Akseki

(Booker and duğmeli evi outside of Akseki. All photos by Mary Hunter)

"Burada tarih yok," said the kindly cook/waiter/restaurateur, as he set down a bowl of steaming köfte soup before me. "There is no history here." Here being Akseki, a small town in the rugged Taurus mountains, 100km northwest of Alanya.

As a trained and certified doctor of History, I know that when someone insists there is no history around, it is a reliable indication that there is plenty of history to be had. We gathered this held true for Akseki and we were not disappointed.

Like many travelers, we came to escape people like us. After visiting Istanbul, Ankara and Cappadocia—the places most often visited by foreigners in Turkey, with the possible exception of Ephesus--and then spending two months in the tourist haven of Alanya, we felt the need to go somewhere off the beaten path.

Akseki fit the bill. In our 36 hours there we did not see another yabancı, and the local residents greeted us with the kind of generous, open-hearted curiosity for which Anatolian villages are justly famous. It may be true that the town of Akseki itself has no major historical sites. Most of the buildings in town seem to date from that nebulous period of architectural history between soviet brutalism and pre-fab modular.

But the area is deeply historical. There has been a town on the site of current-day Akseki since the Roman period, when it was a stopping-place on the road that climbed from the coast over the mountains towards Konya. Nowadays, the Manavgat-Konya highway skirts Akseki, and its travelers stop at lavishly-equipped, complete-service rest areas rather than spare caravanserais. Akseki has a small campus of Akdeniz University, a Saturday market where wizened farmers sell succulent pomegranates four for a lira (about ten cents apiece) and not much else.

(Pomegranates and uncured olives, cumartesi pazarı, Akseki)

In the town square there is a statue of Ömer Duruk, apparently (so the plaque indicates) a beloved scion and pillar of Akseki's economic and cultural life until his death in 2006. The plaque does not say so, but if the statue is a faithful representation, he was also a gentleman of tremendous ears, rotated outward from his head as if to capture distant radio waves. We stopped into the Duruk Hotel, a block away, for directions, and found ourselves face to face with Ömer's spitting image at the hotel desk. It turned out to be his grandson. It is that kind of town.

The young Duruk faithfully directed us to the nearest kervan yolu, one of the old caravan roads, some of them dating to Roman times, that criss-cross the mountains. Down the hill, across from the stern sentry patrolling the entrance of the local Jandarma, or Gendarmerie, is a lightly-trodden path that varies from sparsely cobbled roadbed to narrow track, occasionally disappearing in weeds and boulders, only to reappear again, in the manner of an Orhan Pamuk novel, just when you think you have lost the thread.

Unless you are a well prepared archeologist it is impossible to tell whether you are on an old Roman road or just a goatherd's path. But that worked for us.

(Kervan yolu outside of Akseki)

We wandered along for half an hour or so until we ran into some boys and asked them where the path led. They pointed into the distance and said simply, "Köy," village. They then explained that it would be easier to reach the village by walking back into town and getting a bus along the asphalt road. I tried to explain why strolling through the meadows at the base of the majestic mountains might be more appealing to outsiders, but my Turkish was insufficient. It was sufficient to understand what they were saying about scary, protective dogs further along the caravan road. As a trained and certified suburbanite, I know that when a local insists that the dog bites, you may as well take his word for it. We turned our attention instead to the hillside itself, and spent the next couple of hours scaling its limestone crags.

(Bouldering in Akseki, above and below)

We then caught a ride a few kilometers out of town to our "boutique hotel," which in this case meant having spotty electricity and no hot water. Need I mention we were the only guests? Good thing, because ours was the only room where the lights were functioning. We dined in the deep hush that can only be produced by an old Ottoman house nestled in a nearly-deserted goatherders' village in the midst of a brownout.

We awoke the next day to a grand view of the mountains, village in foreground. The local Anatolian architecture features düğmeli evleri, or button houses, so called because the uncut beams sticking out of the wattle-and-daub walls supposedly look like buttons. I didn't really see anything buttonish about it, but they were beautiful, matched perfectly to the landscape like all the best vernacular architecture.

 (Boys meet goat, outside of Akseki)

There seemed to be no inhabitants. The eerie silence was broken only by the recorded call to prayer booming from the loudspeakers of the minaret poking above the cottages. But on our return several hours later, after another jaunt along the caravan roads, we met with a circle of elderly women huddled in a circle on a sideroad, busily working. They were sorting olives, separating the green from the black, delicately slicing the skin as they prepared them for the brine. Burada tarih var. There is history here, after all.