Walk through the world and throw yourself on its mercy

The leg from Konya to Silifke is about 160 miles, so it’ll take me 2-3 weeks to walk it. I estimate I’ll be passing through this area in mid-November.

The route climbs from Konya’s 3350 feet to over 5000 feet, and then drops to sea level. Most of the drop occurs over a 25-mile stretch 80 miles outside Konya, so for a week after I leave Konya I’ll still be on the Anatolian plateau.

The first part of this leg, while I’m still on the plateau, follows the route of the Istanbul-Baghdad railroad. The railroad was built in the early 1900s, mostly before World War I. Envisioned as part of a rail link between Berlin and Mesopotamia, the railroad would have extended German and Ottoman economic control into Mesopotamia, balancing British and Russian influence in that region. However, construction was slowed by political and technical difficulties. After WWI the Istanbul-Baghdad railroad was eventually finished, and parts of it are still in operation today, but the vision had for it when construction began in 1903 never came to fruition.

At the edge of the plateau is Karaman, a city of about 132,000 people. This area is known for the extinct volcano Karadag (literally: Black Mountain) and the Binbirkilise, which literally means 1,001 Churches. There aren’t really 1,001 churches, more like 50 ruins, but the area was a hotbed of early Christianity. Once Christianity moved into the cities though, these kinds of outposts out in the boonies often fell by the wayside.

By the way, before Karaman took its Turkish name, it was known in another language as Larawanda, which literally meant “a sandy place.”

About 15 miles out of Karaman I’ll reach Sertavul Pass at 5400 feet. Over a two-day period I will drop from Sertavul to about 600 feet. Imagine driving up a hill that requires you to shift down a couple gears and go slow just to make it — that’s what the slope is like, except, of course, instead of going up I’ll be going down. It’ll take me over half a year to cross Turkey, and I won’t see too many slopes like this one, so I imagine it will be a refreshing change of pace.

Shortly after beginning the descent from Sertavul, near a village called Gecimli, I’ll pass the Alahan Monastery. Alahan was a Christian monastery built in the late 5th century and then abandoned a couple hundred years later. UNESCO is considering Alahan for inclusion on the World Heritage Site list.

A day or so after Alahan, I’ll reach the town of Mut. Mut has about 29,000 people and lies at the foot of the Taurus mountains. The area is known for its apricots, but since I’ll be passing through in November, I don’t expect to see any of those.

After passing through Mut I’ll still have a week of walking up and down rolling hills before reaching Silifke near the Mediterranean.

Much of the road between Mut and Silifke follows the Goksu River. The Goksu (literally: Sky Water) originates in the Taurus Mountains and drains into the Mediterranean. In 1190 during the Third Crusade the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the Goksu River. If all goes well, I will not share his fate.

After about a week rolling along the Goksu I’ll head into the town of Silifke, population 55,000. It looks like the weather around these parts will be a nice change from Konya and the Anatolian plateau, where November’s nighttime temperatures hover around freezing. Silifke’s Mediterranean climate means that even in November the temperatures are likely to fluctuate between the mid-50s (Fahrenheit) at night and the mid-70s during the day (mid-teens to mid-20s Celsius).

Silifke is about 5 miles inland from the Mediterranean, so I probably won’t see the sea until my first day out of town, when I’ll begin an entire week walking along the Mediterranean. As in, so close to the sea that I could pick up a rock, throw it, and it would land in the water. Since by this time I will have been inland for about three months, I will probably be very happy for the change of scenery. More on the post-Silifke walk later, though.

This leg is about 150 miles long, so it’ll take me two or three weeks to cover it.

The first week or so will be a time of lakeshores and memories of St. Paul. I’ll spend a couple days walking along Lake Egirdir — it’s not a huge lake, but remember I’m walking, so my pace is slow. Two days after leaving the shores of Lake Egirdir I’ll pass near Yalvac, formerly known as Antioch, the capital of the Roman province Pisidia. St. Paul visited Antioch many times in the early days of the Christian church. He was from Tarsus by the way, a city I’ll be walking through later on in the journey.

In fact, when first arriving at Lake Egirdir I will intersect a trail called the “St. Paul Trail,” an offroad trail which runs north from Antalya, climbs the Taurus mountains, skirts Lake Egirdir on the lake’s western shore, and ends at Yalvac. The St. Paul Trail project was organized by Kate Clow, a British woman who also developed the Lycian Way trail and some similar projects officially recognized by Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In researching this trip I’ve corresponded with Ms. Clow a couple times. I highly recommend that anyone interested in old Roman roads or the pre-Ottoman history of this part of the world talk to Ms. Clow. She has spent many years building up a wealth of knowledge on the subject and bringing it to life via tangible trails and guidebooks.

A few days after passing Yalvac I will come upon Lake Beysehir. Lake Beysehir is the largest lake in Turkey’s Lake District, about 28 miles long and 12 miles wide. At its southeast corner is Beysehir, a city of about 45,000 people. Hundreds of years ago, before Beysehir was known as Beysehir, it was known as Viransehir, “Wasted City,” even though it was a great place for people from nearby Konya to build summer residences next to the lake.

This entire leg, lakes and all, is on the Central Anatolia plateau. That doesn’t mean everything’s board flat though. In the two weeks (about 125 miles) out of Egirdir, I will climb from the lake’s elevation of 3100 feet to about 5200 feet. The land along that climb becomes pretty arid once I leave the shores of Lake Beysehir. I’ve seen territory like this once before, on the road west of Ankara, but I was in a bus and have never walked through an area like this. I am eager to see it.

After reaching 5200 feet I drop quickly, over the space of about two days, into Konya, a city of about 1,000,000 people at an elevation of about 3350 feet. Konya is said to be one of the more religiously conservative cities in Turkey, so I am looking forward to seeing how it compares to the big bad den of iniquity known as Istanbul.

Konya is also the home of the Mevlevi Order, its whirling dervishes and all things Rumi. Rumi was a 13th century mystic who also goes by the name Mevlana. He was Persian but came to live in Konya when his family fled the expansion of the Mongol Empire.

After laying over in Konya for a week or so, I’ll head south off the plateau and down through the Taurus mountains to the Mediterranean. More on that next leg later.

Syria’s looking a little choppy these days, so I’ve been working on a Plan B. Maybe Syria will have it all sorted out by the time I show up, but you never know.

Plan B would have me walking the full length of Turkey, from the Aegean coast to Iran. 1300 miles, just no Syria, at least not now.

More details to come later this week (route, elevation profile, etc).

This leg begins at Denizli, a city about 1,000 feet above sea level, with a population of about 500,000. From Denizli I will climb about 2,000 feet onto the edge of the Central Anatolia plateau. The climb is very gradual — it’ll take me about a week, since I’ll only be covering about 12 miles a day.

Near the top of that climb is Lake Acigol, a name which is a little redundant since “gol” already means “lake” in Turkish. “Aci,” by the way, means “spicy,” “bitter,” or “painful.” Acigol is a relatively small salt lake, about 2% of the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It is also a shallow lake, less than 2 meters (6 feet) deep, meaning that even if I swam out to the middle my feet would still touch the bottom. It may be small, and it may be shallow, but I am looking forward to walking past it. Passing it means I have definitely left the river valley and climbed onto the plateau.

I’ll be on the plateau for about four weeks, and during that time I’ll be skirting the north edge of the Taurus mountain range. The Taurus is a 1200-mile-long mountain range separating Turkey’s Mediterranean coastal areas south of the range from the Central Anatolia plateau north of the range. The range runs from Turkey’s southwest corner, where I’ll be at this point, all the way east to the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Many of the range’s peaks are 10,000 to 12,000 feet above sea level. I, however, will spend most of the month walking the relatively flat plateau at elevations ranging from 3,000 to 4,000 feet. After a month on the plateau I’ll take a right and head south, dropping off the plateau for a brief one-week foray through the lowlands along the Mediterranean coast. When I make that descent from the plateau, I’ll be threading my way through the Taurus mountains. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though; I’ll save writing about that portion of the journey for a future installment.

Acigol also marks the beginning of Turkey’s Lake District. The Lake District is an area on the plateau with about a half dozen lakes. The largest, Lake Beysehir, is only about a tenth the size of the smallest of the Great Lakes in the US, but this is not a part of the world famous for having a lot of water, so you don’t have to have a lot of big lakes to have a lake district.

Between Denizli and Acigol the land usage transitions from farming to open pasture, and past Acigol I’ll definitely be seeing more pastures than farms. The area past Acigol is sparsely populated. Each day I’ll be passing through one or two small villages with populations of 5,000 to 10,000. Only once during this two-week period will I pass through a larger city, Isparta, population 225,000. In fact, during this two-week period there may be a day or two where I see individual houses, but probably not any villages.

The city of Isparta, a provincial capital, is also known as “The City of Roses.” It is the hometown of Suleyman Demirel, former prime minister and president of Turkey for most of the 1990s.

Isparta is directly north of the coastal city of Antalya, about 70 miles as the crow flies. Separating Isparta and Antalya are the mountains of the Taurus range though, so it’s definitely not a clear shot to Antalya’s Mediterranean shores. There is, however, a two-lane highway running south from Isparta, dropping off the plateau to Antalya and the Mediterranean Sea. I won’t be walking that road though. I will be continuing east.

About two days after passing through Isparta I will arrive at Lake Egirdir. By then about two weeks will have passed since I left Denizli, and I will have been walking for about four weeks total. I suspect I’ll be ready for some downtime, so I’ve targeted Egirdir for a one week layover, a time of rest before continuing further along the plateau.

By the way, Egirdir used to be known as Egrirdir, which means “it’s bent” or “it’s crooked.” In the mid-1980s the name was changed to the only-slightly-more-flattering Egirdir, which means “it’s spinning.”

The journey will begin in the Aegean port town of Kusadasi. Kusadasi means “bird island.”  The city’s primary industry is tourism.  Tourists come by sea on cruise ships, and by air and land from Europe and within Turkey.

The city’s base population is about 65,000, but during the summer tourist months the city’s population can rise to half a million, what with all the tourists and the people who come to the city to serve them.

One of my favorite sites in all of Turkey, Efes (Ephesus), is just a few miles outside of Kusadasi.  I wrote about Efes in my book A Tight Wide-open Space, in the chapter called Scandals, Romans, and Jacuzzis.

From Kusadasi I will begin hiking inland through the Menderes river valley.  The river valley is flat, but the mouth of the Menderes is actually south of Kusadasi, so when I leave Kusadasi I need to climb about 1,000 vertical feet and then drop down into the river valley.

The main city in the river valley is Aydin, which is also the provincial seat.  Aydin has a population of about 188,000. The area’s main crop is figs.

I’ll be walking through the river valley for about a week and a half.

After a week and a half I begin to climb out of the river valley.  Over the space of a week the climb will take me from an elevation of about 500 feet to 3,000 feet.

Early on in the climb I’ll pass through the city of Denizli. Denizli’s population is about 499,000.  The main industry in the area is textiles, especially towels and bathrobes.

Near Denizli is Pamukkale, one of Turkey’s well-known tourist sites.  Pamukkale means “cotton castle.”  The site is a natural collection of hot springs and the carbonate mineral deposits the flowing water has left behind over the years.  I’ve never been there, but for many years have wanted to go.

After Denizli I’ll spend about a week finishing the climb out of the river valley onto the plateau.

This is a bridge over the Euphrates river in southeastern Turkey. I will be crossing this bridge, from left to right, in the fourth month of my trip.

Seeing the Euphrates up close, that’s something I’ve always dreamed of doing.

Some tentative results from yesterday’s route planning…

View Larger Map

Click here for the spreadsheet showing the pinpoints and how much distance is between each one.

Any suggestions? Remember I have never done this before and am happy to get any intel or suggestions I can.