My Thanks, Giving Turkey

March 2025

My route for this blog...

Bolu

I woke up in Yetiş' cold little cabin in the countryside, and was surprised at how late it was. I'd crashed out at 9pm the previous night, and suddenly it was already twelve hours later.

It's so good that I no longer have to set alarms for myself, like I do when I have buses or trains to catch, or, God forbid, when I have to work.

I pottered around for awhile, thinking about the fact that I'm actually heading off riding today, for the first time in over 3 months. Where does the time go? I feel like I just left here.

Suddenly Yetiş' dad Abdullah appeared, and asked me if I wanted coffee. Do I want coffee? Is Mohammed a Muslim? Of course, I'd love to have a coffee with you.

We sat around the little fire and had a lovely chat. Abdullah proceeded to burn old plastic crates in the pot belly stove, broken ones that he once used for his market business. People aren't shy to burn plastic in Turkey, despite its toxicity. You see (and smell) it everywhere.

We had a great conversation about his life, and about Turkey, but eventually I decided that I'd better start moving, and Abdullah had greens to pick for his market stall anyway.

Back on Black (Bewdy)

Before I knew it I was on the road again.

Ripper!

It feels so familiar, so easy, to be back on the bike. There's really nothing too much to think about logistically, because I've done it all before. I know what I need, I know how to organise a route (but unfortunately only of the travelling variety lately haha), I've experienced so many different types of road conditions, weather, hills, different types of shops, languages, money, food. It all seems very straightforward, and my mind has become completely unconcerned with such minor details.

I mean, the cycling itself can be tiring, especially after hardly riding for ages, but I even know what that's like, because I had a break last winter as well.

My life is so boring, nothing interesting happens.

Ha! That'll be the day.

There was a cute new walkway/cycleway, with not another bike in sight.

Soon I hit the road, heading west. Not the freeway of course, but the other road.

It was easy riding for awhile.

There were so many beautiful mosques. These two (above and below) were right across the road from each other. Saves you crossing the road I guess.

Eventually the road climbed, and climbed, and then climbed some more. I hit snow, but luckily it wasn't on the road anymore. It's actually winter here, still. This winter seems to have lasted a long time.

I finally made it to the top of the hill, and snacked. Yum, cheap and thick apricot nectar, my great fave. And bread compliments of Yetiş.

Turkish food is so good. This sign made my mouth water.

Above Centre: Bolu mountain, 900m up.

Below Centre: There were some nice views, but it looked rather hazy down there. Notice the rubbish. It's a massive problem in Turkey. There's shit everywhere along the roads and rivers and streams and open areas. The government really needs to get its act together and educate people about littering.

My Turkish friend Sagun told me that when he scolds other people for littering they either get angry with him, or don't even understand what he's so upset about.

Then I shimmied down the hill. It was freeeeezing!

Doggone!

The sign above is quite appropriate. It's official. There's dogs everywhere in this country. And I'm not talking cute little chihuahuas and poodles, but huge massive bear-dogs that look like one of their parents was a Viking. A mean one. They hang around on the streets, and sometimes in very sinister-looking large gangs.

I mean, sometimes they're just sleepy and look at me disinterestedly (or slightly suspiciously) as I ride by, but then sometimes they suddenly launch straight into attack mode, and before I know it I'm staring into the faces of a murder of sprinting fang-bearing barking demons, dribbling with anticipation at the Polish sausage they're about to have for lunch.

My strategy is to just speak to them calmly, but a fat lot of good that does most of the time around here, because they can't hear a thing because not only are they barking so loud, but their minds have become so obsessed with me that they just can't think straight.

My sister Mish told me I should shout out "Hey, stop!! These aren't bones, these are my legs!!" Or, more appropriately, Hey!!@#&$! These aren't your bones, they're my bones!!

Unfortunately, when they get into their frenzied state nothing much seems to help. If I've got some food handy in my handlebar bag I might throw something to them, sometimes that can distract them. Even if it's a bit of old bread.

Below Centre: I'm actually quite happy I'm heading towards Düzce, and not all the way to Istanbul. My intended route will completely bypass the capital and, even though I love that city, I don't love its traffic, and would much rather stay in the quieter regions, and places I've never visited. I've also been to enough cities lately.

Below Right: I stopped at a little shop and bought some baklava. It was to die for. I started chatting with the owner, Mahmet, he was a lovely guy, and before I knew it I was surrounded by five curious local men.

Above Centre: A couple of the men ran next door and came back with this for me, as a gift. Incredible Turkish hospitality. It's so common that you even come to expect it. This is a special bread they eat during Ramadan, (or Ramazan as it's called here). During this period many people fast during the daylight hours and don't eat until the evening meal, iftar, when it's dark.

In Turkey not everyone fasts of course, it's hard to say how many actually do, but surveys say it could be around half, and apparently that number is declining.

Below Left: Kamal Atatürk, again.

Below Centre: After a long day's cycling I was ready to find somewhere to sleep, and luckily, despite the urbanised nature of a lot of my ride today, I came across a nice patch of forest, and headed up an old rundown road, steeply up into the hills.

I found a spot to pitch my tent, then walked back down to collect my bike and its over-load, and lugged it all the way up the hill, out of sight of the busy road, and further away from its noisiness.

Aaaah, I've missed you my little tent. Aaaaah, I've missed you my little nature. I've been on plenty of nice walks in the bush in the past three months, but haven't camped once. Not once! Sad but true.

It was winter though, and bitterly cold in Northern Europe, so that's a pretty good excuse not to camp. Plus I didn't have my tent.

But it feels so good to be back here, where I belong.

I went for a little stroll at dusk.

There were wild dogs about. Or wolves, I really don't know which. All I know is that when I got horizontal in my tent and it got dark there was an awful lot of howling, and long mournful howling at that. And it was coming from above my tent somewhere.

I imagined wolves at the top of the hill, howling to a blue-ish moon, before they silently slunk down and ripped me into pulled Polak before I even had time to utter a gargled scream.

But luckily the howling never came much closer during the night. I was very thankful, and slept hard.

It was cold overnight, maybe 3 or 4 degrees C, which is not particularly cold if you're European or Canadian or Turkish and you're in a house, but for me it was pretty cold.

I slept until the sun warmed my tent, and went for a little walk. Eventually I brekkied, packed, and headed off, down the steep dirt road, and then up the bitumen one. It always takes me a while to get moving. I like it like that.

Above Right: Yeah yeah, I guess I'd better pack you up.

To Geyve

There were some long climbs and descents the next day, and the road was quiet at the beginning of my ride.

Below Centre: This is truckie piss. They piss into their plastic bottles and throw them out the window. I've seen it in many countries. Use the bloody bin at the servo guys, come on, you've turned your beautiful country into a pigsty in many places, with attitudes like this. There also happens to be very few bins, and insufficient garbage collection or disposal.

Yeah, no judgment, it's just really sad to see, because the landscapes are so beautiful, and rotting garbage and plastic isn't exactly that picturesque or Instagrammable.

Below Right: This truck had caught fire earlier, and they were dousing the flames. No idea what happened, but as it turns out I saw another one the next day, which had also completely burnt out and was left in ruins on the side of the road.

Doesn't exactly instil you with confidence, does it.

Below Left: Cemetery

Below Centre, Right: There's so many mosques in Turkey. In fact there's over 85,000 of them, servicing a population of 85 million, which means there's a mosque for every thousand people.

Even though Turkish government statistics state that around 98% of Turks are Muslims, that's really a little misleading, because the government assigns every person born in Turkey the classification of Muslim, and they need to go through the rigmarole of making an application to change it, which some don't do.

Only 44% of Turks say they visit a mosque at least once a week, and that figure is skewed towards older people. Many young Turks aren't interested in religion, often because it's boring, but also because these days it's come to be linked closely with the current President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his AKP party's conservative and often pro-Islamist policies, which many young Turks reject.

Above Left: Colour in the gloom

It ended up being quite a tough afternoon of riding, because the secondary road that I was on ended up morphing into something much more major, and became jam packed full of speeding trucks and cars, all of which appeared to want to be at the same place at the same time.

It's tiring riding on those sort of roads, because the huge air gusts the trucks spew out sideways when they pass me at high speeds really throw around my flimsy bike, and the flimsy body on it, and I really have to concentrate to stay safely on the road and not end up as köfte mince under the wheels of a thundering multi-tonned steaming juggernaut.

Köfte, by the way, is Turkish meatballs, and different varieties of it are eaten all over this part of the world. I don't want to be an ingredient.

Anyway I got through the highway ordeal, yelling my displeasure every now and then, to no one in particular, and was very thankful to finally get off the fat road and get back to small town rural Turkey.

Eventually I made it to my destination, a small town called Guvye. There was hardly anyone around. In fact at the moment, during the days, on the smaller roads, there's just noone about in the villages. It's Ramadan, and religious and conservative Turks in the small villages are fasting during the daylight hours, and many of the food places are closed during the day as there's no business anyway.

Above, Below Left: Saturday night and I ain't got nobody. Sunset over deserted Guyve streets.

As sunset hit, and the call-to-prayer sounded from the minaret, a huge fireworks bomb was let off, sounding the end of fasting for the day. It's happened everywhere I've been in Turkey during Ramadan.

Above Centre: I met some young boys on pushbikes, who told me where the good food was. This whole order of lentil soup, chick peas, rice, salad and bread was 130 Turkish lira, just over €3. The place was jam packed, and it was almost exclusively men, who were sharing iftar. It was sort of a subdued vibe in there.

By the way fasting Muslims also eat before dawn during Ramadan, a meal called suhur.

There was actually a table of young Istanbullies in the eating place, at the back. We chatted a little, they're on holidays, and just passing through.

I stayed in a cheap little hotel, it was a nice enough room. No one speaks a word of English around these parts. Someone even told me they learnt German as a second language at school, so we chatted in German. I was proud of myself, but to be honest his German was pretty minimal, just like mine.

To Beautiful Iznik

The next day I woke to a cold foggy morning, and the town was dead.

Above Left: Dead beginning street, which also had a dead end.

I was on the real backroads now, and was so happy to be off the bigger roads that I'd had to ride on here and there for the past couple of days, as they were the only practical option. There was absolutely no one around as I rode. No one except the occasional dog-wolves.

Below Right: There's some interesting tiled houses around these parts.

Above: It's fruit and grape country.

And olives. Are olives a fruit? I guess so.

Below Centre: Love the macho truckie's fluffy toys

Above Left: Massive stork nest

Above Centre: The minarets in Turkey are all so impressive, as are the melodies of the ezan, the call to prayer. They're really beautiful, with the voice of the muezzin sometimes reaching super high notes, and the notes bending left right and centre, as is the tradition throughout the Muslim world.

Recently, when I was in Tunisia, Sagun, my Turkish friend, couldn't refrain from demonstrating how the ezan should be sung, after listening to what he regarded as the far inferior Tunisian versions. He was actually amazing.

And now that I'm here I'm really appreciating the complexities of the melodies, and the feeling that's emanating from those minarets.

It's like listening to love songs to God.

Above Centre: Advertising at the cemetery. Interesting concept.

Above Right: Fake cop in front of his fake car.

Below Left: Trashing the place

Below Centre: The most basic lunch in history. Leftovers actually, because nothing was open.

By mid afternoon the fog finally cleared, and I could warm up.

After a long and sometimes hilly ride, I rolled into the historic town of Iznik, on the edge of Iznik Gölü, the beautiful Lake Iznik.

Isnik the town is at the site of the well-known ancient Greek city of Nicaea, which was founded in 316BC, and became a very important Christian city in ancient times.

Iznik the town is at the site of the well-known ancient Greek city of Nicaea, which was founded in 316BC, and became a very important Christian city in ancient times.

The old city was ringed with walls, most of which still survive, although they've put arches through bits of them, to accommodate modern roads. And it looks like they've added a brick or two (or two hundred).

Above: This is the Green Mosque. It's stunning. And it's green. It was built in the late 1300s and is an amazing piece of ancient architecture. I'm constantly blown away by the beauty of the mosques in this country.

Below Left: Iznik is also famous for its pottery and tiles.

Below Left: The ancient Hagia Sofia of Iznik, which was originally built as a Byzantine-era church in the mid 6th Century, was razed in an earthquake, and then rebuilt in its current form around 1065.

It was then converted into the Orhan Mosque after the Ottomans, led by Orhan Ghazi, took the city in 1331.

Below Centre: Finally at the beautiful and super chilled lake.

Below Right: I found a great little place to sit and contemplate life. And drink çay and eat what the girl serving there called "tost" - cheese bread with tomato sauce inside. I found out later it's pretty common, with different fillings, and is pretty tasty too actually.

Above Centre: The dad and his teenage daughter were amazingly friendly. And hospitable, of course. We exchanged very meaningful thoughts about the world in the short time we chatted, like when he said this.

They were very keen to hear of my impressions of Turkey, and of course gave me a huge bottle of water for my onward journey.

My thanks to you, to the always-giving Turkey. My thanks giving Turkey.

Above Right: There was a beautiful cycleway along the lake in town.

Below Left: I rode along the lake out of town for another 10 clicks or so, until I found a little campsite/cabin place run by a beautiful young couple, Tarpan and Beste. Ihr Name war der Beste (her name was the best).

We all had a beautiful connection, and chatted for ages, over çay of course, the ubiquitous Turkish drink. They told me a lot about Turkish politics, and said that many people in the country, particularly younger people, are just waiting for the day when Erdoğan is gone.

Tarpan is 43, and remembers the days when Turkey was a much more open country. He remembers big parties, hippies, and a free and easy lifestyle. Now he says things are totally different. President Erdoğan's AKP (Justice and Development Party) has aligned itself with rightwing conservative and religious parties, to ensure he stays in power. He uses divide-and-rule tactics to create polarisation within the country, and to create scapegoats to blame for his own fuck-ups.

Same old story, different country.

The parties he's aligned with, and his own party, have become less and less tolerant to diversity. Once a beacon of democracy in the region, and on the path towards membership of the EU, liberal Turkey can no longer be described with that adjective.

A coup attempt in 2016, which all Turkish political parties condemned, gave Erdoğan the opportunity to erode democratic processes, totally crush his political opposition, and fill important government and civil service positions with his own supporters. Thousands of military, civil servants and civilians were arrested, many of whom had nothing at all to do with the coup.

In 2017 a referendum gave Erdoğan sweeping new powers, and led the EU to decide that Turkey is no longer eligible for EU membership, because the new Turkish constitution violates the Copenhagen Criteria, a set of rules that must be adhered to by all countries on the EU membership list.

The transformation of a decades-old parliamentary system into a heavily centralised presidential one has removed the checks and balances needed to stop corruption within the Turkish government and economy.

Tarpan and Beste are confident that all of that will change one day, and that true reform will take place, because most young people support it. But Beste, an amazing artist and free thinker, said she feels like she can't breathe at the moment.

I hope change happens, for their sake, and for all the Turkish people, especially the very young, who have never experienced an open and tolerant society.

And actually, since I wrote this, huge protests have erupted around the country, the biggest in about a decade. The catalyst was the arrest of popular Instanbul mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on what his supporters regard as trumped up charges. It's absolutely no coincidence that İmamoğlu is President Erdoğan's main opposition candidate, and a man who many believe would defeat the President in any future election.

It's still pretty unclear how all this will play out, but, unsurprisingly, Erdoğan has had over 2000 protesters arrested so far, the media he controls completely underreported the protests, and he's taken away the media licences of some media companies that broadcast accurate reports of what happened.

Turkey is currently one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist, if you don't toe the government line. It consistently vies with China for the highest total number of journalists imprisoned in any one year, which is pretty hard to do given the massive population difference between the two countries.

Some journalists have been in prison in Turkey for over twenty years, including the three longest serving journalists in the country.

Not a good look, is it.

Anyway, after that sobering discussion I camped in Tarpan and Beste's backyard.

Above Left: The view looking back

Above Centre and Right: Beste's beautiful art and design work inside.

A Very Huggable Coast

So, I'm slowly heading west, hugging the coast. My goal for this part of my journey is to get to Greece. I plan to roughly follow the southern edge of the Sea of Marmara, that huge body of water that connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, then I want to cross the Çanakkale Boğazı, the straits that connect the Mediterranean with the Marmara, (also known as the Dardanelles), and then head along the eastern Mediterranean coast, which is actually more accurately known as the Aegean Sea around there.

But all in good time.

For now I have important things to do.

Like drink çay and türk kahvesi, that delicious muddy Turkish coffee that goes down like a bomb.

Like, every day.

And not just once❤️

http://buymeacoffee.com/krolesh9