Teaching does bring its benefits, but working at a language school in Turkey, summer vacation is not one of them. In fact, with kids out for the summer and parents reluctant to let them waste their time at home playing video games, intensive English classes are a popular method of educational childcare, and so every day our school becomes crowded with all ages, starting as young as five. The morning groups come for four hours, five days a week, and the afternoon groups for three hours. All come armed with pocket money for sugary soft drinks and ice cream so during the hourly tea breaks, you're likely to get bowled over by elementary kids chasing each other on a sugar high through the hallways.
While I was lucky enough to escape the madness of kids' classes, I made up for it by working seven days a week for the past three and a half months. I taught two pre-intermediate intensive classes this summer, which were made up mostly of university students using their summer holidays as a chance to get ahead in English. With these groups meeting every morning, I was hoping to get rid of my weekend schedule, but I have been teaching the same group Saturday-Sunday mornings ever since I came to Turkey and we're pretty close by now, so I hated to give them up. So thanks to my attachment to the weekend group, I had a pretty miserable work marathon from mid-May until this past week. My life started to feel a little like Groundhog Day, waking up every single day at the same time, going through the same routine with very few things to break up the monotony.
For this reason, the week-long holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan was as big a relief to me as it was to the millions of people who had been fasting all month. A few weeks ago I had made up my mind that what I needed the most was to sit on the beach and zone out. And so this week I went down to Bodrum, a peninsula on the southwest coast of Turkey, where the Aegean and Mediterranean seas meet. I was so ready for a break that I didn't even care that this is a huge hotspot for both national and European tourists and that the whole place was crowded.
The thing that really sold me was hearing that Bodrum was home to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who said that it was the most beautiful place in the world. If it's good enough for Herodotus, it's good enough for me!
Bodrum is an 11-hour bus trip from Ankara, but the great thing about the buses here is you can hop on an overnight bus at 9:30 and arrive bright and early in the morning to find this:
Herodotus may have had a limited scope of "the world," but I'm almost inclined to agree with him. This is the harbor at Bodrum. Forgive the picture quality- I only had my camera phone.
Bodrum, as I mentioned, is a hotspot for Europeans, which means that pretty much everyone in Bodrum speaks excellent English and that prices tend to be on the high side. But because most of the foreign tourists speak no Turkish whatsoever, the locals were shocked and super impressed by my less-than-fluent but certainly functional Turkish, enough so that prices dropped a bit whenever I used it. Which was good because the beaches of Bodrum have an interesting feature:
You can't quite see it from the picture, but the entire coast is lined with beach chairs and umbrellas belonging to hotels and restaurants. There isn't an open spot to be had. Technically the chairs are free to use, but most people with any sort of ethical compunctions would feel kind of guilty not at least buying a drink in exchange for the privilege of using the beach. This gets expensive eventually, but wasn't entirely bad; I felt pretty spoiled at one point when I abandoned the chairs to sit with my feet in the Mediterranean, reading a book, as a nice waiter made sure my stuff didn't get wet and then fetched me an ice cold beer.
But this beach is even better because it's also got an historical element to it; namely, this was the ancient Greek city of Halikarnassos, home to the Tomb of Mausolus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. There's a Roman amphitheater plastered visibly on a hillside next to the highway, and the landmark of the harbor is the Castle of St. Peter, built by the Knights of Rhodes in the 15th century AD.
And it's hard to pass up a Crusader castle by the sea, especially when I learned that this castle is also home to the Museum of Underwater Archaeology. It was like all my nerdy childhood classical education and obsession with history and archaeology has finally been given a context.
Ancient sites are magical to me because they require so much from your imagination, to have knowledge of different time periods to recreate what these places must have been like hundreds or thousands of years ago. What did Herodotus see when he looked out his window? What would this have looked like when Alexander the Great invaded? What did the Apostle Paul think when he sailed by here? (and he did; I checked in the book of Acts, and in 21:1 he sailed to the island of Kos, which I visited on Wednesday and which is visible from Bodrum) My senses tingled walking through these stones and imagining who else had been there.
View from the castle, which was constructed by the Knights Hospitaller in the 1400s as a safeguard against the approaching Selcuk Turks, who were taking over Anatolia as the Byzantine Empire crumbled. Christians from all over Asia Minor came to this castle to take refuge.
As you can see from the minaret, the castle did eventually fall to the Ottoman Turks, in 1522, and according to Ottoman tradition, the chapel was converted into a mosque. The minaret was later destroyed by French battleships during World War I. Of course now, the chapel/mosque now houses a shipwreck exhibit, so the archaeologists might be the most blasphemous ones in this story of degrading sacred spaces.
The Museum of Underwater Archaeology is spread out through various rooms in the castle, so as you explore the fortress you're also treated to exhibits of Greek shipwrecks and pieces of glass recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The museum boasts one of the largest collection of amphorae in the world, which is pretty exciting if you're me.
No crowds could spoil my mood. All in all it was a time of great refreshment, physically, mentally, and spiritually. There's nothing like the sea to remind you of God's power and encourage you to just sit still and bask in the splendor of His creation. Plus being in a place with millennia of Christian history also gives me a lot of encouragement as I think about all the people who've been here before me, worshiping and proclaiming the Gospel despite all sorts of opposition and persecution. Reading the Bible in this kind of a context where others have been reading the same words in so many different languages in so many different circumstances gives me a much greater picture of Christianity as a family that transcends time and space, and fills me with joy at the anticipation of someday meeting all these people in Heaven. It also serves as a booster for coming back to Ankara, a place where there isn't really a Christian community and where I don't have the opportunity to go to church on a regular basis.
I'm one of the fortunate ones- while I feel a bit disconnected from the body of Christ, it's nothing compared to those out there who are not only spiritually and physically disconnected from others who share their faith, but who also face persecution for their beliefs. So while it may sound strange in a blog post about a beach holiday, I would like to end with a prayer request for all those out there who have little spiritual support and who don't enjoy the blessing of a large community of faith. Please lift them up in prayer as brothers and sisters in Christ, that they would be encouraged and know that even if they feel alone, they are not.
More to come later on my little day excursion to Greece!
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