Ms. Poiesis

When I was in Cappadocia, I enjoyed having the company of Willemijn and Paul and their three delightful cats, especially my little grey and white friend Keesje. In Dalyan I also enjoyed spending time with Katie, Richard and Sonja, my cycling buddies. Here in Kas I am alone. It is an odd experience traveling alone. I am apparently the only person traveling this way in Turkey at the moment, judging from what I see around me. On the tours that I’ve taken here, I am the seventh wheel – on each of them there have been 3 couples plus me.

Cats: There are many roaming homeless cats and dogs in Kas. Some of the merchants feed them and have donation boxes for this purpose outside their shops. I see many cats missing parts of their ears; yesterday I saw a cat without any external ears at all. He looked quite odd, but still very sweet. Today at Buyuk Cakil beach a small slim grey cat with a tiny triangular face made a beeline for me as I was sitting on my lounger. He hopped up and was very insistent in his demand for pats, completely taking over my chair. After leaving me, he left behind a couple of mementos in the form of two flea bites. The café I like has a resident calico cat which sleeps in a special lined box next to one of the 5 tables.

Motorcycles: Apparently there is a law in Turkey that motorcyclists, and cyclists, must wear helmets. You’d never know it, though, looking around. Very few people driving motorcycles wear them and those who do, don’t wear them properly. Although there may be helmets atop their heads, many people don’t bother to do up the straps, leaving them flapping in the breeze and totally useless in the case of an accident. As in Mexico, here, too, families often ride together on a single motorcycle; young children and even toddlers are often perched on the handlebars without any restraints, harnesses or protection. Apparently, the stats on head injuries here are bad.

Bathing suits: European women have no compunction about wearing bikinis, no matter their size or shape. European men wear speedos, no matter their size or shape.

Smoking (again): There are quite a few adventure travel companies here which specialize in kayak, cycling and trekking tours. One would think that their guides would be among the most fit people here. They may well be but they all still smoke like chimneys. On the Lycian Way hike guide Kevser smoked a cigarette every time we stopped and as a consequence had some difficulty with the hills.

Tea. Turkish cay is the national drink. It is made in a special double pot; boiling water below and tea in a smaller pot above. When being served, a small amount of tea is poured into a tulip-shaped glass which is then filled with boiling water. Two sugar cubes are always added and stirred with a tiny spoon. The merchants and restaurant personnel here consume vast amounts of tea; men carry trays of tea around to the shops at all hours. When purchasing anything, the protocol is to drink a glass of tea before and after the purchase, whether it be a tour or a knic-knac. It is considered enormously impolite to refuse a glass of tea. Lunch and dinner are always concluded with a glass of tea. Some people, although fewer, also drink Turkish coffee. This is boiled in a special brass pot with sugar; when ordering it, you must specify “medium” if you only want a moderate amount of sugar – otherwise it comes with several spoonfuls already mixed in.

Backgammon is the national game. This is played by all Turkish men, it seems. Merchants waiting for customers play it, as do restaurant personnel, and indeed every non-employed Turkish man.

School uniforms are worn here. In elementary school these uniforms are all cobalt blue in colour. The girls wear a pinafore style dress with embroidered white collars of differing designs. The boys wear blue smocks and grey pants. High school students wear dark blue blazers and grey pants or plaid skirts, white shirts and navy blue ties. Instead of ringing a bell to call the students to class, the loudspeaker plays the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, an odd choice, I think.

Call to Prayer: This happens five times a day, and lasts for about 5 minutes each time. Each of the three mosques in town plays the same call, sometimes not quite synchronized, which makes for a rather strange effect. The man who sings Kas’ call does not have as good a voice as the ones in Cappadocia. He wavers a bit on the high notes. But he does embellish some of the musical lines nicely.

Flowers: My apartment building has the most enormous Purple Queen bougainvillea – it is as big as a tree. It also has a beautiful succulent vine with gorgeous pink flowers covering the rock wall in front, along with hibiscus and lemon trees with enormous fruit. The pink flower is called “Hoof of the mule” and closes up at night.

See a few pictures here.

See pictures here.

For more information on the Book of Hours, click here.

Today I joined 6 others, plus our guide and the boat family, on a day long boat tour of the Kekova area, the same area in which I’d kayaked two weeks ago. I had been disappointed on that trip not to have been able to see the Simena castle and necropolis. This trip rectified that deficiency! We left Kas around 10:15 or so in a somewhat rickety jeep Ucagiz-bound, brakes squealing at each downhill turn we made. We stopped several times on the way there – Kekova is about 45 minutes east of Kas – twice so that the driver and guide could pick up tortoises, one a baby, trying to cross the highway and place them on the other side; three times for large herds of goats in the middle of the road.

We boarded the wooden boat, crewed by a family of four, complete with handcrafted scarves and jewellery for sale, and set off on a fairly calm sea for Tersane Bay on Kekova Island. “Tersane” means dockyard, and, in addition to the remains of a Byzantine church, there are also the ruins of a dockyard used by pirates seeking hiding places from the open sea.

My companions on this trip were:

Michael, a food sciences professor from Portland, Oregon

Patty, his wife, a teacher of Spanish in a community college, originally from Peru

Anne-Lise, a teacher from Bretagne, France

*French tourists have a reputation as being snobs and Anne-Lise lived up to it; she constantly made comments behind her hand, sotto voce, about us (“us” meaning the Anglophones on the trip).

Jean, her boyfriend, a teacher of math who lived in Izmir for 6 years

Audrey, a graphic designer from Marseilles

Yusuf, her Turkish boyfriend from Istanbul

Our guide Kadir, a very pleasant young man who did not really speak enough English to be able to convey much about the sites to us (luckily, though, since I’d been before I was able to tell the American couple the little I know about the place).

The Captain and his wife (who took the rudder frequently) (Where the hell were Gilligan, Ginger and Mary Ann?)

Mustafa, their young son

Granny, the Captain’s wife’s mother

We anchored in the small bay, just offshore, and several people in the group decided to swim, jumping in off the boat’s rear platform. It was too cold for me and the sky was a bit cloudy at that point so the sun would not have been strong enough to warm me up, had I swum. I lay like a lizard on one of the several lounge pads on the boat’s top deck. (I noticed that our boat was the only one out that had this great feature). After a bit of time there, we cruised leisurely down the coast of the island, examining the ruins of the sunken city, destroyed by an earthquake in 243 ce. Lots of goats were grazing on the island and seemed to me to be clambering on the rocks following the boat – I presume that people had thrown bread to them from boats in the past. Kadir could not explain how the goats came to be on the island; he speculated that they made a run for it and stowed away on a boat.

We crossed the strait and motored into a sheltered bay where we dropped anchor and stopped for swimming once again. Apparently, there were quite a few sea urchins in that area, as well as some tiny fish. The sea was very calm and quiet, with only one or two other boats in the vicinity. We then cruised over to a pirate cave, a legacy from long ago when this coast was a pirate haven and villages were built on the hills rather than on the sea to avoid them. Another quiet bay, overlooked by a hilltop castle ruin, provided our lunch stop. Granny barbequed spicy meat balls and the captain’s wife brought out a buffet of salads and bread – the food was really delicious and lots of it. Lazing around in the sun after eating I got hot, and by then the clouds had burned off, so I changed into my bathing suit and jumped it. It was cold. All I could manage was a few minutes but it was very refreshing and mind-clearing. The three other  women, though, seemed to have a greater tolerance for the cold and happily snorkeled around the bay for quite a while.

About an hour and a half later, we pulled anchor and set off for Simena, called by the Turks Kalekoy (Castle village), the site of a 15^th century castle built by Sultan Mehmet I, and a Lycian necropolis. The castle is accessed by a set of steep stone steps through the village and up the hill. There’s not a lot of it left except a small – very small – stone theatre hewn from solid rock facing the sea (it held 80 people), and battlements. The necropolis lies outside the castle walls and holds about 30 stone sarcophagi, some of which are in very good shape, and has a beautiful view out over the islands and ocean. All the Lycian sarcophagi have long since been looted – Lycians, like Egyptians, interred people with their “stuff” so that they would have it available in the next life. Local Turks know nothing about the ruins and care less – to them, they are all simply “ancient city”. Surrounded by these remnants of ancient cultures, they probably can’t understand why anyone would bother to come so far to look at rocks. However, they certainly see the potential in visitors; every hamlet has restaurants and goodies for sale, like nazar boncuk hangings (evil eye protectors), handmade scarves and the ubiquitous woolen socks.

After spending an hour or two wandering around the ruins, we set off back to Ucagiz, hopped back on the jeep, noisy brakes squealing, and arrived back in Kas at 6. A very pleasant day had by all.

See pictures here.

See pictures of Kas and my mannequin hands here.

I just found out yesterday that the Internet Explorer version of this site, and my lmaclean.com site, had been compromised, likely due to a flash update. Since I use Firefox, and had been editing and updating my site in that browser, I wasn’t aware of the problem because in Firefox there was no problem. But at least half of my posts – maybe more – for the last two and a half months were missing from or corrupted  in the Internet Explorer version. I imagine you can understand the enormous frustration that I felt in finding that out … and the amount of time it has taken in the last two days, with the help of Ty, to fix it. AAARRRGGGH.

Anyway, since I realise that many of you – well, however many of you there are out there reading this – will have been accessing this site through IE, I have now fixed the problem so that my previous months’ posts can be read in their entirety … “O, joy”, I can hear you say. So, if you do have time one of these days, check them out!

The length of my hike along the Lycian Way yesterday was 12 kilometers, not 10. We actually started from the village of Okcuoldugu, on the hill 2 kilometers above Ufakdere Bay. Ufakdere used to contain an olive press factory, hence the name – it is now in ruins on the beach. The rocky outcrop at the eastern end of the bay is Cape Ulu Burun, the site of a Bronze Age shipwreck.

Today was less successful. I had decided early in the morning that I wanted to go to the ruins of Phellos, the ancient sister city of Kas, called Antiphellos in earlier times:

The ruins of Antiphellos are spread around the town of Kaş, which lies at the neck of a small peninsula in the Mediterranean. Its location makes it one of the most beautiful sites on the south-west Anatolian coast. From what we can glean from Pliny, the original Lycian name of this ancient city was Habesos. Later written sources however, give the city’s name as Antiphellos. It is agreed that Antiphellos was a small port linked to neighbouring Phellos, some 7-8 km. to the north as the crow flies. The term “phellos” means “rocky place” in Greek. Antiphellos means “opposite the rocky place”.

Because there was an increase in trade contacts from Hellenistic times onwards, Antiphellos gained special importance as a port for the export of the region’s timber. Bearing in mind the difficulty of land communications and the perpetual scarcity of suitable arable land around it, it is certain that this town never became a large city.

Anyway, in a book I found in the apartment entitled From Kas to Dalyan, describing walks in this area, I discovered in a map where the ancient city of Phellos was located. In my mind the information that the distance from Kas to Phellos was 7-8 kilometers had registered but not the qualifier “as the crow flies”. So, I packed up my backpack, had a cappuccino and some orange cake at the tiny café in town that I like, and headed towards the taxi stand. As I left the café, I turned down one of the side streets that I hadn’t been down before and saw a sweet dog that reminded me of Brubin sitting with its master at a tea house. I stopped to pat the very friendly dog and its master asked if I’d like to join him for a cup of tea. The man, a Turkish gent of about 70, I had seen before a couple of times walking his dog in the morning down my street.

We had a nice conversation over a glass of tea. He told me that he’d come from Istanbul to Kas 30 years ago, that he doesn’t work, and that every morning he walks his dog along Lycia Caddesi, then goes to the tea house, reads the paper and plays “OK” with his buddies. He also likes to hike and said that it was possible to hike back from Phellos to Kas quite easily. With that bit of information, and what I’d read in my book, I walked to the harbour to inquire about getting a dolmus to take me up somewhere near the ruins, intending to walk back from there. I negotiated a price of 10 lira for the driver to take me up to the fire watch tower, much farther than his usual route which stopped at the village of Agullu, in the hills above Kas.

We dropped off the other two minibus passengers at Agullu and continued to drive up and up into the mountains above and beyond Kas. With each upward hairpin turn we drove further and further away from the sea and from civilization as I knew it, up into the mountains. As each kilometer passed I became more and more convinced that this journey was a mistake, that I had made a serious miscalculation as to my ability to negotiate my way back to Kas through this wilderness. When we finally arrived at the fire watch tower pretty much in the middle of nowhere, about 20-25 kilometers away as I later discovered, I knew that I had to convince the driver to wait for me and take me back to Kas again. I could not possibly walk that distance back in an afternoon.

He wasn’t too happy, but, after consulting his timetable, said for an extra 30 lira, he would wait for 45 minutes while I visited the ruins. I grabbed my bag and started walking very quickly up the tractor path that apparently led to Phellos. As I went, I passed a very long line of bee boxes and heard quite a hum of buzzing bees. Hurrying past them, I continued to make my way down the path, not seeing any signs of the promised ruins and hearing a steady, quite strong sound of buzzing behind me. I looked back and saw lots of bees flying around in the air behind me, some of them swooping around me, and I began to get a bit frightened. With visions of being stung by swarms of crazed bees beginning to fill my head, I decided that a visit to Phellos was not as compelling as my desire to get the hell out of there. So, I turned around and walked swiftly back to the minibus 20 minutes later. The driver was surprised to see me so soon but I explained, in sign language, what the problem had been, and off we went back to Kas. Disappointed but also relieved to have escaped without incident, I decided that these ruins were ones that I was just going to have to miss.

See a few pictures here.

My old lady knees are sore and tired! Today I hiked 10 kilometers of the 520 km Lycian Way long distance footpath from Fethiye to Antalya along the south Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It was one of the things that I definitely wanted to do while I was here and I’m delighted that I was able to do it. 10 kilometers of that up and down route, I figure, is equivalent to running a marathon! The jeep from Dragoman Tours, driven by a man whose broken-nosed profile reminded me of the now-deceased English actor Oliver Reed, drove the six of us up the road past Buyuk Cakil beach (which I had ridden up on my bike) and further up and up along a rocky red soil track (what we’d call in BC a logging road) into the hills of the Limon Agzi peninsula. We stopped briefly near the top to walk on the remains of the Silk Road, the ancient caravanserai route from China to Anatolia – wow. I could still see the old wide paving stones that would have originally paved the route. Finally we arrived at the hill village of Ufakdere where we received our ski pole walking sticks and set off.

The first downhill stretch was steep and rocky with lots of loose stones, winding down through fields of more stones and olive trees. One of our two guides, Kevser, stopped periodically to put a little pyramid of stones on top of path-side rocks, a marker to indicate to the village people that we were travelling through the area. Our first pit stop for snacks was made at sea-level on a wide field next to the ocean and a ruined seaside house. We watched goats frolic as we snacked. Leaving the beach, we began our upward ascent along the stony path through scrub brush, spiky yellow-flowered bushes, and tiny oak trees, pausing briefly to allow what looked to be a school group of hikers to pass by us. The path, marked by red and white stripes painted on the rocks, went up quite steeply and we had to keep a careful eye on the ground because of the loose stones and the possibility of falling. I really did not want to fall or twist my ankle out there in the middle of nowhere.

Our second rest stop was made at the summit and the third when we reached the opposite side of the peninsula and once again descended to sea level. The rocks along the coast here are all limestone and very pitted and eroded and a bit tricky to navigate in places. It was very, very windy and white capped surf was up on the ocean. We could see the island of Meis directly opposite us, glimmering on the mirrored surface of the ocean. (“Meis” means eye and “Kas” means eyebrow, the names linking these two geographically linked places). From there, another upward stretch took us through canyons of eroded rock and a pomegranate field; guide Alkan explained to us that nomadic people still live in this area and they move from seaside village to the mountains to farm, depending on the time of year. In earlier days pirates were a plague along this coast and people built their villages high in the mountains; later, when the Lycian people became more powerful on the sea, they returned to the coast and built villages ocean-side.

Coming down from the hills once again, we crossed a wide level valley and descended down onto one of the three beaches on Limon Agzi. Here live the only full time residents of this peninsula, the family which runs the beachside restaurant. There are two hotels on the other two bays, but these are only populated during the summer season and are not open for business yet. We had a nice lunch of meatballs and fish (these seem to be staples of the cuisine here) and, while the others rested and swam, Alkan took me to the cave which supplies the peninsula with its water. We had to clamber over rough rocky terrain to get there and my knees were certainly complaining but I did want to see the cave.

While we’d been sitting at lunch, I’d noticed some Lycian rock tombs high in the hills above us. I’d asked Alkan whether we were going to climb that mountain and he said no, that we’d be taking the seafront route. Hah! If the route we took was the seafront route, I’d hate to see the mountain top route. From down below, I had no idea that there was actually a path up the mountain and along past the tombs – it was not at all possible to see it from below. The path was very steep and narrow and tough, going up and up a cliff side through scrub brush until finally we reached the two rock tombs. One was quite elaborately decorated and large, carved for a family to occupy. Each of the dead bodies would have been put on one of the stone benches inside, curled up in a foetal position in preparation for their rebirth in the life to come. In the space above the tomb proper, now empty, would originally have been a carved relief of harpies, part-woman and part-bird, carrying off babies – these creatures were the Lycians’ angels of death who were thought to take the souls of the deceased to heaven. The Lycians interred their dead in this way because they thought that to bury people underground was to consign them to Hades, god of the underworld, whereas to place them in tombs high in the hills was to station them part-way to Helios, the sun god, and heaven, from where they could be carried the rest of the upward distance by the harpy-angels. Lycians also engaged in a recycling program for their dead. In some of these rock tombs there are small indentations hollowed out in the centre of the floor; these were used to hold the bones of the old dead when it was time for new corpses to occupy the stone benches.

Around the open doorframe of one of the tombs was tied a thick rope. This we used to navigate up and along a very narrow, high ridge of rock past the tombs. And further up the hill, at the top of the mountain, was one lone sarcophagus just resting there in the trees. Our route continued to take us along a ridge at the top of the hill, over more rocky terrain, through more scrubby, spiky brush and a field of stone pyramids, through a village, and finally down the road past Buyuk Cakil beach back to town. We had a glass of tea at the Dragoman office to celebrate our achievement and I took my weary, sore knees home.

The tour was great. The scenery was amazing and the weather perfect for hiking, sunny with a nice stiff breeze that occasionally gusted up to a gale force wind. Alkan, the cultural guide, spoke good English and is obviously enamored of the Lycian civilization, talking animatedly and at length about the history and customs of these ancient people (who were matriarchal, incidentally). Kevser, the route guide, was more taciturn, likely because she speaks very little English. Everyone else on the tour was Turkish, visiting from Ankara for the long weekend. Even though I didn’t understand most of what was being said when they spoke to one another, I enjoyed the lively energy and enthusiasm of the group.

See pictures here.

I love watching the sky here from my apartment. Sometimes huge white fluffy clouds appear on the horizon behind the island of Meis or the hill opposite me, but they quickly scud across the sky and disappear eastward over the Limon Agzi peninsula.

Yesterday I awoke to one of the 56 days in the year that it is not sunny on the south coast of Turkey. Damn – I thought it was going to rain. I had arranged the day before to have a Turkish bath at the Hotel Club Phellos on the hillside down the road east of my apartment and also to use their huge outdoor pool, located on a terrace overlooking the sea. The idea of a swim wasn’t quite as appealing in cloudy weather as it had been in the brilliant sunshine the day before. The hotel is quite large and a bit rundown; in its heyday, 20 years ago, it was probably pretty swanky. At the moment, though, the interior is a bit dark and the furnishings look like they could use replacing. The hamam is on the downstairs level, right next to the pool deck, and also has a very tiny indoor pool. After changing into my swimsuit, I dipped a toe into the indoor pool but it was disappointingly cold. So I thought “What the hell – since they’re both the same (cool) temperature, I might as well use the great big outdoor one”. No point easing into it slowly – too cold – so I jumped in and proceeded to swim laps for about 20 minutes or so. The pool had a deep end so I also dove in – today my neck is a bit sore from that exercise … feeling my age, just like the hotel!

There are probably all of three people staying in this big hotel, since the season has just opened, and I had the place to myself. First, a screaming hot sauna – it was so hot that I couldn’t stay in for more than a few minutes. My limbs felt like they were going to burst into flames. The hamam area itself is very tiny but had the usual beautiful blue floral patterned tilework. After that furnace of a sauna, the heated marble slab felt cool but as I lay on it relaxing, it gradually warmed up. Then, after 15 minutes, I could see out of the corner of my eye that a man had come in to the room – “Damn”, I thought, peace ruined. But it just turned out to be the hamam attendant who was going to work on me. His peeling and massage efforts were pleasant but too gentle and not long enough to do my old muscles much good. Later, I used the sauna again, after telling the guy, in sign language and saying “Cok Sacak” (too hot!) emphatically, to turn it down a notch. Finally, after being wrapped with three towels, I was instructed to lie on a plastic sun lounger next to the indoor pool and had a green mud (possibly from the Xanthos River, whose healing properties I am still waiting to experience) facial mask applied, which stayed on for about 20 minutes as I lay poolside musing. I really love the whole Turkish bath thing. This one wasn’t as good as some I’ve had (and this bath attendant could have used one of his own baths, with a bit of soap … he did stink a bit!) but even a mediocre hamam is a good thing.

A bit later in the day the clouds cleared off and the sun came out again and I wandered down into town for lunch. Sitting at one of the several tiny cafes near the square, I enjoyed a cappuccino and a chocolate crepe. While eating that, two women arrived at the café and sat opposite me. I recognized them from the other day – they had been sitting on the rocks at the Buyuk Cakil Beach when I was there. I made note of them because they spoke with American accents – this you never hear in this part of the world. I haven’t heard an American voice for a long while in Turkey. Anyway, I asked them if they’d been at the beach the other day and after assenting, they invited me to join them. We had a great chat – turns out that they are both civil engineers from Portland, one working for the Parks and Rec Commission and the other for the transit system and – get this – both named “Lisa”. A North American Lisa meeting two others in Kas – what are the odds of that? We had a good chuckle about it. They had hiked the Lycian way for three days, heading westward out of Fethiye through the Butterfly and Kabak valleys and told me that the route was spectacular. This reminded me of my intention to visit both those valleys – possibly next time I am in this part of the world.

Later still, I wandered once again along the waterfront to the west of the harbour, coming across another Lycian stone sarcophagus just standing there in amongst the dolmuses (minibuses). The seafront hotel that I thought was derelict and would be perfect for an artists’ residency turns out to have just been closed and is now open for business – damn. Another dream shattered … All the little pensions along the sea in that area are slowly opening, bringing out their outdoor furniture, painting, and generally sprucing things up. Metal ladders and diving platforms are being installed on the rocks – very handy for getting into the water on this rocky shoreline.

Another note on tourism here in Kas:

There is a tourist information office on the harbourfront square. I have been there three times now, trying to find out various things. Each time, the two employees inside have been engaged in an animated tea break conversation with several other locals and look up at me as I come in the door with expressions that suggest I am interrupting their day. One, the woman, does not speak English; the other, an older, somewhat officious man, does but is never very inclined to give me the information I’m seeking. And he only graces me with the barest possible amount of information, as if to say, “Well, we really don’t actually want any tourists here at all …”. Even so, I still love the place.

Having decided to do another apartment projection, while I still have the energy and the found objects, I decided that I needed a bouquet of flowers. I took some money along, in case I couldn’t find any suitable wildflowers, but, remembering the profusion of flowers growing wild in and around the cemetery, I made my way there and collected two big bunches of daisies, tiny yellow and purple bearded irises, and a couple of other varieties of wild pink and purple flowers. Too bad that the irises there are mostly all finished – it must have been beautiful at the height of their season. I arranged the flowers in two glass containers and positioned them on the two small tables and, as my friend Cec says, “Bob’s your uncle!” (What does that mean, anyway?)

This piece is called Ruination and consists of 24 images, to represent a human and cosmic lifetime, projected in sequence on the wall in front of a still life consisting of over-lifesize plastic female mannequin (with a necklace of tiny red peppers from the Dalyan market), wooden mortar and pestle, wine glass half full, candles (2 burning, 2 extinguished), crepe paper ribbons, moderately wrinkled, a glass bowl of pine cones picked from the Dalyan cemetery and Iztuzu Beach, and two petrified pomegranates from a field near Ortaca.

See pictures here and here.

The objects in this piece take part of their inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play I love and that we teach often in Liberal Studies. Lucky has the central speech of the play, several hundred words shouted out in response to Pozzo’s command “Think!” It is too long to quote in full, but here is a representative sample:

“Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell . . . one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die … they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant and then it’s night once more.”

Seeing the large wall above one of the couches in my apartment living room, it seemed a perfect spot on which to project images. Wow – I was able to find everything I needed in the apartment itself to make it work – amazing. By putting a small plastic table on the lounge chair, I was even able to compensate for the lack of tall tripod for my camera. And the curtain provided to close off the living room from the kitchen was perfect for my purposes.

However, I am actually the last person who should be working with technology in her art projects. My problem is that I can never seem to do things the same way each time they need to be done. That kind of routine work must be anathema to me, even though I know it needs to be done. The results of that incapacity are that, always, as in these projection projects, something is not right. For example, say that I get the lighting right, then I realize half way through the exercise, that the computer screen is being included in the image – which of course I don’t want. Then, when the lighting is right and the computer screen has been removed from the camera’s view, I don’t photograph all the slides – for some inexplicable reason, when I review the pictures, one slide is missing from the set … sigh. Then, when going through the second set of slides, my camera battery, which seemingly goes forever, dies right in the middle of the proceedings. You get the idea. What should take a relatively short time turns into something more onerous.

Other than that, yesterday was spent photographing the Kas cemetery, a beautiful little spot overlooking the west-most harbour, and wrapping coloured crepe paper ribbons around three trees on the hilltop next to the theatre. I also hung two of the pieces of cotton headscarf material on a small clothes line I erected between two of the trees, allowing the shadows of the trees and leaves to dance across the white surface as they flapped in the breeze. These made beautiful dark blue patterns on the white, reminding me of Chinese ink drawings of landscapes. I could not have painted them so perfectly. After this, I walked the 2 kilometers out of town to Buyuk Cakil Beach, where I flopped on a sun lounger for the afternoon. While there, I had a nice chat with Daniela, the Dutch owner of the beachfront restaurant from which I rented the chair and umbrella. She told me that she and her husband had come to Kas first four years ago, had fallen in love with the place, and almost before they knew what was happening, had bought land, built a house, and acquired a beachfront restaurant. They don’t miss Holland at all. She concurred with me that, with its arts and crafts vibe, and amazing location, Kas would be a wonderful place for an artist colony. Interesting, she also said that the people who like Kas are the same people who like Thailand …

See pictures here, here and here.

It must be wonderful to live in a place where you don’t have to worry about what the weather will be like 9 months of the year. The south coast of Turkey gets 300 days of sun a year … and it is another sunny day in Kas. The only small complaint I have about my apartment, which in every other way is wonderful, is that it backs onto the hillside where roosters, hens and chickens, and dogs, live. Ordinarily this would be no problem, but in the early morning – and I mean early – I am woken by the strangled cries of crowing roosters and the insane barking of dogs. First one starts, then they’re all going crazy – who knows why. And this happens without fail every morning so no sleeping in for moi.

Last night I packed up all my gear and headed back to the House Monument Tomb for one more kick at the projection can. This time, mindful of the darkness inside it, I brought candles to provide a bit more illumination for the piece and a flashlight to help me navigate through the rocky hills in the dark. I really like this venue a lot, but dragging all the stuff over there and being a bit worried that someone will come and bother me, means that it’s not the most comfortable experience. And, as darkness falls, the exposure time gets longer and longer (up to a minute each) and it is more difficult to get photos that are in focus. Even so, I love seeing the inside of the tomb and its contents lit up in the candlelight as darkness descends and the lights of the town, which can be seen out the tomb’s narrow doorway, get brighter and brighter. I worked for an hour and a half with two different projections, another version of Beyond the Flesh Dress and Self Portrait with Six Skulls.

Self Portrait with Six Skulls was the last thing I did at the Babayan Culture House in Ibrahimpasa before I left. Since I had become very enamored of my six silver skulls, and it had been a beautiful sunny day there (wonderful after the cold and snow), I wanted to do one final, final piece with them at the ruined cave house. From the many pictures that I took there I selected 24, to represent the 24 hours in a day (signifying a life time) to use for this projection.

The prone mannequins in their stony tomb remind me of Masaccio’s Trinity (1425) in Florence’s Santa Maria Novella church. For information on this fresco, click here.

See pictures of projections Self Portrait with Six Skulls here and Beyond the Flesh Dress here and photos of Self Portrait with Six Skulls here.

Since I needed to renew my Turkish tourist visa, rather than wait for it to expire in a less convenient place for renewal, I decided to do the visa run to Meis Island, Greece today with Altug’s tour boat. The whole experience was very efficient and quite painless. Arriving at the Kas harbour at 9:15, with my Euro payment in hand, I waited with others at the harbour tea house for our passports to be processed. Then, at 10:30 we were off to the island, sitting topside on deck chairs for the half hour crossing. While there, I chatted with retired couple Peter and Suzie, he originally from the Ukraine and she from New Zealand, both now living in Fiji and veteran couch-surfers. She explained to me that they’d retired early to see the world and they spend several months each year travelling. What a lively and interesting couple – it was great to see their energy and enthusiam.

Once docked at the beautiful little Meis harbour – very Venetian looking – I wandered around looking at all the brightly coloured buildings and shuttered churches dedicated to various St. Georges. Behind the newly painted waterfront buildings are others, less well-maintained, and some in an advanced state of ruination. Many of these latter have for sale signs in the window. I sat harbourside for a cappuccino and the barman there said that the place is packed and hopping in July and August; right now, though, our little boat load of people were almost the only tourists in town. The place had very much the air of a stage set, just waiting for the players to arrive. On the return voyage one of the boatmen presented all of us with a glass of red wine. All in all, a very pleasant way to spend the day. Here’s a bit more info:

“Meis, or Kastellorizo, a tiny Dodecanese island with its population of a couple of hundred, sits opposite the harbour of Kas and in the day time you could be forgiven for thinking it is uninhabited as the port town on the landward side can be a little hard to spot. At night however the lights of the houses, shops and restaurants along the promenade twinkle enticingly across the moonlight bay. Kastellorizo has an interesting history of its own, governed by Rhodes, Egypt, the Venetian Doge and the Ottoman Turks. It’s 20th century history gets much more complicated with the little island passing through the hands of the French, Italians and the British. The events leading up to and including the 2nd World War pretty much decimated the island and its population and the fact that there’s anybody here at all is a testament to the islanders’ determination to keep their community alive.

Most people get here by boat; there are ferries from Rhodes and, recently, direct from Athens and lots of private yachts pull in of an evening to lie up in the harbour for the night”.

(http://www.hitit.co.uk/tosee/Meis/index.html)

See pictures here.