Hello Everyone,
Our final destination on this trip, Trabzon, is a small city in northeastern Turkey, on the Black Sea coast, near the border to Georgia. The geology is what I would call “wildly” mountainous, because there are peaks and valleys everywhere, but not much flat land between them. Everywhere you go, in from the seacoast, you climb and descend and climb some more. The peaks are around 7,000 ft and the passes are 4,000 to 5,000 ft high. You drive through switchbacks up to a crest and then go back down.
From ancient times the landscape has been littered with paths and roads, zig-zagging everywhere between the small communities and mountain farms. Driving is so difficult here that, in modern times, they have completely tunneled the mountains. Small roads and big freeways pass through tunnels to go anywhere inland. The longest tunnel we passed through, while touring in the area, was 15 km long [10 miles] and it took about 20 minutes to pass through it. I haven’t seen tunneling like this since driving in Northern Italy, many years ago.
Our first van excursion took us to The Sümela Monastery, the most significant historical relic in the Trabzon region. Established as Greek Orthodox, in the late 4th century AD and expanded by subsequent settlers, it was built on the side of a cliff, at about 4000 feet above sea level. Constructed with stones & mortar, and cut into the side of the cliff, it is an amazing accomplishment, complete with a small, Roman style aqueduct, to bring water from above. There is a small church there, completely covered in religious frescos, inside and outside. It’s quite a large complex, with many cave-style rooms and lots of long and short stairways all over. From the road there is a very steep half mile pathway, with stairs, to reach the Monastery, and then more stairs inside. We logged over a mile walking and the equivalent of 27 flights of stairs during this visit. It’s an amazing place and worth the difficulty getting here to see it. I included some [hopefully not too many] pix in the photo gallery if you would care to take a look.
Trabzon is a popular tourist outpost for many middle eastern countries like Iran, Iraq, and the Arab nations. They come here to escape the heat in their own countries. A large cross-section of Muslim cultures are in the mix with women’s clothing from completely black Burkas, to modern coverings with head scarves [in sometimes wild colors]. The husbands typically dress in jeans and T-shirts. It’s not very expensive to travel here and the “people watching” is excellent.
This area is a major tea growing region, and tea is the most popular drink here. It’s so good, I’m hauling a kilo [2.2 pounds] of it back to Seattle with me. The markets are full of colorful fruits and vegetables from the local farms and I saw unbelievable gigantic heads of cabbage the size of beach balls. They eat a lot of cabbage here. But, the best thing about the food is the rice pudding called sütlaç! It’s the best in the world. Made with a special milk, from cows that add a particular flavor by grazing on a specific kind of wild flower, that grows in the mountains, in a town called Hamsiköy. They cook it for 3 hours in small earthenware crocks and sell it all over town in restaurants and specialty restaurants. We ate way too much sütlaç while we were here. Another thing they drink a lot of here is Ayron, a cold liquid yogurt. We haven’t seen it much around Europe, but it is very popular in Turkey. It’s good for the digestive system and we try to drink it whenever we can.
There is a beautiful mansion here that was one of the homes of their first president, Mustafa Ataturk. It is now a museum. While visiting one afternoon, they were having a concert of local music, played on traditional instruments. We stayed as long as we could stand it. I swear, their music is hard to appreciate. It’s a continuous wobbly sound of single notes put to a drum beat. It gets monotonous very quickly. Maybe we’re just too ingrained with western musical chords to appreciate it….. but we tried.
We haven’t seen any other Americans since we arrived in Trabzon and there is not much English spoken here. On a driving tour in the mountains, the van stopped at the Hidrinebi Plateau, a popular holiday resort area. It is a rare, high plateau, in the mountains where it is cool in the summer. A lot of tourists come here to camp and relax in the cool climate. It’s almost 5000 ft in altitude. While walking around, we decided to stop at a roadside outdoor restaurant for some….. rice pudding [of course]. The young woman behind the counter had never seen Americans here before. This restaurant was a side job for her. Normally, during the day, she was an English teacher. She was very excited to talk to us, and wanted our picture so she could tell her students about it when she returned to school. She then invited us to share the lunch she had prepared for her and her husband. This is the kind of experience we enjoy most when we travel.
When we set out on this journey, we decided to seek out unusual destinations, the would not be overcrowded with tourists. We pretty much succeeded in that goal. However, it required some unusual travel logistics. Getting all the way to Trabzon required 4 airplane flights and 2 long, overland bus rides [one of them 6 hours long]. But, “getting there” is often half the fun. Now, it was time for the long trip home. That requires three flights, two of them very early morning, and an over night stay in Amsterdam.
As I write this post, while onboard the final flight to Seattle, I’m thinking back on what a fun experience it was, in spite of the exceptional logistics. Turkey is one of the most richly rewarding places in the world to visit. Some of the earliest humans on earth surfaced here and have resided here ever since, creating a very rich history. This was our third trip exploring its inner secrets and there is still more to go……
That’s it for now. Hope to connect with you again next time. Do check out the photos on the right. There are a couple of fun things there that I didn’t write about.
Carol has has just finished her blog about Trabzon that you can find at this link:
https://carolapucci-tips.blogspot.com/2024/10/trabzon-little-istanbul-on-black-sea.html
Later…………. your favorite travelers, Tom and Carol
Trabzon Photos
Click to Enlarge and Read Caption
