Eastern Turkey

Now it was time to head north to Diyarbakir. I was pissed at Isik for having sung Mardin folksongs the whole time we were around… Read More »Puking in Diyarbakir and Nemrut Dag

All these stories and Kadri suddenly opened up in the car about his family history: Armenian; his grandfather died at 42, Musur, went from Caucus… Read More »Threatened Hasankeyf

I was getting to see all the places I wanted and they pretty much let me decide, and I kept saying, east. We drove to… Read More »Syrian monks at the Saffron monastery

I had big plans for the next day, we’d see monasteries and border towns and Hasankeyf and it would all be just so, but Turkey… Read More »The Kurdish lord of Viransehir

The next morning we saw Urfa, and it was like having left the country – very middle-east; little Turkish spoken; Kurdish and Arabic; covered women;… Read More »Bazaar in Urfa

After three days at Elif’s father’s house in Antalya, swimming and eating as if on a beached cruise ship, Kadri announced that we’d be going… Read More »East to the Syrian border

It was late in the day by the time we got to Erzurum, and it felt as if we had left Kurdistan and entered Saudi… Read More »In the terrorists’ footsteps

After staying up with our new Israeli friends, we discovered back in the hotel at 12:30AM that there was no water at all; when we… Read More »Checkpoints in Kurdistan

Four hours later, at 5AM (on Monday the 24th), Dilek is so hot, sleepless, and livid that Co? would treat us this way that she… Read More »Ancient Armenia under military escort