It was the year 2000, start of the new millennium and the start of a new life for Jeremy Osborne. He would not be one of those highly qualified people who end up driving taxis or delivering pizzas. Jeremy had been working as a technician for Power Systems Consulting, a multinational company that managed the transmission of high voltage electricity around the country but when the company lost the contract he was out of a job and had no other options in New Zealand. However, there were other options with the same company in a few other countries, including Sweden, which is how he and Sara ended up in the town of Ludvika in central Sweden.
Jeremy found himself sitting at a bank of computers monitoring power generation and automated switching of bulk electricity from AC to HVDC for long distance transmission throughout the country and for export to Poland, Lithuania and Finland. He was also writing computer code for control systems and troubleshooting equipment failure to keep the systems operating. It was a familiar work environment but an unfamiliar physical and social environment. His Swedish workmates respected his expertise and were friendly enough and they could all speak English but as Jeremy had little Swedish, he felt like an outsider.
He noticed that one of his co-workers was also treated as an outsider. Erol Recep was ethnically Kurdish and his parents had emigrated from Turkey in the seventies. Erol was born in Sweden and spoke Swedish as a native, but Turks were always Turks. He was not ostracised or discriminated against at work but there was clearly a perception that he was not a real Swede. He looked different, he was a Moslem and he didn’t drink alcohol. Jeremy worked alongside Erol and they quickly became friends, perhaps because they were both conscious of being outsiders, but Jeremy also appreciated that Erol took the time to help him with language and culture. Erol was more aware of cultural differences that were invisible to the native Swedes. The Good Morning greetings when the Swedes arrived at work sounded like Moron. Moron.
Jeremy and Sara settled into life in small town Sweden and took advantage of winter sports opportunities close at hand. There was a ski resort a half hour drive away where they went snowboarding. They also appreciated being able to do a bit of travelling around Europe when Jeremy had leave from work, especially during the cold winter months, and they had gone south to Spain, Italy and Greece. Leave was staggered and variable at the company and Jeremy had two weeks of leave coming up in November. He was discussing travel plans with Erol over lunch and coffee in the cafeteria. They also talked about the food and Jeremy impersonated the Swedish chef of the Muppets. Both started speaking in lilting, honking tones to mimic the Swedes, for a laugh.
“Go to Turkey,” Erol advised. “It’s a fabulous country, great food, and good value. I mean compared to the rest of Europe it’s a cheap destination.”
Great food. Good value. Jeremy’s interest was piqued. “You have actually been to Turkey, then?”
“Yes yes, a few times,” Erol assured him. “I have cousins in Istanbul and Izmir.”
“What’s the weather like in November?”
“Depends where you go. It’s a big country. You could go down to the Mediterranean, to the Turkish Riviera, to Antalya, but I recommend one of the tours of western Turkey and into Cappadocia. See more of the country. It’s not tropical but a lot warmer than here.”
“Like a package tour.”
“Yes, you can relax and not have to worry about the language barrier and arranging accommodation and so on. You know it should be interesting to you as a Christian,” Erol added. “The seven churches in the book of Revelation are all in Turkey. Izmir is Smyrna in the Bible, and there’s Ephesus and Pergamum and the others.”
“Oh yeah, the province of Asia in the Bible, modern day Turkey.”
That night Jeremy read the first few chapters of Revelation. “Did you know the seven churches in Revelation are all in Turkey?” he asked Sara.
“Yes, I did.”
“I never realised.” Jeremy said. “Fancy that Moslem Erol knowing that. I thought they only read the Quran.”
“It’s the history of his country and his ancestors,” Sara said. “Turkey was Christian from the first century. Now it’s almost completely Moslem.”
Erol was very hospitable, as were most Moslems, in Jeremy’s experience. He invited Jeremy and Sara to his home, where they met his wife Yasemin and their infant son, Kalle.
“Kalle – that’s a good Swedish name,” Jeremy remarked.
“We hope it will help him to fit in here,” Yasemin said.
“Actually, we named him after Donald Duck,” Erol laughed. “Donald Duck is Kalle Anka in Swedish comics.”
Jeremy and Sara enjoyed a traditional Turkish meal of lamb, featuring lots of exotic, aromatic spices. There was much Q and A about Turkey over dinner and by the end of the evening they were both agreed. They would go to Turkey.
“You won’t regret it,” Erol and Yasemin assured them.
“You convinced me with the food,” Jeremy said, as he finished his baklava dessert. “Turkish food really is great.”
*
Jeremy and Sara booked a ten-day Magic Carpet Tour of western Turkey with Fez Travel, starting and finishing in Istanbul. They became billionaires overnight when they went to the bank to exchange Swedish krona for Turkish lira, as the exchange rate was a million lira to one Swedish krona. That was before the lira was revalued by knocking six zeros off the currency.
They flew to Ataturk Airport and transferred to a hotel in the old city, in Sultanahmet, where they met their guide, Hakan, and the rest of the tour party, and had an evening of eating, drinking and schmoozing.
The hotel porter who brought their luggage to their room asked them where they were from. Sara said Sweden and Jeremy said New Zealand.
“New Zealand!” the porter exclaimed. “All Blacks!” He set the bags down, stamped his foot and slapped his thighs. “Ka mate. Ka mate. Ka ora. Ka ora.” He asked Jeremy for the rest of the words to the haka but all he could remember was “Tenei te tangata huruhuru.”
“Welcome to Turkey,” the porter said, shaking their hands warmly.
“That was bizarre,” Sara said when they were settled in their room.
“Yeah, the Turks love us,” Jeremy said. “Even though we were enemies fighting at Gallipoli, they love Kiwis.”
The next day they began with a walking tour of the old city, visiting Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia, the famous Byzantine architectural icon that changed from Christian cathedral of Constantinople to Moslem mosque of Istanbul, then a museum. See it now before it’s Islamised back to a mosque. Four minarets were added and the original Christian mosaics and frescos were plastered over. While the tour party were assembled in the upper gallery listening to Hakan recounting the history of the Hagia Sophia, Jeremy, with his keen eye for detail, noticed another evidence of its colourful history carved into the wooden rail he was leaning on, which Hakan identified as Viking graffiti.
The next day Jeremy and Sara boarded a twenty-seven seater minibus for a five-hour drive to Gallipoli, with the rest of the tour party, all young couples like themselves, from New Zealand, Australia and the UK, and a few singles. They were getting to know some of their fellow travellers: the more outgoing ones like Nathan, an Israeli, playing football in Australia and his Aussie partner, Denise; ones they particularly liked, the British couple, Patrick and Julie; and ones they didn’t particularly like: Tracey and Greg, another British couple.
Gallipoli was like a pilgrimage for some of the party to honour grandfathers and other relatives who had died at Anzac Cove in the First World War. Neither Jeremy nor Sara had any such connection and were indifferent about their visit to Gallipoli. But walking around the battle sites, with the monuments honouring the dead of both sides of the conflict, and in the war museum, they found it surprisingly moving. If they had come on Anzac Day it would have been overcrowded with visitors and the roads choked with hundreds of buses. As it was there were many Turks in the cemetery honouring their own dead, who far outnumbered the Allied casualties.
Tracey was quite emotional about her grandfather who was killed at Chunuk Bair and all the Aussies who were “slaughtered by the bloody Turks.”
“Well the Turks were on the wrong side all right,” Sara said, “but they were defending their homeland from invaders.”
The travellers spent the night at the Anafartalar Hotel on the Gallipoli Peninsula and took the ferry across the Dardenelles in the morning to Canakkale and down the Aegean coast to Pergamum and Troy, except that the ancient city of Troy was no longer on the coast. The excavations overlooked an expansive silt flood plain with the coast somewhere in the distance. They then stayed overnight in a hotel in the upmarket resort of Kusadasi, where two years later a tourist minibus was blown to pieces by the secessionist PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party.
Ephesus, with its spectacular, well preserved ruins was a highlight. The Apostle John was the Pastor of Ephesus and author of the Book of Revelation, and the stone house where he is reputed to have lived with Mary, the mother of Jesus still stands there, for all to visit. Jeremy stooped through the low doorway into the candle lit shrine to the saints.
“They would have had clay lamps burning olive oil,” Sara said.
“Why John?” Jeremy said.
“Eh?”
“I’ve always wondered why it was John who looked after Jesus’ mother. Jesus had brothers and sisters.”
“I don’t know,” Sara said. “But that’s what it says in the Bible. At the crucifixion Jesus told John, “This is your mother.” and to his mother he said, “This is your son.” And it says, “From that time on the disciple took her into his home.””
Jeremy and Sara stopped to take photos of the very photogenic Celcus library, while their tour party moved on. “You insisted I take those photos,” Jeremy complained to Sara. “You should have kept an eye on our group.”
They spent a couple of hours sightseeing on their own, but mostly anxiously searching for their tour group among the throngs of tourists. They eventually spotted Nathan, who was a head taller than most people. Hakan just said, “We are looking for you.”
“Sorry, guys,” Sara said, “we got distracted and didn’t keep up.”
Reunited, they traversed the terraces of the Grand Theatre and carried on to the famed Temple of Artemis, which may have been one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but is now just a pile of rubble.
The tour bus turned inland to Pamukkale, renowned for its white calcium terraces. Hot springs feed the natural terrace pools and provide warm bathing for overweight Russian tourists in bikinis and Speedos, to the disgust of local Moslem Turks. A uniformed guard blew a referee’s whistle to stop people going out of bounds onto restricted terraces. During biblical times the hot mineral water of Pamukkale was piped to nearby Laodicea, the location of the Lukewarm Church in the Book of Revelation.
The bus continued further east through a landscape of rolling hills covered with millions of olive trees, and on to Konya, home of Sufism and Whirling Dervishes. Here the travellers visited the Mevlana Mosque/Museum with its displays of Ottoman antiquities and holy Moslem relics, such as the nacre box containing the beard of Mohammed. As always, the visitors removed their shoes at the entrance to the mosque and there were sarongs to cover bare legs. Tracey wrapped a sarong around her waist and a scarf across her bare shoulders but her short crop top still revealed her midriff. A Moslem woman walked behind her trying to pull her top down to cover her naked flesh. Sara rolled her eyes and said, “You’d think she would know by now.”
Jeremy noticed at some bus stops in Konya there were billboards with a Christian cross and a Star of David, both splattered with ‘blood’. He asked Hakan to translate the text.
“It’s a quote from the Quran,” he said. “It says Moslems should not befriend Christians or Jews.”
“Who puts up these notices? Jeremy asked.
“It’s the local Islamist Justice and Development Party.”
“That’s religion for you,” Greg said. “Intolerance and hatred.”
“Yes,” Tracey agreed, “they’re all the same.”
From Konya the tour bus continued into the interior along the ancient Silk Road, stopping at caravanserais and on to Cappadocia. Hakan and the driver were listening intently to a news bulletin on the radio. Hakan sat in grim silence, shaking his head. Then he stood up and gripped the handrail as he often did to address the party. “I don’t wish to alarm you,” he said, “but there has been a terrorist attack in Istanbul. Two synagogues have been blown up. Twenty-eight people killed and about three hundred injured.”
There was some murmuring among the passengers and someone asked who was responsible.
“They think Al Qaeda,” Hakan said.
“So Al Qaeda caught up with some oven dodgers, eh,” Greg said.
There was more murmuring and Nathan, who was sitting across the aisle from Greg, said, “Keep your offensive racist comments to yourself, mate.”
“Did he really say oven dodgers?” Sara said incredulously.
*
Marvel at the surreal landscape said the tour brochure, and marvel they all did as they drove into Cappadocia. It was no theme park, but a wild landscape of towering pillars of tufa, a porous, sedimentary limestone sculpted by erosion and by people who carved dwellings out of the towering fairy chimneys, as they were called in the brochure.
The tour party spent the day among open air museums and underground cities and churches that were hewn out of the soft volcanic rock during an era of Christian persecution. The walls and ceilings of the underground churches were adorned with Byzantine frescos, many of which had been literally defaced. Images of Jesus and the apostles had had their faces scraped off or, in some paintings, just their eyes erased. As the party walked along stairways and narrow passages that opened into spacious rooms, Tracey was laughing at some remark Greg made about Christian troglodytes.
The evening meal and entertainment was billed as a Turkish Folklore Show. The menu comprised several traditional dishes, rough red wine and raki. The show commenced with a fanfare of flutes, lutes and drums to accompany the folk dancers: line dancing, shouting and clapping. Whirling dervishes took to the floor like spinning tops with their high conical fezes and white robes flaring out in perfect circles. Each Dervish spun on the ball of one foot and propelled himself by flicking the floor with the other.
Then the belly dancers made dramatic entrances: one lowered from the ceiling in a cage like a go-go dancer and another entering on a lame horse with a deformed hoof. More shimmied onto the dance floor from the sides and gathered together to perform their salacious dances. Then they fanned out to the tables to pluck random male partners from the audience and coaxed them into removing their shirts for the dance. Nathan was selected from the group and he hammed it up with his partner, happily showing off his athletic physique. Jeremy was videoing the performance and was relieved not to have been selected.
Rising before dawn after such a night of revelry was a challenge, but Jeremy and Sara had signed up for the hot air balloon excursion. They were picked up from the hotel and taken to a field of roaring gas burners inflating huge, luminous balloons glowing bulbously in the dawn twilight. A lot of people had come from other tour groups and Jeremy wondered why so few of their own group were taking the opportunity for a relatively inexpensive experience that for him was right up there on his bucket list. He and Sara and also Patrick and Julie climbed aboard the wicker basket of a tethered balloon and soared aloft into the cold, still air over Gӧreme Valley. It really was the best way to view the weird Cappadocia landscape.
Their pilot chatted in broken English and asked his passengers, “Is this your first time in a hot air balloon?” They all said it was and the pilot said, “Me too.”
“Do you think it really is his first flight?” Sara asked, clutching the rail of the basket.
“No, he’s just kidding,” Jeremy said. “I’m sure it’s just part of his spiel.”
The pilot turned out to be very skilled, drifting the balloon down perilously close to tufa spires and timing a blast of propane to glide serenely away. Patrick told a story about a balloonist in England who got caught in a strong wind and blown over such a distance that he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t recognise the landscape but he saw a farmer in a field and lowered the balloon to call out to him, “Where am I?” Here Patrick affected a Yorkshire accent to give the farmer’s reply: “You can’t fool me, you flash bugger. You’re up there in that basket.”
The flight over Cappadocia was over all too soon as the balloon set down in another field and the passengers were treated to a celebratory glass of champagne and given a certificate to commemorate their flight.
On the homeward leg of their journey the tour group visited the Ihlara Valley, where Hakan led his charges on a trek through the steep gorge which followed the Melendiz River. Again there were many cave churches, where early Christians had fled the Romans, but unlike the stark landscape of Gӧreme, the valley was rich with vegetation, autumn colours and bird life. Pigeons and swallows swooped through the canyon and roosted in niches gouged in the rock walls by farmers to collect guano.
Greg and Tracey were having a laugh as they walked along the trail, with Greg making turkey gobbling noises. After most of the group had returned to the bus, Denise limped aboard supported by Nathan. “I sprained my leg on the hike,” she said. “Is there a doctor on the bus?”
“I’m a physiotherapist,” Greg said, “Show me that leg,” and he massaged Denise’s calf muscles under Nathan’s watchful eye.
*
The tour concluded back in Istanbul with a farewell dinner party at a restaurant in the old city. It was a buffet style dinner and had some of the food the group was becoming familiar with: the meaty iskender kebap, kofka kebabs, manti dumplings, aubergine dishes, and fried anchovies. During the dinner a sheet of paper was passed around for everyone to write their name, address, and email address so they could keep in contact with each other.
The party was still going on late into the night when Jeremy and Sara left. They started walking back to their hotel but lost their way in the labyrinth of streets and while they were trying to get their bearings they were drawn to the sound of live folk music and the lights in the courtyard of a café. It was like a repeat of the Turkish Folklore Show at Gӧreme, complete with Whirling Dervishes, but this was not a show put on for tourists. It had a very different atmosphere and the Dervishes were much more accomplished performers. Quite by chance Jeremy and Sara experienced a bit of genuine Turkish culture. They had left the farewell dinner because they were feeling tired but here at the café with the lively music, they felt buoyed with a second wind. They settled in for a bit and revived themselves with the caffeine and sugar of more cups of turbid Turkish coffee and Turkish delight. They exchanged greetings with a couple of locals, which was about the extent of the Turkish language they had acquired. Jeremy gave the name of their hotel and was helpfully pointed in the right direction.
*
Some of the tour group, including Jeremy and Sara, stayed on longer at the hotel. There was still plenty to see and do in Istanbul. Hakan also stayed on to pick up his next group of tourists. Tracey had lost her passport and couldn’t leave till she’d got a new one. Jeremy was pleased that Patrick and Julie were also extending their stay but not so fussed about Greg and Tracey still being there. Jeremy particularly wanted to see the Chora Church Museum, which has the finest extant Byzantine mosaics and frescoes. Sara was keen to visit the Grand Bazaar and do some shopping.
The Grand Bazaar, the world’s first shopping mall, was a maze of covered streets and thousands of shops, selling all manner of goods but specialising in jewellery, especially gold, ceramics, carpets and kilims, and leather goods. It was altogether a sensory overload of Ottoman architecture, bling, exotic aromas exuding from bins of spices and street food, and the noise of bustling crowds. Jeremy and Sara had decided to allow themselves one extravagant purchase of the best quality leather jackets they could find. After the obligatory haggling, and apple tea, Jeremy came away with a very fine deerskin jacket and Sara with a stylish black Gucci knockoff. They carried their purchases away in bags emblazoned with the logo of the shop, which seemed to identify them as big spenders and attracted vendors everywhere they went in the mall. They turned the bags inside out so the plain packaging would be less conspicuous but they were still pestered by hawkers. They inevitably got lost in the market but eventually exited at one of the many gates and found their way back to the street they had come by.
They boarded a hop on hop off bus to see more of Istanbul and got off in the Fatih District to visit the Chora Church. The walls and vaulted and domed ceilings of the building were richly decorated with Christian iconography: depictions of the Virgin Mary and Christ child, Jesus the Messiah, angels, apostles and various biblical scenes. Jeremy was gazing up at a fresco on one of the domes, of the resurrected Christ, breaking down the gates of hell, surrounded by various saints, when there was a loud explosion somewhere off to the north or east of the city.
“What do you think it was?” Sara said. “Could it be a bomb – another terrorist attack?”
“God, I hope not. Let’s just carry on here.”
Other people in the church, were looking around anxiously and muttering in Turkish. A few went outside. Jeremy was again absorbed in examining mosaics and as he was photographing the King Herod Massacre of the Innocents, there was another louder, possibly closer explosion, five minutes after the first.
“Let’s get back to the hotel,” Sara said.
They walked the bus route till they saw the bus coming and ran to the Sehzadebasi stop to catch it. They could hear sirens and saw a plume of smoke in the distance across the Bosphorous. They got off the bus back at Sultanahmet and Hakan met them at the hotel. “Yes, they were bombs,” he said. “The first was at an HSBC bank and the second at the British Consulate.” He came to their room later with more news. There were many casualties. “Your friends, Greg and Tracey,” he said, “they were at the British Consulate. I’m sorry, they are killed in the explosion there. I can’t contact the Consulate but our company will notify their next of kin.”
One’s first reaction to such shocking news can be unpredictable and unexpected. Jeremy’s first thought was They were not our friends. He did not say that, but he said, “Wow, couldn’t happen to a nicer couple.”
Hakan took this at face value but after he’d left, Sara said, “Why did you say that? Why did you say, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer couple.” That’s what you say sarcastically when you think someone deserves their misfortune.”
“I don’t know. It just came out. I didn’t like them and neither did you, but no, no one deserves to be blown to bits. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Jeremy said, and to make amends for his mean spirited remark, he added, “I would wish them well in spite of everything.”
“In spite of everything?”
“You know, they were blatantly anti-Semitic and they thought people of any faith or different cultures were just stupid.”
*
News of the bombs was all in the media the following day. It was an Al Qaeda terrorist attack, targeting British institutions because of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq. The bank and the consulate were both severely damaged by truck bombs, detonated when traffic lights had stopped lines of cars in front of the buildings. Thirty-one people had been killed and 450 injured. Body parts were found 450 metres from the bank. The explosions at the synagogues five days before, also an Al Qaeda attack, killed twenty-eight and injured 300.
Jeremy and Sara were flying home the next day, as were Patrick and Julie, but on a different flight, and they had dinner together in the hotel.
“Isn’t it just awful,” Julie said.
“Yeah,” Sara said. “How well did you know them?”
“We only met them on this tour and we didn’t really care to get to know them.”
“I know what you mean,” Jeremy said.
“I don’t really know why but I feel guilty about it,” Julie said.
“I suppose you’re feeling survivor guilt,” Jeremy said, “but you shouldn’t. There’s nothing you could have done about it.”
“No, of course you shouldn’t,” Sara agreed.
“I feel kind of guilty for disliking them,” Patrick said.
“They didn’t exactly endear themselves, did they,” Sara said.
“We so easily take on feelings of guilt, but it’s just irrational,” Jeremy said. “Don’t even go there.”
“It’s a sad end to a great trip,” Patrick said.
“Tragic,” Jeremy agreed. “You know you’re not safe from Al Qaeda back in England either. They’ve really got it in for you Brits, because of Iraq, and the Americans too, of course.”
“Yeah, well, nobody likes Americans,” Patrick said. “But you Kiwis should be all right. Everyone likes Kiwis. New Zealand didn’t send troops into Iraq, did they?”
“No, just some engineers for reconstruction and humanitarian aid.”
“But we’re going back to Sweden,” Sara said.
“You’re definitely okay in the famously neutral Sweden,” Julie said. “Anyway, we should keep in touch. Hakan gave us these photocopies of the sheet we filled in with our names and contact details.”
“Great, thanks,” Jeremy said. “I guess we can cross these two off the list.”
Sara folded the sheet carefully and put it into her handbag. They returned to Sweden fully intending to keep in touch with the others but they didn’t get any mail from any of the group and never got round to sending any.