Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
In every sense of the word, Cengis’s Çayhane, Cengis’ tea house, to me could be construed, somewhat I felt to High Command disapproval, as the nucleus of the whole excavation. It had not much to commend it architecturally, made as it was of a few reed screens and a reed roof, but for me it became the human interface between the various disparate elements of the excavation – the site supervisors, the workers, the dig house staff, Mehmet the light house keeper, the Jandarma (militia), the musicians, the bekçiler (site guardians) and any other visitors, hangers on, sea captains, passers by and ne’er do well’s who were part of the ebb and flow of the life of this incongruent, isolated community.
The Çayhane was strategically placed on the site. It was quite close to the theatre where the sinuous dirt road from Datça and Yazιköy finally petered out, and it lay at one end of the isthmus which linked the mainland, where all the workers slept in the fields, to the island where The Trans-Atlantic contingent kept court at the dig house, some one hundred and fifty meters away. Like the classical theatre, the Çayhane had its own conventions – approaching from the road – outside news; approach from the dig house - home news. Cengis had erected it on a small, slightly prominent knoll overlooking the Commercial harbour, actually a knoll supported by the original block-work of the harbour isthmus and adjacent to what was now
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the only jetty, where the little fishing boats tied up, convenient for the daily catch – foreign news from the sea. This was important, because food, especially fish, was one of the main attractions of the Çayhane. The other, the real glue which cemented the diverse elements of the Çayhane together, was alcohol. Cengis sold booze!
It was to the Çayhane that the field staff would repair at the end of the day, to sink an Efes – the appropriately named Ephesus beer. It was to the Çayhane that the villagers would gather to drink tea, or later in the evening, if they felt flush, aslan sütü, lion’s milk, the local sobriquet for rakι, the equivalent of the Arabic arak or the Greek ouzo, that milky-looking fiery liquid that turns a young man into a…well, stumbling wreck! And it was to the Çayhane that I would go to eat with the men each night, on the principle that the Reşadiye Peninsula was a veritable cornucopia of comestible resource, something of which the Expedition’s frugal budgeting had never made use.
On a tiny gas ring, and a small tin tray which acted as a charcoal barbecue, Cengis could produce the most remarkable dishes – kebabed fresh grouper, lamb köfte and a variety of egg recipes. He brought from the village a colossal array of fruits – sweet grapes, huge peaches, green and black figs, mandarins, apples, oranges, apricots and cherries - and olives, which grew in super-abundance, and nuts, especially new-season’s almonds, for which the area around Yazιköy, his own village, was famously and justly renowned. The Çayhane offered an absolute profusion of comestibles for a growing lad like me, and Cengis also had wine - not very good wine, admittedly, but there were suggestive elements of Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ about it, you know, the one about ‘A drowsy numbness pains my senses’ etcetera. Well, it didn’t really classify as quite like Keat’s blushful Hippocrene, but the purple stained mouth was right, and the beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and the drowsy numbness did indeed pain my senses, especially the next morning.
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One of my favourite dishes which Cengis made in the Çayhane was, and still is, menemen, a singularly Turkish dish made with tomatoes, onions and green peppers which are sweated in butter until soft, and then into which an egg is scrambled. With fresh village bread and a glass of Efes, this was nirvana to a budding field surveyor like me. Another collation I made my own was a plate of two fried eggs, with the dark yolks bursting, dipped with fresh crusts. My Turkish at that stage didn’t stretch to the full kizartilmιş yumurtasι, ‘eggs that are fried’, so I would order with my abbreviated version, yumurta pfssss, to indicate the process. Many a dish did I order of ‘yumurta pfssss’ over the months. But in the end it somewhat backfired on me. One particular evening, near the end of the excavation, a night when for some reason I was especially popular – I must have bought a round of drinks or something – the recipient villagers, without consulting me or Cengis, each ordered plates of ‘yumurta pfssss’ and then donated them to me, so that I ended up with seven plates-worth, a total of fourteen eggs, all of which out of politeness I had to eat. Never again!
It was in the Çayhane that I learnt most of my Turkish, and much more importantly, my great admiration of and my love for the Turkish people, something which has become more profound as the years have rolled by. Haltingly, in my case anyway, we discussed major topics and characters of the day. Recurrent themes were:
Amerikanlar fena. ‘Americans are bad’, on the basis that the bosses were American and responsible for the wages, and therefore were always fair game.
Ümit fena ‘Ümit is bad’, not unnaturally I suppose, in that he was the Management’s right-hand Turk who was also the hire and fire merchant.
Ruzgar fena ‘the wind is bad.’
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This needs slightly more explanation. Knidos, being at the end of the long peninsula and surrounded by open sea, was prone to terrific winds whistling round the headlands and blowing at strength across the isthmus. Every few days, these strong winds blew, picking up sand from the beaches and dust from the excavations which then insinuated itself into everything, especially into our tents and our bedding. It really was most uncomfortable. Knidos, ancient and modern, must be considered the ‘windy city,’ the Chicago of the Eastern Mediterranean.
But then there were good things too.
‘Sonny iyi’ - Sonny is good
‘Deyvit iyi’ - well, I wouldn’t argue with that.
‘Olga güzel’ - ‘Olga is beautiful’, which was a bit of an over-statement perhaps, but was probably meant in a more spiritual than physical sense.
The Çayhane also doubled as our music hall, and it was there of an evening that sundry members would bring their musical instruments and play. There was Birol who played the saz, a four-stringed, long-necked lute, sometimes accompanied by his brother Mehmet, the fenerci, (light-house keeper), who played the keman, the violin. Cengis kept a dümbelek, a narrow-bodied tubular drum, on the shelf with the soft drinks which someone would take and pick up a tintinnabulating rhythm. And we also had Ömer, the flute player, who played the zurna, an ancient wooden pipe, the kind one sees in cartoons of snake charmers, which emitted a coarse, reedy oboe-like sound. And the rest of the assembled rakι drinkers would begin to sing. I can remember the songs to this day, largely because they tended always to be the same ones, night after night. They were old folk songs of the region, of unrequited love, or of a man about to go on a long journey, who would forget his sweet-heart back in
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the village. They were sung in the minor key and became more poignant as the evening wore on. The arty lot in the dig house, who were all fond of grand opera, ridiculed them. The raucous singing drifted across the water of the Commercial Harbour, disturbing their enjoyment of the record player. But for me they were among some of the unforgettable sounds of Knidos. And with the music, the men would dance, often with a slow, balanced, twirling motion which as a genre went back hundreds of years. For me, it was magical.
✳ ✳ ✳ ✳
It was while I was at Knidos in that summer of 1969, in July of that year to be precise, that we heard that man had landed on the moon. We were so cut off where we were that world news rarely penetrated as far as the outer edges of our consciousness, and being none the wiser, we were happy not to know about floods in India and the progress, or lack of it, of the war in Vietnam. But one of the High Command kept a radio and could tune in to the ‘Voice of America’, and this was the chink in our otherwise hermetically sealed, news-free armour. We had been blissfully unaware of moon probes, Saturn V rockets or Apollo missions. The nearest we got to Apollo was that we had a temple dedicated to the same god half way up the mountain - the real Apollo, that is, if there is such a thing!
One evening, with the Çayhane extravaganza approaching full swing, complete with terpsichorean twirling and unrestrained