Tuesday about 3:00 pm I started looking for a place to stay. It had been completely overcast the whole day. It would be getting dark early. I stopped at a Shell gas station. They were nice and friendly, but didn’t have much in the way of desirable places to...
Stopped by a gas station in Icericumra, south of Konya, today to ask a quick question. Ended up going inside for a couple cups of tea with, from left to right, Fatih, Harun, and Deniz. I had originally planned to do this stretch (Konya to the edge of the plateau) in...
Christian, a friend of mine from university, visited this weekend. For some reason he knew immediately, before I even had to open my mouth to mention it, that I considered walking across Turkey my job, not a vacation. For many things I was thankful, but perhaps most...
South of Konya I stopped for lunch, a very typical meal for me, fasulye ve pilav (beans and rice). I was waited on by Esat, the restaurant owner’s son. As I paid the tab Esat told me he had seen me the night before on the local TV news. A. I don’t know who...
Ali bey introduced me to Hikmet usta (usta means "craftsman" and is often used as a title to show respect towards a professional who works with his hands), a mechanic at a car shop next door to Ali’s motorcycle repair shop. Here Hikmet is testing a...
The south side of Konya has lots of car repair shops and cattle feed shops. This is Ali bey, the owner of a motorcycle repair shop in south Konya. Ali has two kids, a boy and a girl, and a cousin who is a teacher in the USA. Ali is a very social man — it was his...
I got lost yesterday trying to make my way out of Konya. Once I finally found my way back to the correct road, I stopped for a breakfast of soup and bread. Here is Ibrahim, one of the workers at the restaurant, and the oven they use to make the etli ekmek (the...
Christian and I were in Tarsus the other day, and I saw fit to do my hackneyed geek rendition of walking like an Egyptian, because Cleopatra was Egyptian, right?
I’m camping in a spare classroom in a Koran school in a village called Cariklar, about 25 kilometers south of Konya. The way I got here is kind of interesting, but I am exhausted and am going to rest a bit before writing it up. By the way, thank god I bought a...
Photo by Anton Bogomolov. The morning of the day I left Istanbul last week, I met Anton Bogomolov and Smaranda Voicu for breakfast. Anton, a professional photographer from Russia, has been taking some amazing photos of Istanbul, and Smaranda has come from Romania to...
A friend of mine from university, Christian, flew in from Cyprus last week, and we spent the past few days touring around the Adana/Mersin area, climbing around on some ruins yesterday at Alahan and communing with the spirit of St. Paul today in Tarsus. Christian is...
No, St. Paul did not actually preach at this church in Tarsus, even though Tarsus was his hometown. This church was not built until the 1850s, and today it is not an active church with regular services; it is on museum grounds.
