Sadness of a ghost town

When we visited Kayaköy last month, I felt very sad since it occurred to me that these were not ancient ruins. People lived in those houses only 100 years ago. Why and how did they leave?

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Kayaköy or Rock Village from Ölüdeniz is 4 km as a bird flies and 9.2 km by road.

Over 6000 people lived here in 1923. It is today a ghost town as shown below:

By Wikitestaccountlogin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128923050

The place got designated as a “museum” recently. In 2017, 31342 people visited Kayaköy (Kutukız, 2019).

These are not historical ruins but regular homes vacated relatively recently

Some of the building details are easy to recognise in this picture below.

The residents of the house kept their animals (sheep, goats, donkey) at the bottom level where I am standing. There was a timber floor separating the sheep pen from the upper floor, where the human residents lived. The floor was supported by the cross beams that fit the holes near the top of the far wall. The corner has the hearth where they did their cooking.

I initially thought that these walls were well preserved. Then I remembered that the buildings were not really old. There was a woman cooking dinner in that hearth only one hundred years ago, with children playing on the floor and the men tending the animals below. There are many buildings in Istanbul that are much older than Kayaköy ruins and are still in active use. In fact, our Istanbul home was built in 1932, only ten years after the Kayaköy evacuation.

Residents of Kayaköy had been living there for millenia. What social catastrophe forced them to abandon their ancestral homes? To answer this question, I need to provide some historical background.

The Great Catastrophe

My forefathers moved to Bessarabia when Russia invaded Crimea. The respite was relatively short. Bessarabia too became a difficult place for Tartars after 1912. My great-grandfather mobilised enough people to commission a boat to go to Istanbul. There they pleaded the Sultan for a new place to live. The Sultan settled them in Eskisehir. I was born there in 1955.

Not every family was as lucky. Millions died in Balkans and Anatolia in the twelve years of continuous fighting between 1910 and 1922. Villages were burned down, whole communities were massacred or displaced. The Near East had not seen destruction at this level since the Mongol invasion.

Fethiye and Kayaköy were relatively isolated from the strife. Christian residents of Kayaköy and the Muslims in the surrounding towns continued trading and living together through this turmoil, as they had been doing for centuries. Kayaköy dates back to 3000 BC. Ottoman rule in the region was established in 1391. Kayaköy (called Elviz in the Ottoman records) stayed a Christian village of artisans flourishing amongst the almost exclusively Muslim population of Mağri (present Fethiye).

If left alone, this coexistence probably would continue after 1923. How do I know? I have no evidence but I think that if the Kayaköy residents had felt a need to leave they probably would have done so by 1923. They were forced to leave though because the Lausanne Treaty stipulated a forced exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey.

The Great Exchange after Lausanne

The victors of World War I imposed harsh treaties on the defeated nations. The Treaty of Versailles targeted Germany, while the Treaty of Sèvres was directed at the Ottoman Empire. It took the Germans 15 years to rise against the terms of Versailles. In contrast, the Turks immediately took up arms, successfully reversing parts of the Sèvres Treaty and establishing the boundaries of the modern Turkish Republic. The WW1 ended for Turkey with the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923.

Amongst other things, the Treaty tried to resolve the question of minorities in Greece and Turkey. My knowledge of how Lausanne addressed this issue is mostly based on this book: Büyük Mübadele by Kemal Arı (Arı, 2021). Everybody was concerned about the fate of the masses of people displaced between 1910 and 1922. The League of Nations in 1921 appointed the Norwegian scientist and explorer Fridtjof Nansen as League's High Commissioner for Refugees. In 1922 Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did in this position. Part of his brief included the displaced people in Greece and Turkey. After discussions with Turkish and Greek governments, he suggested a voluntary exchange of the Muslims in Greece and all Orthodox Christians in Turkey excluding the ones in Istanbul. Both the Greek and Turkish governments agreed on the concept but the Turks wanted to include the Orthodox Christians of Istanbul in the deal and also argued for the exclusion of the Muslims in Western Thrace because they were not a minority in that region.

It is not clear how and why Nansen’s recommendation that people should not be forced to move was ignored in Lausanne. In (Arı, 2021), Lord Curzon’s argument for forced exchange was to prevent delays and to provide material support the transported people by settling them on each other’s property. Of the total number of 1.6 million people who had to swap their homelands (1.2m Anatolian Greek Orthodox to Greece and 400,000 Western Thracian Turks to Turkey), I do not know how many were forced to do it at gun point.

I find the concept of forced exchange unsettling even in the paradigms of the last century. With today’s sensibilities, I find it abhorrent. I am not aware of any other example in the world history where a condition for peace was the forceful deportation of some regular citizens from both sides.

If the exchange had been voluntary as first sugested by Nansen, Kayaköy residents might have chosen to stay. I would like to believe that one of the reasons the vacated buildings were not occupied was that the people of the surrounding towns felt sorry for their neighbors who had been living together with them for the past five hundred years. I conclude with this passage from Yamak (2023):

Kayaköy continues to tell its sad story as the roofs collapse and the walls collapse and the paintings melt away a little more with each passing winter. The people living in the villages of Kayaçukuru are a part of this story. Due to immigration in the region, the land has become lonely, while the way of production has changed, people have become impoverished compared to the past. Viticulture and tobacco farming, which were important sources of income in the past, have been replaced by horticulture.

…

The forced migration has eroded the place and culture along with the lives of those who come and go. It is because of all these events that Kayaköy is the cultural and spatial memory of the incessant war years and before and after the world war. 

References

Arı, K. (2021). Büyük Mübadele. İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları.

Bardakçı, M. (2008). Talat Paşa'nın Evrak-ı Metrukesi. Everest Yayınları. ISBN 978-975-289-560-7

Kutukız, D., & Çaprak, A. U. D. (2019). Fethiye Destinasyonuna Gelen Turistlerin Kültürel Miras Destinasyonuna yönelik algılarının belirlenmesi: Kayaköy Örneği. The Journal of Academic Social Science, 60(60), 41-58.

McCharty, J. (2002) Population History of the Middle East and the Balkans, The ISIS Press, Istanbul.

Yamak, G. and Biçer, Ü. (2023). A “Solitary” Narrative in Context of Cultural and Spatial Identity: Kayaköy. Urban Academy, 16(1)ö 88-105.

Short Takes

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Smart Nanoprobe Identifies Prostate Cancer Cells

Medical Design Briefs, 14 June 2024

Detecting cancer cells buried deep within normal tissues like prostate glands is very difficult using existing imaging technology. Blood tests measuring prostate-specific antigens (PSA) offer some detection power but it has well-known limitations.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University developed a smart nanoprobe designed to infiltrate prostate tumors and send back a detectable signal. This is very exciting. The probe (which they called nanoSABER) works as explained in the following image:

Aggressive cancerous cells in the prostate issue an enzyme called legumain. If nanoSABER encounters legumain in the cell, it is transformed to a spherical nanopropbe that emits a signal detected by Raman spectroscopy. In the laboratory, this signal had an intensity that corresponded to the amount of legumain produced by the cancer cells. The non-legumain cell type did not activate the nanoprobe, demonstrating that the nanoSABER system performed as designed.

It is still early days but a cheap implementation of this technique may lead to a standard test tool that may be taken annually to detect prostate cancer.

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Higher Temperature Materials needed for Hydrogen Economy

Power, 11 June 2024, Haleigh Heil (NETL)

The World is exploring the feasibility of a hydrogen-based energy paradigm, which means hydrogen both as energy carrier and as power generation fuel. The current energy paradigm based on fossil fuels is a complex system with many interlocking components that are difficult to replace one at a time. High temperature materials is one of them. Materials used in a combustion system must be able to resist the maximum flame temperatures. This is expressed as the adiabatic flame temperature, which is different for different fuels.

The adiabatic flame temperature for hydrogen is about 250 C higher than that for natural gas. This means hydrogen combustion devices may generate hot spots that would exceed the current temperature capacities of traditional superalloys. Ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) are proposed but they have their own problems. For example, they degrade in the the presence of water vapor. This makes them unsuitable for hydrogen combustion, which produces water vapour. The potential solution is silicon-based environmental barrier coatings (EBCs).

The progress in new CMC/EBC development has been slow. Part of the reason is the lack of sufficient of market pull to justify investment in this area. This recent article by the NETL (National Energy Technology Laboratory) concludes that “current CMC/EBC technologies can withstand temperatures up to 2,400F (1,316C); however, the industry is already looking at next-generation materials that can withstand up to 2,700F (1,482C) to enable higher turbine efficiency and power outputs. Nevertheless, significant efforts to enhance existing EBC systems to prolong materials’ lifespans are needed.”

You Tube Video

-+-+-+-+ This Dr Campbell video is on the implications of recent research conducted in Denmark. A paper published last month that the quality of the semen (measured by sperm motility) among men applying to be sperm donors in Denmark declined 22% from 2017 to 2022.

Dr Campbell says that the cause of this decline may have been the vaccine rather than the COVID virus. He may be right. In any case, I think it is imperative that similar research is conducted in other countries and other populations. As Dr Campbelll says at the beginning of the video, you do not have to be a Professor of Physiology to realise that sperms losing motility will not fertilise the egg, which means no more children. The situation is not as severe yet but more research is urgently needed.

Diary

-+-+-+-+ We are back in Australia. Our current project is converting our Rumpus Room to a playroom. Some renovation is involved but it is mostly getting rid of the old things to create space for the new playroom stuff. We started decluttering last week but quickly realised that we needed a very big rubbish bin. So we hired a mini skip.

A truck dropped it. It cost A$320 but I think it is the only option if one wants to do serious decluttering.

Beşiktaş Haircut

-+-+-+-+ During COVID, Meliz had become my barber. She started simple but developed her own style. I must admit that I liked the result. When I started going to the barber again, I tried to describe it to Eddie and although I thought he gave me a good haircut, Meliz thought it could be improved. Last month, my Beşiktaş barber Mevlüt passed by along the street while Meliz and I were having coffee at the Cup of Love on Ihlamurdere Street. We invited Mevlüt to have coffee with us and this gave Meliz the opportunity to describe him her haircut preference for me.

Here I am after Mevlüt cut my hair the day before we left Istanbul:

We are sitting at the table just outside his shop drinking tea brewed during the haircut. Mevlüt likes keeping a notebook with pages filled in by his regular customers. When having tea we realised that I had not made an entry into his book yet. This is what I am doing in the above photograph. The following photo has both of us. It was taken by the owner of the neighboring shop:

Mevlüt Bolat is one of the old hands of Beşiktaş Çarşı. In fact, when I first met him his shop was just inside the Çarşı but he had to shift when the landowner wanted to replace his Barbershop with a small Korean eatery that would bring a higher rent. If you want to get a first-class haircut and have a good chat on what is happening in Beşiktaş, you can find his new shop on the corner of Abbasağa Sokağı and Barbaros Caddesi.

Mevlüt is not only a good barber but also a good writer. One of his books has the interesting title of Bir Berberin Manifestosu (Manifesto of a Barber). The book is a collection of stories inspired by some of his interesting customers, with a common thread through the book. Mevlüt has strong beliefs on how one should live and this comes apparent in the book. With a bit more effort and some careful editing, he could become a 21st century Robert Pirsig for the Turkish readers, like Zen and the Art of Cutting Hair. It is a pity that he has not published commercially yet. The Turkish publishing scene is very difficult.

More Scenes from our Turkish Trip

-+-+-+-+ Here are some interesting pictures and this concludes my narrative on our last Turkish trip.

Karadeniz Döner

This is the best döner in Beşiktaş if not in Istanbul (Define Büfe nearby is a close second). Here is how the wheel starts in the morning:

It is all gone by early afternoon. Meliz and I enjoyed ir several times durıng our stay. Here is what we ordered on one occasion:

BKM Mutfak

BKM Mutfak is a place in the Çarşı where you can have a drink and enjoy the up and coming stand-up comedians. Meliz and I have been going there for 15 years and I remember early appearances of some of the names who are quite big now. Here I am enjoying a beer and waiting for the show to start:

And here are Meliz (not shown) and I on another (colder) night with Ayşe Melike Çerçi, who had just finşshed her performance:

Mahmutpaşa

This is one of the popular shopping areas in İstanbul. Every street is specialised in one line of goods. Here I am in Mahmutpaşa:

The Havuzlu Han is an eight-storey building in Mahmutpaşa dedicated to babywear:

Boat Trips

One of the more pleasent travel modes of travel in Istanbul is by the sea. I met with classmates every Monday in a Kadıköy pub to drink beer and have a chat. From Besiktaş to Kadıköy, there is a service fifteen minutes before and after every hour. Here I am inside the ship against the silhoutte of the heart of Istanbul. Topkapı Palace is at the end of the peninsula, the Sultanahmet (Blue Mosque) is in the middle and Ayasofya (Haggie Sophia) is on the right.

Here is another selfie crossing Bosphorus from Beşiktaş to Üsküdar. The bridge you see was built in 1973 and is the first one of the three suspension bridges connecting the European and the Asian continents across Bosphorus.

Yıldız Park

Yıldız Park is a very large park close to our Beşiktaş home. It was once part of the imperial garden of Yıldız Palace, reserved only for palace dwellers during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. I enter the Park through the gate across the Cırağan Palace. It is a steep climb up the hill but it is worth it.

Many of the plant pots were kangaroos holding the plants in their pouches. SOmeone must have thought it was a brilliant idea. Here I am taking a selfie while sitting at the edge of one:

Moving House in Istanbul

High rises are the norm in Istanbul. Some of them have lifts but they are really small lifts. I always wondered how people shifted furniture. Here you see how they do it:

Cup of Love and Dozze

Here I am at our regular coffee place, Cup of Love. It is on Ihlamurdere Street after the Yapı Kredi Bank towards Ihlamur:

If you want to have coffee while shopping at Eminönü. try Dozze Eminönü. Meliz had capuccino and I had a long black (called Americano in Turkey). Both were very good. The mosaic cake (pieces of biscuit in hard chocolate cake) we shared was delicious:

Elde Börek

If you want to taste what is cooked in regular homes in Turkey, try Elde Börek on Ihlamurdere Street. It is one of our regular dinner places. Here is a photo of what we ordered one night:

The soup is yoghurt-based with oregano garnish. Meliz had bulgur, köfte and potatoes and a bowl of salad. I had some meat dish in the bowl and celeriac and purslane on the plate.

Pascal Hagi

Pascal and Hagi used to dig into one of the recesses of my desk but one day they gave up on it. When we were away, they resumed the habit. To give them something to dig their beaks into, I put a small wood chew toy there. I thought this would make them happy but it worked just the opposite. They are now very nervous to enter the recess as you see in the video below.

Past experience says they will overcome their fear but this has not happened yet.

What I Read

While away, I finished the EarthSea books by Ursula K. Le Guin. She started to write a trilogy but then it expanded to a six-book series. The first three books were:

• A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

• The Tombs of Atuan (1970)

• The Farthest Shore (1972)

She decided to continue in 1990 with Tehanu. Ten years later she published a book of Earthsea stories and the final Earthsea book: The Other Wind (2001). I read all but the stories.

I am not sure I liked the Earthsea Cycle as well as I did ULG’s other books, probably because I am not a fan of so-called fantasy fiction. Nevertheless, there are some interesting ideas. For example,

• The world of Earthsea is created by magic and the creation has its language. This language makes it possible to do the magic and the people who can still talk the old language are the magicians. A language having real physical power is interesting. People cannot lie in that language because it is the True Language. Reading this, I thought of a programming language that is used to create a computer simulation. If you are part of the simulation and you know the language, this talent would probably give you power to change the simulated environment.

• I always wondered how the dragons fed themselves in other fantasy worlds. They are huge creatures and you would think they would soon run out of prey. In Earthsea, the dragons do not need to eat because they are part of the creation and are eternal. Humans separate themselves from dragons and become humans because they want to possess things and this is both their downfall and their ascension.

• Although all magicians are men, there are very powerful women in Earthsea. It is not a woke universe however and men and women have clearly different functions but there is no inferior sex.

Should you read these books? If you like fantasy fiction, then you definitely should. Otherwise, I think there are much better books to introduce yourself to Le Guin’s genius.