Agencies from the Balkans have also reached Kusadasi a long time ago. I haven't met anyone who didn't like it there, but there weren't any who would say they vacation there every year either. We didn't come to this city on the Aegean coast, which is located about a hundred kilometers south of Izmir, by coastal road or by sea. We arrived from the hinterland.
We were entering the city from the direction of Aydin, and I'll tell you what we did there another time. The first impressions on the hilly outskirts of Kusadasi are that there is construction everywhere. The guide who accompanies us through Turkey says that the price of a square meter has skyrocketed since the war in Ukraine began - there are not enough apartments.
Our hotel is far from the center. The view from the terrace is, of course, one of the things that people go on vacation for. The sea waves crash onto the empty beach. And the restaurant in the hotel's small marina already shows us that we've come to the right place tonight.
The next day, after a hearty breakfast at the hotel, we decided to head to the old town. At the reception, they explained that there was a bus stop nearby. "Dolmuş?" I asked. The Turkish receptionist's face broke into a smile. He understood that it wasn't my first time in Turkey and that I could appreciate public transport in coastal cities.
The dolmus, a squat minibus, is a real transport institution for locals and tourists alike. The fare is cheap, the bus comes frequently, and each one passes through the city center. Moreover, it is perhaps the only space in which a nurse rushing to work, a Norwegian man heading to the beach, a peasant woman going to the city for some kind of work, a Russian woman hurrying to her new home, a dark-skinned dock worker, an elderly woman perhaps going to visit her daughter, are all democratically equal. They all raise their hands and the bus stops. The driver with the obligatory mustache pays for the fare, but there is no ticket.
We get out on the waterfront near the center. The morning is still a bit chilly. We wanted to have a coffee in a cafe that is enthusiastically recommended on the Internet. But the girl shaking the cushions on the garden chairs says that it is not open. Another half hour. Maybe an hour. We have forgotten the fact that this is the Mediterranean East. The city wakes up later. Opening hours recorded on the Internet may or may not be accurate. As this example shows, it is good to understand them in advance only as a non-binding, approximate guide.
We walk along the coast and come to a place that almost every tourist aims their lens at. This monument on the coast is called the "Hand of Peace". It is 16 meters high and is especially popular as a motif at sunset. It must be a beautiful sight, when the red ball tilts there towards distant Sicily and even further Barcelona, towards the other, western end of the huge Mediterranean basin. But now it is morning, and cloudy.
Not every city has to fulfill the promises in the agency brochure. Kusadasi is already nice to me at first sight. I remember that the name of the city can be translated as Bird Island. Hence the birds on the Hand of Peace.
THE SULTAN CALLED HIM WITH HIS HAIR
We reach the port, which is slowly waking up, along the coast. I see that a huge cruise ship is anchored in the bay. The crowds will only start around noon. Now we find a good cafe with the label "specialty". This is a sign everywhere in the world that the skill of preparing the black drink has become a cult here. We sit in the garden opposite the port and are in no hurry. The sky is clearing up above Kusadasi.
After enjoying a cup of coffee, we enter the pedestrian zone. Its atmosphere reminds me of some neighborhoods in Izmir.
The shops are already open. We peek in here and there. Although the city has 130 inhabitants, it looks like a nice little town in the center. But its history goes back a long way – to the third millennium BC. The rulers have changed – Lydian, Persian, Greek, Persian again, then Roman.
The Greek settlement of Neopolis was dominated by nearby Ephesus. When Ephesus lost its importance – alluvium and earthquakes cut it off from the sea – the time had come for this coastal settlement. The port developed rapidly. The Genoese and Venetians turned it into their trading colony under the name Skala Nova. The Ottomans appeared in 1413. Mehmed I conquered the city and annexed it to the empire.
After all these centuries, here we are. The city opens up like a rose. First we wander around the Caravanserai. The fortified building was built in the early 17th century.
At that time, the most powerful man in the empire after the sultan was Mehmed Pasha, the grand vizier. Today we would say prime minister. The sultan called Mehmed Pasha Okuz, which means ox in Turkish. Some say he got the nickname because his father traded oxen in Constantinople, where Okuz Mehmed Pasha was born, while others attributed it to his appearance. He suppressed rebellions in Egypt, and for a time was also the head of the Aydın Vilayet. The caravanserai is named after him because it was built during his reign. It first served as a fortress protecting maritime trade. It was later converted into an inn.
A similar fate befell the building in the 20th century. In the XNUMXs, it was renovated and a French luxury hotel moved in. Former US President Jimmy Carter stayed there when he came to visit the nearby ancient Ephesus. The Turkish and Greek prime ministers discussed improving neighborly relations in the hotel. However, the hotel was later closed, and the entire building was converted into a museum.
MARKET DAY
The most interesting part, as in many other Turkish cities, is the bazaar, the market, the bazaar. We are already finding our way around here. Merchants call out to us from all sides, offering us to enter their shops. They sell everything and anything, but the alleys smell mostly of leather.
We enter some shops and they barely let us out. They offer us tea, praise the goods we touch or look at. And of course, they want to know where we are from. As soon as they find out that it's our first time in town, they smile as if they've received something as a gift. And if you add that you like it here, the happiness knows no bounds.
You never know whether a smile is professional or sincere. But the Mediterranean-Oriental sense of theatricality and making a show of shopping makes it all fun. Provided you don't mind haggling. The prices of excellent leather coats are at least half the prices in neighboring Greece, and compared to the western coast of the same sea, leather is even four to five times cheaper. If you add to this the textiles – cotton is a Turkish word after all – then it really pays to shop around here, regardless of inflation and price increases, which Turkey, regionally located between two battlefields, the one in Gaza and the one overseas, in Ukraine, is certainly not spared.
SNOWFLAKE MEAT MEATS
We walk through the bazaar, which is already bustling with life. Tourists have flocked to the city from the sea, and the local population has come down from the hilly neighborhoods for work. In the main square is a bronze statue of a trumpeter. Behind it, the minaret of the Mehmed Pasha Mosque, built in 1617, towers over everything.
That was two years before the pasha was strangled with a silk cord by a young janissary. This endowment of his remains testifies to the transience of human power and the ever-smoldering hope of salvation. It is recorded that the mosque was called the "jewel of jewels".
The restaurants were bustling with life, with guys or girls standing in front of them trying to lure tourists into the gardens. Some of the places were full. And we started thinking about lunch.
The smell of barbecue and fish covered the bazaar like a cloak. But I haven't spontaneously entered cafes and restaurants for a long time. One of the advantages of the digital age is the ability to understand in advance where they intend to give you a haircut, and where the place is honest. I usually check out landmarks, restaurants and museums online. And this time I had a plan.
We walked to the end of the pedestrian zone, past the cemetery. The dead lie in a line under the evergreen trees. And we are alive and already a little hungry.
If it weren't for those lazy Sunday afternoons in the Bosnian town, when chess pieces just rattle on the terrace of the Cultural Center, and my mother, running away from the broadcast of football matches, finds a sevdalinka on the radio, I might not know what the name of the restaurant we're standing in front of means. "Bulbul" is sung in folk poetry and in Bosnian old town songs. The word traveled from Persian, via Arabic and Turkish, to find its way into our language. Bulbul is a nightingale. And Safet Isović knew how to sing: "Bulbul is singing around Mostar, come, dear, here's our behara."
I don't know if the Mostar darling has come or not, because sevdalinka are based on longing, not its fulfillment, so the song ends before the tragic or happy ending. But this Bulbul will sing to us gastronomically today.
Blue and white checkered tablecloths on the terrace under the vines. We spent about an hour and a half there, enjoying our meal. What I first learned in Germany in popular Turkish restaurants, and what was confirmed in Istanbul, was further confirmed in Izmir, what delighted us in Alanya or Alaçatı and this time was confirmed in the best way: the Turkish culinary heritage is one of the best in the world. And it is close to us.
DADA FOR THE END
We wandered around the city for a while longer. We didn't go to the fortress and lighthouse on the island that is connected to the mainland. We didn't climb the hill to the monument to Ataturk. There are plenty of monuments around the city anyway. On the coast there is another one dedicated to Kemal Pasha, as the founder of modern Turkey is sometimes called. In one street I came across a monument to Lieutenant Kay Aldogan, who fell heroically in the Korean War in 1950. In the harbor there is a statue of a woman with a fish in her hand, and near the cemetery there is a monument to Turkish soldiers who fell in Ataturk's army.
I didn't want to dwell on all that, because Kusadasi is actually a warm and peaceful city, which, like the entire Aegean coast, doesn't hide its commitment to Kemalism. I was more interested in scenes of everyday life. A man selling strawberries on a cart or transporting pickles. Sunlit stairs lead to one of the neighborhoods above the city.
The hospitality we experienced in the Izmir region, without exception, also applies to Kusadasi. When we asked for a shop or a street, people, mostly in bad English, tried to explain to us with a smile, hands and feet. This sometimes caused a collective laugh.
We had coffee with a younger T-shirt seller on the first floor of his shop. He told us that he had been all over Turkey. He listened to where we had been and nodded in agreement. Then he asked us if we had been to Antalya. We hadn't, but we would like to. He said with shining eyes – next to Istanbul, it is the most beautiful city. We parted as friends.
Then we wanted to seal our time in the city with another coffee. We came across that cafe that wasn't open that morning. When you're in a city for the first time, time gets condensed, and by the evening it feels like you've been there for days.
Dada Coffee Shop and Roastery – if I lived here, this would be the place I would spend my free mornings. The garden, separated from the shore by only a street, was beautiful, but the breeze from the open sea brought a touch of coolness, so we went inside.
When we went back to the hotel, we got off at the wrong dolmus stop. We asked the woman, who was obviously seeing her mother off on the bus, how to get to the right stop. She told us to wait with her, she would ask the driver. And so it was. The driver waved us in. He would drop us off two stops away, where our bus also stops. And he wouldn't charge us anything. His face, the face of the woman waving to us and her mother, would merge with the face of Kusadasi, as tame as the bird it bears in its name.
Bonus video:
