Pide to the people

"Sıcak sıcak sıcaaaaak!!!!"

"Var mı, pide isteyen?!?!"

Since Turkey began weekend lockdowns in its large cities earlier this month – fully confining everyone except certain essential workers to their homes – normally raucous Istanbul has been eerily quiet on Saturdays and Sundays. No matter how late of a lie in I indulge myself with (because really, what's the point of getting out of bed when you can't leave the apartment?), the silence of the streets outside hangs heavily, as if the whole world had vanished while I slept.

Then it happens. The low thrum of a small van inching its way down the street, followed by the crackle of a portable speaker, or an unamplified, full-throated cry. "Geldi geldi geldi!!!!"

Sometimes it's just one voice, other times a competing cacophony. Either way, the sounds break the silence, and the spell that seems to have been cast on the neighborhood. When I pop my head out the window, faces up and down the street mirror my own. The old, infirm, or simply weary lift baskets over their windowsill or balcony railing, lower them on a rope, and wait. The rest stuff a few coins in pockets, slip on some shoes (what are those again?), and rush out the door, not wanting to miss the highlight (OK, the only event) of the day: bread delivery time.

For many Turks, a meal without bread is unthinkable. An estimated 20 million loaves are sold daily in Istanbul (population 16 million) alone. I've seen Turkish friends refuse to eat breakfast because there was no fresh bread, only the slices left over from the day before. A Turkish colleague told our WhatsApp group that even during the 1980 military coup, when tanks patrolled the city’s empty streets, bread was distributed in large trucks to each house or apartment.

So certainly a little thing like a global pandemic wasn't going to keep the halk from their ekmek. The Interior Ministry's curfew order included an exemption allowing people to leave their homes to walk to their nearest bakery. Politicians jostled to be the heroes providing bread to the cooped-up masses, posting videos on social media with soothing footage of loaves coming out of ovens and being brought to homes. And local bakeries took to the streets with their delivery vans.

I'll be honest – even as starved for activity and interaction as I am on weekends, the standard white loaves, more air than bread, weren't going to entice me to run after the bakery van. But this weekend, their siren call became very beguiling, with the addition to their offerings of the Ramazan pidesi. This pillowy flatbread is made during the holy month of Ramadan, when observant Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight hours, then sit down to a fast-breaking meal called iftar at sunset.

Even for the non-religious, the sight of people coming together each evening, whether at huge tables set up by the municipality or on small stools set up around a newspaper-covered folding table, creates a sense of shared urban conviviality. Of course in 2020, coming together is tehlikeli ve yasaktır, as is jostling in front of the fırın to buy a fresh-out-of-the-oven pide in the last possible minutes before iftar so it's still piping-hot at fast-breaking time.

On weekends, then, buying pide from the bread van is about as close as we can come to a communal experience. So I wasn't going to miss out on that. And if a bread that's usually torn into pieces and shared has to be eaten by one person while it's still warm and at its tastiest, well, it's the kind of year in which sacrifices must be made. But only one pide a day, no matter how many times the vans cruise down my street. Even in a pandemic, you have to draw the line somewhere.

Year in review: freelance highlights for 2018

One of the first pieces I published this year was also my favorite (and for one of my favorite outlets): the story of an inspiring housing cooperative in western Turkey. I learned about the Düzce Hope Homes while reporting a big piece on political urbanism in 2017 and spent a rainy day in January at the construction site with members of the community, who sent me off on my bus trip back to Istanbul laden with jars of their homemade yogurt and preserves:

The 'Most Hopeful' New Housing in Turkey: Twenty years after being displaced by an earthquake, families in Düzce, Turkey, are getting homes that they helped design and build themselves. (CityLab, 23 February 2018)

It's far too easy to waste all day on Twitter, but I wouldn't have published this piece without the social-media platform. Spotting a call for pitches in a tweet led to my first story for Hyperallergic, and my first on performance art:

Artists Fill Six-Story Istanbul House with 672 Hours of Performance Art: The house will become a research space and library in a country where performance art remains underdeveloped, and many artists fear persecution. (Hyperallergic, 15 March 2018)

The always challenging, idea-driven Istanbul Design Biennial is never easy to grasp hold of and digest, but I enjoyed once again wrestling with its concepts and creations and synthesizing them into a review for the design journal Disegno, with which I've been happily developing a relationship over the past few years:

Back to School: The fourth edition of the Istanbul Design Biennial draws on types of knowledge that are generally little-valued in standard design education. (Disegno, 27 September 2018)

I continued my longstanding relationship with Culinary Backstreets this year, writing three pieces for the site: on a project helping refugees become food entrepreneurs, a restaurant serving Istanbul's homeless, and this one, on a new generation of farmers in Turkey. The idea for this story had been percolating in my mind since summer 2016, when I met a woman who'd given up the corporate life to make cheese, and I was happy to be able to take a broader look at this trend:

Back to the Land: Urban Turks Tackle Rural Life: The number of Turks swapping the city for the countryside is multiplying, driven by rising urban stresses and an increasingly stifling political climate. (Culinary Backstreets, 23 March 2018)

An assignment from Korean Air's in-flight magazine to write about Turkey's cherry industry saw me traveling with a photographer to the western city of Tekirdağ for its cherry festival and a tour of a prize-winning local cherry orchard. I also spoke with numerous Istanbul chefs, including Çiya's influential Musa Dağdeviren, about the use of the fruit in both historical and contemporary cooking:

Cherries on Top: Turkey leads the world in cherry production, but the fruit’s role in its kitchens has dwindled over the decades. Now, a culinary rediscovery of this local bounty may be in the works. (Morning Calm, September 2018)

This year, I also continued working with Lonely Planet as both a freelance editor and as the travel publisher's "Istanbul Local," a role that included putting together a neighborhood guide to Fener and Balat, writing news stories about a wildly popular train journey in Turkey and the new Troy Museum, and contributing photos of Istanbul's colorful "semt pazarları" (neighborhood markets) for an Instagram story.

And I traveled from İzmir to Bodrum (and quite a few other places along the way) updating the "Central and Southern Aegean Coast" chapter for the Fodor's Turkey guidebook, to be published in 2019.

Unrelated to work (but helping keep me sane enough to cope with the ups and downs of freelancing), I also ran 1,000 miles this year, and hiked to the summit of Kaçkar Dağ, amongst other outdoor adventures.

I'm still looking for a home for some of the stories I'm most passionate about: If any editors out there are interested in a feature piece about the fight to save one of Turkey's last wild landscapes and the traditional ways of life dependent on it, do get in touch.

Ready to see what 2019 will bring!

Year in review: freelance highlights for 2017

With all the juggling involved in a freelancer's life — pitching, writing, invoicing, researching, editing, fact-checking, drumming up new work, updating websites and social media, following up on emails, and on and on — it's easy to lose track of the big picture while constantly chasing after the next assignment and rushing to meet the next deadline. So it was good to take a moment to look back at the year and acknowledge that I'd published some pieces I was really proud of. Here's my personal top five stories from 2017:

1) Science, Interrupted

War and strife have uprooted many researchers. Can their life’s work be saved? (Discover, September 2017)

This feature on displaced scientists and researchers struggling to resume their careers as refugees was one of the most rewarding projects I worked on this year.  It's always a pleasure to work with Discover and my stellar editor at the magazine, who believed in me and this story enough to encourage me to take my kernel of an idea for a short news article and make it blossom into a long feature.

2) Contested Spaces

New political urbanism in Istanbul's Taksim Square. (Disegno, Autumn 2017)

Taking this deep dive into issues of public space, urban design and the politics of urbanism in Istanbul was another highlight of the year. I'm grateful to Disegno and the editors there for giving me so much room and freedom to explore issues I've been thinking, reading, talking and writing about for years in such an in-depth way. I learned so much from the architects and planners I interviewed, and even took away some bits of hope where I'd expected to find none.

3) Turkey ploughs on with controversial €1.2 billion dam project

A controversial €1.2 billion dam project threatens to displace tens of thousands of people across the Tigris Valley and submerge 12,000 years of history in Hasankeyf. (Equal Times, 20 November 2017)

The endangered town of Hasankeyf is a special place in Turkey; I first visited it in 2011 and wrote a travel piece for Time Out Istanbul, followed in 2013 by an article on a cross-border river journey that aimed to raise awareness about the dam threatening Hasankeyf and downstream parts of the Tigris River in Iraq. This year, as the pace of preparations for Hasankeyf's flooding accelerated, I wrote two news pieces about the looming destruction of its communities, heritage and environment, this one for Equal Times, and one earlier in the year for Thomson Reuters Foundation.

4) The Secrets Beneath a Suburb

Experts are uncovering millennia of history under a Turkish megacity’s outskirts. (Discover, November 2017)

Plentiful chances to ramble around ruins are one of the things I love about living in Turkey, and the more hidden-away and neglected, the better. So when one of my regular hiking excursions in Istanbul took our group hacking through thick and thorny brush to reach the largely forgotten remains of a bustling Byzantine trading port, I knew I wanted to learn more – and write – about this fascinating place. Following on my previous features for Discover about urban archaeology and the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, the magazine published this short piece I wrote highlighting some of archaeologists' key finds at Bathonea.

5) Beyond Baklava

To eat in Istanbul is to taste a broad swath of the world and centuries of history, and the city’s sweets are no exception. (Fare, Issue 1)

Over the years I've lived in Istanbul, I've often been disappointed to see travel and food writers cover the same well-trodden ground about Turkey over and over, even in publications I respected. So I was happy to get an email from the editor of Fare, a new magazine promising a more eclectic, imaginative approach, asking me if I had a fresh story about food in Istanbul to tell. My short piece about some lesser-known treats with bittersweet histories appeared in Fare's inaugural edition, a beautifully designed publication devoted to all things Istanbul.

Another big highlight of the year has been developing an ongoing relationship with the wonderful team at Lonely Planet, with whom my work has included helping update their online coverage of Istanbul; putting together neighborhood guides and other fun "insider" looks at the city; writing short travel news items and longer travel narratives about Turkey; contributing social media content to their channels; and editing parts of their global content on places from Argentina to Tallinn.

The year wasn't all about work, of course: hiking, traveling, running, art, books, food and friends kept me busy and inspired, both professionally and personally.

Onward to 2018!

The forgotten ruins of Bathonea

On a warm day in June 2016, I was part of a hearty band of hikers who hacked through the thick and thorny brush surrounding Istanbul's Küçükçekmece Lake to reach the largely forgotten remains of a bustling Byzantine trading port.

The ruins of Bathonea, located on the outskirts of the city far from its historic center, came as a magical surprise to me, but archaeologists have been working for a decade to uncover their secrets.

I highlighted a few of their finds in a short piece for Discover magazine's November 2017 issue: "The Secrets Beneath a Suburb."

Istanbul art madness

Art-lovers in Istanbul were spoiled for choice this fall, with the annual art fair Contemporary Istanbul changing its usual place in the calendar to coincide with the Istanbul Biennial, and dozens upon dozens of museums, galleries and artist-run spaces opening new shows at the same time.

Trying to catch them all made for an exhausting but invigorating few weeks of exhibition-hopping, during which I wrote four pieces of arts coverage:

• "Istanbul's Biggest Art Festival Branches Out to Greece," on the Istanbul Biennial and its "neighboring event" on the Greek island of Lesvos, for Lonely Planet

• "New Date, Director and Galleries Reinvigorate Contemporary Istanbul in Art Fair’s 12th Year," on the latest edition of Contemporary Istanbul, for Selections

• "This Stunning Ottoman Villa in Istanbul is Open to Visitors for the First Time with Contemporary Art Exhibition," on the Ömer M. Koç Collection exhibit at the Abdülmecid Efendi Köşkü, for Lonely Planet

• "Beauty Versus Reality – Ai Weiwei," on the world-renowned Chinese artist's first solo exhibition in Turkey, at the Sakıp Sabanci Museum, for Selections

Paint's dance with water

“Your hand must be like a machine, with a nice, steady rhythm — not dropping the paint with too much or too little force,” says Bahar Kocabaş. “You have to be patient, but when the colors open up, it’s beautiful.”

That's how Kocabaş, an artist and teacher in Istanbul, described the art of paper marbling to me. Known in Turkish as ebru, the process has been inscribed on UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity -- a list that Morning Calm, the inflight magazine for Korean Air, is featuring in a series of cover stories. I was asked to write the magazine's feature on ebru, which appeared on the cover of Morning Calm's July 2017 edition, and delved into controversies about the art's origins and the way both tradition and innovation are playing a role in keeping it alive.

Read a pdf version of my piece, "Water Colors," accompanied by lovely photos by John Wreford.

A city and its food

Photo via Fare Magazine

The new magazine Fare, devoted to "exploring city culture through food, history, and community," chose Istanbul as the feature city for its inaugural issue, which was published this week. It's full of beautiful photography and design, and an eclectic selection of articles, including a piece by me on some of Istanbul's lesser-known sweet treats, such as the beyaz tatlı once beloved by the city's Greek, Jewish and Armenian communities and now, like the people who once ate it, largely swept away in a tide of cultural and culinary homogenization.

My piece, "Beyond Baklava," and a wealth of other stories are available in Fare Issue 1: Istanbul, on sale at independent book and magazine stores and other locations in Turkey and Europe -- and available for shipping worldwide.

Bonus photos:

Üç Şekerleme proprietor Altuğ Dörtler scooping out some beyaz tatlı for a guest (me!)

A rainbow array of sweets for sale at Üç Yıldız Şekerleme in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district

A Lycian Way mini-adventure: Rest day in Kemer

Happy toes in the sand

You know you're in an Antalya beach resort when... your friend leaves her wallet on the minibus and you're alerted to this fact by your Turkish fellow passengers calling out not "Abla" or "Hanımefendi" or "Bayan" or even "Hey lady" but "Devushka! Devushka!"

In case it wasn't already clear from the Cyrillic signs on shops selling fur coats and skimpy bathing suits, that was a pretty good hint that the holiday town of Kemer is known as a destination for Russian tourists. And though I try not to be overly judgmental, it was hard to escape the feeling that they'd given all foreign visitors a pretty bad rap.

Cheers to new adventures

There were exceptions, of course -- the friendly, chatty hunter who had just come down from Tahtalı Dağı and showed us photos of the cave where he'd set up the blackened çaydanlık that he'd hauled up to the summit in his backpack comes to mind.

But on the whole, we received the surliest welcome in Kemer that I've ever experienced in famously hospitable Turkey -- from brusquely impatient waiters to the hotel staff pounding on our door and following us down the hallway to repeatedly demand payment up front for our room. One woman I sat next to on a bus softened noticably when she found out I was American, and not Russian. Finally! A country with an even worse international reputation than my own.

Last sunrise in Lycia (for now)

Though Kemer's beautiful long stretch of both sand and pebble beaches was whipped by wind in the afternoon and marred by cat-calling magandas in the early evening, our little band of hikers was happy to trade our boots for sandals, sit in the sun, and finally make a proper toast to adventures just had, and those yet to come.

A Lycian Way mini-adventure, day 5: Tekirova to....?

Poppies and a misty mountain

Fortified after yesterday's exertions with börek and eggs at a local pastane, we picked up the trail again (after plodding across none-too-memorable Tekirova) on a service road behind the sprawling Rixos hotel, whose waterpark and shabby outlying buildings butt up right against the woodlands on the outskirts of town.

It was an inauspicious start to the day's hike, but after a short jaunt through sparse forest, across a campground/equestrian center, and past some flower-dappled fields backdropped by a mist-shrouded Tahtalı Dağı, we were back on favorite territory: curving coastal paths above the Mediterranean Sea, more slate blue than turquoise on this overcast morning, but beautiful nonetheless.

Lovely Phaselis

The promise of visiting the ruins of Phaselis had been a major motivation to get our tired legs moving once again, though having not been to the site in nearly five years, I'll admit I feared for the worst. Would it be blighted by garish concession stands, filled with ham-fisted restorations, or marred by new roads? Thankfully, the remains of this ancient maritime city were exactly as I remembered: an evocative series of arches and tombs and column capitals half-hidden away in the woods, centered around a wide paved-stone road leading to the sea.

There weren't many other visitors at Phaselis when we passed through, but those who were there seemed to be having so much fun, their joy was infectious: a young pair faux-fencing with sticks, a Turkish woman flamboyantly play-acting on the stage of the ancient theater, a group of tourists arraying themselves on the theater steps for cheesy-album-cover-style photos.

Seaside serenity

We took a few band photos of our own on the dramatic, volcanic-rock-like cliffs past Phaselis, then lost the trail in a maze of low brush before deciding to break for lunch overlooking the sea, across a small bay from the town of Çamyuva. Continuing on through a predictably garbage-ridden picnic area, we followed an asphalt road to the main highway, where the trail waymarks led -- in very Hiking Istanbul-esque fashion -- through a graffitied underpass and across a large construction site where a fresh pair of tunnels emerged from the hillside.

What our guidebook described as a forest track seemed to be en route to being turned into forest road, with rocks piled underfoot and some new crash barriers alongside. With one member of our party hobbled by painful blisters, we stood little chance of reaching the next village by nightfall, and after climbing up this unappealing series of switchbacks for about 45 minutes, we decided it wasn't worth continuing on.

Unlovely construction

We hiked back down, crossed through the construction site and the underpass again, and ended our hiking adventure -- this installment, at least! -- hailing a minibus by the side of the highway.

Four-and-a-half Lycian Way segments down, just 24 ½ more on to go on future excursions before I can get the trail's waymark tattooed on my arm. Kidding. Kinda.

A Lycian Way mini-adventure, day 4: Çıralı to Tekirova

Tired as my legs were, I nearly broke into a run when I spotted the yellow signpost in the distance, at the end of yet another field of rough red rocks. But when I reached the post, my heart sank. We had already been walking for nine hours on what we'd been led to believe was a hike of about that length, the daylight was starting to wane, and if the yellow sign was correct, we still had more than three hours to go to reach the next town.

Can't get enough of that
turquoise water

We'd started out the day from Çıralı in high spirits, if a bit leery of the dark clouds roaming across the sky. A short climb above the seafront took us on a route leading up and down a series of small coves and the rocky cliffs overlooking their beaches, each vista seemingly more photo-worthy than the last. Turning inland brought us first across the exposed, drab, rocky remains of old mining operations, then into an overgrown meadow that hid any official trail markers, leaving only other hikers' rock cairns to follow through a maze of bushes and tall grasses.

Then we climbed and climbed over rocky slopes where hardy flowers bloomed between the stones, going higher and higher until stopping for a rest at one point, I turned around to be awestruck by the vast panorama below, spreading out to the ocean and those little coves we'd visited hours before, each inch of the view earned by our calloused feet and straining muscles.

Hardy and beautiful flowers

Invigorated by the sight of how far we'd come, we marched forward until the pine-needle-strewn paths turned again into rocky outcroppings and the time we'd allotted for the hike passed without any indication that we might be nearing its end.

Night started to fall not long after we came across the yellow sign, and the question of whether it would be more dangerous to continue on in the dark, make a a treacherous beeline down a steep ravine to the distant highway that was the only sign of civilization in sight, or try to find shelter (since we were carrying none of our own) in the woods for the night shadowed our every footstep.

We started all the way down there
at sea level

I tried to quicken my pace even as I felt my feet begin to stumble from fatigue, the red-and-white slashes of paint on rocks alongside the trail becoming harder and harder to see as the light faded further. Digging out extra batteries for one of two failing flashlights, we continued on in the dark, tracing the uneven path and searching for trail markers with our narrow beam of light.

It was hard to know if minutes had passed, or hours, but eventually the hum of cars on the distant highway had started to seem louder -- or was it just our weary minds' wishful thinking? Then the flashlight's beam caught a piece of styrofoam on the ground, then a wire fence, then an electric pylon, then finally, mercifully, a dirt road. Never had I been so happy to see the signs of development encroaching on nature.

So damn many rocks

For our final hours in the dark, I'd driven myself forward with thoughts of a cheeseburger, a giant plate of fries, and a cold beer (if not three). But by the time the dirt road turned into an asphalt one and reached town, it was past 10pm, too late to buy alcohol from the shop, and the only restaurant within crawling distance was dry. We fell upon our kebabs and pide like a pack of wolves on their prey and toasted our safe arrival with soda and ayran.

Tomorrow, onward to Roman Bridge?