The bus ride from Denizli to Antalya was the longest highway leg of our trip, but it wasn’t boring. For one thing, the scenery was spectacular.
Our route took us through a number of small provincial towns – there was no burg of any size on the E87 between Denizli and Antalya – and they were mostly unremarkable, but in one of them we passed this striking silver mosque, and I was able to snap a photo of it as we went by. The tinting of the bus’s windshield is responsible for the blue coloring of the upper quarter of the picture.
In general these towns appeared to be farming communities, not much different from any others you would find in the Balkans or the rest of southeastern Europe.
Most of the pictures in this leg of the trip I shot from the bus, since we made few stops. Aside from the silver mosque, there were few items worth a snapshot, although I did take a fancy to the bright yellow structure in the picture below, since it seemed a bit atypical for the area. The facade had the appearance of a small business establishment rather than a residence, but there were no signs to identify it as such. Perhaps it was just being completed and hadn’t opened for business yet.
When we did stop, it was for gas and food. We obtained both at this gas station and restaurant in one of the small towns on the road.
The nazar boncuğu is an amulet believed to protect against the “evil eye.” Nazar boncuğu is the Turkish spelling; the ğ is silent, and the c is pronounced like a “j” in English, so pronounce it as if it were spelled “nazar bonju”. (Or just Anglicize it completely to “nazar bonchuk.”) The nazar boncuğu can take a number of forms; beads are one of the most common, but the one we encountered most often was a glass disk with a blue edge and a blue or black dot superimposed on a white or yellow center. In the truck stop restaurant on the way to Antalya, Jim Windlinger demonstrated one possible application for it.
Nazar-type amulets are found all over the Middle East and South Asia, but they are especially popular in Turkey, and we found them everywhere we went. I bought up a large batch of them – they are quite inexpensive – and distributed them to various friends and my co-workers in the LA County Internal Services Department upon my return.
After lunch we made one other stop on the way to Antalya. Attila announced that he knew a nomad who had a camp by the side of the highway in a remote area, and we would take a break there. The ostensible “nomad camp” turned out to be a kind of concession where the lady sold shawls, amulets and various other trinkets, and I’m sure she made a decent living off the tourist trade. She appeared to be living alone there, which seemed unlikely given the isolation of the place, and the tent, despite its rustic appearance, was too elaborate and well-furnished to be the dwelling of a real nomad.
I wondered what kind of arrangement the owner – whoever the real owner was – had made with the government to obtain the cachet to set up beside the highway to sell souvenirs to tourists with no competitors.
Nevertheless, it was a pleasant diversion on what was an otherwise uneventful part of the trip, and we enjoyed the break.
The tractor in the picture below was a dead giveaway that the “nomad” camp was probably a side business run by a local landowner; why on earth would a real nomad need a tractor?
Across the highway from the “nomad” camp was a mysterious structure, shaped somewhat like a yurt but made of masonry, standing by itself in the middle of a field. We never found out its purpose.
Finally, just before sunset, we came down from the mountains and caught our first glimpse of the Antalya, metropolis of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, gleaming in the late afternoon sun.
