Transforming - Atulya K Bingham

Transforming LYCIA
A MUDHOUSE BOOK
First edition published by Mudhouse in Turkey in 2014
Copyright © Atulya K Bingham 2014
The right of Atulya K Bingham to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover photo by Melissa Maples
Reproduced by MUDHOUSE
All those who’ve read Ayşe’s Trail will no doubt realise, it is
a story besotted with nature, and a love song to one of the
last remaining unspoilt areas of Mediterranean Turkey;
Lycia. Having first visited Lycia in 1988, I’ve eyed this
enchanting corner with a lump in my throat. As development
inevitably encroached upon the Turkish Riviera, it is
something of a wonder that Lycia has escaped, while not
wholly unscathed, at least recognisably intact. The caretta
caretta is still with us, and this was far from a certainty 20
years ago. The endemic orchid the Turkish winter drink salep
is made from still exists. The ancient pine forests at the
Tahtalı end of Lycia are still, for the most part, standing.
Development has bunched at either end of the region –
Fethiye and Antalya stand as fortresses absorbing the worst
of the concrete bombardment.
I may wish on a cloud that nothing would change, but change
is one of life’s givens. Even so, it is often conveniently omitted
from the adage that the form change takes perhaps isn’t.
Transforming LYCIA
Meditations on a changing landscape
Atulya K. Bingham
Ölüdeniz
Once upon a time Ölüdeniz was a backpacker haven. I
remember it back in eighty-eight, when Turkish policeman
were caricatures from Midnight Express and Westerners
thought the Turks wore the veil. There were no chaise longues
and no English breakfasts, just a leg of cream sand curling out
into the kind of water I’d only ever seen on a postcard. I was
ensconced in a shabby shack on the beach with a few roadworn travellers. Most were crossing the world from the
southern edge of the Pacific Rim. At dinner they would huddle
about a long trestle table pouring over the Lonely Planet.
Adventure stories were dissected. Travel horrors exaggerated.
One of the Kiwis, a young brunette, wailed about the lizards
roaming her mould-speckled walls. An Australian tolerated
rain plopping onto his blanket from a hole in the old tin roof.
There were bed bugs and holes in the ground to squat over. So
it was back then.
Fethiye
“What’s happened?” I cried.
Nearly twenty years had passed and I was in Fethiye again.
But it was no longer a fishing town of a few thousand. It had
become a red-tiled metropolis complete with cash-and-carry
stores and traffic flow concerns. As the bus sailed through
the previously non-existent outskirts, I lamented the change,
the concrete, the persistent ugliness of modernity.
I made for the harbour and gaped indignantly at bottles of
vinegar on the tables of the fish restaurants. I walked the
length of the promenade smelling the brine of the fishertown
it always was. My journey ended at a café on the waterfront. I
ordered an Americano. When it arrived, I sipped it gratefully
and smacked my lips at the taste of good imported coffee.
The past and the present crashed inside me and out, like a
storm at sea.
Later, I wandered into Karagözler. I found myself among
pansiyons which by some miracle had withstood the traps of
time; budget backpacker hostels in original white-washed
cottages with grapes trailing over the yard. The gift shops
and fumes seemed unable to reach this nethermost corner of
Fethiye. The English had preferred Calış beach instead.
Yet in truth, The Expats were only one of a thousand groups
to invade Lycia and transform her. People have always
traversed borders and claimed new territory as their own,
bringing innovation and destruction in equal measure. Does
it make any sense to mourn the past, when the past was
someone else’s future? The new is only new if you’ve existed
long enough to remember the old.
Xanthos 545BC
Lycia had been independent for centuries. And then one day,
the Persians came, thousands of them, shields and armour
glinting like rows and rows of sharp polished teeth. It was a
formidable horde of warriors primed for a whitewash. The
serpent necks of the dromedaries twisted and turned as their
riders, a sleek crew of some of the deadliest archers in the
ancient world, pulled back their bowstrings in anticipation.
The sun was taking no prisoners that day and hurled down its
molten white heat, broiling the entire plain.
The Xanthian army marched out to meet the fighting force of
an empire. They comprised a modest bunch of men, but their
ardour more than made up for their lack in numbers. Lycia
had been independent for centuries. These were the children
of Leto, and they trusted no one. As they lined up, a wall of
flesh ready to protect a wall of stone, they growled and spat.
‘Lycia is free. Xanthos is independent. The Persians can go to
hell!’
Both sides stabbed the sky with their swords and roared. It
had begun. Moments yawned open. Swarms of arrows filled
the heavens, swelling and swaying like a hideous black
creature. The creature swooped, driving down into the
Xanthians, clawing into their shields and bodies.*
Photo by Melissa Maples
Xanthos
Lost
Stones bestrewn,
She collapses
Upon her knoll.
Walls
Sunken,
Columns crumbled,
Tombs toppled in disarray.
Broken
Burned
And
Unredeemed.
All castaway bones in a common grave.
Not
one
did
they
save.*
* Excerpt from Ayşe’s Trail.
Letoon
The past never dies. It recedes below the surface – a smooth
pebble of memories sinking in a murky lake. The present
ignores it as it clatters on above. Yet there below, the heart of
the past pumps on. And on. And on. If you listen hard enough,
if you pause and close your eyes, perhaps you’ll hear its beat.
Forgotten Goddess
Buried in a swamp of Leto secrets
In a no place no where.
Sinking behind polytunnels,
crushed between the cogs of the Agricultural Machine.
Did you hear her speak?
From her shrine grave down below,
The Earth Mother whispers
pale as the moon
while broken columns,
pierce the blotchy skin
of an abandoned lagoon.
The temples hold their tongues
the statues have lost their heads.
Without mouths, they are silent.
Speechless. Unheard.
Sinking
Underground.
With their priestess secrets
And their magic
Sloshing in their watery bellies.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Kalkan
It was not much more than a hamlet back in eighty-eight – a
handful of white pansiyons digging their heels into the hillside
as if to stop them skidding downward. The unblemished land
jutted her rocky toes into the turquoise beneath. I remember;
I stayed in a clean-tiled pansiyon overlooking the
Mediterranean. When morning arrived and the sun
illuminated the curtains. It looked like the Second Coming. I
quickly sat up and twitched back the white drapes. I blinked.
Was this heaven? Had I died? Could anywhere possibly be (or
stay) this beautiful?
Photo by Melissa Maples
The Road
Back in the sixties, before I was even a salubrious thought, the
road to Kaş was a rubble-filled, death-defying event. It
writhed in agony the length of the turquoise coast, a bitumenless serpent in eternal escape. Those wealthy enough to own
cars ploughed the dirt with the wheels of their Devrims. The
non-wealthy lurched forward on donkeys. It could take a day
or eternity, depending on whether the switchbacks took you
or not. Too bad if you needed an emergency operation, or a
carton of milk for breakfast. Things moved at snail’s pace. The
steering wheel of life was firmly in the hands of fate, or kismet
as the Turks would say.
Kaş – New and Old
In a periwinkle rowboat
with a face
of ruts and grooves,
a fisherman rocks among the crystal drops,
his rudder shaking
the dark fishy plumes.
Sun blinding,
he stares at the young
diver men with ponytails,
sunglasses winking,
dimples twitching,
reeling in the tourist girls instead.
And the women,
hippie chicks and ladies
from ‘Stanbul,
cigarettes turning in their pretty hands
as they trot over the cobbles crying, ‘yok yaw’
Auntie stares from her wooden blue door
tucked in the awnings
of white-washed stone.
She gathers her laundry
amid living streets
of swinging coloured lanterns
and fluttering cloth.
Children squawk and skateboards collide,
scooters buzz like two-wheeled flies
about the salty, blue honey pot of the harbour,
both new and old.
Photo by Melissa Maples
Aperlae
If you visit Aperlae today, there remains nothing but a stone
house with forget-me-not shutters, and a spatter of ruins in
the background. It was not always so. Two thousand years
ago, Aperlae bustled with merchants, fishermen, and seafarers. The bay brimmed with Murex sea snails, too. The
purple dye made from their tiny bodies coloured the fabric of
the rich. Such a small mollusc. So valuable. As Aperlae
presided over the decimation of the Murex, it became wealthy.
It became Somewhere.
And then one day the last Aperlae Murex was crushed. The
last drop of dye squeezed. The last boat docked. It wasn’t the
first case of extinction caused by greed. It wouldn’t be the last.
Nothing would ever be the same, and yet some things never
change.
Kekova
It was the year 2000 and we were camped on a tiny seaside
plateau at Kekova’s rim. We were rucksack-toting adventurers
aboard the spanking new Lycian Way. As we tripped and
trotted through the Lycian countryside, we marvelled at the
footpaths, the red and white painted markers, the map. Such
things had never been seen (or needed) before. Who walked
other than the shepherds and villagers who already knew the
way? We were a new breed for a new Turkey; hikers.
As we packed up our tents, donned our packs and trekked into
Ucağız, I stared bleakly at the small pansiyons. Ah, it wouldn’t
last much longer now, would it? Everyone would be trekking
this route. And this was such a perfect spot, so obviously
appealing to tourists with its sunken city and its quayside fish
restaurants. It was sure to be one of the first places to fall. Sure
to be. I flinched at the prospect of the five star megalith which
never came to pass.
Photo by Tuğbahan Ozod
Adrasan – Hatice, Ayşe, Fatma
Hatice fiddled with the tails of her headscarf and scowled as
she tried, and failed, to read the sign at the entrance of
Adrasan’s sağlık ocağı. She had never learned the art of
reading. No one had ever seen the point. Squashing salça and
boiling up carob molasses didn’t require a lexicon. Now at
fifty-five, she chewed on her fleshy bottom lip as she squinted
at the mass of print. Did it say Doctor Evrim Karabulut?
Ayşe panted as she clambered up the steps. Her bosom was
clamped in a support bra, the lines of which were visible under
a tight white T shirt. Her henna-red hair was tied in a bun.
‘Mum, just sit a minute will you? I’m coming!’ She puffed. She
climbed to the top of the stairs and plonked herself heavily
into the chair next to her mother. She reached for the tabloid
newspaper someone had left on the next empty seat.
University Exam Results Better Than Ever, crowed the
headline.
‘I did it! I did it!’ Fatma appeared at the top of the staircase.
Beaming, she fluttered mascara laden lashes. Her long black
hair was coiffed in film star magnificence. She sat beside her
mother and grandmother. Three bottoms in a line, each
generation’s smaller than the previous one. Fatma pulled out
a brown envelope from her bag and handed it to her mother.
But Ayşe’s eyes were already moist.
Photo by Melissa Maples
Olympos
The mouth of the Olympos valley
opened wide and chortled.
A gravelly scoundrel’s laugh it was
shaking the morals
of any who dared to enter.
Because no one was ever the same
once the peculiar blue light of the stars had touched them,
or the sheer rocks cast their evening shadows.
The ancient city would whisper to them,
possess them.
And they would never be the same.
As they paddled in a midnight sea,
black as tar and warm as hot milk,
clouds of gold burst from under their hands,
magic sea beasts
in an enchanted bay.
And so they fell
willingly
under the spell.
The call of a reed flute
slid through the night.
A drum
beat out its primal imperative.
Silhouettes danced in the firelight,
mouths joining,
bodies falling.
And that was that.
There was no going back.
Olympos had taken their souls and their minds.
They would never be the same.
Çıralı
Artfully evading both the kitsch
and multi-storey.
Bridging both the ancient,
old and new.
Understanding development
not as concrete
but as attitude,
with turtle nests
and protests,
ecology and herbs,
evening peace
and therapies,
She is transforming
soul intact.
Photo by Tuğbahan Ozod
Also by Atulya K. Bingham
Winner of the One Big Book Launch, London
2014.
Hugh Pope, Today’s
Zaman
“Atulya K Bingham has
breathed new life into one of
Turkey’s most beautiful
surviving outposts of accessible
mountain wilderness.”
Julia Powers,
Turkey’s for Life
“Three days to read; that’s all
it took, for three days I’ve been
lost in time . . . and, if you
read this book, you will be too.
Travelogue meets historical fiction, Ayşe's Trail is a story
of one woman’s hike over the hills of southern
Turkey and the forgotten civilisation of ancient Lycia.
Ayşe’s Trail on the web. www.atulyakbingham.com
Ayşe’s Trail on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/atulyakbingham?ref=hl
Atulya K. Bingham has lived and worked in Turkey since 1997.
She is a writer and natural builder, and lives off-the-grid in a
house of mud somewhere in the Lycian hills.
She loves trees, writing, dogs, decent coffee, and her own
company.
Atulya is currently completing her next book Mudball, a
humorous and occasionally philosophical memoir of how she
and a fair few others built her earthbag house.