"Allah's Warm Dagger"
Istanbul, Turkey
August 23, 1984
Dear Folks,
As the geographical and cultural meeting point of West and East, Turkey will provide many of the best adventures yet on the walk. With Istanbul as the door into Asia, it seems fitting that the journey's halfway mark is only 500 miles further.
I must confess that originally this nation of 45 million was not on my walk's planned route. It was only with the greatest reluctance and anxiety that, long after the start of the worldwalk, I decided to cross Turkey's windswept plains and rugged mountain passes. It was while I was in Morocco that I realized I would reach the Middle East during the hottest part of the year, and I knew then I would have to forfeit my original target of Egypt and, instead, cross the cooler terrain of Turkish Asia Minor.
At the time I made the decision to cross Turkey (rather than Egypt), a part of me felt as if I was trading a diamond for a dull, filthy dagger. Egypt is so well-known internationally for its warmth and kindness to visitors, while on the other hand all I'd ever heard of the Turkish society was of police and military brutality, corruption, and poverty. The fact that over three million Turkish men work in Germany convinced me that in Turkey I'd again find the terrible poverty I suffered through in North Africa. I worried that a nation that had such a large percentage of its males traveling so far to find work must be a desperate place.
As a result of negative publicity from newspaper accounts of the harsh, oftentimes deadly, crackdowns on public demonstrations by Turkey's military, and my vivid memories of a Hollywood film,Midnight Express, which I'd seen while in college, I felt a great fear of being alone and on foot in Turkey's remoteness. The film had been about a lone American's horrendous treatment in a Turkish prison.
In the likewise militaristic and Muslim Morocco, I'd had had nightmarish experiences that I could see being repeated in Turkey. And even before that, there'd been a bad incident at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C. It had been in February 1983, during my pre-walk visit to the embassies.
Late one afternoon I'd gone, briefcase in hand, to the heavily-guarded Turkish Embassy. At that time I was searching for the Turkish consulate offices. When I located the consulate's thick steel door, it was locked, and a sign on the door directly below a bulletproof peek-window listed the work hours as being during morning hours. So I set my briefcase down beside the door, to fish out a pen and notebook, when suddenly a gruff voice from behind commanded me to raise my arms or I was a dead man. Well, I reached for the clouds, then I spun about to find one of the biggest, meanest-looking D.C. law officers I'd ever seen. Expertly gripped in her hands was a cloth-covered machine gun. The look on her face left no doubt I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was only after much loud and brusque questioning that I was allowed to leave. As I did, I tiredly snapped to the officer that it wouldn't have hurt her personality to try being a little nicer.
"I don't get paid to be nice!" she growled.
That evening I decided I would most definitely go to Egypt after Greece, for guns, fear, and armor-plated doors had no place on my agenda. However, Egypt was not to happen, especially since the summer heat in Greece had been ferocious, and common sense told me the sun and heat in Egypt would only be worse.
Now, after all the new Turkish friends I've made in crossing the 160 miles of this country's European portion, I feel a bit embarrassed at how easily I had prejudged a people I'd never even met. Afetrall, that policewoman in D.C. had been an American, not one of the Turkish workers at thir consulate. And the policewoman's roughness towards me had not been personal, and it had no doubt occurred because only a few days before, in California, a Turkish diplomat had been killed by an Armenian assassin. Could she be blamed for fearing I might have had a bomb in the briefcase I set beside the consulate's door?
And as for that filmMidnight Express, I should know that Hollywood is not always close to reality. Now, I realize I was mostly wrong in thinking that Muslim societies must be alike. Not so, I've discovered. Just as a society's overall character can't be based simply upon the skin color of its people, so it is with that society's religion. Each Muslim nation has been as vastly different from the others as, say, Catholic Ireland and France and Italy are different from one another.
In fact, long before I left North Africa, the thought of visiting Muslim Turkey had become intriguing. In contrast to Morocco, Algeria's hospitality at times had bordered on being fairytale-like. In village after village in someparts of Algeria I had been surrounded by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of curious people wanting so much to know who I was, where I was from, and why--for the sake of Allah!--was I in their corner of the world on foot and alone.
They'd wanted nothing from me, other than stories of my own homeland (which they receive so little of in their tightly-controlled media). The Muslim Algerians had wanted to give and give and give--so much so that many days I had had to continue walking well past nightfall, lest the locals discover where I was camped and come to my tent, to merrily drag me away to their homes and stuff my agonized insides with yet another meal of couscous, mint tea and goat milk.
In many towns I had had to stride through with my eyes riveted to the asphalt, pretending not to hear the shouts of welcome from cafes and tea houses. Being befriended by a Muslim nearly always means several big meals, constant entertainment, and a bed for the night, complete with tucking me under the bed covers (always done by the men, which, as with all the handholding and kissing of the men with each other, took me quite a while to get used to).
Had I not learned to be "rude" to all the Muslim benefactors constantly coming to me in Algeria and Tunisia, I might still be in Africa living the life of a blessed tramp. To illustrate the warmth I found throughout Algeria, consider that I spent only 200 of the 1,000 dinars that I was required to purchase upon entering that country--even though it took me 40 days to cross to Tunisia!
Now, in Turkey, I find the thought that these same people once plundered alongside the likes of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun an almost preposterous idea. In the past 12 days the warmth of the Turks has been a stark contrast to all the cold, high stone fortifications I passed in Europe that were built long ago to keep out the Turk's warring ancestors
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"I think you will find yourself spending more days in Turkey `resting' than walking," laughed a carpet dealer from Istanbul who, like many others, had invited me off the street to the family's meal table.
Well, I'll soon be fiinding out if what the carpet dealer told me is true. My next destination, Pakistan and India, may have to be a bit more patient, if my "evil" Turks have their way. Unless, of course, I learn to be more "rude."
Steven