Greece and Turkey in 2004

To welcome my Turkish readers, here are excerpts of a letter I wrote to our families in

New Zealand and Australia after visiting Greece and Turkey in 2004:

                                                                                                                                  

We arrived in Athens on a blustery autumn afternoon when the bay of Salamis was speckled with foamy white-capped waves and spray, not at all like Homer’s wine-dark sea.  But it was warm and sunny and the sunshine continued for the whole 5 weeks we were away, temperatures mostly in the mid to high 20s.  At Delphi about 700 meters up on Mount Parnassus we were cool, but only enough to need a light jacket. When we got to Ankara for our last 5 days we thought we’d need the winter clothes we’d lugged everywhere for a month because on the same dates a year earlier it had been snowing, but despite cool nights it was mid-20s by day even there. It drizzled briefly when we were in a bus between Olympia and Delphi, and it rained the morning we left Cappadocia, but the sun came out later both days.

Temple of Zeus, Athens; Parthenon in background

Athens was for me a wonderful renewal of acquaintance with a city rich in legend and history that I’d last seen in 1953. It was Wendy’s first visit.  On our first full day we walked through the Plaka, a neighborhood of narrow lanes, fascinating shops, and appetizing restaurants, scaled the Akropolis and scrambled over the uneven surfaces as close as we are allowed to get nowadays to the Parthenon. The ancient monuments I roamed all over in 1953 are now quite rightly protected by barriers from direct contact with myriads of tourists. I remember the Parthenon as almost translucent white. For many years I had a tiny piece of sparkling white marble that I picked up in 1953 when tourists were allowed to wander anywhere and acquire such fragments.  Now the Parthenon and other ancient monuments are stained a dirty brown by exposure to exhaust emissions from the innumerable cars and buses that choke the streets of Athens. The sculptures and friezes in the Parthenon Museum at the far end of the Athenian Akropolis (like the looted Elgin Marbles in the British Museum) are still white.  At Cape Sounion about 60 Km away, the marble columns of the Temple of Poseidon hint at the original pure white, and so do the surviving columns of the Tholos and the Temple of Athena at Delphi. At Ephesus and Pergamon far from traffic on the Aegean coast of Turkey, the marble remains mostly pure white.  But everywhere we went in Greece the exposed marble has lost its sparkle.   

We surprised ourselves by our energy and agility on the steep hills where the most spectacular ruins are located.  Jonathan gave us walking sticks as going-away presents. Wendy found hers essential, I was glad of mine at the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion, on the steep slopes of Mount Parnassus at Delphi, and on several hazardous hills that we scaled in Turkey to see the temples and fortresses at their summits; but I managed without it most of the time.

In Athens before our tour of Greece and Turkey, as well as seeing the Temple of Poseidon, we went to the Archeological Museum.  In 1953 I spent most of my museum time in the toilet, so I appreciated seeing it again with a steady gut. We had a long walk to get there along roads where buses were stopped and patriotic songs blared from loud speakers mounted on the lamp-posts.  The remnants of the Greek Communist Party, just a few hundred members now but very noisy, were staging a street demonstration against the Iraq war.  We charged through their ranks from across the street to the museum, Wendy flourishing her walking stick to clear the way. Footsore at the end of that memorable day we got back to our hotel on the Metro, an excellent underground railway. This museum is a marvelously rich collection of artifacts ranging from prehistoric through classical Greek to Hellenistic.  There are many statues, pottery, weapons, armour, all dated and displayed clearly in spacious galleries and halls.  The highlights include a perfectly preserved bronze Zeus, slightly larger than life size, recovered from the sea off Cape Sounion a few years ago. Many bronzes, weapons and marble statues have been recovered lately by underwater archeology. Another precious relic is the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ found by Heinrich Schliemann in the ruins at Mycenae.  The Agamemnon of the Iliad flourished in the 8^th century BCE if he existed (he probably did, Homer’s human characters were very likely based on real people); but the mask, and other gold ornaments that Schliemann found are nearly 1000 years older than that and their provenance is uncertain.

Each evening we took the hotel shuttle bus to Syntagma Square, setting for the parliament, and strolled through the Plaka to browse the shops and to eat a Greek meal, sip a glass or two of Greek wine. One evening we took in some night life with traditional folk dancing and – imported in the Ottoman period and retained after the liberation of Greece in 1830 – a spectacular display of belly-dancing.  By rights we ought to have seen this in Istanbul, but the Greek belly-dancer was probably as good as any we’d have seen along the Bosphorus.  She gyrated and jiggled in all the appropriate places and that’s all that matters.

After five days in and around Athens we joined a bus tour to Corinth, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Olympia, Delphi, and a few other places along the route though the Peloponnesis and back over the new suspension bridge at the western end of the Gulf of Corinth at Patras. We had a small tour party and an excellent guide who knows and loves Greece and its history. She told us all about it at length in English and French as we progressed around the country. This was much better than my experience in 1953 with a guide who spoke only French (albeit with an accent so atrocious that I understood him almost as well as the French students with whom I traveled!).

Epidaurus alone is worth the long trip to Greece, a vast open-air amphitheatre that seats 12,500 people and has miraculously perfect acoustics.  I climbed to the top so Wendy could whisper sweet nothings to me from the sandy stage, and every syllable was clear as a bell.  Another couple from Canada in our small tour party, both originally from Uruguay, sang a Latin American love duet, similarly as crisply audible. It is a magical place, and like many we visited, a place where we would happily have lingered longer. Epidaurus is also the site of the Temple of Asklepios where Hippocrates practised and taught medicine so it had extra resonance for me.

The Greek mainland at the end of the Balkans is made up of rugged mountains that we had to cross to get to Olympia on the western side of the Peloponnesian peninsula, climbing to about 1000 meters before descending to the fertile alluvial plain beside the Ionian (or southern Adriatic) Sea. Olympia is a little way inland, and it’s where Greek recorded history began – all dates were counted from the first Olympiad in 776 BCE.   Here as at all these archeological sites there is a small museum as well as the partially restored ruins of temples, an amphitheatre, and the stadium of the original Olympic Games conducted every 4 years from 776 BCE until ended by edict of the Christian emperor Theodosias in 394 CE.  The museum at Olympia has wonderful friezes from the pediments of the ancient temples, and – the highlight – the beautiful statue of Hermes by Praxilites (4^th century BCE). This is enough to justify a visit to Olympia. 

At Delphi

We left the best till the end.  Delphi is breath-taking.  I have never forgotten the details of my visit in 1953, and I am very happy to have had a chance to see it again after half a century, very pleased too that we were able to scramble up and down the steep slopes and gravel-strewn paths to see almost all of the structures scattered over this site, the ‘navel of the world’ as the Greeks called it, because of the mystical symbolism of the three mountain ridges that intersect there. The setting of Delphi alone makes its beauty unforgettable, and there is so much ancient history as well as so much myth and legend embodied here, that – like so many other places we visited on this tour – I would love to have stayed much longer. 

On the drive back to Athens we went past Thebes, but this time I looked in vain for the place where three roads meet where Oedipus had his ill-fated encounter with his father, argued with and killed him before going on to Thebes and marrying his own mother. (Is the Oedipus myth based in fact? It’s easy to believe it is).  A new expressway and commercial and residential development have obliterated that mythical meeting-place which was pointed out to me in 1953.   

On October 16 we embarked at Pireaus for what ought to have been a three-day cruise through Aegean islands, ending in Kuşadasi on the Turkish coast.  But Royal Olympic shipping lines had been barred from Turkey for defaulting on port taxes, so our cruise lasted only one day.  We did visit Myconos, a lovely little island with picturesque windmills and a tame pink pelican, where every house is white stucco, but early next morning we disembarked at Samos, crossed the wharf to a Turkish ferry and sailed across the narrow sea to Kuşadasi, where a minibus met us and took us to Izmir (formerly Smyrna).  The extra day at Izmir was a much needed rest day after ten strenuous days of touring which we had found quite hard work.  We were glad to relax, unwind, and have our first experience of the fabled delicious foods of Turkey, and get ready for more strenuous touring.  It was Ramadan, but few Turks seem to observe strict Islamic customs, because all the restaurants were already crowded before sunset.  

 "High street" at Ephesus

Everybody said Ephesus would take our breath away, and it did.  This large site is the remains of a flourishing metropolis in Hellenistic and Roman times, with marble streets, a library second only to Alexandria, an amphitheatre, many temples, a communal flush toilet (a 24-holer!) rows of shop fronts, even a brothel with an advertisement for the charms of its occupants carved into the marble pavement.  Ephesus was a rich seaport 2000 years ago, but the harbour has silted up, the Meander River on which it is situated has meandered off in a different direction, and Ephesus is now several Km inland.  It is another place where we would have liked more time.  It was the same story next day at Pergamon, about 80 Km up the Aegean coast from Izmir in the opposite direction from Ephesus.  Our guidebook describes Pergamon as ‘vertiginous’ and so it is – neither Wendy nor I, nor the Australian couple who shared our guide that day, felt comfortable standing too close to the steep cliffs on the edge of the Akropolis and the amphitheatre that clings to the steep side of the cliffs.  Pergamon also has rich medical associations. It’s the birthplace and medical school of Galen, with the remains of the ancient hospital and the lecture theatre for the students. At the end of our visit to Pergamon, with the obligatory visit to a carpet factory (we visited many carpet factories in Turkey!) our minibus dropped us at the airport for the short flight to Istanbul, where we arrived about 8.30 pm, catching glimpses of the Bosphorus as another minibus ferried us to our hotel in the heart of the city.

Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, and before that Byzantium, is one of the world’s truly great cities.  We heard estimates of its population ranging from 11 to 17 million, and everything we saw suggests the reality is nearer the higher than the lower estimate.  The Bosphorus is a geological and geographical marvel, quite apart from its fascinating and turbulent history as the setting for this great city.  At the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago when the North American ice fields thawed, the Athabasca ice dam burst, trillions of metric tonnes of fresh water suddenly flooded into the Atlantic Ocean, a great tidal wave several meters high, funneled huge volumes of water into the eastern end of the Mediterranean, up the Aegean Sea, and over the cliffs at the north-eastern end of the Aegean Sea into the fresh-water Lake Euxine, in a devastating ecological catastrophe. Lake Euxine and the plains along its southern shore were inundated and transformed from a bountiful fresh-water inland sea into the dark and different Black Sea, and the fertile fields on its south shore where agriculture was beginning to develop, were submerged 30 meters or more under water. This was the reality that probably became the biblical flood, the legend of Noah and other ancient tales.  The 35-Km narrow twisting valley through which the sea water poured was gouged out to a depth of 20-30 meters to become the Bosphorus. Byzantium grew up along the strategic waterway between the grain fields of the Black Sea littoral and the seaports around the Mediterranean – and between Europe and Asia. Troy was the fortress at the other end of the Dardanelles (the Hellespont) at the southern end of the Sea of Marmora, and like Byzantium, it was a city of tremendous strategic importance, Helen of Troy notwithstanding.  The whole region is steeped in history and I feel privileged to have had a chance to see for myself the setting for so many of these fabled and historically important places that I’ve known about since I was a boy. 

Blue Mosque, Istanbul

We began our exploration of Istanbul at the Hippodrome, where chariot races were held in Justinian’s time, now decorated with an obelisk (a triplet of the centre-piece of the Place de la Concorde and Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment) and no longer recognizable as a place where chariots could walk, let alone race, but nonetheless a great public space.  We strolled from there to the Blue Mosque, one of the greatest of the Islamic mosques, to admire its austerely beautiful interior and the exterior vista of its graceful minarets and domes, overlooking the Bosphorus – surely one of the loveliest religious shrines in the world. We went to Topkapi Palace, once the stately home of Suleiman the Magnificent and his womenfolk, now a marvelous museum with rich treasures, gold, jewels, rooms full of the possessions of Ottoman rulers from Suleiman’s time to the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 when Kemal Attaturk made it into a museum.  These rich treasure-houses are on the southern side of the Golden Horn, the inlet that runs off the Bosphorus in the heart of the historical district of the city.  Another great building that is now a museum is Dolmabahce Palace, also on the Bosphorus in what it now the business and financial district. Here are many hotels including ours, and the bustling Taxim Square off of which runs a long street lined with fashionable shops, arcades and many lanes with delectable restaurants, a handful of which we were able to sample. On those first few days we also visited Hagyasofia, originally Santa Sofia, the cathedral church of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, then a mosque, and since Kemal’s reforms, a museum, in which the original Christian mosaics and frescos are being restored – though in the cavernous gloom and high on the walls and alcoves, most are barely visible. We browsed the Grand Bazaar and the Spice (or Egyptian) Bazaar, bought a few bits and pieces for the family (Wendy isn’t a bargainer and I’m not much better, and the essence of trading is to bargain, starting with an offer about a fifth or a quarter of the price the seller asks). We had a cruise in a ferry boat along about 10 Km of the Bosphorus from the quay beside the Golden Horn to the newer, more northerly, of the two massive suspension bridges that link Europe to Asia. 

We had 3 days in Istanbul before my hosts, Çagatay [pronounced Char’h’tai] Guler and his colleague Etem Erginoz, collected us for a 3-day excursion to Gallipoli, Troy, and points south.  After that excursion we came back to Istanbul to see more of it – a second look at the Grand Bazaar, a visit to the huge underground cistern that supplied Constantinople with fresh water, a magnificent arched cavern built in Justinian’s time. 

 With Professors Guler (L) and Hayran (R)

We stayed for this second visit at the University of Istanbul’s residence, an old palace on the edge of the Bosphorus just north of the new bridge to Asia.  From the dining room windows a couple of meters above water level we had a superb view of the passing parade of ships – tankers, freighters, luxury liners,  ferry boats, yachts, launches, tiny dinghies from which fishermen caught many small fish in the rich nutritious waters where the Black Sea  and the Aegean mix and mingle.  We had a couple of excellent meals in this restaurant, as well as too much breakfast each morning. By the time we left Istanbul, all the surplus flab I’d shed in our energetic explorations of the Parthenon, Delphi and the other sites in classical Greece was back again. On our last day in Istanbul, Çagatay Guler took us across the new bridge to Asia to meet the urbane Osman Hayran, the Dean of Health Sciences at the University of Marmara which is on the Asian side of Istanbul.  Osman Hayran drove us to some vantage points for spectacular views back towards the European side of Istanbul. We visited a lovely ‘kiosk’ – a small and beautifully decorated palace.  

 Lunch by the Bosphorus

 We had lunch beside the water at a superb seafood restaurant in a fishing village near the Black Sea end of the Bosphorus. This drive confirmed our image of the jagged mountainous terrain that makes up this fascinating part of the world. Istanbul has expanded from the comparatively gentle slopes of the ancient city of Byzantium and the medieval city of the Ottomans to the precipitous hills and ravines all along both sides of the Bosphorus, where houses and high-rise towers are often perched precariously on cliffs.  If anything the Asian side is even more rugged than the European. Driving along the main road beside the Asian side of the Bosphorus, we climbed steeply and descended as precipitously, often with grades steeper than any I’ve ever dared to drive on.  After that splendid fish lunch we walked up a very steep hill from the village towards the castle that guards the Asian side of the entrance from the Black Sea to the Bosphorus but it was further than Osman Hayran had thought so we turned about and came down before reaching the crest where we would have seen the Black Sea – by then we were 300 meters above the sea so it had been quite a climb, but we had almost as far to go before we would get the view.  I’ve seen the Black Sea from the air and we would see it again flying in from Ankara, so it may be as well that we turned back when we did – Çagatay Guler is out of condition, a smoker, and he was a bad colour when we turned back.

Graves at Anzac Cove

 ...and at Shrapnel Valley

In emails before we left Canada I had mentioned to Çagatay Gfler that I hoped we would be able to visit Troy and Gallipoli, but I never expected that he would take over a week off immediately before hosting the National Public Health Congress in order to take us there himself as well as show us his beloved Istanbul. He and his cheerful, linguistically challenged protege Etem Erginoz met us at our hotel at 8 am on the morning of October 22.  I assumed the plan was to take us to a tourist agency, but soon realized that they planned to take us themselves to Gallipoli and Troy.

Kemal Attaturk's inscription, Turkish Memorial, Gallipoli 

We had heard about Turkish hospitality.  We were about to experience it. Çagatay Gfler is one of the kindest people we’ve ever known, altogether a lovely man.  His English is adequate, not as fluent as that of many of his colleagues, although better than Etem Erginoz’s often mangled mishmash. (English is the language of instruction and communication in most Turkish medical schools but only partially at Hacettepe University in Ankara).   Çagatay Guler’s accent and comprehension are adequate, and he compensates for imperfections with endearing turns of phrase, the most memorable of which is “In my childish time” when reminiscing about what life had been like in Turkey, especially in Istanbul, when he was a small boy. 

With Etem driving, we headed south out of Istanbul on the expressway that leads to the border with Bulgaria, then cut across yet another mountain range to the road that runs beside the Sea of Marmara, and made our way by lunch time to Gelibolu which we call Gallipoli, a fishing village and small seaport at the inner end of the Dardanelles.  Seeing that rugged terrain close up made me realize even before we reached the landing beaches that the plan to invade and conquer the Ottoman Empire by seizing the peninsula at the European end of the Dardanelles was one of the most extraordinary acts of stupidity of all the many perpetrated by the military planners in the 1914-1918 blood bath that irrevocably wounded European civilization.  The landing places and especially Anzac Cove, could not have been more ill-chosen, on a steeply shelving beach where the sea is two meters or more deep less than two meters from the shore, the beach itself is very narrow, the sand soft, and the crumbling sandstone cliffs are up to 20-30 meters high and nearly vertical.  The Turks were forewarned and were well dug in with machine gun emplacements all along the tops of the cliffs. Wendy’s father and several of my uncles went ashore there in 1915, and one of my uncles is buried there. A huge diorama in the Ataturk Museum in Ankara helps to show why so many died. It is sacred ground now to Turks as well as to Anzacs, Brits, French, Indians. The toll of dead and wounded was about 250,000 Turkish defenders (mostly in naval bombardments) and about 215,000 on ‘our’ side.  The former battle ground is dotted with many small graveyards rather than with a few large ones as in France – most of the dead are buried where they fell.  So on the green lawn of Anzac Cove, in Shrapnel Valley, and several other places where we stopped to look, there are little neat rows of headstones.  Interestingly, no distinctions of national origins are made in the Allied graveyards – Brits, Anzacs, French, Indians lie side by side. I was more moved – as much by anger at the stupidity of it all, as by sorrow – than at Gettysburg, Monte Casino, or the Somme and other battlefields of Northern France.    

 Crossing the Hellaspont

After a good look at these battlefields and the impressive Turkish memorials, a short ferry ride took us across the narrow seas of the Dardanelles (the Hellaspont) to Çanakkale, a city on the Asian shore near the bottom end of the Dardanelles. We used a new five-star tourist hotel in Çanakkale as base to visit some of the archeological sites on the Asian side of the northern Aegean.  The first of these and by far the most interesting, much more so than Gallipoli, was Troy.  All who read Homer want to see Troy. It’s over 2000 years older than the city for which Priam, Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others waged the 10-year war Homer described. That took place about 800 BCE. Heinrich Schliemann did much damage with his ignorant digging in the 1880s but more carefully trained archeologists since then have unraveled the nine layers, dating back to 2500 BCE and earlier. We had a long, leisurely look on a hot sunny day, and I would have been happy to spend much longer. This was obviously a great city several thousand years ago. The original harbour has long since silted up and is now a fertile plain several Km from the open sea, but it’s easy to recognize the strategic importance of this place in and before Homer’s time. We visited several other sites that day, most memorably a hazardous climb to the remains of a Temple of Athene on the top of a spectacular akropolis at Ossos overlooking the Aegean and the island of Lesbos, home of the Greek lyric poet Sappho whose reputed sexual orientation gave us the word lesbian. 

 Wendy on Balcony, University Residence; bridge to Asia crossing Bosphorus

Bosphorus and Bridge to Asia from Istanbul University residence

On October 27 we flew from Istanbul to Ankara, where another of Çagatay Guler’s colleagues met us at the airport to drive us straight to Cappadocia, where we hired a professional guide.  I am so glad we did this, because Cappadocia is a unique and fascinating place and our guide explained it all to us clearly.  It is geologically weird, a large region of pointed sandstone pinnacles often capped by hard basalt rock of a darker colour, formed in ancient eruptions of volcanoes in the Caucasus and eroded over the millennia by wind and water.  About 2000 years ago, the local people began to hollow out the insides of these sandstone pinnacles to live inside them, and in about 200 CE, very early Christians who were escaping from persecution by the Romans, found refuge here and established the churches that were the first fixed settings for Christian religious worship.  They painted frescos on the walls and some of these survive more or less intact.  This is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and there is a large open-air museum. We had a fascinating day here, ending as our Turkish tour days often did, with a visit to a carpet factory.  It was another perfect warm and sunny day, but next morning when we had already decided we needed a day off back in Ankara before I started working, it was pouring with a soaking rain, so we asked to go straight back to Ankara. 

 Coffee with Osman Hayran, overlooking Bosphorus

In Ankara we had two more sightseeing days, both memorable.  The first, with Çagatay Guler, was a visit to the world-renowned Museum of Anatolian Civilization.  Since the looting and scattering of the Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad that the Americans allowed to happen after they invaded Iraq, this is the only extant collection of artifacts from prehistory and early historical times of that part of the world.  Anatolia was the region of the bronze age Hittites, a bread-basket of early agricultural settlements, a region fought over by many warring factions for thousands of years, Hittites, Greeks and Persians, Romans, Seljuks, the country Xenophon crossed when he led the March to the Sea of the Ten Thousand Greeks who survived defeat by the Persians early in the 4^th century BCE, the penultimate segment of the Silk Route from China to Byzantium, the heartland from which Kemal Attaturk launched the creation of modern Turkey in the early 1920s.  This museum was another place where I could have spent days.  The following day, my last day before starting my talks, Hikmet Pekcan, a distinguished professor in the department of public health at Hacettepe and another delightful, civilized man, took us to the Attaturk mausoleum and museum which we found very impressive, then to lunch at a superb restaurant in a very old house from early Ottoman times, perched on the hillside just below the Roman and Crusader castle at the top, overlooking all of Ankara. This is a famous place whose recent patrons include Hillary Clinton.  We didn’t see the menu – Hikmet Pekcan chose our dishes – but the prices were probably astronomical, although I thought the meal, and the ambience of the old building, made it worth whatever it cost. 

                                                                                             

I am sorry all the work was compressed into such a brief time frame, because I met and would very much have liked to see more of several very impressive staff members of the department of public health at Hacettepe University and at least one very impressive young women graduate from there, now working at Duzce Medical School on the Black Sea.  As a youngster fresh out of medical school she was at the epicentre of a terrible earthquake that ravaged Turkey several years ago.  She took leadership in setting up emergency triage services and acquitted herself with distinction.  She is a talented amateur artist, and next day at lunch she presented me with a pastel she had painted the previous evening after listening to my first talk.  She’d framed it herself, and gave it to us to bring home. I packed it carefully in the middle of our large suitcase, and got it home intact. It is now on our living-room wall.  It is a lovely painting, impressionist in style, showing me, white beard and all, seated high with a pupil (her, I think) beside me, above a field of flowers.  I’ve received many awards, distinctions and honours in the past few years, but this unexpected tribute touched me more than most others.

The US presidential election took place on the day I gave my first talk and the results were known by the second day, our last in Turkey.  We’d picked up signals everywhere we went confirming press reports that 80% or more of the population of Europe (and maybe 98-99% of the Muslim world) would vote for John Kerry if they had a vote, so everyone was appalled at the outcome, apprehensive about what it might portend for the rest of the world.  I came home overnight then went off to Washington to the American Public Health Association annual meeting, where I got another award.  The British historian Simon Schama had an article in The Guardian on November 5 about the Divided States of America and others have referred to the Terrified States of America and the Paranoid States of America.  I thought, on the basis of my brief visit, as brief as I could  make it, that ‘terrified’ and ‘paranoid’ captured the prevailing mood rather well.  Everyone seemed apprehensive, as if expecting terrorists to attack them at any moment. The USA has sunk deeply into one of its bouts of periodic madness, worse, more dangerous than the Civil War, or Prohibition, or the McCarthy paranoia.  There is no trace of that mood in Turkey where until recently and perhaps even now, the Kurdish separatists, the PKK, were using terror as a weapon. Occasionally bombs go off in Istanbul and Ankara as they have done for years.  There is plenty of visible security on the streets and at airports, and there is in Greece too, as elsewhere throughout Europe. But there’s none of the fear and paranoia that seem to have gripped the American people. I think we’ll be staying away from the USA until this mood subsides, and so, I think, will a great many others.  The fear and paranoia in the USA, not to mention the xenophobia (directed broadly at anyone from outside the USA) make for unease.  I’d prefer to live in Turkey now, rather than the USA.