From a Greek Easter, Christina Dodwell moves into a chilly Eastern Turkish spring, not improved for the cold and hungry traveller by the fairly strict observance of Ramadan. Retreating west, she visits the buried cities and rock-hewn churches of Cappadocia on the first of a number of hired, borrowed or bought horses, the ideal liberating companions for her unconventional style of travel. While the snow still clothes the eastern mountains, she moves further east over the border into Iran, to a ranch breeding miniature Caspian horses near the Russian frontier, to the salt desert villages of the south-east, and on into Pakistan for a visa renewal, the unity of her journey maintained by the fact that she is still within the confines of the Persian empire, as she celebrates the end of Ramadan in a festive village near the Afghan border. Back in Iran, she visits the crumbling grandiloquence of lost empires at Pasargad, Naksh-i-Rustam and Persepolis, as well as the trouble spots of yesterday and today in the valleys of the Assassins and Kurdistan. But her journey reaches its happiest fulfilment back in Eastern Turkey when she buys a fine grey Arab stallion called Keyif — the name aptly means high-spirited. Together they ride among snow caps, salt lakes, nomadic summer camps and lowland rice paddies, across mountain country from Erzurum to Lake Van, up the Russian border to Mount Ararat, and discover the unexpected pleasures and hazards of remote mountain village life. Christina Dodwell has the gift to communicate the zest of adventure, and even the occasional night in an Iranian police cell cannot dim her sheer delight in travel to remote and challenging places.
Christina Dodwell's first journey on horseback was in 1975 at the start of three years of travelling in Africa, which she has described in her first book. Travels with Fortune. Other horse journeys followed, and are recounted in In Papua New Guinea and An Explorer's Handbook. After being thrown by a bucking bronco which cracked three of her ribs. Christina turned to river travel, becoming the first foreigner to paddle Papua New Guinea's largest river, the Sepik, a solo four-month voyage; and in 1983 she returned with a team making the first descent of one of the wildest rivers in the world, the Wahgi, or Eater of Men. This was filmed by BBC Television as part of their River Journeys series which has won several international film awards. Rivers were again a theme in her last book. A Traveller in China. Reviewing this in the Sunday Telegraph Linda O Callaghan described Christina Dodwell as a ‘natural nomad’ and wrote of ‘her courage and an insatiable wanderlust’. Both qualities are amply demonstrated when she returns to her first love — travel on horseback — in her latest journeys in Turkey and Iran.
Contents
One-Cappadocia 1 Cappadocia gesiorum / 13
Two - From Caspian Coast to Desert of Salt 2 A guarded welcome to Iran / 31 3 Caspian miniatures and Alexander's Wall / 38 4 A bath house with uncle / 49 5 Dancing Arabs and desert water / 56
Three - Baluchistan 6 Afghans and Zoroastrians / 67 7 The Eid / 74
Four - Persepolis to Kurdistan 8 In the footsteps of Cyrus / 81 9 Riding to Persepolis / 86 10 Trouble at the centre of the world / 94 11 Into the war zone / 101
Five - Travels with Keyif 12 Horse-trading days / 113 13 Welcome to the feast / 118 14 Over the hills to Lake Van / 128 15 Fabled shores / 139 16 Bandit border / 149 17 Noah was here / 160 18 A consumer's guide to Kurdish farriers / 167 19 Interrogation in Kars / 172 20 A sheep for Bayram / 183
CAPPADOCIA
1 Cappadocia gesiorum
It was time for me to go travelling again by horse. I knew the journey would be more fun in a wild part of the world, and what particularly attracted me were the remoter regions of Turkey and Iran.
It's odd how people try to put a woman off such ideas by saying it's too dangerous and she might be killed. My instinct told me that this was unlikely; in all the other journeys I've made the same warnings have been untrue. As for the threat of bandits or arrest by revolutionaries, I trusted in my common sense and doubted there would still be bandits nowadays.
Turkey's strategic position as a land-bridge spanning two continents has given it a colourful ten thousand years of surging and receding invasions. But it was surprisingly difficult to buy a good map. The Turkish ones had enlargements of western Turkey but the east was shown only in small scale and much of it looked empty. The lack of main roads would be no problem on horseback, however.
My departure, early in May, coincided with the Greek Orthodox Church's Easter celebrations in Athens which, being en route, I couldn't resist. And a short stop in Greece would give me the chance to look into my great-many-times-great-uncle Edward Dodwell's journey by mule across Greece in the early nineteenth century. He had been travelling to find and record ruins of historical and religious interest.
The festivities for Greek Easter culminated on the day I arrived and that night I followed a brass band, along streets lined with soldiers standing at attention, to Athens' main cathedral. Other regiments converged, marching with equal pomp; one group in white blousy tunics and tight leggings marched by sliding their feet along the ground in an unusual shuffle. Leaving the parades, I slipped up back alleys heading for the hilltop at Likavetos where a different sort of festival would take place.
The alleys were dimly lit and I had to dodge as someone threw a bucket of water from an upstairs balcony. Many people were heading for Likavetos, soon we were a throng. On top of the peak the terraces round the chapel of St George were so crowded that walking was impossible. I wriggled slowly through the mass. Inside the church a priest intoned litanies and a crown of thorns was prominently displayed. A man sold me a candle. Everyone was holding candles, some ornate with ribbons and lace. They would all light their candles from the sacred flame on the altar at midnight.
The packed church was hot and stuffy so I retreated outside and found a space to sit on the wall overlooking Athens, a denseness of city lights encircled by darkness, making it an island surrounded by the night. We were high above the Acropolis' illuminated shape. The city sky below us jumped with firecrackers and flashed with fireworks, the displays growing more spectacular each minute.
At midnight on the hill the priests brought out their finest jewelled crosses and announced, 'Christ has risen from the dead.' The church bells started pealing, rockets flooded the sky, the crowd began to sing. The sacred flame was passed from candle to candle, each person lighting from another, a small boy lit mine, and slowly everyone formed a procession leading down the winding hillside path. I watched from the summit as the procession grew. People walked carefully shielding their candles, trying to reach home with them still alight. Then they make the sign of the cross with the flame on the door and it's said to bring good luck all the year. My candle burned steadily and my fingers got glued together with hot wax. In some way my journey began with that procession down the hillside.
I spent nearly a week in Greece, crossing my old Uncle Edward's route on Peloponnese hillsides ablaze with scarlet poppies. It felt marvellous to be out under a warm sun after England's long cold winter. Edward Dodwell had felt a sense of liberation even greater than mine, for he was a prisoner on parole, having been captured in France in the Napoleonic Wars. As a parole prisoner, he was not allowed to return to Britain, so he went travelling instead. The temples and fortresses that he and I visited are now too well-known to need description here, though their columns and walls gave me a sense of infinity which I enjoyed. But, despite the temptation to continue through Greece, I decided not to be side-tracked from Turkey and Iran.
So I caught a ferry-yacht across the Aegean, pottering between islands along rugged coastlines, and disembarked at the small Turkish port of Kuşadasi. After immigration formalities, I bought a ticket for the next day's bus to Nevşehir which is about 700 kilometres east on the central Anatolian Plateau and halfway across Turkey. Then I found a campsite where I slung my hammock.
The bus was efficient, cheap and fast. We were offered sprinklings of cologne on our hands; the other passengers all rubbed their hands together, then over their faces, sniffing a whiff up their noses, before finally smoothing their hair with their hands. It seems that men are not allowed to sit next to an unrelated woman, so someone's mother sat by me, whether for my moral protection or the men's, I wondered. She was fat and homely, easy for me to relax with, though she was slightly shocked to discover I have no husband and children. She clicked with disapproval, and suggested I'd be wise to tell Turkish men that my husband and children were awaiting me at my destination. The bus stopped for a break while passengers had a meal, and several times for tea. During one stop my companion ordered coffee tor us. This was special treatment for, contrary to what you might expect, Turks drink more tea than coffee since nowadays coffee is expensive. Afterwards she told my fortune from the upturned coffee grains. Her rural accent was so strong I could only understand that both accidents and joys were in store.
By dawn we had climbed on to the Anatolian Plateau and it was cold. The bus terminated in Nevşehir and I caught a dolmuş, the useful Turkish cross between a taxi and a minibus, to Orgup, a village in the heart of Cappadocia's most exciting and beautiful region. Mount Erciyes loomed ahead, an extinct volcano 4,300 metres high and permanently covered in snow. Wonderful scenery opened up all around, I wished we were going more slowly and resolved to look for a horse in Ürgüp's local bazaar, so that I could see the region in my own way.
Ürgüp is a small town of cobbled streets and old stone houses nestling against a hill honeycombed with semi-troglodyte dwellings. Walking through the bazaar, I enjoyed the colours of the fruit and vegetables. The women selling them wore yashmaks and the men woolly hats; one man told me what the fruits on his stall are called in Turkish. He pointed at some unripe plums and said, 'My name is Eric.'
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Christina Dodwell
A Traveller on Horseback
Hodder & Stoughton
Hodder & Stoughton A Traveller on Horseback in Eastern Turkey and Iran Christina Dodwell
Hodder& Stoughton London Sydney Auckland Toronto
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dodwell, Christina A traveller on horseback in Eastern Turkey and Iran. 1. Turkey - Description and travel - 1960- 2. Iran - Description and travel -1979- I. Title 915.66'0437 / DR429
Main jacket photograph, Isak Paşa near Dogulmyazit, Turkey. Back of jacket photographs, from the top: arrival at Gümüşlü; Keyif in a Seljuk graveyard at Alilat on Lake Van; among Patlian tribesmen; Naksh-i-Rustam, Valerian cringing before Shapur. All photographs by Christina Dodwell.
