With the memories of Byzantium still in mind, we flew from Istanbul to the last Byzantine outpost of Trabzon. Today, a traveler needs a vivid imagination to reconstruct a vision of the past from the current industrial and grimy port of Trabzon, with its Russian markets. Several parks and mosques are worth a visit, especially the Aya Sophia, standing on a bluff overlooking the Black Sea.

We then moved inland to Erzerum and Kars, visiting the medieval Armenian town of Ani, (map).  We then moved south thru Igdir and Dogubayezit to Van.After exploring the Urartian ruins there, we drove to Nemrut Dag, then to Diyarbakir, Urfa and on to Antakya, near the Syrian border.

Silk Road

“This is mountain scenery of the most magnificent variety.  At Kale stands an old blackened castle in a desperate pass, the rushing river between sheer rock walls, the wild sharp mountains upreared against the sky.  From the heights above Torut, in the very matrix of mountains, such a wilderness of peaks and winding valleys as I never saw before lay below us, threaded with rivers gleaming up through the smoky, cloudy light of the evening .  This is scenery for the hand of the illustrator, and the vocabulary of the narrator, to work upon until they produce together a volume which will satisfy the romantic expectations of the armchair traveller.  Here the crags ‘beetle’, the cliffs, ‘frown’, the heights are ‘dizzy’, chasms ‘yawn’, and the rivers are all ‘cataracts’”

Trabzon:

“In the recesses of his imagination everyone, I believe , must carry a secret map given him in childhood with the sites of treasure trove marked upon it where the rest of the world sees only a town’s name, and to travel is to try and reach these sites, pickaxe in hand, hoping against hope for the ring of its blade on the buried casket. ..”

“Unfortunately, modernization, in all but a handful of countries rich enough to afford nostalgia, consists in pulling down just about very thing that the tourist from those few rich countries would like to see, and in putting in its place, all that interests him least about the provincial cities of his own land.  The truth is that few individuals have ever traveled, in modern times, to see what other countries are like nowadays; in general people travel in search of traces of past eras and they have in consequence almost always been disappointed by what exists when they get there….The disappointments are brought about by the mis-preparation of your mind for what really exists; yet it’s the mis-preparation – the treasure trove buried in your mind under certain place-names in early days – which draws you on to travel in the first place.  Perhaps if I’d known what it’s really like in most of Trabzon nowadays, I wouldn’t have come. Only by not knowing, by refusing to listen, by insisting on setting out with pickaxe and secret map, can you hope to find Trabezond.”