Antakya: Getting There

Last weekend my colleague Judy Isacoff and I traveled to Antakya (Antioch) for the weekend. We needed a break from our lives here and wanted to do a little sightseeing. Antakya was within striking distance so off we went.

The only transportation other than private car is a dolmush (In Turkish the "s" has a little tail and there is no “h” but I wrote it so you would know how the word sounds.) These are vans that run between two destinations but stop whenever someone wants to get off or on. The dolmush we took down was officially a 20-person van, a row of double seats on the left and a row of single seats down the right side. The one remarkable feature was the overhead lighting. There were almond-shaped lights – a little big longer and narrower than almonds -- placed crosswise in the ceiling. But the fun part is that they were fringed. Yes, about three-inch red fringe all around – a hint of bordello. And I must say, I wouldn’t have been disappointed if the ride had been the only thing we did that weekend. It was quite an experience. But back to the beginning.

When we arrived at the very large bus station in Gaziantep someone working there came up and asked if we spoke German – whew, I could actually ask a question and understand the answer. We told him we wanted to go to Antakya, and he guided us to the right place, a good thing because it's no small bus station. We then went into the station itself looking for a restroom. I was astonished. It was immaculately clean. The actual building is circular and there were all sorts of little shops in a smaller concentric circle inside the terminal. You had to pay one lira to use the restroom, but it was very clean and there was an attendant on duty. How different from your average Greyhound bus station.

When we pulled out of the bus station, there were only four passengers, plus a young man whose job it was to collect fares from people as they boarded along the way. There were also two other people sitting in the front seat with the driver -- don'gtknow who they were. Anyhow, I thought the fares from the four of us would hardly cover gas money. It was about $12 one way. I need not have worried. We drove very slowly through the city, picking up passengers here and there, and by the time we passed the city limits, the van was full – and not only with people. At one stop, a group of men loaded six extremely large bags of corn, still in the husks, onto the van. Three of them fit into the luggage compartment but the other three came right into the van. Two were wedged into the passenger seat behind the driver and the other right inside the door. Never would have passed muster in the US.

The bus stopped here and there. A father and son got off at a dirt road leading up to a village – we figured they might be visiting grandparents for the day. An elderly woman got off in what seemed the middle of nowhere. There were some houses on the other side of the four-lane highway. Who knows. I felt like someone should have seen her safely across, but we just drove on.

After driving through a hilly, dry, rocky landscape for about a half hour, we began a very steep descent. For those who have driven I-5 north from California to Oregon, it reminded me of the descent into Ashland. I was surprised to see that the hillside to our left was treed, lot of healthy looking long-needled pines. Then the view opened up. I was awestruck. Far below us on the north side was a vast agricultural valley. You could clearly see the individual fields. Further north were mountains, and if you looked carefully, you could see snow on the top of the chain of mountains behind. It was quite a view, and so different from what you see around Gaziantep.

As we got closer to the valley itself, you could see the peppers and/or tomatoes drying on the rooftops. People had obviously put down rectangular tarps and filled the tarps with the red peppers because the red patches on the roofs were perfect rectangles. A bit later I actually saw peppers drying on a tarp spread out in a cemetery. Some people had built bowers over part of the roof. Somehow the secured four uprights to the roof – they looked like the trunks of saplings – and then created a shelter or sunshade out of leafy branches. They reminded me of the sun shelters you see on the Navaho reservation. Later we saw similarly constructed shelters along the road – perhaps designed for people waiting for rides.

After a good hour we came into a town called Nuragi. If we had continued east we would have ended up in Adana, a port city known to most Americans because there is a big US air base nearby. However, we headed south, hugging the mountains on the western side of the valley all the way to Antakya. Just after we exited the traffic circle in Nuragi, the bus pulled over to the side of the road. A man with a tray of breads shaped like large round pretzels topped with sesame seeds came aboard. I’d noticed him running across the traffic circle when we pulled through town. I thought he was just in a hurry somewhere - dodging traffic quite adriotly - but he was meeting our bus. Actually, these rolls are sold all over, and they aren’t at all like pretzels. The bread is soft and really tasty. I bought one for about 35 cents. Good deal.

I have no idea what is grown in that marvelous valley, but I assume it’s mostly the produce that ends up in our local markets. Most of the fields had been plowed or looked like they might have been left fallow. We did see some people picking cotton as we got closer to Antalya. We also saw some lettuce fields – there’s a lot of romaine in the markets. There were also fields of corn – the stocks all dried. I image it's intended for silage. People got on and off all the way south – some in small towns along the way and others in places where not even a house was in sight. Sometimes entire families climbed aboard and were accommodated somehow. Sometimes the young man who collected fares and was generally in charge of the passengers would ask someone to move so that a devout Muslim female passenger did not have to sit next to a strange man.

Sadly, we finally had to leave the agricultural scene. I had to chuckle. The highway into Antakya is lined with about every car/truck/van dealer you could things of – the Germans, Japanese, French, Koreans and Americans were all represented. I guess it’s a sign of having joined the industrialized world. And we had arrived at the place were Christians were first Christians and Paul had begun his missionary work.