The Pillars of Hercules

It was immediately apparent, even in the swift one-day passage from Greece to Turkey, that we were in a different country. I compared them, because as old enemies they were constantly comparing each other. Turkey was both more ramshackle and more real. Travelers tended to avoid Turkey, which was not a member of the European Community (thanks in part to Greece’s opposition), so Turkey had not depended on tourists for its income and had had to become self-sufficient, with the steel industry and the manufacturing that Greece lacked. Turks were calmer, more polite, less passionate, somewhat dour—even lugubrious; less in awe of tourists, and so they were more hospitable and helpful. Greeks were antagonistic towards each other, which made them hard for foreigners to rub along with; Turks, more formal, had rules of engagement, and also seemed to like each other better. Turkey had a bigger hinterland and shared a border with seven countries, yet Turks were less paranoid and certainly less xenophobic, less vocal, less blaming, perhaps more fatalistic.

We had crossed from Europe to Asia. Turkey is the superficially westernized edge of the Orient, Greece is the degraded fringe of Europe, basically a peasant society, fortunate in its ruins and (with most of the Mediterranean) its selective memory. But it was wrong to compare Greece with Turkey, since their geography and their size were so different. Greece’s landscape was more similar to Albania, and if Greece was a successful version of Albania, Turkey was a happier version of Iran—perhaps the only moderate Muslim country in the world.

After the assault by touts at Greek ports it was restful to walk down the quay in Bodrum and not have Turks flying at us. That restraint was an Asiatic virtue. Turks also had Asian contempt, and were famously cruel, both knowing they were so and believing that most people in the world were just the same. If you abused Turkish hospitality (as I did frequently) and asked Turks whether they tortured their prisoners, they spat and said, “Everyone tortures their prisoners!”

It was raining in Bodrum. Half the Seabourn passengers did not bother to go ashore. But even in the rain the harbor looked alive, an effect perhaps of being full of beautiful wooden sailboats in port for a regatta. The crusader castle was intact, except for the occasional mark of an infidel’s aggression. There were pious Latin inscriptions over the battlements and gateways (“No victory is possible without your help, O Lord”), a nice reminder that Christianity had kept its faith robust with its own jihads—holy wars that had lasted for centuries.

Walking past a carpet shop—an unmistakable sign that we were in Asia—I saw Jack Greenwald being harangued by the carpet dealer.

“This is not a carpet! This is a piece of art!” he cried. “I am selling art!”

Jack beckoned me in, introduced me to the dealer, Mr. Arcyet, as “my millionaire friend,” and soon carpets were being unrolled and were flopping one on another. It was another Greenwald tease to abandon me to the hysteria of a Turkish carpet dealer who believed he had an American tycoon captive in his shop, on a rainy day in Bodrum.

His hysteria was short-lived, interrupted by a more dramatic event. Outside the shop, a huge Turkish woman had collapsed on the street, and she lay in the rain, her skirt hiked up, while a Turkish man slapped her face in a violent attempt to revive her, and other Turks sauntered by to stare. Soon there was a crowd of murmuring Turks, watching the supine woman, and when a taxi came to take her away, it required four of them to haul her into the backseat.

That unscheduled event was the only drama in Bodrum that day. It was too rainy to go anywhere. The phones would not work without a Turkish phone card, and there were no cards for sale anywhere in the town (“You come back next week”). I looked at the old mausoleum and the new casino and the suburbs of bungalows and condominiums of the sort that were being retailed elsewhere in the Mediterranean as holiday homes for Europeans in less congenial climates. The prices of this Turkish real estate ranged from $30,000 to $60,000—cheaper than, but just as hideous as, the ones in Spain, Malta and Greece.

Resolute about staying ashore, I had a Turkish lunch of eggplant, fava beans, stuffed peppers and a gooey dessert, and afterwards, back on the ship, realized that the people who had stayed on board had had a better lunch, a drier time of it, and still enjoyed the thrill of seeing the castle and the sailboats and the shapely Turkish mountains.