancı, described in the wall text at his namesake museum as "the late Turkish industrialist who transformed Turkey into a modern developing country."

"Wow, all by himself?" my friend asked, tongue firmly in cheek, as we read the description before entering the darkened room at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum where Ataman's unimaginatively titled artwork "Sakıp Sabancı" is on display until 10 August.

Unlike historical portraits of the rich and powerful, however, this one contains multitudes -- it's made up of thousands of passport-sized photographs of "people from all walks of life whose paths crossed the famous businessman's in some way." But whether it's a particularly generous approach or a particularly grandiose one is harder to ascertain.

'Sılsel' at the Galata
Greek School in 2012

Watching the hypnotic digital dance above our heads, I wondered, does Ataman's work challenge the "great man" approach to history by creating a portrait of Sakıp Sabancı made up of all the people who influenced him and touched his life -- a humbling recognition of how we are all in many ways the sum of our encounters and experiences with others -- or perpetuate it by enlisting the images of many anonymous people in celebration of the single one who gives the artwork its name?

Visitors to the Sabancı Museum are invited to submit their own ID photographs to be added to the piece, an interactive element that hearkens back to Ataman's previous project "Sılsel," in which viewers could contribute their own messages written on a piece of cloth to a freewheeling fabric mosaic also hung overhead. In that case, though, the portrait that ensued was not just of one man, but of a whole country and its hopes and dreams.

TO VISIT: The piece "Sakıp Sabancı" is on display until August 10 at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul's Emirgan neighborhood. The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. General admission is 15 Turkish Liras.

Unsettled history

On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman state "sent notice to the provinces... with the aim of stopping the activities of the Armenian gangs who had killed innocent people, rebelled against the state, and made cooperation with the enemy." Of course, that's not quite how Armenians see it.

It is, however, how history is told in the "Belgelerle Ermeni Sorunu Salonu" (Armenian Problem with Documents Room) at the Istanbul Military Museum in Harbiye.

That small chamber on the museum's upper level, part of its WWI display, does indeed contain a few documents -- on the "circumstances necessitating the relocation" of the empire's Armenians -- as well as the bloody shirt of a pasha killed by an Armenian assassin in Berlin. The bulk of its holdings, though, are photographs: of bombs and weapons captured from Armenians, of members of "Armenian gangs," of mosques burned to the ground by Armenians, and gory image after gory image of Turks (including children) set on fire, hacked apart, bound and left to die, even fetuses pulled from their mother's wombs.

The imagery was deeply disturbing on at least two levels -- because of its content, most certainly, but also for the single-minded determination to depict a country as made up of only heroes and martyrs that it represents. Let me be clear: I am well aware that many Turks contest this formulation, and that my own country is no stranger to erasing (or manipulating) inconvenient historical facts. I also have no illusions that the presentation at a counterpart museum in, say, Yerevan would be any more nuanced.

But looking at such official portrayals of history, it seems unfortunately easy to understand how people's beliefs about the "other" can be formed and reinforced, and how this can contribute to creating intractable tensions between two parties. Somber thoughts for a museum best known for its colorful but mind-numbingly repetitive mehter band performance.

With such ideas on my mind as I continued exploring the museum's collection, one artifact stood out in the nearby area devoted to the Korean and Cyprus conflicts: a "Bloody cleaver used by the Greeks against the Turks in Cyprus."

Going Dutch in Istanbul

"Wager cup with hunting scenes
and allegorical tableaux," c. 1642-44,
Unknown artist, Rijksmuseum

Is it so wrong that my favorite thing about the exhibit of Dutch Masters currently on view at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum wasn't a painting by Rembrandt or Vermeer, but instead a silver windmill cup used for 17th-century drinking games?

As if the idea of trying to chug-a-lug the entire glass before the little windmill's blades stopped turning wasn't entertaining enough, the cup -- aptly known as a "drink-up" -- is displayed alongside paintings and drawings of poor Dutch souls who failed to hold their liquor. Depicting fat, slovenly, and lecherous figures, these types of pictures were the PSAs of their time, according to the exhibit text, which explained that they were meant to show the dangers of drinking too much.

The pairing of paintings with objects depicted in or related to them is one of the clever touches in the fine, but otherwise mostly unsurprising "Rembrandt and His Contemporaries" exhibit, which brings together more than 100 works from the "Golden Age" of Dutch art. Alongside the expected range of stern portraits, dramatically lit still lives, and gorgeously rendered landscapes, the decidedly modernist-looking "The Golden Bend in the Herengracht in Amsterdam" stands out, its crisp, spare composition seemingly a couple of hundred years ahead of its time.

"The Golden Bend in the Herengracht in Amsterdam,"
1671-72, Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde, Rijksmuseum

The museum's free audio guide offers some useful interpretative tips (who knew a painting of a ship at sea on a wall was an "instantly recognizable" symbol of romantic passion?) while occasionally lapsing into condescending platitudes. (I can decide whether I think the ducks on the pond add a charming detail or not, thanks.)

The Sabancı's Rembrandt exhibit is just one of the many Dutch-themed art shows that have been popping up around town like so many spring tulips, part of a commemoration of 400 years of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands. (Or, as they were known back then, between the Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces.)

Unknown painter,
17th century,
Pera Museum

The trade relationship embarked on in 1612 sparked, among other things, the Dutch mania for tulips, a wild flower in Central Asia that was cultivated in the sultan's gardens in Istanbul and features in one section of "Sultans, Merchants, Painters: The Early Years of Turkish - Dutch Relations," another anniversary exhibit, this one at the Pera Museum. In the text accompanying a lovely set of tulip drawings, the museum's curators note that "the famous motifs seen on 17th century tulip leaves" are now known to have been "caused by a viral infection." Talk about bursting one's bubble.

TO VISIT: The "Rembrandt and His Contemporaries" exhibit is on display until June 10 at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul's Emirgan neighborhood. The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. General admission is 12 Turkish Liras.

The "Sultans, Merchants, Painters" exhibit ends this Sunday, April 1, at the Pera Museum in the Beyoğlu district. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. General admission is 10 Turkish Liras.

Eclectic art in an unexpected location

Artistic rabble-rouser Robert Rauschenberg photographing puppies? A serene sunset cityscape by the sexually provocative Nan Goldin? A photograph by Cindy Sherman without the artist in any of her many guises?

Collectors Can and Sevda Elgiz enjoy finding and buying works by artists that depart from their best-known styles, Billur Tansel, the manager of the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, told me on a recent tour. Starting with the first pieces by Turkish artists that the couple acquired in the 1980s, they have let "gusto" guide their collecting decisions.

The result is an eclectic, eye-catching mix of works in various mediums -- from a mannequin-like figure made out of dead beetles (by Belgian artist Jan Fabre) to an inflatable PVC "cloud" shot through with rays of sunlight (by Turkish artist Iskender Yediler) that expands and contracts as if it is breathing above the viewer's head.

A selection from the collection is currently on display as part of the museum's 10th-anniversary celebration. If you haven't heard of the Elgiz Museum before, you're not alone; according to Tansel, the institution is much better known to people outside of Turkey than to local art-lovers. Despite the quality of work exhibited, this doesn't come as that much of a surprise; the museum's location behind an office tower in the Maslak business district is far off the typical Tophane/Nişantaşı/Galata gallery-hopping trail, but well worth a visit.

When Can and Sevda Elgiz decided to use some of the wealth from their construction business Giz İnşaat to establish the museum's predecessor, the Proje 4L art space in 4. Levent, back in 2001, platforms for contemporary art were limited in Istanbul. That is now far from the case. It will be interesting to see how the Elgizes maintain their reputation as trendsetters now that nearly every major family-managed firm or holding company in the city seems to have an art space to its name.

TO VISIT: The 10th-anniversary exhibition "Elgiz 10 Istanbul" is on view until this Saturday, March 17, at the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul's Maslak district. The museum is open Wednesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. Take the metro from Taksim to the İTÜ Ayazağa stop and walk toward the Beybi Giz Plaza building. The museum is around the back to the right of the main entrance.

Turkey's 19th-century Renaissance man

Osman Hamdi Bey's "The Tortoise Trainer"

Maybe it's all the bad knock-offs of his most famous painting, "The Tortoise Trainer," for sale on İstiklal Caddesi and around the Galata Tower, but I always found it a bit hard to understand what all the fuss was about Osman Hamdi Bey.

Turns out painting was probably the least of the sad-eyed, long-faced Ottoman intellectual's contributions to Turkish culture. As the exhibit "Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans" details, old Osman Hamdi essentially invented Turkish archaeology, conducting important digs at Nemrut Dağı in central Turkey, Assos along the Aegean coast, and Sidon in modern-day Lebanon.

The small, well-put-together exhibit -- which admittedly is likely to be of most interest if you've visited some of the places Osman Hamdi excavated -- ends this weekend at the Pera Museum but the fruits of his labors can be seen in perpetuity at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums across the Golden Horn in Sultanahmet.

Chillin' at Nemrut Dağı

Now one of the most important institutions of its kind, the museum's "collection" was essentially just a pile of booty from Ottoman military campaigns when Osman Hamdi was appointed director in 1881.

His focus on scientific classification and protecting antiquities turned the museum into what it is today, while the enacting of the Antiquities Law he wrote kept Ottoman treasures within the empire at a time when they were being increasingly hauled off to Europe by whoever found them. (Whether the famous Alexander Sarcophagus and other discoveries from Sidon should now go back to Lebanon is, I suppose, another question altogether.)

And for my money, his richly detailed painting "The Fountain of Life" (also on display at the Pera Museum) runs rings around that damn tortoise trainer any day.

Weekends at the office

Unlike any office in which I've ever worked, the headquarters of Borusan Holding is eerily tidy. Nary a stray piece of paper mars the crisp white interior, where the few framed family photos and coffee-table books placed just so seem more like movie-set props than actual personal belongings.

"Everyone has to gather up their things before the weekend," a security guard explains, confirming my suspicions. I wondered if the owners of the one pad of Post-It notes and the one empty water bottle I spied on desks would get their pay docked this month.

On the weekends, this corporate office turns into a museum, allowing visitors to walk through its hushed hallways and executive suites to peek at the company's contemporary art collection and -- no less a draw -- inside one of the most distinctive buildings along the Bosphorus.

Built beginning in the 1910s, the Perili Köşk's red-brick turret soars alongside the second Bosphorus Bridge, affording sweeping views across the strait that, strikingly framed in the building's many windows, often threaten to overshadow the art on display in what Borusan touts as "Turkey's first office museum." Seven new acquisitions, all video/multimedia works, are given their own screening area, while the current selection from the Borusan collection (dubbed "Segment #1") is spread throughout nine increasingly vertiginous floors of offices and meeting rooms

A smartly chosen mix of works in different mediums, the collection appears to contain very little that could potentially offend workplace sensibilities, though many pieces are bold in color, size, or placement, and generally pleasing to the eye, if not particularly challenging to the mind.

With no more than around 15 works on any given floor, the nine stories of art aren't nearly as daunting or exhausting as they may sound, but just to be on the safe side, fortify yourself first at one of the many all-day breakfast places lining the road below nearby Rumeli Hisarı, which are packed to the gills on weekends.

At Rumeli Kale Cafe, a tea server squeezes through the crowd as voices echo off the wooden walls and metal ceiling in the narrow dining room, its tables overflowing with little plates of cheese, olives, cucumbers, and tomatoes; single-serving frying pans with eggs and halloumi cheese; baskets of olive-studded bread; and dishes full of tahini paste and big slabs of thick cream soaking in honey. It's the kind of breakfast that will keep you full until well after dinner time.

TO VISIT: The exhibits "Segment #1" and "Seven New Works" are on view until December 11 at Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul's Sarıyer district. The museum is open Saturday and Sunday only, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. General admission is 10 Turkish Liras. Bus 42T will get you there from Taksim Square.

Rumeli Kale and the other breakfast places are just a few meters south along the water. Go as early as possible to avoid the rush, and bring a good book for when you inevitably get stuck in traffic on the way back.

Peeking inside the Aya İrini, and into Anatolia's ancient past

Marriages, divorces, broken betrothals, inheritance disputes, the selling of slaves, even the arrest of a spy -- it's awfully juicy material to be found in faded etchings on small clay tablets. Though they may not have the aesthetic grace of a well-crafted jug or bowl, or the obvious intrigue of icon-like animal figurines, these early records of the drudgery (field sales, donkey transportation fees) and drama of daily life in Central Anatolia some 4,000 years ago are perhaps the most compelling part of the exhibit currently on display at the Hagia Eirene Museum in Istanbul.

Even if you're not interested in ancient archaeological discoveries, the awkwardly named "Foreword to Anatolia Kültepe-Kanesh Karum: Assyrians in Istanbul" is worth a visit for the chance to peek inside the Hagia Eirene (Aya İrini), a mini-version of the more famous Hagia Sophia that's typically closed to the public. But unlike many such exhibits where endless rows of coins and pottery are displayed with little more than a date on the label, some effort was made here to interpret the findings from Kültepe (Karesh), an 18-level dig near the modern city of Kayseri, for a general audience.

The first written documents in Anatolia, those little clay tablets can be thought of as the beginning of history in the area. They also reveal the somewhat surprising fact that women in the settlement had legal rights and could sign business transactions -- abilities probably no one was willing to try and keep from women tough enough to guard their homes against robbers and collect from debtors while their merchant husbands were away. Equality only went so far, though: A man could take a second wife in the event of infertility, which was considered solely his first wife's fault.

Also striking were some examples of the extraordinary longevity of good design. A clay colander c. 1880 BC looked pretty much the same as the metal ones in today's kitchens, while a pair of gold hoop earrings from 1700 BC could have been the first pair I wore in high school.

Not addressed, however, was whether users of stamps bearing the image of a double-headed eagle -- a common motif apparently symbolizing "the meeting of East and West" -- were soundly mocked for resorting to cliché.

TO VISIT: The exhibit is on view until March 28 at the Hagia Eirene Museum in the Topkapı Palace Garden in Istanbul. The museum is open Wednesday through Monday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and admission is free.

Masters of painting at the Pera Museum

An older woman collapses into the arms of a stoic young soldier-to-be, their farewell watched by dozens of fellow peasants inside the crowded barn. Hanging alongside this massive canvas, a smaller painting is suffused in the crisp light of a clear winter's day. The picture shows two boys, one wearing an over-sized army coat and hat, beside a freshly dug grave. Its title: "Orphaned."

The juxtaposition, though not entirely unexpected, caused me to gasp slightly, experiencing the rush of emotions that good -- and well-curated -- art can provoke. Wrenching moments are not in short supply in "Scenes from Tsarist Russia," one of the current shows at Istanbul's excellent Pera Museum. A bride sobs, covering her face in her hands, on her wedding day to a much older man. Families escape with a few scant belongings from a village fire. A dying woman sits in a garden, staring off into the distance. Other paintings draw a smile: women celebrating a rural "hen night," a boy being distracted from his studies by the sight of a girl in the window across the way.

Though the local media has been falling all over itself to herald the Pera's other current exhibit, "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera," people in the know had told me the 19th-century realist paintings from the State Russian Museum were the real find. Many were powerful indeed, combining fine brushwork with emotional sensitivity. But the fiery stars of 20th-century Mexican art are worth spending time with as well, even if you think you're already very familiar with their work.

The show, though small, artfully juxtaposes examples of Frida's famous self-portraits with photographs, including some gorgeous shots by one of her lovers, that shed some light on how the way she perceived -- or wanted to portray -- herself both matched and differed from reality. Perhaps most moving is a sketch Frida made after a miscarriage, showing the lost child outside her body but still tethered to it, tears streaming from her womb.

TO VISIT: Both exhibits are on view until March 20 at the Pera Museum in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. For the duration of these two shows, it will also stay open until 8:30 p.m. on Fridays. General admission is 10 Turkish Liras.

A 'second' take on Turkish art

Flip, flip, flip. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Flip, flip, flip. Stamp, stamp, stamp. The hands move fast on seven wall-mounted flat screens, mindlessly shuffling through paper in a way familiar -- and likely at least a little bit funny -- to anyone who's spent time hacking through the bureaucratic tangle at any of Turkey's many müdürlük (directorate) offices.

Across the way from Ali Kazma's video installation (titled "O.K."), a small grouping of museum-style cases hold drab-looking documents, including the Turkish Constitution and the country's Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works -- each spiral-bound on both sides.

This kind of sly humor is too often lacking in Turkish contemporary art, which I generally have found to be overly obscure, self-referential, or hammer-to-the-head blunt. There's plenty in ARTER's "İkinci Sergi" (Second Exhibition) that falls into those categories as well, but it's a good step up in accessibility from the new art space's first show, "Starter," which I wandered through in a daze after being drawn in by the super-cool inflating/deflating green tank in the main-floor window, unable to connect emotionally or intellectually with a single piece. OK, the dismantled piano looked kinda awesome, but the point escaped me.

"Second Exhibition" has a similarly eye-catching piece in its "shop window," Ayşe Erkmen's installation of colorful hats -- a work I thought was just fun eye candy until I learned that the building used to hold a milliner's shop, and that the hats themselves are reproductions of a 1920s style by a local woman still practicing the trade.

TO VISIT: "Second Exhibition" is on view until March 13 at ARTER on İstiklal Caddesi in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district. The gallery is open Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday through Sunday from noon to 8 p.m. Closed Monday.

Saturday stroll: Istanbul's Ottoman chalet

I'd visited Istanbul three times, and lived here for almost a year, before I ever got around to poking my head inside Dolmabahçe Palace, the "modern" home of the late-Ottoman-era sultans. I can't say I thought I had been missing out on much. Sure, there's a 4.5-ton chandelier, and the minibar hidden inside a hollowed-out book is pretty damn cool. But it was hard to get excited about a place where everyone apparently spent all their time sitting in uncomfortable-looking straight-backed chairs on the far sides of large rooms from each other.

Still, operating on the small-museums-are-better principle (and mindful of my beginning-of-the-year vow to Try More New Things^TM), I decided to take a Saturday stroll to one of Istanbul's lesser-known palaces, Yıldız Şale (Chalet). Part of the Yıldız Palace complex in peaceful hillside Yıldız Park, it's got a charmingly tasteful wooden façade that wouldn't be out of place on a Swiss ski slope, but couldn't be further style-wise from the typically over-the-top Baroque mish-mash of furniture and decor inside. Like its bigger cousins, the şale can only be entered on a tour, by visitors whose shoes are encased in shower-cap-like pink plastic booties, but this particular tour is led by an affable fellow who sits around chatting and drinking tea until he decides there's enough people for a group (in this case, four).

As we walked through the quiet, empty, and dimly lit rooms, it felt less like passing through a stage set a la Dolmabahçe than being let into a home (OK, a really big home) that had been evacuated suddenly and then completely forgotten about. Fun facts:

• The Ottomans apparently thought being "modern" meant slapping together a bunch of different European influences -- French furniture, Italian wall treatments -- and throwing in a banquet hall richly decorated in Islamic motifs for good measure.


• The eager-to-impress sultan tacked on another wing to the şale every time Kaiser Wilhelm II came to town. The German emperor never had to sleep in the same bedroom twice.


• A 400-meter-square carpet is really, really big. And apparently has to be made in the room it's meant for requires knocking out an exterior wall to install. Tough to get up the stairs and in the door otherwise, I guess.
  


• Barbaros Bulvarı used to be a little country road, with green space all around. This is no surprise, of course, but it blows my mind anew each time I see a picture of Istanbul (this one in a ceiling painting) looking so bucolic.
  

I think the şale may also have been the first building in Istanbul to have electricity, but don't quote me on that one. There's always something that gets lost in translation.

TO VISIT: The Yıldız Chalet (Şale Köşkü) is located at the top of Yıldız Park (it's a bit of a hike) in Beşiktaş, across from the Çirağan Palace. Regular admission is 4 Turkish Liras. Tours are given in Turkish and happen when they happen. Open 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in winter (October through February) and 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year. Closed Mondays and Thursdays.

Eight millennia underfoot

I spent last winter living in a building constructed in 1880 -- charmingly crumbling and ancient by my American standards, but representing just a blip in Istanbul time. Still, despite the perennial jokes about the "New Mosque" (completed in 1663) and the ever-present reminders like the big stone aqueduct looming over the highway, it's surprisingly easy to become inured to the fact that those massive walls you pass by on the bus to work every day were built in the 5th century, that beneath the streets you walk on to get home lie centuries of history -- 8,000 years of it, according to an engrossing show currently on display at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum.

Fellow expat Carpetblogger recommended the air-conditioned exhibit as a respite from the hot, sticky weather earlier this month, but we both had to agree "Legendary Istanbul" has a lot more going for it than just a well-functioning klima. The showstoppers are probably the ceiling projection of designs from domes around the city and the massive tent made out of carpets a la the ones that would have been set up for the sultans during their battle campaigns. But most noteworthy to me was a grouping of figurines recovered from the "Silahtarağa statues" (pictured, poorly, at right). Admittedly, I almost walked past with a dismissive glance -- another smattering of armless statues -- but then I noticed the familiar-looking name.

Needing to remind myself where Silahtarağa is -- and having overcome my typical resistance to walking around the museum with an audio-tour device stuck to my ear -- I learned that the statues had been uncovered during construction of the coal-fired power plant that later became the site of the SantralIstanbul college campus and museum complex. Which meant I had laid on the grass, looked at art, attended a water-activists' workshop, and eaten a passable prosciutto sandwich in the same place where those statues were made in the 4th century.

Personal connection aside, the Silahtarağa statues were apparently made to depict the famous mythological battle between the Greek gods and the giants. The victorious gods were carved out of smooth white stone while the defeated giants were fashioned from rough dark rock -- perhaps the earliest known example of heavy-handed Hollywood-style "white hat"/"black hat" symbolism.

TO VISIT: The "Legendary Istanbul" exhibit is on view until Sept. 26 at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul's Emirgan neighborhood. The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Küçük müzeler

Far be it from me to suggest a kinship with a Nobel Prize-winning author, but Orhan Pamuk and I do have something in common: a love for small museums.

While big institutions such as the Louvre or the Uffizi can sometimes leave me cold, I rarely miss the chance to check out a small town's dustiest collection of ephemera. On a trip last fall to the Western U.S., I even entertained idle fantasies of apprenticing myself to whoever ran the historical society in Silverton, a miniscule old mining town that I adored, and then taking over the museum once she (for it surely is an elderly she) retired.

The Türk-İslam Eserleri Müzesi (Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum) in Edirne will always have a special place in my heart for its utterly random assortment of Ottoman pistols, photos of famous oil wrestlers, illustrated Korans, and a local professor's collection of handwoven socks. Yes, seriously: socks. As will the Malatya Museum, where the guards said "Maşallah!" upon encountering a Turkish-speaking yabancı, as if they hadn't had a visitor all week and a foreign one maybe ever. They fell all over themselves to tell me what the "must-see" exhibits were. To be honest (sorry, guys), I found them mostly forgettable, but I'll always remember one of the guards bringing me a Turkish coffee to sip as I looked at the old coins and earthenware pottery.

The phenomenon seems to work in big cities too, as long as you get off the beaten track a bit. At the Ethnography Museum in İzmir, I got a personal tour of the collection of traditional, heavily embroidered bridal wear; delicately latticed metal coffee cups; rusty firearms; and Koran-carrying satchels. I suppose the guard may have wanted a tip, but I like to think he was just happy to have someone to whom he could show off their costumed dolls from many different countries. "Do we have one from America...? Ah, yes - cowboy!"