The Turkey trip

Women's World Tae Kwon Do champ arrives home in Turkey on Lex's plane. The team and their fans are draped in Turkish flags

Lex and the family visited turkey over the Easter weekend. We were in central Turkey an area called Cappadocia. It is an area which was formed by volcanic eruptions millions of years ago. Historians date Cappadocia’s early civilizations to about 3,500 BC. These civilizations carved their homes into solid rock and even constructed vast underground cities. The nearest thing to it that I’ve seen before, and it’s really nothing like it, is the cliff dwellings in Arizona. Aside from the natural beauty of the area and the ingenuity of the early inhabitants, three things struck me about this trip.

The first occurred before we left. I took my eight year old to our barber for a hair cut. The barber in this one chair shop is an old Italian fellow named Giuseppe. I told Giuseppe we going to Turkey for the Easter holiday and he said, “Noa one a liva a there a anymore. The a whola place is a empty.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Noa one a there. They a alla over here now.” Giuseppe was referring to the huge influx of Turkish labor into Europe. Lex has noted this before and has attributed it to western European countrys’ too generous social welfare systems and declining population growths.

The next thing that struck me was our tour guide’s insistence that while Turkey was a 98% Muslim country, it was secular to its core. She never missed an opportunity to reinforce that. When asked about her religion, she’d answer the question and then throw in a, “But in my country politics and religion are never mixed.” I find that hard to believe. Religious people tend to act in religious ways. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s when some religious prelate urges the murder of the innocent in the name of religion that we have problems. I do believe that Turkey is a very proud nationalistic country rather an Islamo fascists one though. The reason I believe that is the ever present Turkish flag. One cannot walk or drive very far without seeing one displayed in a shop window or from an apartment balcony. Our fist experience with this phenomenon was at the airport when we arrived with a Turkish woman who had just won the World Tae Kwon do championship. Turkish flags were everywhere. Islamo fascist seem to drape themselves in a phony version of Islam rather than any national symbol.

The last thing that struck me was our tour guide’s attempt to airbrush history with regard to the Armenian genocide 1915-17. She said, rather of mater-of-factly, that the Armenian genocide – she never called it that of course - was necessary because the Armenians supported Soviet Russia. I guess this was supposed to be good enough for the Americans on her tour. Well if the Armenians were supporting the Russians then every man woman and child deserved whatever they got - right? Except for one thing, the timeline is all wrong. The Bolsheviks began their rise to power in October 1917 forcing a Tsarist Russia to withdraw from WWI with Turkish ally Germany. So the biggest part of the between 1 and 2 million Armenians killed in Turkey were dead long before the Bolsheviks took control of Moscow in November 1917. I guess it is natural to want to airbrush certain embarrassing things from history. You know like, Uncle Willy isn't a drunk. He was scared by war. But if you use a straw street broom to apply the paint it ain't going to look like airbrushing.