A Giant Moth

This huge moth plopped onto our dinner table one night in Bodrum. It was quite large, (this picture would look about natural size on a 1680 x 1050 display,) and I had never seen anything like it before in this region. It looks like a large hawk moth, perhaps of the genus Deilephila... But as always with insects, I can never be sure.

Architectural Cancer

What looks like a set photo from an unlikely sequel to Blade Runner is actually the mess of gangrenous urbanism that plagues most cities in the Balkans and the Middle East. This example, of course, is from Istanbul.

Here, you have a garage entrance with a weird, hallway-like room overhanging its ceiling. Also note the strange windows at the back, and the ubiquitous, wart-like clusters of air conditioners.

Just in this photo alone, you can see a food kiosk, a stationery and photocopy shop, a luggage vendor's stall, a hairdresser for men, an ad agency for big newspapers and a sports club all mashed up together.

As more money enters Istanbul and her residents begin to understand the meaning of city planning, such unplanned mistakes will take years, if not decades to correct.

Pontos

In the Plaka bazaar in Athens last year, I saw this interesting poster about Pontos, the Black-Sea coast of Anatolia.

Here are the Pontic towns and cities that used to have significant Greek populations: Pafri, Amisos, Oinoi, Kotiori, Kerazonta, Tripoli, Trapezonta, Rizaion. Today, they are known as Bafra, Samsun, Ünye, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, Trabzon and Rize.

Besides the names of the cities, the Greeks also left many important landmarks in the region. Perhaps the most important of all of these is the Sumela Monastery, perched high above the mountains near Trabzon. Once a Mount Athos-like citadel for priests, it is one of the region's greatest tourist attractions today.

Even though almost no Greeks live there now, a regional language, closely related to Greek, is still spoken by a few Turkish inhabitants of the region. Like many places in Anatolia where Muslims and Christians lived together, the lines between who is Greek and who is Turkish is blurry; some of these people have converted from Christianity only in the last century-and-a-half. Despite their differences, both the Greeks and Turks of Pontos still share a common heritage of weapons, macho attitudes and music played with the regional kemenche instrument.

But not all memories of Pontos are nice ones, especially not after the horrendous population exchange of Turkish Christians and Greek Moslems in 1923.

A few years earlier in Salonika, I had visited a commemorative event in the name of the so-called Pontic Genocide that took place in 1919, which was supposedly as nasty as the Armenian one. Although I have different views on the plight of the Armenians, I think what happened in Pontos was more like what happened in Lebanon in the 1970s than what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Despite the strong sentiments people on each side have for Pontiac culture and history, I don't think anyone except a minority of die-hard nationalists on each side still has dreams, or nightmares about Pontic Greece establishing itself as an independent country.

Beer of Doom

Beer for 1.5 ytl (0.75 Euros?) Would you be up for it? Rock pubs in Istanbul offer inconceivably low prices, so much that you'd think there's something wrong with the whole deal.

Dervish Street Art

Traditional graffiti from the streets of Istanbul. Should I call this a graffiti or a wall painting? Or a mural? What is it supposed to depict? Who did it here, and why? So many questions...

The Ghosts of Pera

A beautiful neoclassical building in Istanbul's Pera district...

...this building almost certainly belonged to Turkish Greeks, until they were forcefully expelled between the period of persecution between the 50s and the late 60s. Now, Kurdish immigrants from the east run a number of bohemian cafes and bars in it.

Haunted in every corner by the losses it suffered in the past, life in Pera goes on.

Weird Fish

After a hiatus of two weeks, I'm back with more posts! Here is a green aquarium I saw in a shop in Turkey, full of weird fish. I can see at least two different species of catfish, and a cichlid. The ghost-like figure in the center is a Notopterid knifefish.

Here is one of the large, unidentified catfish in the tank.

...and here is its mouth. Aquaria have always fascinated me as a child; I could never know what to find in them, and there was always the chance of seeing something new and strange. Now I'm a bit more sad about them, for the fish in an aquarium invariably lead sad, captive lives.

The-O in Istanbul

More than two months ago, I attended an exhibition opening organized by my friend Mihda, seen above on the right-hand side. She runs URA, a gallery-space-thing in one of the busiest districts in Istanbul.

This exhibit in URA was devoted mostly to the documentaries of Bronwen-Parker Rhodes, who is an up-and coming director from London. Here she is.

I really liked her work, especially that one big video that chronicles the lives of some nerds who dress up, act and live like Tolkien-esque orcs.

There was also this one, which peeked into the life of an entomologist. For more of Bronwen's work, you can visit this link.

But arguably, the highlight of the opening night was an "art performance" by a certain The-O; a British-Cypriot performer. Admittedly, I had seen some very poor stuff peddled off as "performance" before in Istanbul, so I didn't have high hopes...

...but this show was really intense. And good.

Halfway through the show, I was viciously attacked by The-O. Here is a shot from my camera just then.

Using complicated Krav-Maga maneuvers, I redirected his attack to an unsuspecting group of Turkish art appreciators standing next to me.

At the end of the show, The-O suddenly dropped as if dead, and proceeded to lie comatose for the next hour.

...not even shock therapy, or being kicked by hot girls, could revive him.

At the end, however, he did move from his place as hunger pressed above all other needs. Mihda and some of our friends took The-O to a local Sutlac (Turkish pudding) place, resulting in a stranger artistic combination than anything that happened before in the night.

Charles Darwin

Only one year left until the bicentennial! Even though his ideas have been heavily built upon, and someone else would have certainly noticed evolution in the natural world had it not been for him, have a happy Darwin Day!

A Littoral Expedition in Bodrum

Every summer, one of my favorite hobbies is taking an afternoon stroll in the littoral zone, turning over stones just beneath the water's surface and meeting the strange creatures underneath...

...As I go along, I usually (and sadly,) find discarded plastic bottles, and use them to "bottle up" some of the more interesting creatures I encounter. I later take their photos in a makeshift studio, and release them back to the waters. Here then, are the results of the littoral photo-expedition I took in August, 2007, in the waters around Bitez beach, in Bodrum.

Here are two tiny juvenile sea urchins and the strange "red object" I found under a big rock.

The sea urchins seem to be the offspring of the common variety found all over the place.

But this... the mysterious "red object" leaves me completely clueless! I first thought it could be a very young sea cucumber, due to the strange sucker-like things protruding from its side. But it also looks like a weird polychaete worm, or a larva of one. Or maybe a flatworm? My best guess at this point is that it is an Aphroditomorph scale worm, but do those things even live in the Mediterranean? Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope!

Next, we have a more familiar creature, one that occurs in plague-like densities around these parts.

Dancing around like five miniature serpents tied in a knot, these brittle stars are always an interesting sight.

These creatures appear to feed on seafloor detritus. Besides placing them in the group ophiurida, I cannot say anything about their genus or species.

Here is a common sight from Turkish beaches. Behold the bearded fireworm, Hermodice carunculata.(?)

Locally, these critters are known as "sea centipedes" and their scratching, sting is dreaded on every beach. They writhe around in pain and seem to suffer extremely when someone spits on them, thus explaining the local belief that "saliva is like acid to them." Don't worry, I didn't try it.

A close up of the fireworm's main weapons, the white tufts of stinging spikes.

I found a large variety of immature sea cucumbers under some larger stones. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember my previous adventures with sea cucumbers. If you haven't, suffice it say that sea cucumbers are related to sea stars and brittle stars (see above,) and are awesome.

This was the first variety I encountered on the beaches of Bitez. I don't know exactly what any of these things might be, or if they are separate species. They sure looked different enough, so I gave them arbitrary nicknames.

I call this one "the mottled variety." Here is its underside, showing the multitudes of tube-feet.

This one, the "meatball variety," was almost certainly a member of the genus Holothuria.

Here is its top view...

...and bottom view.

Finally, the third kind of sea cucumber I encountered was the "spiny variety". Quite obviously, I named it so after its fleshy spikes, and dazzling spots.

Here is its underside, showing the tubular suction feet again, and also the bizarre green tentacles that surround its mouth. Although all sea cucumbers have these tentacles, only the spiny ones had them this big and this prominent.

Another trick these ones have up their sleeves is their ability to eject their intestines as sticky, string-like gooey filaments.

Here is what it did to my hand! No, that's not what it looks like.

I also found some crabs, again unidentifiable to my armchair scientific knowledge.

These thin, dark ones had long, heavy pincers on proportionally long-ish arms.

UPDATE!

My friends Jonas and Emile tell me that these are Anomuran porcelain crabs, relatives of hermit crabs and lobsters that are not true crabs, but just crab-shaped. Notice their six legs, as opposed to eight in true crabs.

While these larger, heavyset kinds had a peculiar kind of "fuzz" lining up their bodies.

Here it is on macro, showing the cowboy-style tassels closer-up. I don't know if this integument comes from the crab's body itself, or is a sort of symbiotic algae.

As the sun began to set, I found it difficult to go walking over slippery rocks, or photograph what I found under them. I thus returned my invertebrate friends to the sea, and their plastic holding bottles to the trash. I ended my day with an immense sense of satisfaction.

I know many natural history enthusiasts and specialists are reading my blog. If you can identify what exactly these creatures were, I'll be forever in your debt. (or something like that.)