Venice, etc. - Kusadasi, Priene, Miletus, Didyma, Rhodes, Cyprus, Haifa and Acre, Israel, November 20 through 25, 2013

Kusadasi, Priene, Miletus and Didyma, November 20, 2013, Wednesday

            Breakfast at the Korumar was something between a treat and a curiosity.  Obviously the hotels four stars are well deserved.  The halls, the verandas and the large dining area overlooking the sea and the appointments are appropriately grand. The view of the harbor and bay from high on the cliffs rising from the sea is stunning. 

 

But something about a resort hotel that is east of Italy and that seeks to emulate the luxury of London or Las Vegas never seems to come quite together.  The wood finishes are too pale and orange-blond to be oak, the patrons’ resort wear somehow doesn’t coordinate and the ladies’ hair colorings have a flat, faux-gold hue that betrays darker origins.  The breakfast buffet was a fair copy of a sister facility, say in Kempinski Grand Hotel Heiligendamm or Badenweiler, but the taste was off.  Perhaps if the feta, yoghurt and honey and the koulouria were in a separate counter?  Our fellow diners – honeymooners from Ankara? – didn’t make us want to begin a conversation.

            8:30 came soon, and we were in the lobby with our bags to meet the driver.  A short drive and we were at last in the port loading those bags on to the Nautica and registering ourselves with the reception on the fourth deck.  All set with our I.D. cards and bottled water, we disembarked and climbed aboard the yellow “jeep.”  It was a light gray day as drove along the coast and up into the hills to our first stop, the Hellenistic site of Priene.

            Dare had visited Priene in 1990 as a co-leader of a group from the Stanford Art Museum, along with Bob Gregg, then the Chaplain of the Stanford Memorial Church and a professor of early Christian history.  Of all of the ancient sites on the coast of Asia Minor, to our knowledge Priene stands alone as a purely Greek settlement that was not later expanded and built-over by the Romans.   The first order of business is a climb of a hundred yards or so up an inclined stone path, all the while staring at the parade of forty or so early-bird German tourists who had finished their visit and were climbing down. 

            Once on the level of the collapsed town, you can get a feel from the small dimensions and intimacy of the site for what a Greek settlement of the second and third centuries B.C. must have been like.  Very little of the original settlement has been reconstructed.  Given that Dare and I are no longer so acute as we were in our youth in reading the outlines of excavated two foot high stone walls, we could still tell houses from public buildings, climb into the temple area, enjoy the ruins and the vista and ponder what life had been like shortly after Alexander’s conquests.

            The next stop was a whole different deal:  the massive Roman ruins at Miletus, another site hallowed because I had first read about it as a child in Richard Halliburton’s First Book of Marvels.  According to Wikipedia, “in the 6th century BC, Miletus was the site of origin of the Greek philosophical (and scientific) tradition, when Thales, followedby Anaximander and Anaximenes (known collectively, to modern scholars, as the Milesian School) began to speculate about the material constitution of the world, and to propose speculative naturalistic (as opposed to traditional, supernatural) explanations for various natural phenomena.”  Our reaction was that the place still has supernatural elements.  The New Testament mentions Miletus as the site where the Apostle Paul in AD 57 met with the elders of the church of Ephesus near the close of his Third Missionary Journey, as recorded in Acts of the Apostles (Acts 20:15–38).  

The main attraction is the enormous amphitheater (see the photo above), but other parts of the settlement, some seemingly almost a mile away, have been excavated.  In Byzantine and later Ottoman times a fortress was built atop the theater, and today a large Turkish flag waves from the summit.  We had visited Ephesus in October of 2012.   Comparing my recollection of that Roman theater with the Miletus theater, I concluded that the Miletus structure is larger and grander, but I have not verified that.  I overcame my terminal sloth – an affliction thankfully that Dare, at all of 115 pounds, does not share – and we climbed up to the top row of the theater, all 70 or 80 rows of stone seats (vertigo city), and then to the fortress.  We traversed about a half-mile arc from the fortress through the minor excavations back to the entrance, stopping to share a delicious tumbler of cool, crushed pomegranate juice at a lonely stand, and our waiting driver.

            We then drove to our third and final destination of the day, the Roman ruins of Didyma.  These ruins are set in the middle of the modern town of Didim.  Look up Didyma in Wikipedia, and you will see a better small photo of the site than I was able to muster on a cloudy afternoon with no adequate vantage.  Further according to Wikipedia, “next to Delphi, Didyma was the most renowned oracle of the Hellenic world, first mentioned among the Greeks in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, but an establishment preceding literacy and even the Hellenic colonization of Ionia.”  The main attraction is a massive and yet compact temple of Apollo.  Many of the columns have been reconstructed so the viewer has a strong impression of what life was like in Roman times.

            Our clever driver took us into another part of Didim for what he promised would be good “Turkish” food.  What that term now means is old-style cooking of lamb and other ground meats together with soggy but delicious tomatoes, green beans, okra and the like, all stewed for hours together in large clay pots.  As in Greece and even France, the old ways of cooking are fading away, as they were always time-consuming.  The restaurant that received us had the old fashioned steam table with all of the day’s dishes displayed for the customer’s ordering.  We chose and then consumed a hearty and delicious lunch.  We were driven to the port in Kusadasi at some distance away, and found that we were in a modern small city with modern and attractive retail establishments.  Kusadasi is obviously thriving.  Upon being left off at the port entrance we walked through the tourist shops that constitute a gamut to be run, stopping only to pick up a fifth of Jack Daniel’s at the duty free.

            We were on the Nautica at last, our cruise beginning a full five days after we had first been scheduled to board in Civitavecchia on Saturday the 16th.  Better late than never.

Rhodes, November 21, 2013, Thursday

            According to our story, dating back to the fall of 1957 and through all the intervening years deemed appropriate and sufficiently intriguing for public consumption, Dare and I met on the romantic island of Rhodes in crisp, balmy and sunny weather, the air laden with the fragrances of thousands of budding orange trees, on a day in the early part of April in 1955.  That event, worthy of the epic meeting of Jacob and Rachel by the well, is truly a marvelous story but inappropriate and too time consuming to be repeated in this venue.  Of course those singular events appear more hallowed and more vibrant with each passing year.  Suffice it to say that we have returned to Rhodes as a domesticated pair four or five times since those magnificent days.  The latest sortie was in October 2012, as a stop on our Barcelona to Istanbul cruise aboard Oceania’s “Marina.”  We scampered off the gangway and through the customs shed during an interruption in the slight drizzle and into the waiting arms of a group of men I characterized in my account of last year’s cruise as “that nest of vipers known as the Rhodian taxi squadron.”

            This year the horde were slightly more mannerly, but we strode away from the pack resolutely to the east toward the gate into the old city, when just one more driver accosted us and began to plead his case.  He argued that we could not possibly see all there was to see on foot and that we needed him to guide us.  We gave in.  In a minute he had picked us up in a spacious late-model Mercedes, whereupon we relaxed in comfort as he sped off.  The driver was right.   We were soon among scores of new hotels and apartments along the beachfront to the east of the old city where the coastline curves to the north.  Most mainland Greeks have views of Rhodes ranging from troubled indifference to outright hostility, but we like the place, both the old walled city and the modern town with its new construction and its buildings dating from the Italian occupation through World War II.  Mussolini’s modernist architects had been allowed to design and build municipal buildings and a large theater during the ‘30’s in a style parallel to that of Rome’s EUR, and I for one am very sentimental about that style of architecture.   Alas, another of my minority positions.

            We drove to the heights above the city of Rhodes to the north and stopped for an impressive view. 

         We paid a quick tribute to the ancient acropolis of the city.  The driver then convinced us to extend our tour to include the town of Lindos, halfway down the east coast of the island.   His rock-bottom price was too high, but fuel is so expensive that he might have been justified.  No matter.  There was no turning back, and an hour later we were in the old square in Lindos looking for a spot to have a cup of coffee.  There was an eerie quiet.  We soon realized that we had arrived at the end of the tourist season, most shops were closed and the narrow lanes (there is no passage among the houses and shops that can be called a street) were deserted.  We arranged with our driver to return to the square in about an hour and began our ascent through the narrow lanes up the hill to the acropolis of Lindos.   

           The most pleasant surprise awaited us.  The lanes up the hill – I would guess about five or six hundred yards – the last time we had climbed to the top had been saturated with vendors (think 5,000 embroidered bedspreads and every figurine and doodad imaginable) and tourists.  Twenty years or so ago one heard mainly French on the hillside.  On this day there was superb emptiness and silence, just an Italian or Russian or two ambling on the stone walkways.

             

             We found the Temple of Apollo area at the top to be rather clinically restored, but even the best of science can’t kill romance entirely.

           The cool wind was blowing hard, but the rain had stopped, and the sun shone brightly on the temple and the large, brown parapets of the Byzantine/Ottoman fort that had been built around it.  We stayed for half an hour and took lots of pictures.  We wondered anew about the old stories that Peter had met Paul on the bay below Lindos.  It’s a great spot, and it was even better that day because we had it to ourselves. 

          We walked down carefully and slowly because the stone surfaces of the pathways were worn and slick.  We found the driver, who sped us north along the coast past resorts and new beach housing until we crossed through the Crusader era ramparts of the old town and were dropped off in the middle of a tourist shopping area.  We had a good Greek lunch in a taverna owned by one Athanasios Stavrianakes in an old square,  Plateia Ippocratous18.  The lunch was anchored by a tasty village salad with feta.  We roamed around the shops, and I bought a summery, long-sleeved tee shirt for almost nothing because the shop was closing for the season that evening.  Most of the shops were closed for the season, as only one more cruise ship was due to dock in Rhodes for the year after the Nautica sailed.  We walked a half mile or so back to the ship and called it a day about 3 p.m., about an hour before we sailed.

            Once on board I treated myself to a thorough haircut and shampoo in the Canyon Ranch Spa (I’m not kidding), administered by an attractive young lady beautician who confessed to being a Serb.   That day, like many on the ship, ended with a brief workout, steam, Bombay martinis on the rocks with a twist at the “Martinis Bar” shipboard and a very well prepared dinner.

Cyprus, November 22, 2013, Friday

            I had made arrangements with my Cypriot friend, Christos Spanos, for a driver to pick us up at the port in Limassol for a tour.  We hoped that Christos could join us for lunch or a coffee so we could continue our conversation at the seaside restaurant in Limassol a year ago October when we had stopped on our cruise on the Marina.  Cyprus has always been the focal point of gossip and intrigue for the Near East, and we wanted to hear Christos’s views as an investment counselor on Russian influence on the island, Cyprus relations with the EU and the euro and how it was going with placing funds for Eastern Europeans and Russians in Switzerland.  We were not to meet, however, because one tiny Nicholas Spanos was delivered at exactly 2:36 p.m. on this day, the first child of Nadia and Christos, who had been newlyweds the October before.  Christos took a raincheck on our lunch, as proud as a Greek father can be at the birth of his first son.

           That left us with a most able and cordial but somewhat unmotivated taxi driver.  We drove out of Limassol, which had been virtually a fishing village on my first visit before Christmas of 1954 but is now a wealthy, modern port city.  We proceeded on the main highway, unsurprisingly denominated the “A1,” northeast toward the capital, Nicosia.

            The first stop was a very interesting “dig,” the 9th millennium B.C. aceramic Neolithic settlement of Choirokoitia.  You are no doubt frowning and asking, “Why aceramic?”  Because they had no pottery, that’s why.  The place was settled by continental settlers, who gradually lost their connection to the motherland and developed a unique civilization.  It is not clear to the unpracticed eye upon touring the site and viewing what first appears as jumbles of rocks what that means exactly, but the settlement is extensive, and the inhabitants must have been able to cultivate crops and bring water.  All that is left is the lower parts of walls, but the archaeologists have been able to piece together living and burial customs.  It was a good stop for a half hour or so.

          Stop two was Lefkara, a small very old village with modern amenities such as several ATM’s situated inland from the A1 at about 1500 feet elevation.   Lefkara is famous for its lace, according to Christos an art apparently inherited from Venetian conquerors in the 17th century.  Indeed we walked for several blocks around two streets lined with stores selling various antiques, embroideries, knick-knacks, peasant costumes and tons of silver jewelry.  It was the end of the season, and there were hardly any tourists on the streets.  A few women sat before doorways tatting and embroidering,  a bit forlorn.  We found the scene somewhat depressing because most of the articles for sale appeared to have passed from common usage or home decoration three decades ago.  This is a part of the world where inventory is wealth regardless of the turnover rate and perhaps somewhere dowries were waiting to be graced with lace doilies from Lefkara, but we doubted it. 

            We drove on to Nicosia.  My first impression was that we must have detoured and ended up in a small city in West Germany.  The sun was out, the streets were wide and clean and chrome and glass sparkled everywhere.  The old orient was nowhere to be found, the comfy disarray of the bazaar having been replaced with shopping center neatness.  We did approach the old city, divided since 1974 at the so-called Green Line, which separates the main part of Cyprus from the north of Cyprus.  The northern area has been administered by a Turkish authority, which is not considered de jure, since that time.  According to Wikipedia, a buffer zone between the now Turkish north and Greek south of Cyprus was first established in 1964, when Major-General Peter Young was the commander of the British peace force (a predecessor of the present UN force which patrols the buffer zone) set it up in the wake of the intercommunal violence of the early 1960s. After stationing his troops in different areas of Nicosia, the general drew a cease-fire line on a map with a dark green crayon.  Thus the humble origin of what was to become known as the "Green Line". 

            Our driver poked around the dark and worn perimeter of the old city, and we passed what appeared to be a large hole in a crusader-era wall that was a checkpoint for passage through to the Turkish area, but the driver kept looking at his watch.  I was hungry and tired of being driven for hours in taxis, and another old town wasn’t appetizing.  When the driver said that “good Greek food” was available nearby, I caved and asked to be deposited at the restaurant he had in mind.  The place turned out to be a fast-food shop called the “Souvlaki Bar.”  The patrons were mostly under 25, and the menu was dotted with admonitions urging the patrons to like the place on Facebook.  I was not disposed to run up my AT&T bill for downloading data in a far off jurisdiction for that purpose just then, but at last the gyros were served, and they were delicious. 

            We took our last swing through a town that was no doubt fascinating 50 years ago but now looked like a city catering to insurance company headquarters.  We urged the driver to return us to the Nautica with all deliberate speed.  He was pleased to do so, and we were back on board by about 3 p.m.

Haifa and Acre, Israel, November 23, 2013, Saturday

            Weeks before arrival in Haifa, I had made contact with a close friend whom I had not seen since 1978.  Ami Gov and I had been colleagues at Teledyne in the early ‘70’s when Ami headed the company’s branch office in Tel Aviv and I was in the corporate office in Los Angeles.  We had worked together in ventures to sell and produce in Israel commercial products such as wire and cable and avionics for military aircraft.  Ami came to Teledyne after retiring as a major from the Israeli Air Force.  One of his last projects had been to coordinate the design and production of an inexpensive fighter aircraft for the Air Force made from parts produced entirely in Israel.  This was deemed a superlative achievement.  The Israelis thus had a good enough airplane at a fraction of the cost of a used American F-4.

            Ami (now a vigorous 86 years old), and his charming wife of forever, Zahava, a diminutive bundle of energy and dialogue, picked us up in their Prius at the dock of the harbor in Haifa.  Both Zahava and Ami have ancestors who lived in Omsk, Siberia, both are natives of Israel and both started adult life and met in a kibbutz, where Zahava crewed on a fishing boat and Ami drove a truck.  We could spend the day in Nazareth, a town of beautiful places of worship, or the Crusader stronghold of Acre (Akko).   We opted for Acre because we had both been reading about the Crusades and the Kingdom of Acre for many years, in my case since the mid-fifties. 

            The first stop, however, after a coffee at a café on a street that could have been anywhere in Europe were the magnificent gardens of Haifa’s Baha’i temple.  Locals will tell you that this temple was built in the locale where the Baha’i faith was founded as an offshoot of Islam in the 19^th century, although the Wikipedia account disagrees.  The extensive gardens, which are famous worldwide and are precise and rational to a point where they make the gardens of the Tuilleries or Villandry seem slipshod and poorly tended, cascade down a hill high above the Haifa harbor.  We arrived after the gardens had closed at noon.  We were impressed with the sculpted quality of the trees and flowerbeds laid out in geometric patterns.

The garden tour completed, off we went, driving northbound in the direction of the Lebanese border about twenty miles on an expressway crowded with Sabbath traffic to Acre.

            Ami is a creative and daring car-parker.   We stopped close to the massive fortress.  For centuries all that apparently remained of old Acre was the Ottoman era fortress, when suddenly about fifteen or twenty years ago a stone street gave way and exposed underneath a vast underground labyrinth of large gothic, stone rooms.  These were mainly the hospital of the Hospitallers, later named the Knights of St. John and later still the Knights of Malta (I know three of them today in San Francisco).   In the hospital the Knights took care of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, roughly speaking from 1192, when the Kingdom of Jerusalem was re-established in Acre after the Third Crusade, which itself came after Saladin destroyed the Crusader state of Jerusalem in 1187.  The hospital continued operational through 1291 when the Kingdom of Acre, the last stronghold of the Roman Catholic West in the Holy Land, was destroyed by armies of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty.   At that point the chapter was ended, and the Knights of the Hospital and the Knights Templar left for Rhodes and eventually for Malta.

            Dare and I fancy ourselves amateur critics of archaeological reconstructions.  These range throughout the ancient world from (1) new digs in the Peloponnese, for example, which have been excavated with rigorous, scientific precision, sometimes literally using teaspoons and toothbrushes so that not a pebble be damaged to (2) the spectacular sites such as the Palace of Knossos in Crete or almost anywhere that Italian archaeologists have excavated, where imagination has been unleashed to build atop the mute stones approximations of the original structures, often lavishly painted, to give the viewer a sense of what life must have been like.  The Israeli intelligentsia are nothing if not heirs of the (dare one say German) scientific tradition, and we soon became aware that each uncovered stone of the Crusader era ruin was carefully in its place and braced against any earthquake that might occur in the next thousand years.  A minor quibble, but such preserved sites feel more like touring a laboratory than basking in the glory of a battle between the forces of Richard the Lion Hearted and Saladin.  Quibble aside, one became aware that the Crusader bastions in the Holy Land were very substantial and in my opinion that the reconstructions give a better impression of medieval life than what remains from that period in Europe, with the possible exception of Carcassonne.

            Emerging from the underground hospital and fortress, we walked through the narrow, stone streets to the famous Abu Christo Restaurant on the waterfront for lunch.  (“Abu” means uncle, but in the broad sense of any respected senior man of the community.)  There must have been 300 diners seated in the outdoor part of the restaurant on this Sabbath day, served by dozens of waiters and serving the proverbial dizzying array of all manner of seafood and Turkish delights.  The place, which of course has to be, as it is, a Greek restaurant, Christo Triandafiledes, Managing Director, thank you, ranks in my estimation with Sam’s Grill in San Francisco, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach as one of the great, institutional, old shoe, traditional, albeit unstarred, restaurants of the world.  Abu Christo is a marvelous blend of an old Arab bazaar, where one might not be surprised to see Sidney Green street in a fez at the next table, and a modern, albeit somewhat shabby, seaside resort.  The main course was fish, but the table was studded with small plates of olives, humus, ground parsley, tsazik and all else that is tasty about the world of the Ottomans and Arabs.  And all the while we were dining with a secular, thoroughly European, Jewish engineer, of course.  Totally satisfactory. 

We impressed with the hustle and bustle of the restaurant, and we were pleased that Arab and Jewish families were having their lunches side by side.  All in all the crowd were enjoying their Sabbath day off with gusto.

Or not, if you were relaxing in a hookah bar.

            Acre was crawling with weekend traffic, and Ami took a couple of wrong turns (still, pretty good at his age – he appears ageless), but finally we were on the freeway and an hour and a half later finally at our hotel in Tel Aviv.   Ami had booked us in the Cinema Hotel, formerly a movie house that he remembered being in the middle of a stretch of unpaved sand when he was a boy.  The hotel features “Modern Times” projected in the lobby, three dozen or so movie cameras and projectors from the past, a passel of old movie posters, some of Israeli movies, and a dining area that still had free wine and snacks available.  We partook for our dinner.  After taking a short walk along the main thoroughfare in that part of town, named after Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor (1921-1925), we gratefully turned in.

Tel Aviv and Jaffa, Israel, November 24, 2013, Sunday

            First, there’s that strange feeling you get in Israel when you awake on a Sunday morning to realize that this is a working day, the first working day of the week.  Second, the guests in the dining room for breakfast, from many countries, all looked like serious intellectuals.   I tried to look a bit world-weary but no doubt succeeded only in looking worn and weary.  Zahava and Ami picked us up, and we drove around sections of this bustling city.  Zahava and Dare got along very well.

Interestingly, the place most important to them to show us was a monument at the site of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, perhaps to convey a tacit understanding that that act ended the one chance of peace with Israel’s neighbors before or since that had might have succeeded.

            The next stop was old and new Jaffa, still largely an Arab settlement.  The old forts along the water have been converted to residences that we were told are the most expensive in the metropolitan area.  We saw a number of Nigerian tourists visiting at Anthony’s Church.

We saw soldiers taking a break from guard duty.

And more expensive real estate:

            We walked a fair distance among an extensive flea market, where I made the mistake of drinking a small tumbler of Arab coffee.  It turned out to be destructive.  I could not sleep after 3a.m. later that night. 

             

We saw families were relaxing with their children.

            

After that came another delightful and colorful lunch on the old marina among fishing boats.

            About six p.m. we undertook the adventure of walking from our hotel through Rabin Square to the high rise apartment building where the Govs live.  We made it.  The Govs served typically light Israeli supper fare, several varieties of humus and cheeses, olives and wines.  We were joined by the Govs’ son, Nir, a physicist who last year had a fellowship to the Curie Institute in Paris and who is working on the physics of pharmaceuticals, i.e., the effects of heat and motion after absorption in the body.  We didn’t get it.  His slender wife, also a scientist with a doctorate in veterinary medicine, and Nir have two boys.  Rents are rising rapidly in Tel Aviv, and Nir and his wife are having trouble finding an apartment near where the folks live.  We were joined later by Anak, the Govs’ younger daughter, who lives nearby and is the accounting manager for a large travel agency.  She proudly told us about and showed us pictures of her two months’ old grandson.  Anak and Nir had visited Dare and me with their parents at our Woodside home in 1978.   They were children, but they graciously pretended to remember us.  We couldn’t even pretend.  The Govs’ oldest daughter lives in a Tel Aviv suburb.  She was unable to join us.   That lady has two granddaughters who live in Iowa City and love it there.   All back in Israel are distressed, not because the young women, who are married, are in Iowa City but because they like living there.  Unaccountably, Ami, who has been there, thinks Iowa City is a cultural desert apart from the University of Iowa.  Who would have suspected?  A significant part of the conversation was not about conflict with Israel’s neighbors but about the disdain, even extreme irritation, felt by the secular Jews of Tel Aviv toward the religious Jews who live mostly in Jerusalem.  We were surprised at the intensity and pervasiveness of our hosts’ feelings.

            We intended to walk back to the hotel but weakened and found a cab across the street from the Govs’ apartment building.

Israel, November 25, 2013, Monday

            After breakfast with the same intimidating highbrow crowd, we walked up Dizengoff Street, Dare to buy a lipstick and I to buy a lighter for my cigars and a trendy shopping center.

There were new buildings and ‘20’s and ‘30’s buildings.

            Zahava and Ami picked us up at 10:45 and drove us to the railroad station for the 11:22 train to Haifa.  We boarded and rode without incident, but when we reached the main station in Haifa we lost our nerve.  We had descended from the train with Joanne and Dick Spotswood at the last stop in Haifa last year on our cruise to Istanbul and had been able to drag our bags a short distance to the embarkation point.  We couldn’t be sure that this train would stop there, so we got off.  A bandit taxi driver drove us the mile to the port after demanding 100 shekels.   I gave him the remaining 80 I had in my wallet and counted myself lucky only to be robbed.  We boarded the Nautica, changed clothes and headed for the fitness center for a workout and steam.