Turkish delight

The minibus to Pergamon was packed. The Turkish word for these tireless little vehicles, which ply ceaselessly back and forth across the immense land mass of Anatolia, is the same as the word for a stuffed vegetable - dolmus - and when a dolmus rattles to a stop in front of you and the door bursts open to reveal an assortment of passengers squished into every conceivable nook and cranny, you don't have to ask why.

By some miraculous suspension of the laws of relativity, however, they always seem to manage to accommodate one more body: and so I took my place in the back seat, crammed between a toothless elderly woman swathed in black and a large, moustachioed, fierce-looking man armed with a spade.

I paid the conductor and was settling down to enjoy sporadic glimpses of spectacularly rugged countryside through a forest of bobbing heads when I became aware that the man with the spade was studying me with interest and, I thought, faint disapproval. Mindful of the warnings issued in guide books to women travelling alone in rural Turkey - stay calm, act confident, avoid eye contact - I ignored him; but when he shook the arm of a man who was standing in the aisle and initiated an urgent exchange which involved a great deal of head-shaking, muttering, tut-tutting and glances in my direction, I began to regret the spirit of adventure which had led me away from the well-trodden safety of the package holiday trail.

The temperature inside the minibus must have been approaching 100 degrees. The sweat which had been trickling quietly down the back of my T-shirt grew chilly. Headlines assembled themselves in my mind's increasingly fevered eye. "Irish tourist disappears on her way to remote archaeological site on top of a mountain somewhere in the wilds of the Aegean coast of Turkey." The spade, I noted grimly, was very sharp. Eventually the man in the aisle cleared his throat and addressed me. "Deutsch?" I shook my head. "English." He made a gesture of despair. "I no speak," he continued, in pidgin German. "My friend" - he indicated the spade-carrier, who nodded solemnly - "say, problem." Within minutes we had established that I had been charged for a return fare instead of a single, the conductor had been called over, given a severe talking-to and obliged to hand me back the difference - a sum of roughly 50 pence. The spadecarrier and I were beaming at each other and the entire minibus was convulsed with delight. The man in the aisle spent the remainder of the journey trying to teach the spade-carrier to say "120" in German, presumably in case of future emergencies to do with bus fares. "Ein hundert zwanzig, ein hundert zwanzig," he repeated earnestly, over and over, as we bumped and jolted along the dusty road to Pergamon.

Since then, I've been to Turkey 10 times in the past five years, and I've been in dozens of dolmuses in all sorts of places, and I've learned - among many other things - that in Turkey, the men armed with spades aren't necessarily the ones you need to be wary of. I didn't choose Turkey: I have a sneaking suspicion that Turkey chose me. When a friend in the travel business - a Greek, actually - recommended it, in answer to my 1992 query along the lines of "where can you take two kids that's safe and cheap?", I arrived expecting another anodyne holiday destination. Turkey, however, slammed straight into my senses. The smells: cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper. The tastes: lentil soup, fruity red wines, vegetable dishes to die for. The sounds: jingle-jangle pop music, the haunting magic of the call to prayer, the endless mystery of the oud.

The sights: Marmaris, where fragrant pine forests wend their way to a sparkling sapphire sea; the castle of St Peter at Bodrum, whose massive ramparts, built by the Knights of St John in 1402, are inscribed with the poignant plea "O Lord, protect us in our sleep, save us when we wake. Without your protection, nobody can keep us from harm". And the language. Nothing could have prepared me for that glorious lilting language. Imagine Italian with a dash of ice and lemon, and that's Turkish.

Food for the soul came later. "Are you aware that the Bosphorus is regressing? I doubt that you are . . . " In the spring of 1997 I made the acquaintance of both Orhan Pamuk's superb novel, The Black Book, and the city of Istanbul, and I'm still not sure which is the more surreal - Pamuk's eclectic, dazzling voyage through the warp and weave of Istanbul society, or the real-life maze of the city itself. In Istanbul more than anywhere else, you realise just how deep this thing goes; how the Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which celebrates its 75th birthday on October 29th, is like a delicate plant floating on the surface of a vast, churning body of water whose murky depths seethe with powerful cross-currents, the legacy left by everyone who has, over the centuries, passed through: Greek traders, nomadic horsemen from the steppes of central Asia, Crusader knights from the elite families of Europe, the armies of Suleyman the Magnificent.

Even to a visitor, it's obvious that it's an awfully long way from the sixth-century dome of the Byzantine church of Haghia Sofia to the chrome-and-glass structures of fashionable shopping centres in Nisantasi and the new Asian suburbs of Istanbul. But it's only when you read a book like John Freely's Istanbul: the Imperial City, with its accounts of the routine brutality which took place under the Ottoman Sultans - Selim the Grim, who executed a grand vizier a year whether he needed to or not; Murat IV, whose alcoholism turned him into a homicidal maniac; Ibrahim the Mad, whose insane excesses finally led to his imprisonment and strangulation - that you begin, dimly, to realise the magnitude of Ataturk's achievement in placing this country firmly on the road to satellite television, mobile phones and email.

When I first arrived in Turkey I thought I had landed in paradise. But of course the Turkey of today - natural beauty notwithstanding - is far from perfect. The country's political and economic problems have been thoroughly documented in the Western media, and although tourists are unlikely to encounter the worst of the shanty-town poverty which surrounds the biggest cities, or stumble upon the sort of angry street kerfuffle which seems to be a feature of just about every television news bulletin, it's obvious, even to the casual observer, that many Turks are struggling to make a living and that those who do make a living have to work damned hard for it.

It's the contradictions, naturally, that keep me coming back. I have on occasion stood on a Turkish street and screamed a silent scream of exasperation. In Turkey, things often make no sense; worse, things which made sense yesterday can simply evaporate in the night, leaving no trace but the ominous word yok, the Turkish word for everything negative. Otobus yok: tough luck, pal, you'll have to walk. Bayan yok: yeah, well, even if it is raining cats and dogs you still can't come into this tea-house because you're a woman, see. Sut yok: what do you mean, you got milk here every day for the past week? But somehow the frustrations never quite boil over. Somebody always comes to the rescue, or cracks a joke, and the problem disappears. Problem yok.

A bite-sized taste of Turkish culture will be on offer at the National Concert Hall in Dublin tonight in the shape of a show called Turkey the Beautiful, a heady melange of Anatolian folk-dancing, Western and Turkish art music performed by Turkish musicians and a collection of designer fashions hot from the coolest Turkish catwalks. The show, which is presented by the Turkish embassy, has been put together to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Republic of Turkey.

Making connections

There are just under 200 Turks registered as resident in Ireland at present.

In 1992, 25,500 Irish citizens visited Turkey; last year, 40,000 Irish people made the trip. From 1996 to 1997 the number of Irish visitors to Turkey increased by 57 per cent, the largest percentage increase among OECD countries.

The population of Turkey currently stands at 63 million.