Socks And Jocks

"Ive said it before, Only 1 person can take the blame for this circus at Arsenal and that is Mr Burns aka Wenger who was toothless in the transfer market in the summer. This is what you get for being so fcking tight, You only have yourself to blame Wenger."

- Attila, from the Gooner Forum.

I'm back in Istanbul, and I'm staying in the same hostel that I did when I first arrived. I'm even in the same room, and only two beds along from the one I slept in before. It's quite odd. They say you should never go back, and I'm starting to realise it applies to hostels as well. Everyone I knew from two weeks ago has left. The rooftop bar's been closed for winter. And the new people are, well, new. 

It's a shock to realise just how transient your experiences really are.

I suppose I should say something about the Villa game. I've been avoiding it because there isn't anything new to say. It's all pretty obvious. We played crap and deserved to lose. If we play like that again, we're not going to qualify for the Champions League next season. We need reinforcements in January because our current players aren't good enough. And if we don't get those players, Cesc Fabregas will leave at the end of the season.

It's all been said before, and I'm sick of saying it again.

I spent today exploring the streets between the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar. It's quite an interesting area. It's a maze of shops and malls and little side-alleys. You can buy virtually everything in there - baby turtles, Turkish Delight, cameras, power drills, designer clothes, weapons.... but I ended up just buying a bunch of socks and boxer shorts. It's tempting to buy something touristy, like a hand-woven carpet, but I've a limited budget and I'm running out of the essentials. I'm sick of wearing the same pair of underwear for days on end. 

And there's a lesson in that for Arsenal, maybe. It's exciting to consider the potential of our kids, and it's probably incredibly fun to try and unearth the next Zidane or Pele, but what we really need right now is a solid defensive midfielder and a gusty central defender. We've been shopping for the future for so long that we've run out of underwear. I know it's tempting to continue buying those baby turtles and 1 YTL lottery tickets, but we're hopelessly exposed at the moment, and we live in terror of our next de-pantsing. 

Time to buy some socks and jocks, Arsene. 

Troy

Sing, goddess, of Achilles' ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans,
And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes
To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs
And birds of prey.

 - The Iliad, first lines, Book 1

The first Troy I knew came from the World Book encyclopedia. I was really into Greek myths as a kid, and the Trojan War was the ancient world's equivalent of a red carpet parade at the Oscar's. After reading all the articles, I was curious whether Ajax the Lesser ever had resented being compared to Ajax the Greater. 

The second Troy I knew was from this book they got us to read in Year 7, "The Luck of Troy". It was an account of the Trojan War from the point of view of Helen's kid by Menelaus. It's a sanitised version of the events, with Helen being bewitched by Paris, Achilles being a gentleman, and Menelaus being a concerned husband and father who just wants his family together again. 

The third Troy I knew was from school textbooks. It's where I learnt about Schliemann and his penchant for dynamite and ancient buried treasure. It was also my first exposure to the scale of the plunder that 19th century Europeans carted back to their cities.  

The fourth Troy I knew was from the Iliad. It had got to the stage where I was so curious about this stuff that I wanted to read from the source. I wasn't really prepared for the galleons of blood, guts and gore that our heroes waded through, nor the 400 pages of prose verse I had to wade through. It was moving, though, especially went I got to the lines, "and then they buried Hector, tamer of horses".

The fifth Troy I knew was from the film. It starred Brad Pitt as Achilles, Eric Bana as Hector and Darryl Hannah as Helen. It was panned by the critics, but it wasn't too bad. Of course, Oliver Stone's decision to take away the supernatural aspects from the film was like stripping a Disney film of smultz, but I liked the realpolitick elements. And Rose Byrne is a bit of alright. 

The sixth Troy I know, I visited today. It's the real Troy, a city perched on a hill overlooking a plain, with the Dardanelles on the horizon. The walls are high and strong and if you squint, you can almost see the armies of Agamemnon arrayed on the fields below the city. There's nothing much else left of the city - it's been called a "ruin of a ruin" - but it's a big kick to walking around it. 

There are nine Troys all up, built one on top of each other. The sixth one is considered the Troy of the Iliad, and the ruins date mainly from the ninth, Roman Troy. Schliemann blasted through a lot of strata to get to Priam's treasure, and it's been exposed to looters and sticky-fingered tourists ever since. So it's not like Ephesus or Pergamum, with their restored buildings and ruined grandeur. But it is something to imagine that sixth Troy, with all the armies of Greece crashing against the walls and not prevailing. 

Gallipoli

"I'm not ordering you to fight; I'm ordering you to die. Your deaths will buy time for another commander and another army to arrive."

- Mustapha Kemal, to the 57th Regiment as they died at Cunuck Bair

You know, I'd planned this post another way in my mind. I was going for the anti-war angle, with a mention of Australia's involvement in Iraq and a rather sarcastic observations about how, both times, we were led into stupid conflicts by short, war-mongering old men with an eye for the populist vote. 

But the Gallipoli peninsula is actually quite a beautiful place. It's hilly and covered with a scrub forest, with a curving shoreline that's studded with pebble beaches. The Aegean Sea's a vivid blue, and when you find a spot where the sun's shining and you can hear the waves washing against the shore, you're flooded with this sense of peace. 

It's incredibly difficult to picture this as a place where 100,000 people lost their lives. 

When you walk through the various memorial sites that are scattered along the shore, though, the setting seems oddly appropriate. Because most soldiers were buried in mass graves, or simply disintegrated where they fell, they've resorted to placing memorial plaques for the fallen at the places where they landed. And the memory of those deaths is somehow more poignant when you're surrounded so much beauty. 

The strangest thing is that Gallipoli means as much for the Turks as it does for us antipodeans. You wouldn't think it, mostly because we Australians tend to be naively self-absorbed about things like this. In Australia, we've kind of warped it to make ourselves both noble warriors and victims of Imperial dictates. The Ottomans, who lost 55,000 soldiers, are barely mentioned. 

When you're learning about Gallipoli in school, you tend to forget that we're the aggressors in the campaign. And when you're driving through the pennisula, all the memorials are to the ANZACs. It's only up on the hill, at Cunuck Bair, that you get an idea that it wasn't all just about us. There's a memorial up there to the Turkish 57th Regiment, who charged repeatedly at the ANZAC trenches to buy time for reinforcements to arrive. They all died, of course, even the water boy. And there's just one memorial of theirs, versus the scores of ours dotted across the landscape. 

It makes you think. 

Anyway, Gallipoli's seen as the genesis of modern Turkey. From Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal went on to become the hero that founded the Republic of Turkey. Influential man, Kemal. History's supposed to be made through the glacial shift of public opinion rather than through the force of one man's ideas, but Kemal's an exception. I doubt any other Turkish leader could've set Turkey on the road to modernisation as well as he did. It's with good reason that they call him Ataturk (father of the Turks). 

I'll end with a quote of his, about the kids who died at Gallipoli. I first heard this in primary school, and it's never failed to move me since:

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives.. you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.. You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now living in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

P.S. There's a cowboy on Turkish TV at the moment, and he's lassooing people to the tune of "Wild Wild West". I'm sure there's a perfectly plausible explanation, but it's all Turkish to me. 

I Am Backpacker

And now I'm all alone again, 

Nowhere to turn, no one to go to,

Without a home, without a friend, 

Without a face to say hello to.

- On my own, Les Miserables (at least Epinone feels my pain...)

I'm the only person staying at TJ's. 

TJ's is a five storey apartment building that has been converted into a hostel. It's in Eceabet, on the Gallipoli pennisula, and about twenty metres away from the ferry to Canakale. The hostel has thirty rooms over three levels, and in the summer, it can accommodate 140 people. There's this cafe/lounge on the 5th floor which has panoramic views of the Dardenelles, and it really must be something to sit on the balcony in summer and watch the container ships sail pass.  

It's winter now, though, and the place is just spooky when you're there by yourself.

It's an eerie feeling walking through the building. The foyer's homely with some nice Turkish touches, but the 2nd floor feels like it's a mental institution. It's half-lit with chained-up doors and twisting corridors. In the summer, when there are people around, I imagine it's a great place to stay, but when you're fumbling with the keys in the middle of the night, and the wind's murmuring just over your shoulder, it's plain scary. 

When you're in a hostel, the problem usually is finding some privacy. People are sleeping in the dorms, cooking in the kitchen, talking in the lounge... it can be hard to find your own headspace. It means that often, five minutes alone can feel like a stolen moment of illicit pleasure. But TJ's different. The silence is oppressive.  

I guess it's a bit like that interlude in the film I Am Legend, when Will Smith's stalking the deer through the deserted streets of New York. There's that same haunted emptiness in this hostel. It's like you can feel the memory of all those people who've stayed here and who've now gone. I suppose it's the disadvantage of coming to Gallipoli a few days after Remembrance Day. 

Whatever the case, I'll be fricking glad to be back in Istanbul in a couple of days. 

An Englishman, an American and an Australian

"It's a bit like the beginning of a bad joke, isn't it?"

- The Englishman (Adam), when I step into the van and introduced myself

It was an inauspicious start. One cramped little mini-van, three guys, a tour guide, a bus driver - and three hours to kill before we got to Bergama. As Adam put it, it seemed like the beginning of one of those jokes - you know, the Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman ones....

But wasn't too bad. It was nice good, in fact. It was nice to wander the ruins of Pergamon with a handful of people. You get the uninterrupted attention of the guide. You get to take photos without having to wonder how to avoid the backs of other people's heads. And you get to stroll around the place with a certain unhurried ease. Really, it's the best of both worlds.

The tragedy of Pergamon is that the altar of Zeus was carted off to Berlin in the mid 1800s. In fact, I saw the altar a month ago when I was in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. It's a beautiful piece of architecture, and the friezes on the front are lovely, but it doesn't belong there. Certain things belong to a certain place, and that altar belongs on a hilltop overlooking the city of Bergama, under the shade of a couple of cyprus trees. It's the place where, in the Iliad, Zeus sat down and watched the Trojan War unfold. It's the place where the kings of Pergamon, who believed themselves the descendants of Zeus, build their altar to honour their ancestor. And that altar looks out of place sitting in a giant hall in a museum in the middle of Berlin. 

It's about context, you know. 

Then again, I came from Cappadocia and I've seen what the Turks can do with their historical heritage. After the Christian monasteries were closed down, and the Greek expelled, some enlightened souls decided to go up to the cave churches and hack the faces off the frescos that decorated the walls. The result is a series of galleries which are striking mainly because of what has been lost, rather than what is there. 

And the Hagia Sophia, of course. You can never forget the damage done to the mosaics of the Hagia Sophia. 

Still, there's something to be said about repatriation. Like the Elgin Marbles, like the bones of the Australian Aborigines, like the hundred and one mummies that are stuffed in the British Musuem, repatriation is the decent thing to do. They belong to their local environment, and not in some over-heated exhibition hall in the middle of a European city. 

Maybe it's a bit selfish of me. I get the biggest thrill when I walk through cities like Ephesus and Pergamon, and I realise that I'm in the amphitheatre where St Paul was nearly lynched, or where St John preached, or even where Zeus sat down with a bucket of ambrosia and watched the greatest battle in mythology unfold. 

Touring around Selcuk

I'm in the middle of a tour of Turkey. I'm staying at Selcuk at the moment, and I'm seeing a few ruins over a few days - Ephesus, Hierapolis, Pergamon.  

In some ways, a tour's a good idea. You're bussed around to all the places you want to see, tour guides explain the history of a place while you're there, and you're given decent hotel rooms. After 3 months of sharing dorm rooms with snoring, stinking, noisy backpackers, it's nice to have the privacy of a private room. It's liberating to realise that I could blog in the nude if so inclined. 

But in many other ways, a tour's a bad idea. You definitely feel dumber on tour. Because everything is basically just a footstep away from the tour bus, you lose all sense of location. You live in a cocoon of buffet meals, air-conditioned buses and large floppy hats. I'm staying in the middle of Selcuk, but I haven't been further than a block around the hotel because.... well, there's really no point. Most of everything I require has been provided by the tour, and I can't really summon the motivation to have a gander at the town. 

So now, I've done travelling one way, and I've done it another. And while a tour's much more comfortable, it really doesn't compare with the discomforts and petty irritations of solo travelling. I'll never do it this way again. 

That said, it really is something to walk down the main street of Ephesus towards the Library of Celsus. And the view from the theatre is magnificent. You really get an idea of how grand and imposing a city like Ephesus would've been back in its heyday. And the age of the place is simply staggering. I was sitting in the latrines, and it was awe-inspiring to realise that toga-wearing dudes were sitting in the exact same spot, doing much the same thing, 1500 years ago. 

Or maybe it's just me. I've got a low threshold for awe. 

The youngsters beat Wigan 3-0 last night, with Jack Wilshere and Carlos Vela showing the world why Wenger's not as deluded as we were all thinking a week ago. I didn't watch it, so I can't comment. I wish Wenger would play Vela in the first team, though, because I'd like to see the guy play. 

OMFG, 2-1 to the Arsenal

"So I take it you're here to find yourself?"

- Dora, the Canadian ex-pat who's made Goreme her home. 

Dora's lived in Cappadocia for 13 years. She followed her husband to Goreme, and after they divorced, she liked the town so much that she stayed. She bought a house and ran a pension for a number of years. At the moment, she's wondering whether it's worthwhile giving up on the town and moving back to Canada. She's got a plane booked in December, but she's not quite sure whether to take it. 

She belongs in Goreme. Yesterday, she walked through the valleys around the town and picked stinging nettles. There's a slower, more reflective pace of life that suits her well. Her "home" is Calgary, but she's been away for so long that she's afraid she won't adapt if she moves back. In her mind, she's Turkish, and Goreme is her home. 

And when she asked me that question, it was with a certain kind of weariness, like she's seen my type so many times before. I suppose she's met a lot of people travelling in Cappadocia, and a lot of them are trying to find themselves. I'm not sure what I'm doing here, to be honest. When I first started out in August, the idea of travel seemed to have a sense of purpose. Now, I'm not sure. Just going through the motions of living, I suppose. Just drifting along. 

There are some amazing sights in Cappadocia, though. The lunar landscapes is spectacular, and the way the inhabitants managed to carve those houses, monasteries and cities is amazing. If I hadn't have lost my USB cable in Istanbul, I'd post a few pictures. Simply amazing stuff, and well worth the 11 hour bus ride. 

Not sure if it was worth missing out on Arsenal beating Man Utd 2-1, though. I haven't had internet access since Friday, and it's a bit of shock to read about it after a 14 hour bus ride to Selcuk. How the fuck did that happen?

Not Constantinople

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works
That's nobody's business but the Turks

- Istanbul (Not Constantinople), by They Might Be Giants, a song that, weirdly enough, had been banned by the Turkish Government.

We limped into Istanbul around 10 o'clock this morning. 

I'd always imagined it to be an awe-inspiring experience, because the train passes through the walls of old Constantinople. In my mind, I'd thought the train would pass through a giant archway underneath huge red-and-white brick fortifications that stretched across the city. What we went through was a couple of crumbling sections of wall with a giant bulldozed hole in the middle. 

Not what I had in mind. 

The American girls in the room are talking about this other girl who's latched onto them for a night's company. They're trying to shake her off before they go out for the night with the French boys. And the things they say about her... I've met some really awesome Americans while over here, but these girls ain't them. 

I have a problem remembering that it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. The city that fascinated me as a kid was the old city, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the city of Constantine and Justinian. When I think of this city, I think of the Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome and those red-and-white bricked city walls. 

It's hard to remember that it was also the Ottoman capital for 500 years, the cultural capital of Turkey for 70 more, and that it's well and truly been Islamasized. My knowledge of the city's history pretty much ended about 1453, and while the bones of old Constantinople still stick out, it's an Islamic city now. It's bizarre to sit in the Sultanahmet garden and see the Aya Sophia on my right, the Blue Mosque on my left, and realise there's a millennia of history separating the two. And it's a bit sad that while the former has been converted into a crumbling, poorly-funded museum, the latter's a beautifully maintained, functioning mosque. 

Still, it's a pretty city. I took a walk along Kennedy Cad today. It was beautiful. On your left, there's the old Sea Wall with the Topkapi Palace looming overhead. On your right, there's the glittering expanse of the Sea of Marama and the Asian half of Istanbul staring back at you. On sunny days like today, you've got fishermen on the rocks, bathers in the sea, and a fleet of yachts and ferries in the distance. 

And I came across an "Arsenal Youth Hostel" in Sultanahmet. The owner's a gooner, and there are pictures of himself and his little boy standing in front of Emirates. There's an Arsenal banner right next to the reception. If I hadn't already paid three nights for the place I'm at now, I might've stayed there.

Here's a picture: