Meanwhile over in Turkey Marcus and I were climbing a stupendous cliff, toiling up an old mule track that scaled the face of the precipice in a torturous because seemingly endless sequence of switchbacks. The kalderimi, as these antique thoroughfares are known, was not unlike those I had encountered in Greece, in places like Crete and the Peloponnese: faultlessly engineered, roughly cobbled and stepped and meticulously buttressed on their outer flanks, they were the kind of paths that exhausted the body even as they delighted the spirit with their historical provenance and considerable aesthetic appeal. Over the years I had huffed and puffed my way up plenty of them, never, despite the effort involved, without the greatest pleasure coupled with a kind of crazy reverence for something I had never bothered to try and define.
I felt something of the sort now as I trailed Marcus up the slope, taking photographs and revelling in the epic surroundings. Along with the fine kalderimi, the visit to Kalabantia had left a residue of happiness in my heart that further lightened my footsteps. In an age in which the internet and rampant globalisation were, so people said, making the world smaller, it was refreshing to think that such places existed. Certainly Kalabantia wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination Xanadu or the Temple of the Lost Ark; it’s dimensions were far too modest for that. Yet even allowing for this caveat, the presence in the wilds of the Turkish countryside of an ancient settlement that was unfenced, unsupervised and, by all accounts, largely unrecognised struck me as a cause for celebration.
As I climbed, passing tangles of woody mastic, papery white cistus flowers and lovely red-barked strawberry trees that draped glossy canopies of leaves over the track, I contemplated the whys and wherefores of the place. Presumably the Greek inscription over the tomb harked back to the Byzantine period, which extended from the early fourth century to the beginning of the second millennium when the arrival of the first Turkish tribes loosened the Empire’s hold on the region. However the Byzantines were just one in a steady procession of peoples who occupied this wild and mountainous corner of southwest Asia Minor, preceded over many tumultuous centuries by the Lycians – the hardy, warlike people after whom the region is named – Persians, Classical and Hellenistic Greeks, and Romans. It was possible that any number of these folk contributed to the building of the settlement whose ruins Marcus and I had so casually perused, with those that came later adding to, or reusing, what had gone before.
But as a Byzantine harbour Kalabantia must surely have facilitated the export of products such as timber and grain from the hinterland, to build the Empire’s warships and feed its people. Beneath the hot and humid sky it was easy to imagine heavily laden donkey trains trundling down this very path, to be met in the harbour by wooden galleys and merchantmen flying the renowned double-headed eagle of Byzantium.
All this was mere conjecture, gleaned from a shaky knowledge of history. However it kept me occupied all the way up the cliff until I finally stood, mildly breathless, and bathed in sweat, on a stony precipice more than seven hundred metres above the sea. Nearby, an elderly man in a tattered jacket and floppy cap, perched under a tree, watched over a small herd of cattle. He was the only human figure in a glorious upland world of bright green grain fields enfolded by mountains, the rugged, grey limestone flanks of the mountains densely thatched with pine forest. Erratically scattered and clearly very old olive and turpentine trees hemmed the fields, which were sown with an impressive variety of wildflowers including yellow field daisies, lilac mallows and scarlet poppies. Standing among the knee-high grain roughly a hundred metres apart were a pair of buildings, a rudimentary iron shed, like something grandfather might have built, and a fine Ottoman cistern.
The cistern must have been hundreds of years old, but it remained in excellent condition. It was built of rugged limestone hewn from the mountains, gorgeously weathered and overlaid in places by an adhesive patina of concrete. A broad and shallow dome, constructed of tiers of uniformly shaped bricks, spanned a solid, perfectly round stone base. Protruding from one end a dormer-like structure of dressed stone blocks was equipped with an ornately arched entrance that opened into a dark interior reliably full of water. Fragments of light reflecting off the surface of the water flickered on the underside of the dome; as I kneeled in the entrance, peering into the shadows, something jumped and I heard the liquid plop of a frog. From the outside the cistern owned a simple dignity of form that blended harmoniously with its surroundings, the mountains crowding the skyline and the unripe grain lapping against its walls. It was pleasant but also unsettling to reflect, in these days of cheap and nasty architecture, that people not all that long ago built with such considerations in mind, constructing even utilitarian buildings not only to be functional but also to please the eye.
‘It was also built to last,’ said Marcus, snapping a photograph with his phone. ‘Just look at the thickness of these walls.’
From the cistern a pebbly track marked by the red and white flashes of the Lycian Way led towards Alinca. We followed it past a small house with green stucco walls and a red corrugated iron roof, set among outbuildings cobbled together from stone and wood and sheets of clear plastic sheeting. From here the way led up over a low wooded saddle dominated by another giant crag; the slopes of this monolith dropped sheer into a ravine round which a causeway of limestone slabs, hewn from the face of vast cliffs that towered overhead, precariously wound. In places no more than two metres wide, the path was badly exposed with a drop from its outer rim of several hundred metres into cavernous, tree-cluttered depths. The presence of all that airy space mere inches from my feet was thrilling, but terrifying, and I walked with my eyes glued on my feet, loathe to look down, though I paused once or twice to gaze back across the gulf to the relatively innocuous saddle from which we had started. Treks into the countryside, I thought, are made of moments like this.
Eventually we came to a fold in the cliffs, where water gushed from a modern concrete cistern, and a goat track spiralled up a steep slope plush with spiny cushions of vivid, yellow-flowering genista acanthoclada and dotted with some beautifully twisted carob trees. Here Marcus did something very unorthodox, leaving the path and bounding uphill with a yell on a trajectory of his own devising. I watched him disappear from view wondering if something had bitten him and hoping, as I continued on my own merry way, that the bite wasn’t fatal. Not long after this I had the pleasure of negotiating another limestone precipice suspended, above the void, seemingly in mid-air.
A bird of prey swooped by, ominous at eye level. Fathoms below I sensed rather than saw Paradise Beach, a crescent of white sand cossetted by piney headlands. Then Marcus called, ‘Ian,’ and, craning my neck, I looked up to see him standing on a brown and barren slope some twenty metres overhead, chugging water from a bottle and looking very much intact. Upon clambering up to join him, I found him on a dirt track that ascended the slope in a pale stony ribbon, passing a couple of simple trekkers’ pensions and one horrendous new development, complete with swimming pool, currently under construction. The latter depressed me as this was one of the few places on the Turkish coastline that hadn’t been ruined by thoughtless and seemingly unchecked development but it, too, was clearly going under.
After all this walking I decided that I needed a beer. The idea seemed to horrify Marcus, who gasped, ‘A beer!’ rather as one would cry, ‘A shark!’ considering it, I suspect, somewhat premature given that we were in the middle of nowhere and faced a long walk back to George House. Yet despite his misgivings my companion waited stoically beside me as I sipped an ice-cold Tuborg, the pair of us seated on a rectangular terrace, enclosed by a low whitewashed stone parapet, hanging like a balcony above the sea. To entertain himself while he waited Marcus daydreamed about the wine that Hassan was bringing back from Fethiye, wondering, in a trance of weary rapture, whether he’d buy white or red, but hopefully both, and speculating upon what sort of delights the women would cook up in order to accompany it.
‘I don’t know about you,’ Marcus said, ‘but I’d like that red cabbage they do in yogurt, flavoured with garlic and dill, and maybe some beans and lentils and a big pile of rice. And baklava for desert…’
Delightful in themselves, my companion’s fantasies were having a dangerous effect on me. ‘If you keep talking like that,’ I warned him, ‘I’m going to have to order another beer.’
Marcus promptly shut up and, after I’d paid for the beer, we set off for home.
The sky by now was completely overcast. Yet a lingering humidity drew the sweat from our pores as we negotiated yet another ancient path, half-cobbled beneath a carpet of dry brown needles and buttressed with stones. Outside Alinca we passed a high broad saddle where olive trees stood shoulder to shoulder with meadows burned by the sun to a lovely sere hue. Just below this, where the path turned into the forest, someone had set up a stall to sell water and tea and snacks; there was no sign of the person, but an elegant stainless steel samovar, balanced on a bed of glowing red coals, quietly bubbled and hissed beside a folding table laden with goodies and a plastic cooler full of drinks. I felt like helping myself and, quite possibly, had there been beer on hand, I would have; as it was I contented myself with a photograph before resuming the march, tramping downhill beneath enormously tall pines that draped the path in a shadowy penumbra in which nothing could be heard except the occasional twitter of birdsong and the thud of our footfalls.
Unlikely and quite beautiful orchids flourished in dim and gloomy corners. According to the guidebook the path had been used for centuries by the villagers of Kabak to reach their olive groves, meagre holdings of gnarled old trees astride slender terraces buttressed by dry-stone walls in the few places where the land was sufficiently horizontal to support such activity. Between these outposts the path plunged precipitously, following the line of enormous red-ochre cliffs riddled with caves and fissures that steepled upwards out of the trees, becoming increasingly lofty and formidable as we dropped down beneath them. We sped on, amazed yet impatient. In such surroundings it was impossible not to feel awed and humbled by god’s creation, even if god itself remained a hazy and much-debated notion.
At the very base of the cliffs, under some unusual formations hollowed out of the limestone, we came to a crossroads. One path led downhill to the beach and Kabak’s many campgrounds. However we took a second path which curled around the rear of the lush deep valley through lonely and remote forest. By now the beer that I had drunk at Alinca was making itself felt and I walked along giddily. My speed increased as I drew ahead of Marcus. In the momentum of striding out I became quite carried away by everything, moved by the tall silent trees, the brooding solitude of the forest, and the easy, uncomplicated rhythm of my body. I passed a small Ottoman graveyard, a mere handful of stones tilted askew beneath the pines, and several stone cisterns, all but one of which were dry. At last, on the far side of the valley the path narrowed to a thread of beaten earth which turned and climbed until, with a final twist, it emerged on to another of those balcony-like ledges suspended halfway to the sky.
Far below, all Kabak lay outspread before me. It was a wonderful vista of sere-yellow fields, billowing treetops in multifarious shades of green and stonewalled terraces, scattered with little red-roofed houses and ending in a pale strip of shingle bookended by piney headlands and lapped by the grey-blue Mediterranean. The view stopped me in my tracks and I stood for a moment, breathing deeply, with my heart thudding against my ribs, drinking it in.
A bit later Marcus and I became separated when I waited for him to catch up and he took another of his shortcuts, passing by out of sight directly overhead. I waited fifteen minutes or more before, shaking my head in bewilderment, I realised what had happened. I took off after him and, somewhat miraculously, we arrived at George House together, heroes of a minor nature unable to decide whether to shower first, then drink a beer, or vice versa, before tackling dinner. In the end the sight and sound of Hassan beating the medieval-looking dinner bell outside the softly glowing dining room prompted us to take the shower option, from which we emerged clean and refreshed and ready, as never before, to sample the much-anticipated local wine.
Alas, disappointment awaited. Upon seeking out Hassan I found him in the kitchen, fork in hand, enjoying a plate of lentils. At my mention of wine a characteristically jolly grin bisected his friendly round face and, raising his right arm, he beat the palm of his hand against his forehead. ‘ Oh no, I forget the wine,’ he said, laughing. ‘I am sorry…’
It was a crushing blow, for which we consoled ourselves with numerous bottles of Tuborg over a lengthy and quite wonderful dinner. Next day Marcus left for Greece.
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