Archive for the ‘Building’ Category
Oh joy of joys, yet another water pipe is being buried along the side of the road outside my house. This is the third pipe, the first was a big twelve inch diameter one made of hard plastic that was buried about a metre deep. The second was smaller probably two inch diameter and is being ripped out to make way for this one which is four inch. The works for this new pipe include cutting through everything that crosses the road too, including the pipe that supplies water to my house and my neighbour’s house. It also includes ripping up the concrete “bridge” that I made to cross the gulley that carried rainwater down the side of the road. I expect it will be up to me to make a join from my drive entrance to the road surface but it would appear that a bridge will not be necessary because the digger driver is filling in the the gulley level with the road surface.
Here are a couple of photos, the result will be shown in a day or two.
I’m cut off from the world! Good job I left my car down the road a piece.
Neighbour’s drive entrance.
While a point could be made that I wasn’t informed it was going to happen and other complaints, the fact of the matter is that I am delighted because the lack of mains water in the summer months is something that has plagued us for far too long. There has been very little planning in the expansion of Kaş over the last twenty years and none at all in the development of Çukurbağ village. Of course local businesses wish to take advantage of the expanding tourism and making more hotels and other rental accommodation is an important part of that as are the other aspects of tourism like beach facilities. Kaş cannot remain as it was even though I and many others wish it could, summer tourists are going to come whether we like it or not and they will resort to sleeping by the sides of the road if nothing else is available, sympathetic planning and provision of infrastructure must at least keep up with growing demand. I hope the people in charge can figure this out and react accordingly.
I had an email from my brother this morning. He lives with his wife in a small town in Oxfordshire, UK and told me that he was lying on his sofa watching motorcycle racing from Assen in Holland last Monday when about 3pm he was shaken by an almighty crash from his kitchen. Of course being a curious kind of guy he went to investigate and this is what he found.
Doesn’t look too bad does it but the hole in the wall is a bit of a clue to more damage. On going outside to have a look the full scale of the problem revealed itself.
Apparently a lady driver of 81 years of age had started her car in gear and because it started moving had stamped hard on what she though was the brake…..clearly it wasn’t.
My niece’s daughter is often in my brother’s house and local children are often walking home past his house from school at about that time too so thank God there were no injuries.
So my brother is now waiting to see how quickly the insurance company can galvanise themselves into action and get builders to start work. Builders are temporarily propping up the walls and upper floor today.
I suggested that he think about moving to the bedroom at the back of the house and he said he’d already thought of that. Hope it all gets repaired soon.
For the past few years my sleep at night has been disturbed by my cat Stanley. He lies around the house most of the day and only stirs himself to stroll the few paces to the food and water bowls to keep body and soul together. Yes, I believe animals have souls, how could they give us so much pleasure if they didn’t?
Stanley likes to have a big feed at about two in the morning and then go out to check on what’s happening in the garden. To go out someone has had to let him out of the window, me. Then about two hours later, after he has chased all the little furry and scaly creatures back into their hiding place and maybe had a bit of a fight with another cat (the black and white murderer) he jumps up and hangs onto the window frame and scratches at the window to be let back in, me again. Well I was telling a lady friend about this and she said that she had fitted a new cat flap because her cat was bringing his friends in through the old one that didn’t discriminate and let all and sundry in. The new cat flap had a device that recognised a device on the cat’s collar and kept gate crashers out. Would I like to have the old one, she asked. What a nice offer I thought and said yes please.
The cat flap has been installed in the door at the front leading onto the patio and Stanley is slowly getting used to it. He doesn’t mind coming into the house through it from outside but going out through it seems to give him trouble. He sits and bats the flap for about ten minutes with his paw trying to make up his mind or gather the courage to push his way through it. The flap itself is transparent so he can see if there is anything scary hanging around outside waiting to pounce on him but he still goes through this routine. He was doing it the other day and I happened to have my new phone handy, it has a camera and I snapped him. Here he is:
I’ve been doing a bit of sightseeing in the last couple of weeks, places that I should have been to but haven’t. I was introduced to a visitor from America who is going to a lot of places around the world photographing and writing about them. She wanted to have a look at some of the archaeological sites near here so I decided to take a few days off from my labours, drag out my camera which hasn’t seen any proper work for a while and accompany her. Arykanda was the first place we went. There is a main road which goes north from Finike but the coast road is such a trial to get there I thought we could do it more quickly heading north from Demre which is a lot nearer. It wasn’t until we got lost up in the mountains and needed help from the maps that I noticed that a section of one of the roads was indicated on the map in orange colour, the rest were all red. Well we toured around a lot of dirt roads until we came close to getting bogged down and I decided that going back a few miles was the bravest thing to do. We could have been stuck in mud up there for a long time and we hadn’t seen anyone to ask the way so we turned round and retraced our steps until we saw a sign and followed that road. The signs up there are very few and far between.
This is an abandoned school on the road into the mountains, people have moved away from a lot of villages into the towns and cities for a less hard life so the countryside is often deserted apart from a few goatherders.
Anyway we eventually found the right road and carried on until I saw a sign for Arykanda in my rearview mirror and stopped to have a look. The sign that should have been facing our side of the road had a truck parked in front of it blocking my view so we went up a little lane and found the place.
Arykanda was discovered by an English traveller and researcher Charles Fellows, one of the first travel writers of which there are now legions trotting around the globe. It was seen by other travellers during the following years but remained largely forgotten due to the difficulties of getting there.
Arykanda appears to have been inhabited from the end of the late Calcolithic Age (Copper Age beginning in the late 5th Millenium BC) and survived because of it’s easily defensible location with a huge rock cliff behind it and thick forests in front. Even now it is barely visible from the road and is easy to miss if you don’t see the signposts. After a string of earthquakes necessitating major rebuilding each time the inhabitants moved to a place a little way away.
The city is now being conserved and tourism is being encouraged although there were only a few people there when we visited. There are temples dedicated to Helios and Trajan and the remains of other temples as yet of unknown dedication. Here are a few photographs to whet the appetite.
This is the bath complex from the rear and the front respectively.
The centre of one of the mosaics, the photograph doesn’t really do the whole thing justice.
There are lots more things to see, and the setting below the huge cliff is stunning, it is well worth a visit.
On the lane up to the site there is a very nice pension and restaurant where we had something to eat and met Mustafa and Aysel who own and run it. A very pleasant watering hole after clambering around ruins and getting lost in the mountains.
Next will be Patara, Xanthos and Letoon.
Two major upgrades to my house to report today. A few weeks ago I went over to Izmir to pick up a dishwasher machine that I was given. It was also during the first rains of the season and when I got into the middle of Izmir it started raining. Naturally I turned on my windscreen wipers just to see the business edge of the rubber blades stay stuck to the windscreen while the metal carriers screeched across the windscreen like a fingernail down a blackboard (you have to be a certain age to appreciate that). It happens every year because the sun rots the rubber during the summer. Luckily it was only a light shower (unusual here) and I was able to carry on although a bit more careful than usual. I had been looking forward to having a beer and a chat with the guys I was picking up the dishwasher from but unfortunately that was not to be. Anyway suffice to say I got the machine back home cleaned it up and temporarily connected it to give it a test and find out how it works, I’d never used one before you see. The supermarkets in Kaş had lots of different detergent options, I had no idea which one to use but I’d seen a little compartment in the door of the machine so opened a box with tablets in it. They seemed very small but were exactly the size of the compartment so I took them. Well it was a revelation to me, I’ve never seen my washing up so clean before. Yes it’s a bit of childlike excitement, it’s pitiful really but I love getting new things, or even old things that are new to me and I’m treating it like the 21st Birthday present I never got. I won’t be using it all the time, I don’t generate enough washing up for that but when I cook up a few things to freeze for the coming month I use every pot and utensil in the house and I hate washing up after myself then. I’m not going to bother with a photograph of it, it’s a white cubiod thing just like a million others.
Every autumn for the last five years I’ve made weather resistant panels to keep the rain out of the porch with some 2×2 and polythene sheeting. It has worked well and kept the porch dry and surprisingly warm as the sun is low in the sky and the porch faces south. Sometimes it gets up to 35C in there, it’s lovely to sit in there in January wearing shorts and tee-shirt with a cold beer and read a book or do a crossword or two. The trouble with it was it looked terrible and I wasn’t proud of it. Anyway I was tidying up a few weeks ago and came across a brochure that someone gave me a couple of years ago advertising custom made screens which zip together. I decided to give them a call to find out how much it would cost to have some made and they came to measure up and give me a quote. A couple of days later I got an email with the quote , I replied asking them to go ahead and a couple of weeks later they turned up in the late afternoon to fit them.
It took a while and the guys weren’t finished until late afternoon but it was a good job and I’m happy with the result. The screens look a great deal smarter than my polythene ones, you can see clearly through the windows and the material is stronger than the polythene too.
Because it gets so warm in there with the screens it tends to keep the house warmer in the winter meaning that I don’t have to use so so much wood in the stove and the dogs have somewhere warm and dry too. All in all a good addition.
I need to think of new projects to do like the Sahara needs another bucketful of sand. Doesn’t stop me thinking them up though and browsing pages on the wwweb all about construction, woodwork and doing things isn’t going to reduce the number is it? So I was looking critically at the old bench that the boss of the company that built my house made while his carpenters were busy.
Doesn’t look like much does it and frankly I was a bit disappointed with him, after all he was the boss of a company that built wooden houses, not much of an advert was it. I have to say that I have added bits of reinforcement to it over the years, it regularly threatened to dump me on my backside when I was standing on it to reach the grape vines and it has been dragged unceremoniously around from place to place as needed. However the main reason I’ve been wanting to make a new one is that too many people assume that I’ve made this one. Now my woodworking skills are not honed to a fine edge, God knows it’s only since I had my eyes done that I can make a straight cut with a hand saw, but I was damned sure I could make a better effort that his. I found a website with a page about building a basic bench and seeing as I had been tidying up and now had a nice pile of wood crying out to be used I thought I would do it. Don’t ask why I’m tidying up after all this time, I just am, ok?
This is the website that I found and I’m very grateful to Bruce Maki for creating it.
http://www.hammerzone.com/archives/workshop/bench/below20xl.html
His looks a lot better than mine, he’s got all nice new wood but the legs on mine are stronger. Anyway I got up yesterday morning and decided that it was a good day for bench building and this is the result.
Well that’s all for this time, I might make a settee with the rest of the offcuts, if I do and it looks ok I’ll let you know, if it looks rubbish you’ll never know I did it, bye for now.
At last I am able to finish the notes on Side. Not much more to talk about as we were only there for a couple of days so here are a few pictures of the place with a few comments. All of the photographs are clickable for the larger version.
Here is a small part of the ancient harbour, there’s a new and much larger one where the big boats moor, this one seems to be reserved for the little boats.
This one is in the bigger modern harbour. I rather liked the juxtaposition of colours here and the way they reflected in the water.
This little black cat could be heard all over the harbour, he wanted some fish and wasn’t going to give up crying until he got some. Obviously he is well known to the fishermen who regularly feed him. He seemed to be the only one there.
Talking of juxtapositions, I thought this horse on top of the restaurant looked sufficiently crazy to warrant a photograph.
This house was a very good example of an old system being deemed good enough to use in modern times. Apart from mortar the infill between the stone blocks is of broken clay pottery, just the same as you can see on some of the old Roman remains around the town. Why change a system if it works?
Yet another juxtaposition. All around the town there are modern (I use the term loosely) buildings next to or even integrated with ancient remains in their structure. Here the Temple of Apollo can be seen close to houses with part of the Basilica just to the left of it.
This young woman was making a very intricate and fine kilim using silks. The designs she was using are hung above for reference. The speed she worked at was very impressive and clearly she was highly skilled and experienced. There were no markings for her to follow on the backing strings (warp or weft?) the accuracy of the resulting design was solely due to her skill in interpreting the pictures.
Almost all of the houses have been turned into restaurants, hotels or shops. Here just back from the seafront the shops dominate.
Well that’s all for now, you should really go and see the place for yourselves, you’ll be delighted, amazed and in July or August very hot too.
Side, what a nice place to have all that archaeology. Last weekend a friend and I went over to Side, about four hours straight driving time from here. To someone with a passing interest in history it is like manna from heaven. Archaeology surrounds you on all sides and under your feet too, in the old town you never seem to be more than a couple of metres from another piece of carved stone.
Apparently there had been a late season rush and most of the hotels were fully booked but two rooms were found in a little ’boutique’ hotel and, while not exactly salubrious, it provided shelter, breakfast and a bar.
A quick shower and change and out to see the sights pretty much left me with my jaw on the floor. I’ve never been to Rome or any of the big ancient Greek places but the extent and quality of the remains in Side are a bit overwhelming at first. The ‘old’ town of Side (not as old as the remains though) is made up of small houses converted into bars, restaurants and hotels in more modern years. A lot of the buildings incorporate 2000 year old remains. The origins of the ancient city date from the 15th century B.C. and it has had a history of being attacked and occupied by most of the rulers of the Middle Eastern empires. It was invaded by the Persians in 547 B.C. and surrendered to Alexander the Great in 334 B.C later to become the site of his mint. The Ptolemaios and Seleucids then fought over it and it became part of the kingdom of Pergamos in 188 B.C.
The theatre dates from the second century A.D. with additions in the third century.
Side had gained importance as one of the Mediterranean trading centres and at the beginning of the 1st century B.C. pirates captured and carried out raids on shipping and trading caravans.
In 78 B.C. the Romans took it over and it’s rise to it’s heyday began. Temples, a huge amphitheatre, baths and all the trappings of the finest Roman lifestyle were built. Cleopatra and Anthony stayed there too, although a friend of mine says this about them:
“Did you know that Cleopatra was an arrogant bitch who had a habit of murdering her siblings and other relatives, as well as in intervals the entire aristocracy in Alexandria in order to stay in power? The only reason she stayed in power and was not taken over by the Romans was due to the support of her lovers, first Caesar and later Anthony. They used her as a source of gold and grain, both important for their wars. Likewise, Anthony was not the dazzling man one would like to imagine. He was a lousy general; made a major mistake somewhere east of Turkey – attacking while leaving his supply troops behind, unprotected in an open field. Also, he was a heavy drinker. So, now the Cleopatra and Anthony illusions are destroyed. But apparently they did love each other.”
And there’s more:
“Know how they died? Cleopatra built herself a huge mausoleum in Alexandria and when things went bad and the two were hunted down by Octavian and his army, she went in there and ordered the only door to be permanently closed with a stone wall (but there was a window!). Through a courier she let Anthony know that she was dead (which was not the case; cunning woman she was). So he decided to commit suicide and asked a slave to help him do it. But the slave did not want to do it and instead killed himself. So Anthony stabbed himself into the stomach, but did not do a complete job of it. Cleopatra heard his cries and looked out of the window, from which he rightfully concluded that she was not dead. He wanted to join her; so he got pulled up and in through the window of the mausoleum and he died shortly thereafter. So now she had to decide to commit suicide. She died 10 days later; historians think by letting herself being bitten by a poisonous snake. Her kids by Caesar and Anthony were later on killed by the Romans.”
The slave trade and maritime commercial activities further increased the wealth found in Side but by the end of the 3rd century A.D. following attacks from the northern mountain peoples it’s prosperity waned. For the next hundred years it was a shadow of it’s former glory and then a Christian Bishopric, founded by the Byzantine Empire in 5th and 6th centuries restored it’s fortunes. Between the 6th and 10th centuries it suffered earthquakes, attacks by Arabs and was again taken over by pirates. The people had obviously had enough by the the 10th century because they left to go to live in Antalya, in 1150 it was completely abandoned.
The Seljuks reigned over the area in the 13th century and then the Ottomans from the 15th but nothing was done to restore the city, then when the population exchange between Greece and Turkey occurred in the early 20th Century Turks from Crete established a village called Selimye on the site of the ancient city. This has now become Side full of tourism with it’s long sandy beaches and miles of hotels.
Anyone with a passing interest in the history of the Mediterranean peoples or archaeology would have a great experience by visiting Side. I intend to go again sometime during early spring to get some better photographs and enjoy some time there unhampered by pushy bar staff and holidaymakers.
On the day we left we went looking for a pig and ostrich farm that we had been told about. It is to the north of Manavgat and eventually we found it but weren’t able to buy any meat, much to my disappointment. I’ll definitely phone ahead next time so that they can get the freezer stocked up. I was strange to see the pigs in their sties and ostriches in their pens though.
Yilmaz, the owner of the Hi Jazz bar in Kaş, and Necat, the owner of Kaş Camping, have got together with a few other interested people to create an exciting project. In the village of Izne, up in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean coastline at Kaş they are renovating an old schoolhouse to create a centre with workshops and studios for artisans and artists to work and teach their skills.
Set amongst mature almond and fig trees this project will surely be one of a kind.
Izne village is very small and many people have moved away to work in tourist hot spots but some of the local men who stayed are working on the school and some remember being taught there forty or fifty years ago. They feel as though they are helping to bring the village back to life.
Yilmaz says “The aim is for it to be a centre where we can show the crafts and arts of Turkish village life. It will also be a place where visitors to Turkey will be able to get away from the tourist areas for a few hours to experience a real Turkish village and see beautiful and interesting arts and crafts. Visitors will be able to buy some of the things created here and local women will cook traditional dishes to feed everyone.”
It is an ambitious project but the partners have taken a lease on the school for twenty years and are determined to make it succeed. Accommodation will be available eventually.
Work is going on to make new floors, prepare for the installation of new windows and doors and repair the walls. Wherever possible existing features such as the cedar ceilings and sixty year old blackboard are being retained.
My veranda faces west and while it’s nice to able to sit in the sun, it’s impossible to use that space in July and August because it’s just too hot. I’ve been thinking about having a frame with vines growing over it for a few years and yesterday the first part of the plan was completed when the frame was erected.
While they were putting it up I was a bit concerned about it. It looked a bit stark and angular but I know it will soften as soon as something is growing over it. Ramazan, a neighbour and local steel fabricator, brought all the necessary stuff and, along with his brother, started the job about 9.30. He asked me if it was too early for me, bless him he doesn’t realise the dogs have me awake at 5.30 every morning, and before that quite often. Recently Bayram’s big dog has been baying nearly all night at just about everything that moves and because I have my bedroom window open at night I’ve not been getting much sleep, I’m getting fed up with it.
When it was finished I started to paint the frame green (a vine frame is called a çardak in Turkish) but only had a small amount of paint left from a previous job. Tomorrow I’ll get some more and some thinners and gloves to keep the paint off me. I’m very messy when it comes to painting and always get it all over my hands, most of my clothes and even in my hair sometimes. This morning some of the green paint was on the side of the bath, how did that get there?
Once the painting is done there is some shading material to put over it to provide shade until the vines grow, the legs will need concrete put round them to secure it for the winter winds. The second part of the plan is to remove the wooden veranda, level the area from the house foundation to the outer limit of the frame with sand and then pave it to make a big patio with the same flat stone I’m using for the drive. The level will be about eight or nine inches lower than the veranda so it will need a step down from the house too.
My eyes are still improving and I’m so glad I had the laser surgery done it’s making a big difference to my life. I had a check-up a week after the surgery and there is a tiny bit of astigmatism left but if it doesn’t rectify itself after a month I can have it done under the guarantee.
Cukurbagli's Blog 
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