#Curl meander crossword driver#
A camel driver leading a string of haughty beasts talks on his cellular phone a veiled cotton picker in baggy flowered trousers squats in the fields silhouetted against a smoke-belching detergent factory at an outdoor bazaar lacy hand-crocheted doilies are laid out for sale next to a stack of Johnny Cash cassettes. There was more, I discovered, to interest me in the less-visited hinterlands, because they remain so visibly engaged in a tug of war between Eastern and Western sensibilities, ancient traditions and modern expectations. Intriguing though coastal Turkey is, however, cheap cement-block construction is smothering the landscape day by day, as the region strives to accommodate hordes of vacationing sun seekers. My interest in Turkey was first piqued by delighted reports from friends who had recently visited Istanbul, the Greek ruins at Ephesus, and the fishing villages on Turkey's Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. While the World Air Games whistled by overhead that day in Urgüp, I beamed a flashlight on thousand-year-old Byzantine cave frescoes depicting lovely almond-eyed Marys and baby Jesuses.
Central Anatolia, Turkey's Asian heartland, is mined with surprises, as I discovered on a three-week tour of the country. There at eye level one hazy sunrise last September bobbed sixty, eventually a hundred, brilliantly colored hot-air balloons - gaudy bubbles drifting above the Cappadocian landscape of walnut orchards and erosion-sculpted rock.
For a breath of dawn I would bolt from bed around a stairwell to a balcony that looked out over a hillside pockmarked with cave dwellings and across a vast, dusty valley of undulating vineyards planted in tawny volcanic grit. This curious cacophony was my wake-up call, buried as I was in a windowless hollow sculpted from a cliff of soft rock. EVERY morning the Muslim call to prayer, an adenoidal chant whining from as many as five minarets in Urgüp, our small town in central Turkey, incited roosters and posses of roaming dogs to join the chorus.
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