Sky-Walker

A web-building spider I saw in Cesme this summer...

..once again, I am at a complete loss over its identity.

D.I.Y. Lomo Colorsplash

Only an idiot would be daft enough to fork out hard-earned money for a clunky Lomo Colorsplash camera when the alternative is blindingly obvious. Just hold out differently colored drinks or beverage bottles in front of the flash with any ordinary camera: Voila! You have trendy looking distorted, colorful, psychedelic photos in no time! Now, you can upload your ersatz-lomo photographs on Myspace and tell all the ladies that you have a Lomo up in your bedroom.

Above is the intense red strobe that results from holding a cherry-vodka mixture in front of the flash...

...while green-tinted beer bottles create this hallucinogenic green glow. This method has an additional bonus in coolness, as you can also reveal your extravagant drinking habits along with the pictures.

Beer in a plain glass, on the other hand, creates a very subtle yellow haze.

Drinks are not the only things you can hold out in front of the flash. Here is the effect given by using a pair of sunglasses instead. Ping! Everywhere is all brown, slick and grungy!

I wonder what light reflected off a glass of Raki would look like? A glass of wine? Some tea? The potentials are limitless.

Assyrian Battle Tanks

I am currently reading a trilogy of books by S. M. Stirling where the modern-day island of Nantucket somehow goes back to the Bronze age, with all the anachronistic consequences like modern-day weapons in the past. So, imagine my excitement when I saw this tank-like vehicle on the famous Assyrian wall in the British Museum this week.

Wow! Here's the "tank" in action. It looks like these things were used as battering rams or siege towers during war. Of course, they could also be grossly exaggerated in size or function.

Here's an even closer view of an Assyrian Tank in the heat of battle. Boom! Boom! There goes your walls, you dastardly enemy city-state! If you look closely, you can see the enemy trying to throw flaming oil on top of our heroes but no, their uber-tank also has a system of water pumps that douse out the pestering fires. Resplendent in scenes of war and destruction, the rest of these reliefs read like an antique version of 300.

A Mural in a Coffee-House

This small, quiet coffeehouse at the bus station in Ilıca, near Çeşme, on the Turkish Aegean...

...hosts one of the strangest-yet-sweetest murals I've seen. The words spell out a popular Turkish idiom: "A cup of coffee has memories for forty years." It is my opinion that no trendy urban-street artists can duplicate the incredible naivety of images like these.

"Environmentally Friendly" Hypocrisy

The recent craze of "healthy", "fair trade" and "guilt-free" foods has hit London harder than any other city in the world. This means only one thing: Paying more for crap food with cool packaging. I normally try to conserve my meager students' allowance and health by avoiding such dross like the plague and eating in. However, this being London, there are times and places where one simply has to dish out a flabbergasting three pounds for just such a lunchtime snack, for there are cafeterias and eateries that sell nothing else. Will you look at that package, absolutely NOTHING artificial! The rustic, "grandma's farm" lettering also immediately informs me that eating this bag of chips can only be good for my health!

The back of the package contains a tirade of nostalgic, emotional marketing bullshit. I want to cry my eyes out, no one believed in them at the beginning! They all thought they were crazy! Those bastards!

Of course, one can only lie so much while staring at you straight in the eye. A deeper glance into the small type reveals this embarrassing note: The friendly, tree hugging two-faced hippies are so sorry, their faux-homemade packaging is "currently" not recyclable. Oops, I wonder what happened to "never settling for the second best?"

Hey, but at least it is approved by the clowns at "Vegetarian Society", so when you are sleeping safe in the knowledge that no chickens or cows got sad to make your chips, a sea turtle could've already choked to death on this non-recyclable piece of trash. Shame, such a shame.

Vomit in Your Closet

This poor girl seems to have had too many drinks in a recent housewarming party we went to.

Yup, more vomit. By sheer bad luck, it also lies splattered all over the home-owner's class sketchbook. I wonder if that is a bad thing, or could the awful stains be marketed off as a unique style with experimental materials?

A Guitarfish

A dried-up guitarfish (family Rhinobatidae,) I saw nailed to the door of a fish restaurant in the Karaburun region of the Turkish Aegean. Guitarfishes look both like sharks and their close relatives, the rays. They supposedly taste great, but local restaurants have yet to figure out how to fix a tasty bowl of guitarfish soup.

A Trip to Prinkipo

This summer's photos are only now turning up on my blog. Here is a series from our most recent trip to Büyükada, or Prinkipo this August. Although I'd been living within twenty miles of it for most of my life, I'd never visited this beautiful island for almost ten years. Only with the arrival of Sofia and Kleio from Greece did I manage to lift that ass and visit Prinkipo once more.

Here, you see the port at Bostanci, on the Anatolian side, that hosts the boat to take us to Prinkipo.

Sailing on faith? I sneaked around to the machine room during the one hour + trip and took this picture. You can see the powerful engines that drive the boat below.

Buyukada is one of the several islands that lie off the City's coast, collectively termed as the Prince Islands. The boat thus made several stops at smaller islands before dropping us off at our destination. Here is Proti, known in Turkish as Kinaliada. (Henna Island) It had a spectacular beach in place of its main street and was arguably the best-looking of all Prince Islands, away from the crowds. I should visit it sometime.

All those stops made the journey a long and sleepy affair.

Finally, we arrived on Prinkipo. The port building has a highly unusual and impressive style, and is an almost obligatory photo moment for all those who land there.

This mini-clock tower at the center of the town is a very popular meeting point.

More views from Prinkipo town. Some Turkish readers get offended when I use the original names for places like Smyrna, Constantinople or Prinkipo, but rest assured - I am not a Greek nationalist nor an enemy of the republic. I am a Turkish citizen and I love my country.

More...

...and more views from sleepy Buyukada. I had a really cheap bargain calamari lunch on this street.

No cars are allowed here, so people get around mostly with horsecarts like these. However, they serve more as tourist rides than actual public transport.

This green building was staffed by horse-cart controllers who ceaselessly bark out the numbers of the carts as customers line out to hire them. Despite this technological advance, it's still a chaotic hurdle to get a ride, and the lines still stretch out around the square.

Not content with waiting in the buggy line, we ended up walking instead. We saw a large number of astonishing old buildings, preserved unchanged since the late Ottoman times.

Wow... I wonder how much this house costs.

Compared to the mainland, most of the houses are in good shape but very few people live here all the time. The few crumbling derelicts either have very poor owners, or the owners in question have been away in Greece for the last few decades.

A very nicely preserved house...

...and another one.

I stopped by this magnificent mansion to ask for directions to the local Synagogue, which I wanted desperately to see. It turned out that the inhabitants were one of the last few remaining Greeks, and our direction-asking adventure turned into a long, melancholic talk about the past and how things changed. That's me in the dorky shorts, trying to practice my vestigial Greek language skills.

We discovered this cute microcinema tucked away inside one of the small, two-story buildings. I'm not sure if foreign readers can get this feeling, but the whole place emanates with an extremely naive feeling of retro; like Istanbul used to be some decades years ago.

Actually, the whole island has that feeling of melancholia, like looking at a fifty-year old picture. In a social parallel to the situation of geographic isolation seen in islands like Australia and Madagascar, beautiful things that have been wiped out in the mainland continue to thrive on Prinkipo. Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews still coexist in comparable numbers without animosity, families leave their doors unlocked at night, and different languages continue to mingle on the streets. Here is the local Greek high school, closed but only for the summer holidays.

The island is still home to many churches of different kinds, here is the Panagia Church next to the horsecart station.

This, on the other hand, is the lavishly decorated door of the San Pacifico Latin Catholic Church. We couldn't go inside.

Prinkipos is one of the few places where Greek places of worship outnumber those of others, including mosques. Here is the Hagios Dimitrios, situated a little way off the town center.

We saw this strange marker stone in the courtyard of Hagios Dimitrios. The place was deserted, but we were told that the community still gathers here in important religious holidays.

Beyond the churches, however, the place I really wanted to visit was the Hesset Le Abraham Synagogue.

We almost missed the boat trying to get there, but no one was allowed due to security measures. These two were the only pictures I could get of this graceful building.

Soon afterwards we returned home to the mainland, but our visit to Büyükada - Prinkipo would still haunt me for days afterward, in the shape of diarrhea from my visit to the cheap calamari place. Perhaps I shouldn't be such a cheapo after all.

Splendors of the Izmir Museum of Archaeology

Here we go on a special post on the wonders of the Izmir (Smyrna) Museum of Archeology, which I visited this summer. Although not well-known, this place hosts some of the best preserved metal statues from Antiquity. Take a look at this athlete figure, made all the more beautiful through its imperfections.

Most statues of ancient Greek and Hellenistic periods were possibly made out of bronze like these, but over time greedy bastards have scavenged most of them for the metal. The examples that remain have almost all been recovered from shipwrecks.

I think their centuries-long slumber under the sea makes such statues even more haunting. Just look at this nameless lady, staring at us through black eyes that open up to her hollow insides. Had it been stolen by the British, this statue would have occupied a room entirely of its own in the British Museum. Instead, it lies gathering dust in the corner of this run-down museum, ignored but safely at home.

The museum is full of many other wonderful artifacts, but it is in the garden that you'll find the most dazzling works. These faces, all representing different individuals and expressions, were carved in a nearby settlement that boasted a school of sculpture in antique times.

This foundation stone, adorned with mysterious serpentine designs, was also one of my favorites. Who would have commissioned it? Why? What was it used for? Did they get it on with cultist virgins on top of it? Such questions, sadly, will never be answered with certainty.

Due to lack of fundings and the sheer profusion of archaeological artifacts, the level of neglect in Turkish museums is sometimes downright appalling. Take a look at this magnificent Hellenistic tomb, chucked outside the museum's front lawn like some redneck's broken-down pickup engine.

Right next to the Archeology museum lies an old French orphanage that was transformed into a "Museum of Ethnography" after the Turkification of Smyrna. It looks pretty impressive from the outside...

...but inside, it is full of moth-eaten folk clothes and depressing mannequins re-enacting household scenes from old Ottoman life. This plastic boy was representing an old circumcision scene, so no wonder why he looks scared out of his wits.

Izmir or Smyrna, this is a wonderful city, all the more because of its profound history. Be sure to visit the Archeology museum if you ever make your way there. (You can skip the lame-ass Ethnography museum, tough.)

Ants

I turned over a stone in my garden back in Istanbul, and here is what I saw. What are all these ants (Formica sp?) doing?

My sister, who had been observing them with me all along, suddenly screamed out that "The ants were making rice!" The "rice", of course, is the ants' multitudinous pupae and eggs. Notice how they come in different sizes. Is this because they were destined to hatch into different ant castes, or were the smaller ones simply younger? I was as clueless as my little sister about this question.

Usually, a single queen is responsible for all the egg-laying in the colony. The queens are really conspicuous creatures, usually several times larger than their workers. We found the queen of this hive secreted in a seemingly artificial "brooding chamber," alongside some of her most recently-laid eggs. We carefully replaced the stone that had been shielding the colony, and left the ants alone to make more "rice."

Ants are some of the most flabbergastingly diverse, weird and wonderful organisms on our planet, and with sites like AntWeb and Antbase around, you no longer have an excuse not to learn more about them.