#26: Delusion and Reality on the Black Sea Coast (August 14, 2022, the severed branch)
Travels along Turkey's northern coast take me through Amasra, Kastamonu, and Trabzon; fantasies about the edge of the world give way to the realities of history
Above: The sun sets over the Black Sea and Trabzon, Turkey (all pictures my own)
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July 2010
I spent both evenings in Amasra simply walking along the water, watching the colors change as the sun set and eagerly awaiting the night. For months, I had privately obsessed over the beauty of pitch-black bodies of water. Whenever it came, I was unable to resist the opportunity to stand before that great emerging darkness in a semi-worshipful trance. When the water was near a city or town, with lights to obstruct the brightest stars, the blackness was even more intense. The inability to see the immense surface of the sea, which only an hour before might have been glittering in the light of the sun, enabled me to nurture the delusion that the beach was the beginning of the Divinity’s handicraft. The foamy waves which emerged from the shadowy depths were elemental emanations of the Deity, the foundations of Creation.
But as much as I wished to believe in these mysteries, for several weeks now they had been something about which I could only fantasize. I had left the Adriatic a month ago, and other than while in Istanbul I had been far away from any coast which might tempt me away from my bunk at the hostel. But here in Amasra, I finally had the chance to silently behold the way the sun set over the water and then gave way to the vast empty beauty of the Black Sea at night. I paced alone about the shore for hours; I walked through the sunset, the dusk, and finally the night, before reluctantly returning to the isolation of my tiny pink room at the guesthouse.
Above: The Black Sea and its surroundings (Wikimedia Commons)
I had often dreamed of standing on the distant shores of the Black Sea in particular. True, I had visited Istanbul twice and seen it from there, but such a storied capital of civilization seemed incompatible with my stimulating delusions about this mighty expanse. To me, the Black Sea was a place of primitive magic and natural forces. When I lived in Germany, I had sat in my room looking at maps and imagining how I might arrive travel east overland until finally reaching shores of Romania. Once there in the great port of Constanta, I would board a vampire-infested ship bound for the shaman-populated shores of Georgia. This was my idea of a successful tour around the Black Sea. And yet once I actually did reach Romania back then, I made it no further east than Dracula’s castle at Brasov, from where I headed southwest for Serbia. After this, maps of Europe began to haunt me more fervently, reminding me of the worlds which had proven beyond my reach. I became obsessed with launching a second expedition, also from Germany. This time I would reach the other side.
It would only be truly satisfactory if I never returned. I had read in books about Russian military officers disappearing into the Caucasus. There, they dressed up in the clothing of villagers and wisemen, mythomaniacally claiming as their own the culture of the people whom they strove to subdue. I contemplated living in seclusion with the nineteenth-century imperialists’ descendants and their indigenous assistants. Working closely with their great-grandchildren in the rickety wooden structures of a remote, mountainous, and untamed Georgian interior, I would master the forbidden and twisted fundamentals of a primeval sorcery. In the serene isolation of those staggering altitudes, where the thinness of the air facilitates an easy communion between the realms, I would pray with the native Georgian witches, conjuring up ghosts from the stones of the most ancient Christian churches. Although Moscow may claim the mantle of Byzantium as the Defender of Orthodoxy, Georgia and Armenia were the first two countries to adopt Christianity as the official state religion. They did so long before even the most learned sages had ever dreamed of a place called Russia. So as I set forth for cultures with such an unbroken connection across the ages to Christ, I anticipated the Light of God reverberating through me.
Above: Evening in Amasra’s harbor
My more rational mind, though only occasionally divorced from the exhilarating hysterics of my most deluded fantasies, had long imagined the Black Sea as a natural barrier to my journeys. Travel, you see, only counts when it is completed by land or water. And since Germany was the starting point for all of my earliest expeditions, the Black Sea constituted the outer edges of reasonable possibility. How would I ever have the time to get to the other side? My principled refusal to fly meant that eastern Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Caspian Sea, all of which lay beyond the Black Sea, had always felt especially far away and unreachable. From Germany, I would need to proceed through the exclusive use of roads, rails, and ships. And that is what I was finally doing in the summer of 2010 when I at last reached Amasra after several weeks of overland travel across Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and central Turkey. I had started this trip in Freiburg, Germany, with Armenia on the other side of the Black Sea as my ultimate goal, and I had at last arrived at the water’s edge. It satisfied me to have traversed this distance on my own, even if I was still at a significant distance from my final destination.
It was time for my Black Sea delusions, although they had been entertaining companions for my long bus and train rides across Europe, to give way to the glimmering real world. Walking along the shores of the small town of Amasra, I was treated to my first actual vision of the Black Sea beyond the old suburbs and fortresses of Constantinople. I was stunned by the many views of Amasra’s two small islands and the stone bridge which connects them, the whole of which I saw from above as my bus had begun descending from the surrounding mountains down into the city. The old town’s presence around a small bay and two harbors enhances the beauty of the mountains and cliffs which surround it. I paced around for hours in a zealous quest to savor every possible perspective of the red roofs and alluring minarets. Having just been in Cappadocia, where a much drier and less forested biome prevailed, I greedily inhaled the salty crisp air which rose up from the sea and the surrounding dark green forests. I passed through each of Amasra’s small harbors, noticing the relaxed fishermen who saw all this every day. Crowded against the docks and rocky shorelines, there seemed to be a sufficient number of boats for every resident of the old town. I walked all the way out to the lighthouse, where I awaited the night.
Above: Wandering along the coast on the outskirts of Amasra
In the meantime, I thought about the dizzying variety of cultures, religions, and civilizations whose connections, expansions, and declines have all been facilitated by the Black Sea. Amasra’s islands are dense with the structures left behind by the military forces and commercial interests who have come and gone: a tower built 3,000 years ago, a castle designed by the Romans and the Byzantines, walls put in place by the Italian merchant-warriors of Genoa, the structural remnants of the Ottoman Empire, and the modern buildings that characterize Turkey today.
These influences are a reminder that the Black Sea has not only acted as a barrier as I liked to imagine it, but rather as a simultaneously benevolent and ruthless conduit of movement and exchange between peoples and regions. In late antiquity, although the Black Sea often did act as a defense from such attacks, northern steppe barbarians once descended upon the richest parts of the Roman Empire by daringly crossing the Black Sea and raiding the opulent estates of modern Turkey. Centuries before that, Greek merchants and city-states colonized what are today Turkish shores. In Crimea, the Greeks built further outposts and fortresses through which passed the Ukrainian grain that fed the ancient population of Athens.
From these ports and colonies emerged a trading network which, thanks to the extensive river networks of modern Ukraine and Russia, extended into the depths of Ukraine to the north. The Italians would later take over much of this network, with fierce competition between Venice and Genoa for control over the enriching commerce passing across these waters. It was even via these same networks that the Black Death reached Europe in the 1340s; the Mongols brought it from Central Asia to Ukraine, where it spread to Italian merchants in Crimea and then arrived by ship in faraway Sicily. From there, the plague killed some 60% of all Europeans in an early round of globalization’s dark side. The Black Sea, then, is not merely a protective or inhibitive obstacle. It is a grim, glittering, amoral facilitator of international interaction. What I imagined as the edge of the Earth is like one of its central nodes.
But alone and isolated in Amasra, I did not feel like I was in the middle of the world. Although I stood unknowingly on the precipice of great adventure and strenuous travel, my long mornings and afternoons in Amasra seemed like the harbinger of a quieter and more secluded time to come. In the daytime, I spent many hours writing letters and journal entries at cafes and on benches. When I wasn’t writing, I simply walked up and down the roads watching old Turkish men play backgammon. Drinking tea inside one of the great backgammon cafes, I noticed the same old men sitting across from their opponents for hours, competing day in and day out.
I felt, for the first time, truly far away, and this is what I had hoped to feel upon finally reaching the shores of the Black Sea. I had just been in Cappadocia and Ankara, both technically further from Germany. But in those places, whether in Cappadocia’s crowded youth hostel or in the couchsurfing hosts’ Ankara apartment, I had been surrounded by ephemeral friends and experienced travelers. In Amasra, on the other hand, I had my own private room for only the second time in nearly 40 nights. I couldn’t find a hostel with dorms, and although there were plenty of Turkish families here on vacation, there were virtually no signs of any other backpackers in the city. This was as I had expected, since my Turkish couchsurfing hosts in Ankara had recommended this as a coastal destination which wasn’t flooded by European tourists. In my secluded space within a small guest house, lacking Internet or phone service beyond what I might briefly purchase at an Internet cafe, I felt genuinely alone for the first time in weeks. And from this point forward on my trip, I knew that I would be increasingly on my own. The further east I went along the Black Sea, the less likely I was to encounter meaningful concentrations of American and European travelers, and it was partly this which helped push me along on my journey.
Above: Kastamonu’s tenth-century Byzantine fortress looms on the hilltop
But soon I shared a bedroom with one, a young Christian man from Germany, in a dingy hotel off the side of the road through the city of Kastamonu to the east. I hadn’t planned on going there at all, but it is where the available public transportation schedules doomed me to sleep when I departed from Amasra after two special days.
I had met the German on the bus. He was the only other passenger who was obviously a backpacker. Together we wandered around Kastamonu debating the non-existence of God until, to save money in a city without any hostels, I asked him if he wanted to share a room with me. After he answered in the affirmative, we found ourselves invited to join a group of Turks having a savory feast in a flowery courtyard. They were a large extended family celebrating a child’s birthday, an event to which I think very few Americans would invite a random stranger off the street. But in Kastamonu, the Islamic virtue of hospitality took over when the revelers saw us drenched in sweat while aimlessly hauling around our big backpacks. We were soon seated with them partaking of their food. By this point it was quite normal to me that Turks would simply invite me to eat or drink with them, and (at least outside of Istanbul) I had ceased to automatically feel suspicious of ulterior motives.
We gave our thanks and said our goodbyes. Then we continued our explorations, enjoying the views of the Kastamonu castle perched up on the city’s fortified hilltop. That mighty fortress was built by a Byzantine commander in the tenth century. In that era, the city was still called Timonion, as it long had been under the Romans. And as an East Roman municipality, it was theoretically ruled by a universal Christian empire. But although he represented an Eastern Orthodox theocracy which claimed to be the Father’s vehicle for human salvation, the general also served an emperor, Basil the Bulgar Slayer, who infamously blinded nearly 15,000 Bulgarian soldiers. These he sent back, under the guidance of the few whose eyes he spared, to the terrified Bulgar king. Such was the Christ-like regime which built the beautiful castle now looming over the entire Muslim city of Kastamonu. But even if the wretched Byzantines were fortunately doomed to vanish from the Earth, the very word “Kastamonu” is a Turkish bastardization of the old Christian commander’s name. Manual Erotikos Komnenos, as he was called, naturally christened his fortification Kastra Komnenon, which eventually inspiring the Turks to call the whole town Kastamonu.
After our wanderings, we checked into a hotel and split the bill. Soon we were lying in parallel beds drifting off to sleep. But a fear of what the Lord might do to me once I died seems to have kept my restless companion awake. The fundamentalist German Evangelical, a curious combination of identities to begin with, had repeatedly told me throughout the day how startled he was that an American could be so adamantly atheist. American culture, he seemed to believe, was the apex of Evangelical morality. “I just don’t understand,” he suddenly asked me in the dark, “how you really don’t believe in God.” I told him that I may not believe in God, but I do believe from time to time in demons. The next morning, we parted ways, never to meet again. I continued eastward for hundreds of miles until I finally reached the old Greek colony of Trabzon.
Above: The grounds of Sumela Monastery
After being founded by Greeks in the eighth century BC as one of several trading outposts sprinkled along the Black Sea, Trabzon spent millennia at the center of the region’s often thriving commercial networks. Over the centuries, its merchants were connected with others as far away as Persia, Crimea, and Italy. Portions of the old Silk Road trade even passed through its port facilities during the days of the Pax Romana (27 BC - AD 180) and especially during the reign of the Turkish Seljuk Empire (AD 1037 - 1194). Goods arrived by road from Iran or Arabia to be shipped further westward. Trabzon reached its political zenith during the late Middle Ages, after the collapse of the Seljuk Empire, when it served as the capital of a short-lived Greek coastal kingdom encapsulating much of modern Turkey’s northern coast and portions of the Crimean peninsula (AD 1204 - 1461).
All this, however, was before the next wave of Muslim conquests in the fifteenth century. The arrival of Turkish artillery brought an end to the Greek king of Trabzon’s increasingly improbable claims to Roman emperorship and inaugurated the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, whose armies would reach as far west as Vienna. By the time I arrived in Trabzon at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the city had passed through the control not only of the Ottomans, whose empire collapsed after the First World War, but also that of the Russians, whose self-styled Caesars once proclaimed themselves the ultimate protectors of all Christians within the sultan’s lands. Today, the city is a major port in modern Turkey, funneling trade from the Black Sea to Iran and Iraq just as it has since ancient times.
The day after I arrived in Trabzon, I took a bus for a day trip to the Sumela Monastery in the nearby mountains. On board, I struck up a conversation with a Turkish guy about my age, 22. He was from Istanbul but was visiting Trabzon for a short weekend trip. Together we roamed the grounds of the fourth-century Greek Orthodox institution. The monastery, impressively built into the sides of a mountain with stunning views the over the lush forests of a temperate high-altitude environment, is a reminder that this predominantly Muslim region was once among the fanatical heartlands of early Christianity. Here is where the East Roman and Byzantine emperors devoted portions of their treasuries to the construction of buildings into which young men retreated for entire lifetimes of insular and single-minded monkhood. But this early Christian fanaticism, which saw East Roman emperors reigning as the men appointed by God to bring salvation to the whole of humanity, was only the first phase of 1600 years of religious despotism.
It would not be until the advent of modern Turkey in 1922, which emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire collapsing in the early twentieth century, that the people of this region would live under a regime that did not claim authority delegated by the One True God. This modernizing project of separating religion from the state, so that religion would be a matter for individuals and their smaller communities rather than for society and government as a whole, was at the core of modern Turkey’s founding ideologies. Lately, however, these principles have been called into question by more religiously minded leadership, which is committed to political Islam.
Once back in town, my new friend and I met for dinner at a restaurant. We were perched up on top of a hill at the outer edges of Trabzon. From there we had magnificent views over the city below as the sun dropped into the water, its once circular shape gradually warping into streaks of sharp orange light. We lingered there for hours as the sun’s very being melted brilliantly into the clouds and shimmering waves. Eventually that great fire lost its form entirely, merging with the surrounding elements to be resurrected the next day. We ordered several rounds of Efes, a Turkish pilsner, while the vanished sun’s light continued to dissipate, transforming into dusk.
Throughout the evening, I found my companion to be a highly informed and intelligent converser. We talked for several hours about Turkish domestic politics, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the status of women in various regions around Turkey, the European Union’s prospects for expansion, and the rise of political Islam.
“I would never date a woman who wore a headscarf,” he told me. “I cannot love a woman who has those kinds of attitudes. My girlfriend would never wear one.”
Above: Turkey’s Black Sea region has a cool, refreshing climate with mountains and waterfalls
He told me what he thought about Erdogan, then Turkey’s prime minister and now its president. Erdogan, a proponent of Islam in government, was initiating reforms which challenged the state’s secular foundations. My Turkish companion’s own father had been a high-ranking military officer, and he maintained confidence that the armed forces would, if necessary, put an end to Erdogan’s religious political program. “If not, he is going to turn us into Iran,” my Turkish companion said. In his views, my Turkish acquaintance placed himself firmly in the tradition of Turkey’s modern founder.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the founder and first president of modern Turkey in 1922. Thinking of himself as a “Westernizer” bringing modernity to his country, he wanted Turkey to maintain strict divisions between mosque and state. And he feared that this effort might be hindered if the religious fundamentalists of the more conservative interior attained too much political or cultural power. That meant, first of all, that this project was always in tension with democracy, which was cast to the side in favor of a one party state effectively ruled dictatorially by Mustafa Kemal and his henchmen. Secondly, it meant that certain aspects of religious expression within public or governmental spheres took on new significance. The headscarf, a visible symbol in Atatürk’s mind of the oppression of women flowing from fundamentalist religion, was duly banned within the offices of the state and the classrooms of the universities.
Once Atatürk passed from the scene, repeated military interventions resulted in the removal and execution of elected leaders. The officers organizing these coups cited the need to ensure that democratization would not threaten secularism, that the state would always be separate from religion, and that electoral politics would not cause chaos or instability in the country. In the same way that one country’s armed forces might swear an oath to the constitution, the Turkish military took the defense of secularism as one of its core values, and this was by the original design of Ataturk. He himself was an army man, and his was a regime with officers at the center. He and his generals were the nation’s real leaders, and their successors would maintain this sense of responsibility even as Turkey began to democratize in the 1950’s. It is only recently that this order has been overturned. Parliament lifted the headscarf ban for universities in 2008 and state offices in 2013, while an attempt by the military to overthrow the government failed in 2016. In the past decade, many changes have been shepherded by Turkey’s new founding father, Erdogan. Unfortunately, he is hardly any more democratic than Ataturk. The same process of democratization which brought him to power is being reversed under his rule. The routine jailing of academics and journalists only intensified after the 2016 coup attempt.
Back then, however, that recent coup was still six years in the future, and my friend was optimistically awaiting the intervention of the generals. Citing his family members who were proud soldiers in the armed forces, he was sure that the officers would not allow his country to continue down a path he found so distressing. “If it is necessary,” he told me between swigs of his beer, “the military will deal with Erdogan, just like they always have.” But while he was concerned about the rise of political Islam in his country, he was utterly opposed to any moves which might grant Turkey’s large Kurdish minority greater autonomy over their own affairs. Turkish nationalism, even to the implicit exclusion of other ethnic groups and languages, was one of several principles which animated his political views. In fact, it was a commitment to the Turkish identity at the expense of all others which formed a second core founding principle of Atatürk’s government.
Above: A view of a harbor in Amasra
My friend was thus flustered by the news that I was heading from here for Turkey’s southeast, a Kurdish-dominated region of the country which had been in open rebellion as recently as the 90s. 40,000 people had died in the conflict with the Kurds, and my sunset companion was proud to inform me that his uncle, a high-ranking officer in the Turkish military, was responsible for the heaviest hits against the so-called Kurdish terrorists. I was not interested in accidentally breaking one of Turkey’s laws against speech, so I refrained from verbally justifying the Kurdish uprising.
Still, I did want to ask him how he could possibly justify the discrimination which Turkey had long promoted against Kurdish language and culture. From 1980 until 1991, by order of the former year’s nationalistic coup, Kurds were forbidden from speaking their language. Many Turks persist in the denial that there is any such thing as a Kurdish people. But it was not for these reasons that my travels concerned him. He was worried primarily about my safety, since the conflict was ongoing. While watching the lights from a ship flicker in the distance out in the sea, I listened to him talk on speaker phone in Turkish with a military contact.
Hanging up after a lengthy back-and-forth, he shrugged. “He says it’s mostly safe.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” I said, although in truth I was quite nervous. The State Department website seemed concerned about roadside bombs, but the travel forums said this was all totally exaggerated, and a friend of mine had ventured there without issues just over a year before. True, battles and skirmishes had taken place recently, but I figured I could avoid these.
“You really should consider just going to the Aegean,” my Turkish friend said. “It’s beautiful. It’s safe. You can go to the beach. You can party. You can relax. There’s lots of girls there. Turkish girls too. Really hot Turkish girls, man.”
“I have wanted to go to the southeast for a long time. I can’t leave Turkey without going there.”
“Well,” he said, “just be careful then.”
In the face of my determination to go in spite of warnings from multiple governments, my ephemeral friend gradually grew jealous of my trip rather than worried about it. He began asking for details about the cities I wanted to visit: Erzurum, Dogubayazit, Van, Diyarbakir, Mardin, Sanilurfa. Places I had not even known existed until just four or five months ago. It was exhilarating to contemplate what was to come as I plunged into what was for me uncharted territory. The spirit of this trip was to reach new distances in my travels, and I was on the verge of achieving just that.
The whole sky eventually went black, and the city below then ended not at the edge of a glittering sea but at the perimeter of an infinite nothingness. Admiring the immensity of the darkness before us, we squinted for unlikely glimpses of the lights across the water in the Russian city of Sochi. We soon had to concede that any faint glow we might catch must surely be coming from a ship. We lingering a while longer, hoping both to savor the perfection of the night and delay our inevitable separation. But he had a flight, and I intended to catch an early bus. We finally embraced while saying our goodbyes. I woke up at sunrise the next morning and boarded a bus for Erzurum, my gateway to the Kurdish regions. A travel fantasy which for weeks I had been unsure about actually accomplishing was about to become reality.