American Life In The Summertime #20 - Turkey

Of all the possible experiences I had expected on this trip, paying money to have a large, hairy man with a thick moustache soap me up and rub me with a loofah in an intimate manner was not one of them, however this is exactly what I found myself doing in Istanbul at one of the famous Turkish bathhouses. You change into a fine Turkish carpet which you wrap around your waist and then file into a room to lie on a slab of hot marble, with your legs aligned snugly around the head of one of your 4 new best friends (ie guys you met at the hostel bar last night). Some time later your bather, who would not look out of place cleaning the pool in an adult movie, invites you with a grunt to come lie on another slab (not a euphemism.....yet). He then proceeds to wash, scrub, rinse, soak, stretch, manhandle and otherwise violate you while you try to keep a neutral face because you are not quite sure whether this is really what is supposed to be happening, but at least you want to make sure that the others are not put off by your discomfort so they will suffer the same fate next. You are suddenly concerned that when it was explained to you that the "happy ending" is not an option, this actually meant that you will not have the option to refuse it. You are then doused liberally with cold water and retire to the welcome room where you sip hot tea and try not to reflect on the fact that you haven't had such an experience since behind the grandstand at high school with someone you later found out was the town trannie. And they were a lot more gentle.

I had full intentions of continuing my local food experimentation in Turkey, after trying ostrich balls in Kenya and various tropical fruits ın Fiji which look like they should also have a starring role in the movie alongside the Turkish pool cleaner. And you can't avoid the various incantations of kebab, which not surprisingly appear no different from the sort you get in Australia at 4am once the pub shuts and you are so hungry you would eat the arse out of a low flying seagull. Turkey, although not expensive, could certainly not be described as great value, with $12 not being unusual for yet another "kebab" which has already unfolded itself all over your plate so that the top layer of pita is flapping in the breeze like some bad edible combover, steadily distributing its contents all over the guy next to you. Thankfully, you have already shared a far more humbling experience than either of you would have preferred in the bathhouse, so showering each other with your meals is the least awkward thing that you have done in the last 24 hours. I did, however, draw the line at sampling one particular Turkish dish called aryan, which would have involved swallowing what was described as, and I quote, a "salty, liquid yoghurt" (and yes girls I do recognise the hypocrisy here, but at least you aren't expected to buy it first).

But the main reason for Turkey, of course, was ANZAC Day. Like anything else you've seen it before on TV & whatever so you think you know what to expect, and largely you do, but there's still nothing like actually being there. Walking up the hill from ANZAC Cove towards the Australian memorial at Lone Pine gives you a sense of how normal these places are, and how many lives were lost trying to capture what looks to you like some random insignificant hill above a pretty nice beach in Turkey. In places the distance between the ANZAC trenches and the Turkish trenches was only 15 paces, so the close quarters made for some ugly, protracted fighting. At one point the number of bodies left out to rot because it was simply too dangerous to recover them was so high that a truce was agreed for a day to clear them out. The close proximity also meant that Galliopli campaign was part of an older era where walking around side by side with the guys you were shooting at the day before, and will be shooting at again the day after, while you each look for the bodies of your fallen comrades, was not an overly strange thing. One of the famous stories, recreated here on thousands of postcards, prints, posters etc, is that of a wounded Australian soldier who fell quite close to the Turkish line, and lay there for hours in agony with nobody able to come pull him back. One of the Turkish soldiers raised a white flag, the shooting stopped, and the soldier walked over the the wounded Australian soldier, picked him up and carried him back to the Australian trenches. Without a word he then returned to his own line, picked up his gun, and the fighting started again.

This kind of thing happened all the time, with troops also routinely throwing their food rations to each other to provide at least some variation in the diet. The attitude was very much that although you are the enemy, you are also a soldier and we are both stuck in this absurd battle, so although I will try to shoot your head off if you are foolish enough to stick it above the trench line, you don't deserve to have to live like this. One of the things that surprised me about ANZAC Day at Gallipoli was the number of Turkish people who attend, maybe 10% of the total crowd, and the sense of pride they have for it and the understanding they have for why Australians also attend. There is a real, palpable, touchable sense of mutual respect and camaraderie between the ANZACs and the Turks here, and they really can tell the difference between those of us Aussies who have figured this out, and those who haven't. So 'til next tıme, as my great grandfather Private William Henry Linsley, WIA, and thousands of others did: take care of yourselves.....and each other.