Malatya and Beyond

This past weekend I took a trip to eastern Anatolia. I traveled with 8 members of our school, and we flew from Istanbul to Malatya which took and hour and then took a 2 hour bus ride to a small town on the Euphrates. This town was centered in a sparsely populated valley that the Euphrates ran through. The town was an interesting mix of modern and ancient. The town slowly crept up the edges of the mountains that close in the river. The area once had a population in the tens of thousands, but in recent years it ahs shrunk to thousands. The people of the town and nearby villages have small businesses and keep themselves going by using local resources. There are gardens and fruit trees everywhere in the town. Grape vines grow throughout the town, even in the tiny square. There is also a relatively famous blacksmith there who specializes in door knockers. These door knockers are specially made, so the person knocking can use one knocker if they are a male and another if they are female. This is so the person in the house can answer according to their gender. I did not get one since the price was 110 YTL for a cheap one and since I do not have a door. In addition to the blacksmith they also have a mill that is run by water and grinds mulberries and local herbs. The miller then uses the ingredients to great deliciousness like Lök (A pasty candy like spread). People also use this term to describe a lazy slob referring to them as Lök, because the food sits to heavy in you stomach. On Saturday, we traveled along a dirt road that that was barely enough room to hold our van. Occasionally along the route, there were tunnels that we passed through. When the valley was more populated, they constructed this road and tunnel to try to open up trade north of the Euphrates. We went along this road and then into another valley a couple hours away to a large town. In the town we saw a famous mosque and castle. Up until the 19th century the village was within the castle walls. After we saw the mosque, we drove and then climbed up a hill to see the castle and a smaller but even older mosque. The next day we traveled around to other villages and then took a boat trip down the Euphrates. We were on the boats for about 5 hours and saw deer (That's what they called them, but they were tiny) and an Armenian church. Our driver got lost trying to find the landing where the bus was supposed to meet us. Usually this wouldn't be a problem on a river, but they put a dam up and this created a kind of lake, so we had to travel the coast until we saw the bus. We made it back to the airport with a cool 10 minutes to spare.