GEORGIA, TURKEY AND THE BLACK SEA 2016

We flew from Thessaloniki to Istanbul to meet up with our friends whom we had left in Lesbos.  Four days earlier a bomb had gone off in Istanbul airport.  To our surprise, there was no sign of damage anywhere.  Apparently the airport was up and running six hours after the blast.

The next day we flew into an airport in Georgia, just over the Turkish border.  We were stamped into Georgia and then straight back out and were put onto a bus to drive us over the border back to Turkey. Here in Hopa, an hour away, we had our first glimpse of the Black Sea. From here we were met by our friends’ university colleague. He took us to his village home, high in the mountains of Artvin Province.  

Village home

We met his wife, daughter and parents-in-law. We stayed for three days, being fed like kings by 90 year old grandmother Nezaket 

Grandmother Nezaket

and we were driven through the densely forested mountains to numerous waterfalls and lakes.  It was not a good idea to look down on some of the hairpin bends on the little sand roads! The mountains are covered in spruce, pine, oak  and hazelnut and it is a tea growing area.  The tea is grown on impossibly steep slopes and the villagers use flying foxes to get their bags of clippings back down the slopes.  There are whole mountainsides of neatly pruned tea bushes, as they are harvested three times in a season.  The farmers use hand shears with bags attached to catch the clippings as they work. Although 80% of the world’s hazelnuts come here, tea has now replaced hazelnut as the dominant produce from this area.  Having seen how much tea people drink in Turkey, we are not surprised there is none left to export!

Tea Harvesting

We joined a  tour. They took us to the town of Batumi in Georgia where we saw a Las Vegas style  waterfront, complete with 5-star hotels and numerous casinos. The sad thing is that one or two roads back, the roads are sand (and become mud with the high rainfall), an unguarded railway line runs through the town, washing is strung across the streets and the buildings are Soviet style, faced with corrugated iron and mostly unmaintained. The high mountains surrounding the town are very beautiful.  They too, like the ones across the border in Turkey, are densely forested. We went to a winery in Georgia which, to our surprise, had photos of a visit by Hilary Clinton.

Back in Turkey, we went into the high villages in Artvin Province and stayed in a traditional lodge in the village of Ayder.  From here we drove to even  higher villages which are used only in summer for grazing cattle.  In winter the farmers move to villages out of the snowline.

Mountain village

Mountain village Ayder

The houses are built of stone and wood, on impossibly steep slopes and are very picturesque, dotted in amongst the forests. From here we hiked  to the snowline and some of our party had a swim in a lake with ice floes floating in it. 

  Because of the very high rainfall, there are countless, very beautiful waterfalls in this part of Turkey.  Although we were there in the rainy season, we were lucky to have only one day of rain-but did it rain! It, in itself, was beautiful, driven rain with the mountain peaks appearing and disappearing behind the clouds.  The rivers were swollen and we had an exhilarating ride down one of these in a raft.

Once our tour was over we slowly made our way along the Black Sea coast, back to Istanbul.  The prevailing wind comes from the north, so the Turkish coast is a lee shore and mostly deep until the edge. We saw only one sailing boat,  in harbour,  in the two weeks we were there and although many small harbours have been built, most of them are only used by small fishing boats.   In most of the towns in the east of Turkey people speak no Western languages. We were very glad to have our Turkish-speaking friends with us! We were pleased we elected not to sail and to travel overland instead.

We awoke one morning to find that there had been an attempted coupe.  We heard the speakers on the minarets calling people to mass meetings in the town squares and TV news coverage consisted  of arrests and speeches by politicians. We heard gunfire on two occasions and saw numerous flags being flown from buildings, cars and even the cable cars which took us up a mountain in one of the towns. This was continuing when we left Turkey two weeks later.

We traveled to Amasya to see the rock tombs of the Pontian kings. After a hot climb to the tombs, we wandered along the river front, amongst the quaint Ottoman houses. Of interest to sailors, we found a statue of Strabo, an ancient Greek from this region, who was the first known Geographer. Sofranbolo, now Heritage

Rock tombs of Pontian Kings, Amasya

 Listed, has an unspoilt old town, an exceptional example of Ottoman architecture. Here we enjoyed shopping in the little shops in the quaint stone alleyways.

A highlight was a visit to the ancient capital of the Hittites, in central Anatolia, with it’s imposing sphinx gateway and reproduction of burial sites as they had been found.

Sphynx gate, ancient Hittite capital

Reproduction of Hittite grave

 These were the people who defeated Ramses II of Egypt, later making the first recorded treaty between two nations. 

The other very beautiful site we visited was the monastery of Sumela, 1600 years old.  It is a very large monastery,  on a very steep cliff, carved into the rockface and perched above a river way below it.  As there are no longer Christians left in this area, it is now a museum. It is currently being restored and unfortunately we were  not allowed to  enter.