Merhaba

  Another day, another couple of hundred photos!  We had a lovely day and our group may even make the local news as it is Tourism Week in Amasya and we were in the right place at the right time.

  I am rereading  Turkish Reflections  by Mary Lee Settle who visited Amasya in the late 80s.  I think her description is still accurate so I’ve excerpted a bit of it below for this Amasya preview email.

Ru

Tourism Bigwigs

Amasya  Day 1

“If I were going to introduce a Westerner to central Turkey , and had to pick a place to start, I would pick Amasya.  ….There is something deeper there than welcome to a stranger, and both more casual and more profound than its beauty.  I know this about Amasya, and I am not the first by some two thousand years.  …. We found it—it is a hidden city—by turning northwest, off the arterial highway across the high plains into a river valley.  …   We were entering another world, a green world of forests and orchards; another kingdom, the capital of the kingdom of Pontus……..

It lies in a deep gorge beyond the confluence of two rivers that flow north to the Black Sea.  There classic names were the Halys and the Thermadon, the river that Jason was told came from Hades.  They form the Yeṣilirmak, which pours through the gorge and then, miraculously, seems to be entirely still and form the central street of Amasya, with its row of Ottoman houses mirrored in the water, and its Roman-Seljuk-Ottoman bridges, whose reflections made circles in the water.”

Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place  by Mary Lee Settle  c. 1991

Breakfast was at 7:30 am and bus pick up was 9 am so between the two I went for an early morning walk in the light drizzle.  I could have been in Colorado, USA; Cameroon Highlands, Malaysia;  or Rishikesh India.  Not because they look alike but because the mountains / rivers  take your imagination to a similar place.

The weather cleared for our visit to Amasya Castle high above the town.

“…so graceful a place, so protected by its fortress mountains, that it was chosen for centuries as the city where Ottoman princes were sent to be educated in the arts of government.”  Mary Lee Settle