Last Words After 1 Year In Turkey

Asking to get off of a bus and pointing out that there is a cow on the side of the road sound remarkably similar in Turkish.  Our confusion between inecek var (ina-jek-var) “get me off” and inek var “check out that cow” led Leon Schneider and I to more than a few late rendezvous, unnecessary taxi diversions and disappointed Turkish children.  Still, we persevered and managed to make the most of our year spent teaching English at a university in Ankara, Turkey.

Despite being the center of government bureaucracy, Ankara does not rank high on the list of must-see Turkish tourist destinations.  We livened things up by helping to organize Ankara’s ultimate frisbee team (The Bilkent Goats) and subsequently compiling good performances against the teams we faced in Turkey and on our travels throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  Of course, it wasn’t all disc and gallivanting.  We did do some teaching, frightening our lily-livered superiors with in-class discussions of Turkish and American politics, including topics like terrorism, religion, the Kurdish situation and Armenia.

We lived 100 kilometers from where Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot and where the events of the 20^th Century continue to etch indelible rifts between neighbors.  The Turkish people today are vitally invested in the many competing historical narratives that have ebbed and flowed through and around the Anatolian Peninsula.  On our emotional last day of classes, my students asked me to share my Turkish experiences when I returned home.  They do not want to be thought of as the backward country of Orientalist myth: all covered women, fez-wearing men and medieval practices.  In truth, I came to know and love a modern nation proudly struggling with a conflicted past and an uncertain future, the home and inheritors of both Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Ottoman Caliphate.

My words can do little justice to the warmth of the people we met and the richness of our escapades. From the soldiers who stopped us at gunpoint and then befriended us in North Cyprus; to the Kurdish brothers who adopted us over breakfast at a remote road stop; to the magnificence of Istanbul’s monuments and the hospitality of its frisbee team; to the frenzied dancing and raki drinking in Ankara, suffice it to say that Leon and I enjoyed our year as much as prudently possible, and probably a fair bit more.

Sadly, we have both left Turkey and parted ways.  Leon is on his way to graduate school at Cornell hitting up the Grand Canyon, Moab and Monument Valley along the way, and I am left to fend for myself in the mountains of Nevada and California in between jobs in Spain and Mexico.  I’m looking to the Dominican Republic next.  While we have become happily reacquainted with American beer and a choice of Mexican, Chinese, or Thai at most street corners over the past few weeks, our one year in Turkey was unforgettable and the places and friends we made along the way will be truly missed.

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