‘Yunanistan Amigos’: Cruising In Turkey, August, 1997

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

by Diana Farr Louis

ANDROS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—8/30/10—Thirteen years ago this month, my spouse, “Joy of the People,” and I joined four close friends on a 12-day cruise along the Turkish coast. We began at Kas, opposite the Greek island of Kastellorizo, sailed south to Demre/Myra, then north as far as Marmari, and reentered Greek waters at the island of Symi. This is the story of our most memorable meal.

It was our fourth day on the yacht. We’d already explored Kas, which had metamorphosed from a quaint fishing hamlet we’d loved in 1980 into a high-rise resort where even the rocky shore had been cemented smooth to facilitate hordes of sunbathers. We’d unwittingly joined a caravan of gulets (large Turkish-style caiques)—floating tourist buses—en route to a bay with a Byzantine arch, and spent a few hours wallowing in their wake. We’d coasted down the side of Kekova island, a hive of ruined houses, tombs and Lycian sarcophagi, and climbed up to a Crusader castle at Kale Koy, opposite.

Wherever we went on sea or land, we were besieged by “scarf girls,” lovely young women trying to peddle kerchiefs, hankies and harem pants. They carried them in wicker baskets that were practically invisible under layers of lavender, yellow, pink and red fabric. Below the castle, they’d beguiled us into trying on the pants, but their stitches began to unravel even as we slipped them up our legs.

Trudging up to the castle, we’d passed miserable hovels sown amidst the rubble of previous habitations going back to the Lycians and everybody since them. Antiquities abounded. The whole place looked like a breeding ground for sarcophagi—there was one squatting in the shallows, others tucked into bougainvillea-covered walls, and a whole caterpillar-chain of them on the ridge of the hill beneath the castle.

We followed a group of loud, middle-aged (i.e. much older than we) Italians up the path, trying to ignore the sad-faced crones hawking more pastel scarves in the shade of some prickly pears, and runny-nosed toddlers chasing squawking chickens. At the castle, we leapt around the battlements snapping photographs while the Italians complained alta voce in the tiny theater built by their ancestors.

The fourth day, we motored down the coast as far as Andriake Bay, the port of Demre and Myra, where empty tourist buses were lined end-to-end along the waterfront and sand dunes backed a vast deserted beach. The usual battered wooden “varka” came out to volunteer chauffeur service to St. Nicholas’s church and the theater/tombs at Myra, and we accepted.

The subsequent taxi ride to Demre took us past salt flats and tattered greenhouses crammed with withered tomato plants, red bubbles glowing against dusty stalks, the only color in a drab, shabby landscape. Not a pretty building to be seen. The church, however, dedicated to the Russians’ patron saint, was better tended and full of signs in Cyrillic. We paid our respects to the mosaic floors and several ornate Byzantine sarcophagi. One of these might once have held Santa Claus’s remains (before the Italians stole them to add prestige to the cathedral in Bari).

Up at Myra, we got our first taste of Lycian tombs en masse—golden sculpted facades (think of Jordan’s Petra on a smaller scale) that shone mysteriously out of precipitous grey rocks—and of the neglected Greco-Roman theaters that litter that coast. We peered at the Lycian tombs through our telephoto lenses and then collapsed into a shady cafe where a family of camels posed for our cameras and took a few tourists for rides in the blazing sun.

By evening, we were feeling homesick for the Aegean, for a mooring empty of tour-boats, for blue and white Cycladic austerity. So we motored back to a cove we’d seen near Kekova. Our chart gave it the unpromising Greek name of Polemos (War) Bay, but it was as peaceful as could be. The water was so still that even the anchor chain caused ripples as it clanked out of the bow. There were only two other yachts in sight and we were savoring the solitude—Alone At Last—when we heard the thumpety-thump of a poorly serviced two-stroke engine laboring at the end of a heavy wooden rowboat. We sighed as it drew up alongside and stopped within a centimeter of ramming the Semele.

With his shaven head, Tartar cheekbones and stocky torso, the intruder looked a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Not friendly. We were flying the Greek flag. Perhaps he would think this casus belli, and Polemos Bay would ring with threats or insults.

Not at all. Our assailant used up three of his ten words of English to invite us to dine at his establishment. “Me restaurant; you eat.” It sounded more like an ultimatum. Only then did we notice a lone shack on shore with a big, hand-painted RESTORANT sign on its roof. Suddenly, eyeing the flag at our stern, Genghis asked, “Yunanistan?”

The six of us gulped. Yunanistan is Turkish for Greek. (From the Ionian tribes who long ago settled the coasts of Asia Minor.)

We nodded and there was a long silence.

Until he cried, “Yunanistan Amigos!” and his assassin’s face broke into a wide grin, as he rubbed his two index fingers together, a Mediterranean gesture of friendship.

Misgivings evaporated and two of the men went off with him to inspect dinner prospects. How could we refuse?

Around 9, our host, whom we decided to give the more benign name Yul, arrived to pick us up. His shanty was decrepit and the Restorant was nothing but two floating docks. But on one stood an impeccably laid table with linen napkins, china and glasses worthy of a Parisian establishment. On the other, two vast cauldrons set over a roaring fire served as the kitchen.

Before we sat down, we poked discreetly about Yul’s homestead. He was happy to introduce us to his camel, a young one standing near a pile of sand—perhaps to keep it from missing the desert—but he kept his daughters well hidden. We barely glimpsed them as they hovered in the shadows.

Dinner has rarely been more delicious, never more of a surprise. As a first course, Yul’s wife had prepared a wonderful salad from their own tomatoes, peppers and onions, with a sprinkling of hot chillis, fresh cheese made from the milk of her 300 goats, and sheets of hot, griddle-baked bread. To our astonishment, Yul’s battered ice chest contained several bottles of a good Turkish white wine we’d already come to like. He might be a strict Muslim, but he knew how to treat foreigners.

Glasses filled, we watched the goings-on in the “kitchen” next door. Both cauldrons bubbled with boiling oil. The smaller one produced some heavenly fried potatoes but, in the second one, Yul was cooking fish. Not some small fry or even our favorite red mullet, but two enormous red snappers. Whole. Never before or since has any of us ever tasted deep-fried fish of that size.

After we’d exulted in every mouthful and picked over the bones, we smacked our lips. How could we tell Yul how wonderful it had been? All we could manage was a loud but inadequate “fish loukoum!”*

When he ferried us back to the Semele, the water in Polemos Bay was sparkling with reflected stars and phosphorescence.

Yunanistan-Turkiye, amigos para siempre.

*Loukoum is both Greek and Turkish for the sweet known as Turkish Delight, but it also means something plump and succulent.