Turkish Delight: Chapter 3

Get High in Turkey

Sweating like heroes

Turkish breakfast turned out to be a buffet, full of yummy things. Fruit, pickled vegetables, cold meats, yogurt, eggs, muesli. I was kind of hoping for a few slices of turkey, but what seemed obvious to me didn’t seem to have occurred to those actually living here.

And there was coffee. Not espresso-made-by-a-hunky-barista-in-a-Melbourne-laneway-with-latte-art coffee but I can be remarkably tolerant about my caffeine delivery system when it’s the first of the day. Filter coffee is better than instant, say no more.

Anton came in, made himself a cup of tea, and sat at the head of the table dunking a croissant, smiling out at the hungry tourists charging themselves up for the day ahead.

“Boomerang!” I said, bringing the borrowed torch out of my camera bag and laying it beside his plate. His eyes twinkled.

“Find the place okay? It’s easy to get lost in the dark down that way, as your countrymen discovered.”

“Yes. Thank you, it came in handy.”

We both sipped our drinks. He dunked his croissant again. I thought of something.

“Funny thing. I met a man swimming down there, just after dawn.”

“Cold, this time of year. Brave man.”

“Yes. I could tell. He said he was camping nearby.”

“More coffee?” The young woman I assumed was Ferdi’s wife, offering the coffeepot.

“Oh yes, please!” I held out my mug and she topped it up.

“You know your soldiers went swimming there? Even the general in command. Somebody took a photo of him with no bathing costume, and every grandmother in Australia knitted him a pair of trunks to cover his shame. Some of them volunteered to deliver them in person.”

Salty woolen bathers. That would be fun. Extra scratchy and saggy.

“I’ll bet he never wore them. His men would say he was hiding something.”

“You got your photographs?”

“Oh yes. Some nice ones, I think.”

“Of the man in the water? Good.” Anton laughed and I shook my head.

“The trouble is that there are so many tourists here and they all take the same shots. I’d like to go to some of the places that aren’t so easy to get to.”

He frowned. “If they aren’t easy to get to here, that means they are difficult.” He reached behind to get one of the laminated maps and a marker.

“One of the best views is just behind Anzac Cove. Plugges Plateau Cemetery. Only twenty graves; there are paths leading to it but they are steep. All around are places where you can see the coastline and the hills, really get a good look at the battlefield.”

He marked two paths. “This is the easiest, well-marked, wooden steps here and there. Go past the Shrapnel Valley Cemetery, follow the signs up. The other one is just behind Ari Burnu car park where you were this morning. Bit of a scramble but you’ll feel just like the soldiers. Put a few rocks in your bag and you’ll get almost the full experience without someone shooting at you, which isn’t legal here anymore.”

My cameras were like rocks, especially once I loaded up with spare batteries and lenses. If that was the price of getting some photographs that everybody else wished they had taken when they saw mine, then fair enough.

“We don’t serve lunch but if these starving explorers leave anything, we can have sandwiches for you with some of last night’s bread. Melodi will make you a picnic basket, maybe some of that apple juice?” He looked at the young woman, who nodded.

The other guests all had words for Anton. Words of thanks and praise. Apart from the German bloke I was the only one staying on for the day but it seemed that there would be a fresh group arriving for the night. “Another audience for my stories,” Anton winked at me, “and they pay me good money to hear them. I have the perfect job!”

On my way out, fresh batteries in my pack, wide hat on my head, car keys in hand, there was Melodi with a basket for me. Dark hair, dark eyes, white teeth, high cheekbones, she was a beauty and Ferdi was a lucky man.

“You saw Tommy this morning? Swimming?” she asked.

“Oh, you know him?”

“He has a bite to his leg, just here.” She placed a hand on her flank. “He taught me many Australian words. Cobber, Pommie, drongo, shufti, bint.”

She turned pink. “And some more he said were French but French people do not know them.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”

She shook her head. “He is not like that. He sits alone and watches the sun go down and writes poetry. He is very clever.”

“Fair dinkum?”

She laughed. “Yes, that is another one. It means no gammon, yes?”

My turn to laugh. “He was playing games with you, I think.”

More pink.

“Those are Australian slang words, not proper English. If you ever go to Australia, they will ask you where you learned to speak ‘Strayan.”

“I shall tell them we come from Anzac,” she said, “and they will be friends.”

True enough. Half of Australia had come this way. Visiting Anzac had become a rite of passage. Any of them passing through the Gallipoli House would have a warm welcome for Anton’s son and daughter-in-law.

“I’ll have to give you my address. You must visit Melbourne or the War Memorial in Canberra for Anzac Day.”

She shook her head. “Oh no, we are always full. It is our busiest time. We will have your Prime Minister here next week. He will stay in the big room upstairs. We can only go away in the winter, when nobody comes.”

“Ah, but it is summer in Australia then. Everybody goes to the beach at Christmas.” A moment of reflection. “I suppose you don’t do Christmas. Oh well, come anyway. You’ll love it.”

The car park — Otopark in Turkish — was still empty. I took a few more shots of the beach. It looked pretty claustrophobic to me, not a place for a cheery swim, even in broad daylight. I had packed a towel and a one-piece, just in case I got a chance to make my own act of homage later on when the water had warmed up in the sunshine. Immerse myself in history, as it were.

Gorgeous day, but.

I hoisted my pack onto my shoulders, grabbed my tripod — you want really crisp landscapes with everything in focus, use a small aperture and a solid tripod — and contemplated the picnic basket. Bugger it. Too heavy and unwieldy to carry up a steep climb. And lunch was hours away.

The path up wasn’t too hard to find. Sideways up a small bump and then it just went straight up through the low scrub at about a 45° angle. Anton was right. This is how the Anzacs did it, except they would have been carrying loads up from the beach.

Very likely this was one of the tracks used by the soldiers. Any random piece of land will gain natural paths as people find the best, easiest, and most direct route between two points. Then again, the Otopark hadn’t been here in 1915, had it?

Up I went. Obviously, this wasn’t any sort of official path; any decent park management would have added steps and handrails. Maybe ladders for some of the steeper bits. Here and there offshoots took an easier route up the slope, slanting across and returning to the main trail and I gratefully sought those out. Wow, feel the burn in my calves.

I paused a few times to survey the view. Hard to get a direct sight of the beach below through all the vegetation but the Aegean sparkled out below, a few fishing boats lazing along, the silhouette of Imbros — whoops Gökçeada — misty blue on the horizon.

And the long curve of the coastline stretching away north and west to Suvla, where the British had dropped a division of New Army troops in the height of summer and expected them to push across the peninsula before the Turks could mount a defence.

Instead, in a massive failure of leadership, their elderly general had remained aboard his battleship, the soldiers had been landed and while they were waiting for orders, took a merry swim in the convenient sea and brewed pots of tea.

All this clearly visible to the Anzacs on the coastal ridge here, who had been mounting diversionary attacks intended to draw in any reserves and taking immense losses in the process. Several cemeteries held those losses.

By the time the British got themselves organised, the Turks had rushed up to the new front, dug trenches on the hills dominating the flats of Suvla and spent the next three months shelling the crap out of the hapless Pommies. Whole battalions had pushed against the Turkish positions and simply vanished as they walked into carefully-sited fields of machinegun fire.

For now, pulling myself up through the prickly shrubs, I was beginning to wonder just how tall this mountain was. My tripod was never intended to be used as a crutch or walking stick, but it was all I had to help me climb.

I was seriously contemplating turning around and sliding back down to drive around to the other, easier path indicated by Anton when the slope abruptly leveled onto the top of the plateau.

My steep little goat track branched into a network of level trails and I followed them here and there along the edge to small outcrops where the scrub thinned and the view opened out.

And what a view! Almost directly at my feet, it seemed I was looking straight down at the coastal road, the carpark, and the beach beyond. And the Aegean reaching out to a hump of an island I hadn’t spotted earlier.

Fabled Samothrace. I remembered the Winged Victory statue I’d seen in the Louvre, looted from the ruins of the great temple on the island.

Troy wasn’t too far away, on the other side of the Dardanelles, where the French had landed. To those Anzac officers with a classical education, they must have felt surrounded by destiny, mythic warriors on a crusade to recapture Constantinople.

Now, where was that fabled cemetery?

As it turned out, just a few paces away. A big white monument rose out of the scrub marking a tiny square space with seventeen scattered grave markers. Low banks enclosed the grass, and slouched on one of these was Tommy, smoking a languid cigarette.

“Sit down and have a durrie, girl,” he said. “You look fair knackered.”

And, to be honest, I was. I waved aside his offer of a rollie but I took a good long pull of my water bottle. In turn, he shook his head when I offered him a drink.

“Save it for later. She’s gunna be a warm old day. You know there was a war correspondent here on Anzac?”

“The Australian, Bean?”

“Yairs, you’ve done your homework. He wrote the Official History. Anyway, he climbed up from the beach, just like you did, came to this exact spot and he saw a dozen wounded men lying here, calling out for water, so he pulled out his water bottle and offered to them The medical corporal told him to save his water for the living, these ones were dead.”

“Oh, so cruel!”

Tommy shrugged. “That’s war for you, eh? There’s three of them lying here in this bit of grass, the rest were carried out to the hospital ship sitting offshore and got chucked over the side when they died, and one survived, hunted down that corporal, and gave him a full water canteen fair in the teeth.”

I made a face. Tommy grinned and his eyes twinkled. “Love that hat.”

I pulled off my hat and showed him.

“Ah, the old hat kafooffle,” he said, taking my battered old digger hat and examining it. “This one’s brand new. Right place for it, but, here on Anzac.”

He tried it on, pulling the brim down over his eyes, just a pair of sparkles in the shadow.

I lifted my camera, raised an eyebrow, and he posed for me, hat at an angle, cigarette balanced on lower lip, cheeky smile with the hills of Anzac in the background. A keeper, if I remembered to get a model release.

“Here,” he handed the hat back. “You need that more than I do. Don’t want to get sunburnt, ruin yer day.”

Together we sat down again, looked out on the view, or what we could glimpse of it through the gaps in the bushes.

I stood up, unfolded my tripod, set it up on the shoulder of the white monument — “Plugge’s Plateau; Their Name Liveth for Evermore” — and took a careful panorama sequence.

“Beautiful place to die, eh?” Tommy said, stubbing out his cigarette and flicking the dead end into a little pile under a bush.

I looked at him. “It must have been like something out of Homer, sailing all this way and fighting to capture Byzantium.”

He looked back. “You’re not just a pretty face, Miss. You read that in a book?”

Just a few.

“They say you write poetry.”

“Who says that?”

“A young lady at the place I’m staying.” I reached back into my memory for her name. Melani, Moodi? “Um, she’s got dark hair, dark eyes, and she’s totally beautiful.”

“Never met her. But I make up a few lines here and there.”

He got to his feet, put one hand behind his back and declaimed to the Aegean:

Güzel bir kız bir melodi gibidir O gece gündüz sana musallat oluyor Öyleyse benimle gel Ve benimle otur Ve güneşin batışını izle.

I must have looked startled, because he laughed. “Language is made for poetry. They have it in their souls, the Turks. Sentimental blokes, they are. Especially the sheilas.”

“But what’s it mean?”

“Ah, rough translation: A clever young poet named Tommy is often mistook for a Pommy. He lives in a cave with his pet lizard Dave and never writes home to his mommy.”

I laughed out loud at that, here in the pretty little cemetery. “Oh, you are so full of it, mate.”

“Arrr, geez. A man puts his heart and soul into a sonnet and gets laughed at for his trouble.” He looked at me again. “What brings you up here? You must be dead keen to climb up the front like that.”

I told him. Photographs of places that the tourists don’t get. Angles and lights that amateurs don’t look for. The story not yet told.

“You shoulda got that young bloke to show you around. You know the one, two pick handles across the shoulders, give you a tour for a thousand lire and a bottle of grog?”

“I wanted to look about on my own. Find places the tourist guides don’t go to, remember?”

“You mean, get lost and fall down a hole and break your leg. Hope you brought your phone to call the ambulance. Cost you more than a thousand deeners, but.”

I thought about it. What did I know about this guy, really?

“You offering to show me places off the beaten track?”

“Yeah, Tommy’s Tours, that’s me. Not like I got anything better to do, eh?”

“You’re on. Just let me call somebody, tell ’em where I’m going.”

I walked a few paces away, faced out over the sea. Down below I could see a couple of big coaches trundling along the coastal road. One had already reached the carpark and tourists were fanning out, arranging themselves for selfies amongst the graves.

The phone picked up after about ten rings. “‘Allo? Gallipoli House.” A female voice.

“Is Anton there?”

“No, gone to market. Can I help?”

Melodi. That was it. “Melodi, is that you? Britni Pepper here. I’ve found Tommy and he wants to give me a guided tour. I wanted to let Anton know, so he can send the police looking for my body.”

She had a smile in her voice. “Tommy? Is he there? Can I speak?”

I handed the phone to Tommy. He took it, listened without expression for a moment, and then responded to whatever he heard in a torrent of Turkish.

Five minutes later, it sounded like it was happy hour at the comedy club, judging by the laughter. He eventually handed the phone back to me.

“It’s me again.”

“Is okay. Tommy says he will be a perfect fucking gentleman, pardon my French. Make sure you take lots of photos of him and show me when you get back.”

Well, that was good.

“Okay. I think I’ve got a ripper already. I’d send it to you now if I could work out how to get it off my camera. There’s an app, but it’s kind of flakey.”

And that’s why people don’t buy cameras any more. Not only are smartphones getting better all the time, they can load your shots straight onto social media and you can start collecting likes. No mucking about with cables and wifi profiles and three apps to do one job.

“I can wait. Thank you. He says he will write a poem about you. Goodbye.”

“See you.”

One big family.

“Righto, let’s hike.”

© 2021 Britni Pepper. All rights reserved.

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