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Four seasons on Davraz: Isparta’s backyard mountain
Turkey is a land of mountains. Even the nation's most ardent urbanites cannot have failed to notice this. Glance up from a glass of tea in Antalya's Karaalioğlu Park and there, across the bay, stretches the serrated spine of the Bey Mountains.
A walk through the red canyon - Cappadocia’s captivating Ihlara valley
Bleak, harsh, barren -- these are just some of the negative epithets applied to the uncompromising volcanic landscape of southern Cappadocia.
The ancient Phrygian site of Gordion and the Midas touch
Back in the 1960s, when I was boy, I spent a lot of time in my uncle George's shed. He was a kind man, and his shed was full of interesting things kids like hammers, nails, saws, drills and the like.
Most intriguingly, he was a bird fancier. His shed held several cages full of chattering budgies and canaries, and a dovecote he'd made himself was screwed above the back window. A joiner by trade, he was a solid, hard-working Yorkshire man. Leaving school at the age of 12, he worked his way through the apprenticeship system. Over the years he plied his trade for several well-respected local firms, earning an honest but very modest living. Hard-work, honesty, reliability and moral rectitude -- these were the values highly esteemed in the part of northern England where he was born and raised. My uncle's speech was peppered with words, idioms and phrases that could only be understood by another Yorkshire man of his generation. One of his sayings, however, remains in vogue today: "He's got the Midas touch." It's used to describe someone who seems to find making money obscenely easy.
My uncle George used the term when describing some slightly disreputable local who had made it big without ever doing a "proper" job. Perhaps a market trader with no education or training, who had made a fortune selling cheap gold-plated watches on the Leeds market -- but who now owned a chain of high street jewelry shops, drove a Rolls Royce, smoked Cuban cigars and wore a camelhair coat. Of the origin of the phrase my uncle knew, I suspect, little. He was a practical man and, though he could read, he didn't have books in his home. Perhaps he was vaguely aware of a story in which a character named Midas turned whatever he touched to gold. But I am certain that he had no idea that there was a real Midas, ruler of a once powerful kingdom -- Phrygia -- with its capital at Gordion, on the rolling Anatolian steppe just 100 kilometers west of Ankara. According to the story from which the saying derives, King Midas was playing host to the grotesque satyr, Silenus, who had helped rear the god of wine, Dionysus. As a reward for the hospitality shown to Silenus, Dionysus granted Midas a wish. The king coveted wealth beyond imagination, and demanded that Dionysus give him the power to turn everything he touched into gold. My Uncle George would have disapproved of Midas' unseemly urge to get rich quick. So, it seems, did Dionysus. The malicious god took the mortal Midas' request literally. When the avaricious king tried to eat, his food turned to gold. What use is gold to a starving man? Then Midas made the mistake of touching his daughter, transforming her into a beautiful but lifeless golden statue. Midas begged Dionysus to forgive him. The god of wine eventually relented, and told Midas to wash his hands in a nearby river. He did as he was told, and was released from the curse, though the river ran gold for centuries afterwards.
The centerpiece of the site of Midas' Gordion is the Midas Tumulus, the largest of many burial mounds that litter the site. Archaeologists are convinced that this royal tomb, popularly thought to be that of The king Midas from the legend, actually belonged to one of his predecessors -- maybe his father. Whichever body it held, it is undeniably impressive. The tumulus is over 300 meters in diameter and was originally close to 80 meters tall, but due to erosion it has been reduced to 60 meters. In the 1950s an American team began work on the Midas tumulus (which they referred to, rather unexcitingly, as Tumulus MM). They dug a 60-meter-long tunnel into the mound and discovered the burial chamber, a timber structure made from sturdy juniper and cedar logs and measuring a little over 6 meters by 5 meters. Said to be the oldest surviving wooden building in Anatolia, it contained the body of a man who had been around 60 years old. He was lying atop a wooden bed, which had collapsed. Lying on his back, his head was turned to face east. The body was surrounded by grave goods -- wooden stools and screens, tables, 169 bronze vessels and 165 fibulae (fastening pins or buckles). These grave goods are thought to have been part of a burial feast. Surprisingly, there were no weapons, and despite the story of Midas and his golden touch, no gold objects. If you're heading out here from Ankara, it's well worth visiting the excellent Museum of Anatolian Civilizations there first. The Phrygian section contains a re-creation of the timber burial chamber, and the best of the bronze and wooden objects found in it are on display.
